Other Points of View April 30, 2004February 25, 2017 Not all of you buy the gist of this past week’s columns. Frank M: ‘No matter how much fear and loathing you dish out, the American people are smart enough to realize that when Democrats had the power you meekly and weakly refused to pull the trigger and deal with Bin Laden. History, under ‘your’ President, shows us that you deliberately chose not to defend the United States, our freedom and liberty when you had the opportunity.’ ☞ I’m not sure it can be fairly said that the Clinton administration deliberately choose not to defend America. Leaving aside the level of prosperity and respect we enjoyed in the world – and the tremendously good military we nurtured – all of which made us strong . . . we did pull the trigger on bin Laden. We shot a cruise missile at him (to hoots of derision from the R’s who said it was to direct attention from Monica Lewinsky) . . . we hunted him with drones . . . we went to ‘battle stations’ when chatter rose . . . we urgently warned the incoming Administration of the growing, ‘tremendous,’ ‘immediate’ threat that he posed. Yet – though urgently warned, both before and after taking office – the Bush folks just pretty much focused on Iraq. Even after 9/11, they let bin Laden get away (first by not going after him ourselves at Tora Bora and then by pulling Special Forces out of Afghanistan to deal with the ‘imminent’ Iraqi threat). Bin Laden will almost surely be captured or killed soon – how could he not be? But why not two years ago, before there was a chance to regroup and metastasize? (And on the topic of defending freedom and liberty, it should be noted we also pulled the trigger for freedom in Kosovo, with considerable success and without alienating the rest of the world . . . and that we pulled lots of triggers in Iraq to enforce the no-fly zone and contain the Iraqi threat.) That said, Frank believes what he believes and is obviously entitled to. Many Republicans, like some I’ve quoted this week, are beginning to disagree. But others remain strongly in the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld camp. So let’s end the week with this, from the venerable conservative biweekly, National Review: April 23, 2004, 8:33 a.m. Myth or Reality? Will Iraq work? That’s up to us. By Victor Davis Hanson Myth #1: America turned off its allies. According to John Kerry, due to inept American diplomacy and unilateral arrogance, the United States failed to get the Europeans and the U.N. on board for the war in Iraq. Thus, unlike in Afghanistan, we find ourselves alone. In fact, there are only about 4,500-5,500 NATO troops in Afghanistan right now. The United States and its Anglo allies routed the Taliban by themselves. NATO contingents in Afghanistan are not commensurate with either the size or the wealth of Europe. There are far more Coalition troops in Iraq presently than in Afghanistan. As in the Balkans, NATO and EU troops will arrive only when the United States has achieved victory and provided security. The same goes for the U.N., which did nothing in Serbia and Rwanda, but watched thousands being butchered under its nose. It fled from Iraq after its first losses. Yes, the U.N. will return to Iraq – but only when the United States defeats the insurrectionists. It will stay away if we don’t. American victory or defeat, as has been true from Korea to the Balkans, will alone determine the degree of (usually post-bellum) participation of others. [Whether or not one grants this, is it not true that much of the world now hates us – as they did not when we were going after Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan? And that by invading Iraq, we have inspired untold numbers of new fanatical enemies? It seems to me these are not small things – especially as they were largely avoidable. – A.T.] Myth #2: Democracy cannot be implemented by force. This is a very popular canard now. The myth is often floated by Middle Eastern intellectuals and American leftists – precisely those who for a half-century damned the United States for its support of anti-Communist authoritarians. Now that their dreams of strong U.S. advocacy for consensual government have been realized, they are panicking at that sudden nightmare – terrified that their fides, their careers, indeed their entire boutique personas might be endangered by finding themselves on the same side of history as the United States. Worse, history really does suggest that democracy often follows only from force or its threat. One does not have to go back to ancient Athens – in 507 or 403 B.C. – to grasp the depressing fact that most authoritarians do not surrender power voluntarily. There would be no democracy today in Japan, South Korea, Italy, or Germany without the Americans’ defeat of fascists and Communists. Democracies in France and most of Western Europe were born from Anglo-American liberation; European resistance to German occupation was an utter failure. Panama, Granada, Serbia, and Afghanistan would have had no chance of a future without the intervention of American troops. All of Eastern Europe is free today only because of American deterrence and decades of military opposition to Communism. Very rarely in the modern age do democratic reforms emerge spontaneously and indigenously (ask the North Koreans, Cubans, or North Vietnamese). Tragically, positive change almost always appears after a war in which authoritarians lose or are discredited (Argentina or Greece), bow to economic or cultural coercion (South Africa), or are forced to hold elections (Nicaragua). [Well, South Africa and the Former Soviet Union do seem to be rather large and recent examples of countries we did not have invade to effect positive change. By contrast, the spectacularly costly military effort in Vietnam failed to produce democracy.] Myth #3: Lies got us into this war. Did the administration really mislead us about the reasons to go to war, and does it really now find itself with an immoral conflict on its hands? Mr. Bush’s lectures about WMD, while perhaps privileging such fears over more pressing practical and humanitarian reasons to remove Saddam Hussein, took their cue from prior warnings from Bill Clinton, senators of both parties including John Kerry, and both the EU and U.N. If anyone goes back to read justifications for Desert Fox (December 1998) or those issued right after September 11 by an array of American politicians, then it is clear that Mr. Bush simply repeated the usual Western litany of about a decade or so – most of it best formulated by the Democratic party under Bill Clinton. Indeed, we opted to launch that campaign in large part because of Iraq’s work on WMDs. No, the real rub is whether Iraq will work: If it does, the WMD bogeyman disappears; if not, it becomes the surrogate issue to justify withdrawing. [It wasn’t Iraq the Clinton-Gore folks told the incoming Administration represented a tremendous, immediate threat. And as war clouds began to gather, I remember many saying he thought it would be wiser to focus on al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. So I’m not sure it’s fair to put too much of this on Clinton/Gore.] Myth #4: Profit-making led to this war. Then there is the strange idea that American administration officials profited from the war. Companies like Bechtel and Halliburton are supposedly “cashing in,” either on oil contracts or rebuilding projects – as if any company is lining up to lure thousands of workers to the Iraqi oasis to lounge and cheat in such a paradise. This idea is absurd for a variety of other reasons, too. Iraqi oil is for the first time under Iraqi, rather than a dictator’s, control. And the Iraqi people most certainly will not sign over their future oil reserves to greedy companies in the manner that Saddam gave French consortia almost criminally profitable contracts. Indeed, no Iraqi politician is going to demand to pump more oil to lower gas prices in the country that freed him. Some imperialism. All U.S. construction is subject to open audit and assessment. A zealous media has not yet found any signs of endemic or secret corruption. There really is a giant scandal surrounding Iraq, but it involves (1) the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, in which U.N. officials and Saddam Hussein, hand-in-glove with European and Russian oil companies, robbed revenues from the Iraqi people; and (2) French petroleum interests that strong-armed a tottering dictator to sign over his country’s national treasure to Parisian profiteers under conditions that no consensual government would ever agree to. The only legitimate accusation of Iraqi profiteering does not involve Dick Cheney or Halliburton, but rather Kofi Annan’s negligence and his son Kojo’s probable malfeasance. [Well, some of us are skeptical. Some of us wonder at the influence of secret energy-task-force participants and the Saudi royal family in the formulation of policy. As for ‘a zealous media’ . . . when it comes to auditing government contracts, so far as I know, neither Michael nor Janet Jackson has ever won such a contract.] Myth #5: Israel has caused the United States untold headaches in the Arab world by its intransigent policies. The refutation of this myth could take volumes, given the depth of daily misinformation. Perhaps, though, we can sum up the absurdity by looking at the nature of West Bank demonstrations over the past few months. The issues baffle Americans: Some Arab citizens of Israel, residing in almost entirely Arab border towns and calling themselves Palestinians, were furious about Mr. Sharon’s offer to cede them sovereign Israeli soil and thus allow them to join the new Palestinian nation. Others were hysterical that two killers – who promised not merely the “liberation” of the West Bank, but also the utter destruction of Israel – were in fact killed in a war by Israelis. Both of the deceased had damned the United States and expressed support for Islamicists now killing our soldiers in Iraq – even as their supporters whined that we did not lament their recent departures to a much-praised paradise. Elsewhere fiery demonstrators were shaking keys to houses that they have not been residing in for 60 years – furious about the forfeiture of the “right of return” and their inability to migrate to live out their lives in the hated “Zionist entry.” Notably absent were the relatives of the hundreds of thousands of Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and other Arab capitals who years ago were all ethnically cleansed and sent packing from centuries-old homes, but apparently got on with what was left of their lives. The Palestinians will, in fact, get their de facto state, though one that may be now cut off entirely from Israeli commerce and cultural intercourse. This is an apparently terrifying thought: Palestinian men can no longer blow up Jews on Monday, seek dialysis from them on Tuesday, get an Israeli paycheck on Wednesday, demonstrate to CNN cameras about the injustice of it all on Thursday – and then go back to tunneling under Gaza and three-hour, all-male, conspiracy-mongering sessions in coffee-houses on Friday. Beware of getting what you bomb for. Perhaps the absurdity of the politics of the Middle East is best summed up by the recent visit of King Abdullah of Jordan, a sober and judicious autocrat, or so we are told. As the monarch of an authoritarian state, recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual American aid, son of a king who backed Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and a leader terrified that the Israeli fence might encourage Palestinian immigration into his own Arab kingdom, one might have thought that he could spare us the moral lectures at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club – especially when his elite Jordanian U.N. peacekeepers were just about to murder American citizens in Kosovo while terrorists in his country tried to mass murder Americans with gas. Instead we got the broken-record Middle East sermon on why Arabs don’t like Americans – as if we had forgotten 9/11 and its quarter-century-long precursors. Does this sensible autocrat – perhaps the most reasonable man in the region – ever ask himself about questions of symmetry and reciprocity? Is there anything like a Commonwealth Club in Amman? And if not, why not? And could a Mr. Blair or Mr. Bush in safety and freedom visit Amman to hold a public press conference, much less to lecture his Jordanian hosts on why Americans in general – given state-sponsored terrorism, Islamic extremism, and failed Middle Eastern regimes – have developed such unfavorable attitudes towards so many Arab societies? What then is the truth of this so-often-caricatured war? On the bright side, there has not been another 9/11 mass-murder. And this is due entirely to our increased vigilance, the latitude given our security people by the hated Patriot Act, and the idea that the war (not a DA’s inquiry) should be fought abroad not at home. The Taliban was routed and Afghanistan has the brightest hopes in thirty years. Pakistan, so unlike 1998, is not engaged in breakneck nuclear proliferation abroad. Libya claims a new departure from its recent past. Syria fears a nascent dissident movement. Saddam is gone. Iran is hysterical about new scrutiny. American troops are out of Saudi Arabia. True, we are facing various groups jockeying for power in a new Iraq; and the country is still unsettled. Yet millions of Kurds are satisfied and pro-American. Millions more Shiites want political power – and think that they can get it constitutionally through us rather than out of the barrel of a gun following an unhinged thug. After all, any fool who names his troops “Mahdists” is sorely misinformed about the fate of the final resting place of the Great Mahdi, the couplets of Hilaire Beloc, and what happened to thousands of Mahdist zealots at Omdurman. So, we can either press ahead in the face of occasionally bad news from Iraq (though it will never be of the magnitude that once came from Sugar Loaf Hill or the icy plains near the Yalu> that did not faze a prior generation’s resolve) – or we can withdraw. Then watch the entire three-year process of real improvement start to accelerate in reverse. If after 1975 we thought that over a million dead in Cambodia, another million on rickety boats fleeing Vietnam, another half-million sent to camps or executed, hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in America, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an Iranian take-over of the U.S. embassy, oil-embargos, Communist entry into Central America, a quarter-century of continual terrorist attacks, and national invective were bad, just watch the new world emerge when Saddam’s Mafioso or Mr. Sadr’s Mahdists force our departure. This war was always a gamble, but not for the reasons many Americans think. We easily had, as proved, the military power to defeat Saddam; we embraced the idealism and humanity to eschew realpolitik and offer something different in the place of mass murder. And we are winning on all fronts at a cost that by any historical measure has confirmed both our skill and resolve. But the lingering question – one that has never been answered – was always our attention and will. The administration assumed that in occasional times of the inevitable bad news, we were now more like the generation that endured the surprise of Okinawa and Pusan rather than Tet and Mogadishu. All were bloody fights; all were similarly controversial and unexpected; all were alike proof of the fighting excellence of the American soldiers – but not all were seen as such by Americans. The former were detours on the road to victory and eventual democracy; the latter led to self-recrimination, defeat, and chaos in our wake. The choice between myth and reality is ours once more. [It should be noted that John Kerry does not plan to cut and run. It should also be noted that tone matters. Humiliation and disrespect are not always the best diplomatic tools – whether it be the U.S. expressing its contempt for ‘old Europe’ or Israel and the U.S. dictating terms of a settlement, however favorable, rather than allowing it to be won in a negotiation. My own feeling, of course, is that the U.S. and Israel are ‘in the right’ on almost every point of substance. But – maddeningly – being right is not always enough to win people over.]
Next Week – Back to Money, I Promise April 29, 2004February 25, 2017 Don: ‘Your advice to Todd Vogel, of Seattle, about buying in Vancouver to take advantage of a boom in case Bush wins – please, please, please don’t buy here. The Vancouver housing market is bad enough as it is without you encouraging your readers to buy what little is left (fewer than 400 properties on the market). Note to Todd: It rains here even more than in Seattle.’ Sue: ‘I have been an avid reader of your column for some time, but your recent links have been really over the edge. One column reads like an anti-Semitic exposé of a Zionist plot to cause unrest in the Middle East. The other, like the greatest conspiracy of all time to take over the Middle East like a modern day Hitler. You are right that we were misled into this war. You are right that Bush ignored the rest of the world and alienated our allies. But quoting these idiots doesn’t enhance your case, it just makes you look as nutty as they are.‘ ☞ I certainly hope the columns I linked to are nutty. I’m just less certain than you that they are. Meanwhile, here‘s what you might view as a more thoughtful one . . . from the Washington Times, no less (not generally thought of as biased against the right wing) – highlighted for speed-readers: Road maps and detours By Bruce Bartlett Published April 21, 2004 ——————————————————————- On Monday, the New York Times reported growing numbers of conservatives are turning against President Bush on Iraq. This follows an inarticulate defense of the Iraq operation by him in a press conference last week and growing attacks on our troops. It is now becoming increasingly clear the basic rationale for the war was not well thought through and that postwar planning was deeply flawed at a minimum. These may result from a basic weakness in this White House’s policymaking and decisionmaking process. I have to say my own feelings on the war parallel those of many others who previously supported the war but now feel deep misgivings. Although I don’t often write on foreign policy, I felt I had an obligation to take a stand on Iraq before the war started. In a February 2003 column, I reluctantly supported the war because at the time I thought there was credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. With that country ruled by a lunatic dictator with known ties to terrorist groups, I felt President Bush deserved the benefit of the doubt. Since then, I have been very disturbed by the lack of WMDs. I am not yet convinced Mr. Bush manufactured evidence for their existence as a pretext for war. But I do believe he has fostered a White House culture that contributes to error, by stifling internal debate, a decisionmaking process that seems to shortcircuit research and analysis, and an obsession with loyalty and secrecy that makes the Nixon White House appear a model of openness and transparency. In this respect, I have been strongly influenced by Ron Suskind’s recent book, The Price of Loyalty, which was based on interviews with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and thousands of internal documents provided by him. That book paints a picture of an administration in which it appears Mr. Bush often makes key decisions with little if any analysis or discussion among those who are to carry out the decisions. In short, President Bush often seems to operate like the character from “Alice in Wonderland” who declared, “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.” Instead of figuring out why and how things should be done before acting, the White House seems to act first and then create ex post facto rationalizations for that decision in lieu of serious deliberation. Although I claim no inside knowledge of the national security process in this administration, I do know Mr. Suskind and Mr. O’Neill’s characterization of its domestic policy operation rings true. While it is conceivable a completely different process operates in the national security arena, I think that is highly unlikely. Presidents establish a style and tone for their White House staff operations and it operates across the board. Therefore, I have every reason to believe the same weaknesses that exist on the domestic side exist within the national security operation as well. Contrary to what conspiracy theorists imagine, I don’t think President Bush ever ordered up invented facts to justify the Iraq war. Rather, I think there was a great deal of what economists call self-selection bias. Facts that confirmed what Mr. Bush wanted to believe tended to filter up to him, while conflicting facts tended to be sidelined. This sort of thing happens on every issue in every White House. But in this White House, the system of deliberation, debate, analysis and discussion seems unusually weak. As a consequence, there was no way of leveling the playing field, with the result decisions were made on the basis of biased presentations rather than objective analysis. In previous administrations, one safety valve has been the press. When participants in the decisionmaking felt the president was not fully taking into account certain facts or views, they would be leaked. At least then there was a chance that they would come to his attention. But in this administration there is very little of that, with loyalty and secrecy being enforced to an amazing degree that appears unprecedented. Moreover, President Bush is, self-admittedly, not a big consumer of news from outside sources. Consequently, alternate ways of communicating facts and views to him are shut down. Of course, one cannot know whether a more open and honest debate on Iraq would have led to a different result. But I for one would not have supported the war if I thought its principal justification was the liberation of the Iraqi people, which is what the White House now says was its primary mission. Our military exists to defend the nation, not be the world’s policeman. If there is a linkage, President Bush has yet to make it. Bruce Bartlett is senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis and a nationally syndicated columnist. Sarah: ‘I am disappointed that Paul Roberts associates Christian fundamentalist ‘agitation to escalate the Middle Eastern conflict’ with Zionism. There is no Zionist agitation to escalate the Middle Eastern conflict; on the contrary, it is the Zionists, represented by the Israeli government, who are pushing for a Middle East peace. As Sandra L. said, If all Arabs put down their weapons, there would be peace; if Israel put down her weapons, there would be no Israel.’ Lynn: ‘The question is not how we got here, it is: what do we do NOW?’ ☞ I agree. We have the wolf by the ears. Now what? My own feeling is that we need to show the world we are not comfortable with the leadership that has gotten us here. Firing the CEO would send the right message and give us a fresh start. The new CEO could then reestablish our alliances and formulate with our allies the best way to proceed. It may even be that they decide THIS is the best way to proceed (more or less) – especially now that the President has asked the UN to determine whom to hand partial sovereignty to, which was clearly not his original plan. But just having others see our genuine dismay at the way we were misled . . . and offering a believable commitment to international cooperation and the prospect of better judgment . . . could improve our effectiveness in fighting terrorism and, now that we’re there, stabilizing Iraq. Jon Frater: ‘Here is an even more devastating article by Paul Craig Roberts – whose politics I almost never agree with, but very much worth reading. [The piece Jon links to makes the case that over the past 25 years or so we have destroyed Iraq. – A.T.]’ ☞ One of the things I think we have to remember in considering this tragedy is that as monstrous as Saddam was, it was we, under Reagan/Bush, who gave him the WMD to use on the Iranians (and told him where to drop them). We, under Bush-Quayle-Cheney-Rumsfeld, who doubled his trade credits the year after he gassed his own people. And we, via communication from our ambassador, April Glaspie, who may even have at least partially green-lighted his invasion of Kuwait. None of this is to say we should not be thrilled Saddam is gone. (But at what cost?) Or that we should not be deeply proud of, and grateful to, our troops. (The mind boggles at the bravery and sacrifice of their service*.) It is just to suggest that little of this is simple, except perhaps to President Bush, who knew long before September 11, 2001, that Iraq needed to be invaded; who doesn’t read newspapers; and who at his most recent press conference couldn’t think of a single mistake he had made. * And at the way so many National Guard families are being bankrupted while the Bush Cabinet gets millions of dollars in income tax cuts. Tomorrow: An Opposing View. Next Week (Please!): Back to Money
And Now for the Conservative View April 28, 2004January 21, 2017 BUT WHAT DO WARREN BUFFETT AND BOB RUBIN KNOW ABOUT MONEY? Tom Anthony: ‘You might want to review Robert Rubin’s new book, In an Uncertain World. I read it straight through. It was one of the three books recommended by Warren Buffet in his current annual report. I am voting Democratic next time for the first time in my life after reading this.’ AND NOW, BACK TO THE END OF THE WORLD Yesterday, Joshua Micah Marshall – a liberal – worried that the Bush administration was . . . intentionally . . . getting us in way deeper than they let on. You ain’t but seen the tip of the iceberg, was his general thrust – and the piece was all the more compelling for having been written more than a year ago, before we launched the war. Today, I draw your attention to what Paul Craig Roberts – a conservative – wrote just last week. (A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, he worked on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, served Ronald Reagan as assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy – lots of solid conservative credentials.) He writes (emphasis mine): April 21, 2004 Locked On Course To Wider War By Paul Craig Roberts The American public has been deceived and locked on a course toward conscription and a wider war. On April 20 Republican Senator Chuck Hagel acknowledged the deceit when he urged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to support the restoration of compulsory military service. The draft must be reinstated, the Republican Senator said, in order that the US can continue its military occupation of Iraq. On the same day, top Pentagon officials informed Congress that the promised transfer of sovereignty to Iraq on June 30 is meaningless as the US military will retain authority to operate unhindered in Iraq regardless of the transfer of “sovereignty.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that June 30 was not “a magical date” that spelled the end of US military rule over Iraq. No one believes Iraqis will accept sham sovereignty. Far more troops than a volunteer army can provide will be needed to put down their uprising. Thus, Republicans are agitating to reinstate the draft. President Bush has used every possible opportunity to spread conflagration in the Middle East. In a diplomatic coup d’etat, Bush sabotaged the Middle East peace process by agreeing to a Greater Israel via Ariel Sharon’s annexation of Palestine’s West Bank. Not content with this affront, our President rubbed salt in Muslim wounds by describing Israel’s murder of Palestinian political leaders as acts of self-defense. Our Middle Eastern allies–essentially American paid puppets –feel the ground shaking under them. In deference to Muslim outrage, the King of Jordan canceled his scheduled meeting with President Bush, effectively giving the finger to “the most powerful man on earth.” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that Bush had created unprecedented “hatred of Americans like never before in the region.” “There was no hatred of Americans,” Mubarak said, but “after what has happened in Iraq, there is unprecedented hatred.” The image of America as an honest broker is shattered. “The despair and feeling of injustice are not going to be limited to our region alone. American and Israeli interests will not be safe, not only in our region but anywhere in the world,” Mubarak said sadly. Bush’s neocon overlords have Bush where they and Ariel Sharon want him, locked on a course toward wider war, with American troops, supplied by conscription, serving as Israel’s legions. Betrayed by a media that works as government’s propaganda arm, the American public has no idea of the tragedy that President Bush has prepared for them. The Bush administration deceived the American public with fabricated tales of nonexistent Iraqi WMD and nonexistent Iraqi links to Osama bin Laden. Bush sent the American Secretary of State to lie to the UN. Bush gratuitously invaded Iraq and proceeded to destroy what remained of a country sacked by 14 years of sanctions and American bombings. Bush’s neocon overlords attempted to spread the war into Syria and Iran, but were prevented by the lack of US troops. They did succeed, however, in provoking Iraqi uprisings to keep the pot boiling until they could find some new fuel to pour on the flames. That has now been done with Bush’s assent to Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. Having surely provoked further uprisings and further acts of terror, Bush will use the violence he provokes to call for more troops and wider incursions to deal with “thugs and criminals, who are preventing us from bringing freedom to the Middle East.” We are bringing fire and destruction to the Middle East. And to ourselves. This is exactly what American evangelical Christians desire, according to George Monbiot. In The Guardian (April 20), Monbiot describes the strong support Christian fundamentalists provide for Bush’s Middle Eastern war. “True believers” actively seek to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world. They believe this will usher in the Rapture, and they will be wafted up to heaven, where they will sit at the right hand of God and watch the rest of us endure the Years of Tribulation. According to Monbiot, “American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide a fictionalized account of the Rapture.” In 2002 when the US foreign policy community still had a say (it no longer does), Bush asked Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin. Angry emails from 100,000 Christian fundamentalists flooded the White House, and Bush never mentioned the matter again. With the public inattentive, there is no check on the Christian-Zionist agitation to escalate the Middle Eastern conflict. Prepare to sacrifice your sons to Christian fundamentalist delusion and to a Greater Israel. @ COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. ☞ Believe me when I tell you I don’t feel competent to judge the merits of either Marshall’s argument yesterday or Roberts’ today. I hope both are wrong. But I am way past trusting George W. Bush. Any man who could look into the camera and tell America that ‘By far, the vast majority of the benefits of [his tax cut] would go to people at the bottom end of the economic ladder’ is simply not dealing with us straight. Tomorrow: From the Washington Times, No Less . . .
Holding a Wolf By Its Ears April 27, 2004January 21, 2017 It’s more fun to read about subservient chickens or even watch ducks discuss Dick Cheney than to read about foreign policy. But having begun the week with references to the Madeleine Albright memoir and Sandy Berger’s piece, I’m headed that way. My excuse is that hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake (among other things), which is ultimately your money, and your kids’. And it’s hard to imagine world events not affecting investment decisions. Tomorrow, I will turn this space over to a conservative commentator who fears we are going down the wrong road. But let’s start with this piece, by Joshua Micah Marshall. What gives it extra poignancy is that it was written more than a year ago, before we launched the war. (And published in the Washington Monthly shortly thereafter.) I know we’re all busy, but this is really worth your taking the time to read and ponder. After all, we may be launching a much bigger war than you imagined. I have abridged it heavily, and bolded some passages to draw your interest, but this will give you the idea: April 2003 Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan. By Joshua Micah Marshall Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. . . . [T]o the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated. In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction . . . Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. . . . [T]he administration is trying to . . . topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. . . . Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East. There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda. Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution. . . . The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world? . . . The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.” But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us. To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently? . . . The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn [Iraq] into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? . . . To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not. . . . Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above. None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it. . . . If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting. Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind. The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con. The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. . . . [P]ush the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan. Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt. Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends [remember, folks: he is writing this before the war – A.T.] is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice. Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Tomorrow: A Conservative Says We’re “Locked On Course To Wider War”
Woodward, Albright and Berger April 26, 2004January 21, 2017 THE WOODWARD BOOK Jack R: ‘I agree with Don Culp concerning your objectivity. Perhaps you don’t care if you offend those of us who tend toward the center of the political spectrum? I think Woodward’s spin on events leading up to the invasion of Iraq are about as believable as the ranting of Teddy Kennedy or Howard Dean. But then, it’s not about the truth, is it Andy?’ ☞ Well, of course, it’s very much about the truth, Jack. In fact, that’s sorta the whole point. Woodward turned out to be correct about Watergate, no? (Does anyone still believe Nixon was telling the truth?) During his 27 years at the Washington Post, I think Woodward has earned a pretty good reputation – which may be one of the reasons President Bush agreed to these interviews and told his team to cooperate. Indeed, the book, Plan of Attack, is listed on the Bush-Cheney ’04 Web site as recommended reading. (My own guess is that Karl Rove decided to embrace it, knowing that relatively few people will actually read it . . . so if they say it’s a good book, they will have essentially defined it as pro-Bush. Smart!) Did you have a similar negative feeling about Woodward’s previous book, Bush at War? That book really is largely positive. Yet it disclosed the January 7, 2001, meeting at which the President- and VP-elect were warned that Osama Bin Laden represented a ‘tremendous’ and ‘immediate’ threat to the United States – and their failure to pay much attention. As for ‘the center of the political spectrum,’ with all due respect, I’m actually not quite yet prepared to cede it to you. My own fiscal leanings are a lot more centrist than those of the borrow-and-spend Republicans, who added $3 trillion to the National Debt under Reagan/Bush and have now set us up to add $3 trillion more – mostly in the cause of enriching the already richest. Meanwhile, Howard Dean cut Vermont income taxes twice, sales tax once, built a rainy day fund that put Vermont in better fiscal shape than, say, Texas (or any other state) . . . yet managed to provide virtually every child under 18 in Vermont health insurance. (And had an A rating from the National Rifle Association.) Which part of that do you oppose? How are you closer to the center than Howard Dean is or I am? I know you will recall that millions more people voted for Gore and Nader than voted for Bush and Buchanan, so I’m not sure that Bush fans do own the center. But I appreciate your views and make no claim to having a lock on the truth – only an interest as genuine as yours in seeking it. THE ALBRIGHT BOOK I just finished listening to Madam Secretary, Madeleine Albright’s memoirs read to me by . . . Madeleine Albright. (Thank you, audible.com.) I assume Jack would read it and imagine the world in even worse shape than it is today if we still had people like Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright running the show. But as I read it, I yearned for that kind of leadership. If you can find time, read it and judge for yourself. THE BERGER ARTICLE Or read former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s important piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Summarized: By stressing unilateralism over cooperation, preemption over prevention, and firepower over staying power, the Bush administration has alienated the United States’ natural allies and disengaged from many of the world’s most pressing problems. To restore U.S. global standing–which is essential in checking the spread of lethal weapons and winning the war on terrorism–the next Democratic president must recognize the obvious: that means are as important as ends.
But Can This Chicken Juggle? Time Travel: Read Monday's Column Today April 23, 2004February 25, 2017 ENOUGH WITH THE CHICKEN! Paul McKittrick: ‘Type in ‘Crispin’ at this site and the ad agency’s creative team emerges from behind the sofa.’ Mike Groenendaal: ‘If you command the chicken to ‘Boycott Burger King,’ it gives you the thumbs up.’ ☞ Oops. That should be enough to get the creative team back behind the couch. (Actually, I’m guessing anything with the words Burger King in it gets the thumbs up. Which leads to some even funnier possibilities . . . and raises the question – though does not BEG the question, which is what an answer does when it weasels out of addressing a question – when, exactly, did chickens get thumbs?) JUGGLING Gray Chang: ‘So what happened when you handed the Flying Karamazov Brothers the tin of fine powder?’ ☞ It was an interesting afternoon. A few weeks earlier, I had gone to their opening night – a packed Broadway theater – expecting nothing of these Americans pretending to be Russians who could juggle. They brought the house down. People were laughing so hard they were crinkled. Yes, some of them had money in the show (opening-night audiences do tend to be enthusiastic), but it wasn’t that. It was juggling genius. Finally! A cultural level on which this Slavic Languages and Literatures major could relate. (When I finish my story, you can click the link above and see the Flying Karamazov Brothers and read their history.) So I called one of the show’s producers to try to get tickets to an upcoming matinee for me and two 11-year-olds (who have since graduated from Yale). I assumed it would be really hard to get good seats on short notice, so I would call in a favor. Though he sounded a bit perplexed, my friend said sure. Whereupon, I set about trying to think what to bring for the part of the show when the Brothers ask the audience to bring things up to the stage for them to juggle. (I had not known about this on opening night but I knew it now.) Indeed – unbeknownst to them – I had developed such a tight intellectual bond with these five Russian brothers (well, Americans pretending to be brothers), that I had spent considerable time trying to imagine what would pose a really new challenge for them – what would get them to notice me, and realize I appreciated their genius. Knives, roses, balloons, kittens – all old hat. (Old hats? Them, too.) And who has kittens to bring to be juggled, anyway? I wanted to bring something that could not be juggled. As luck would have it, I had just opened a cardboard canister of some kind of nutritional powder someone had given me to add to milkshakes or something . . . hated it, yet didn’t want to waste it . . . and realized I had just found its perfect use. I brought the kids and the canister of powder to the theater and, when the time came to approach the stage, I removed the top and stepped forward. Now, I need to tell you that – to my complete astonishment – the theater was barely a third full. This show had apparently become a monster hit in my mind only. And it was the most remarkable thing: It was the exact same show with the exact same cast . . . yet the energy in the theater was entirely different. The matinee audience was in a show-me mood, sleepy after lunch. The Flying Karamazov Brothers, embarrassed by the size of the crowd and dejected that the intellectual sparks they were shooting out to the crowd were not catching fire, lost their insouciance. They began going through the motions, their minds, elsewhere . . . even dropping things on occasion. And then one of them saw the powder. It sat there on stage with a frying pan and a bowling ball and a butcher knife (when did an audience ever not bring a bowling ball or a butcher knife?) . . . and I could see Dmitry (or was it Ivan? Igor? Fyodor?) go off auto-pilot, the juices returning to his brain, the smile returning to his face, the adrenalin pumping to his glands, and I want to tell you that I was a very happy boy. I knew that they knew that somebody in the audience had majored in Slavic Languages and Literatures . . . that somebody in the audience recognized them for the comedic juggling gods they were. And, yes, after considerable clowning around to forestall the inevitable, they finally attempted to add the open canister of finely ground powder to the bowling ball, frying pan, butcher knife rotation . . . proving that of which I had been all but certain: even a god cannot successfully juggle an open container of Ultra SlimFast. It was a fine mess, and there was even some coughing. Thank you for asking. Go see their show. Monday: Woodward, Albright, Berger – Oy! (Read it now at no extra charge.)
Egg On My Face Free PDFs, The Conservative Case April 22, 2004February 25, 2017 EGG ON MY FACE For those of you who tried the subservient chicken link yesterday before I corrected it – my apologies. Also, I feel a little silly not to have realized just what it was that Kathi was sending me. Here I thought it was just a guy in a chicken suit . . . or maybe a bunch of college roommates, each taking turns in the suit, with a web cam . . . you know, one guy at the computer receiving the instructions and then yelling to the guy in the chicken suit, ‘They want you to go fry yourself,’ and then the guy in the chicken suit scratching his head and trying to interpret that for the camera. But actually, it is the creation of the world’s most-award-winning ad agency (in 2003), Crispin Porter & Bogusky – headquartered in Miami! – and an example of viral marketing at its most effective. The chicken has received more than 100 million requests in the lest two weeks, all part of the ‘Have It Your Way’ campaign for Burger King’s new TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. Among the more than 400 commands to which the chicken is prepared to respond: Do the chicken dance Chicken sandwich Go vegan Good job, Chicken! Turn on the television Turn off the light Lay an egg Which last command leads naturally to a topic I last covered in this space five years ago, so some of you may have missed it. Namely, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Many people have asked me this (financial writers being looked to for advice on eggs-in-baskets and chickens-before-they’re-hatched) – all smug, like it’s impossible to answer and I’ll be stumped and that’ll show me (in much the same spirit I once handed The Flying Karamazov Brothers, who boast they can juggle anything, an open tin of finely-ground powder) – but in fact there is a clear and easy answer: The egg. Because at whatever stage you decide to define a chicken as being a chicken – mutated and evolved from whatever near-chicken precursor laid the egg that hatched it – there was an egg with a forthcoming chicken inside before there was a chicken to lay it. The egg was laid by the precursor to the chicken, which had perhaps spent too much time around a poorly-shielded nuclear power plant. The egg cracks, and to the surprise of the near-chicken, out pops . . . a chicken! This, of course, presupposes an acceptance of the theory of evolution, which, judging from a few of my e-mails lately, I should perhaps not do. PDF – PRETTY DARN FREE John Bakke: ‘I’m sure you’ll have plenty of wiseass Apple users pointing this out after your column, but I don’t mind being among them: PDF creation is already built into the Apple operating system. You can also create PDFs online at the Adobe site… the first 5 are free.’ Bill Baron: ‘Another easy way to create PDFs is to use the DocMorph webpage of the National Library of Medicine. The site also offers good optical character recognition and adequate speech synthesis. It’s free, but you must register.’ Paul Romaine: ‘If you don’t mind having an entire free office suite on your hard drive, check out Open Office, an alternative to MS Office. It generates PDF files much more quickly than Word + Adobe Acrobat (Full version). (Acrobat installs a printer driver on your PC and Word ‘prints’ to the driver, which creates a file.) Open Office is about a 66MB download. As a regular Word/Excel user, I find the programs powerful although a bit pokey, but it will generate a PDF in less than half the time than Word+Acrobat, and at no cost. It also has an interesting bibliography manager.’ THE CONSERVATIVE CASE Russell Turpin: ‘I thought you would enjoy this article, the conservative case for voting Democrat. I think they nailed it.’ ☞ By a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, no less. In brief part: Complaints about Republican profligacy have led the White House to promise to mend its ways. But Bush’s latest budget combines accounting flim-flam with unenforceable promises. So how do we put Uncle Sam on a sounder fiscal basis? Vote Democratic. OK. I’m sold.
King of Your Own Domain April 21, 2004February 25, 2017 Kathi Derevan: ‘Finally, somebody in a chicken costume who will do whatever you want. Check it out: subservientchicken.com. (HOW DO THEY DO THIS?????)’ ☞ I was disappointed at the range of his tricks. But I did get him to JUMP. Now, you’re thinking, Who was the genius who had the foresight to nab ‘subservient-chicken.com’ before anyone else? You’re thinking, Why didn’t I have the presence of mind to grab that site back before all the good sites were taken? (And what about subservientduck? Is that taken? Is it too late or me to own Internet real estate like this? I wonder whether anyone thought to claim love.com or coolstuff.com. Those could be valuable.) The answer, of course, is that people have claimed all the good ones – more than 35 million have been registered. But now comes the estimable Marc Fest with this great tip: ‘Check out deleteddomains.com. Besides the occasional chance to snatch a neat expired domain name, just browsing all those deleted domains is fun. One wonders: what great business plans were built on ‘acespot.com’? Or ‘blobjob.com’? Or ‘epidrug.com’?’ Some domains Marc found that were recently available (of more than 22 million that had once been registered but allowed to lapse): youdial.com youguess.com speedofix.com technotip.com usefulfun.com dreamsteps.com goodmuslim.com gotohotsex.com infobuster.com mrfeedback.com netattacks.com nicestores.com prettyarea.com signalcast.com supercrime.com If you find a few you like, just visit godaddy.com to register them for less than $10 each. Thanks, Marc!
Cheapless in Seattle and a Free PDF Maker April 20, 2004February 25, 2017 Todd Vogel: ‘I’ve read with interest the material about a possible housing bubble, and I have this question: My wife and I sold our house and moved across the country to Seattle. At first, we weren’t sure if we were going to stay, but we’ve fallen in love with the mountains, the water, and the fresh fish. We plan to live in Europe for a year and then to return to Seattle to settle for good. We’ve got the proceeds from our house sale sitting in our account, in a safe but plodding investment. Seattle’s housing prices boomed with the tech explosion, and we’re afraid to buy now. On the other hand, we’re afraid to wait a year – things might only be more expensive. I’d like to dollar-cost average a house the way we would our stock investments – or find some other way to spread the risk. Any ideas on how one might attempt this?’ ☞ Free advice can be disastrous, but here’s mine: Wait. If prices stay firm or even rise 2% or 3%, you’ll come out ahead for not having had to deal with the cost and hassle of an empty or rented home for a year. Of course, if Seattle home prices jump sharply in the next year, you’ll hate me for ever having opened my mouth – and that could happen. But you’ve got to wonder whether outsourcing could affect some of the jobs that might otherwise have added to the demand for Seattle housing . . . whether higher interest rates could hurt the ability of buyers to afford even higher monthly payments . . . whether the boom in Seattle housing prices isn’t at least due for a breather . . . and whether it will ever stop raining out there. (Cheap shot. I love Seattle, too.) Of course, the interest rate question raises another issue. What profiteth it a couple to wait a year to buy a house for $380,000 instead of $400,000 – saving $20,000! – if the mortgage rate has gone up a point and their monthly payment, despite the lower price, would be higher? Quick: taker this quiz. Which would you prefer, paying $400,000 with a 5% mortgage or $350,000 with a 7% mortgage? Assume for the sake of simplicity that you are financing 100% of the price, meaning that you’d face a $2,147 monthly payment at 5% on the $400,000 purchase price versus a $2,328 monthly payment at 7% on the $350,000 purchase price. Same house; which deal do you prefer? I’d go with the $350,000 price and the higher mortgage, because there’s always the possibility that in a year or three you might have a chance to refinance the mortgage at a lower rate, if rates drop back down – but under no circumstances will you have a chance to lower the purchase price from $400,000 once you pay it. Furthermore, if you should move in, say, five years, the extra $10,860 you would have paid in interest (less, after the value of the tax deduction) would be more than made up by the extra $50,000 profit on your sale. But you asked a different question: how to hedge this situation. The problem with hedging is that, like any other kind of insurance, it carries a price. You could buy your Seattle dream home and rent it at a small loss until you were ready to move in. That would protect you against rising prices. You could buy a different house or condo, figuring that if the price for your eventual dream house has risen, so will the value of the one you bought as a hedge. But why go through the extra transaction costs of buying and selling – why not just buy the dream house now? Or you could buy something in Vancouver. If Bush wins, demand could soar. Readers: Any better – practical – ideas for Todd? READING .PDF FILES . . . Mark Langenderfer: ‘On the topic of Acrobat Reader, you should refer readers to pdf995.com. It’s a free little program that works GREAT for creating your own PDF files from anything you can normally print on your computer. After you install it, you simply ‘print’ to the PDF995 writer instead of a printer. Did I mention it’s FREE? No need to buy the expensive Adobe program. Only downside is you have to live with a little advertising each time you do it. ‘Adobe Acrobat Reader (the free version) is still needed to view PDF files. This PDF995 software lets you create PDF files to send to other people. PDF is the most widely used format for sending files. I’m on some website displaying a graph, say. I simply hit Print, then change the printer selection to PDF995. I’m asked for a name to make the PDF file and presto, done! And that’s when an ad pops on your screen (the price to pay for free software) which you simply close. You can create PDF files from Word/Excel documents, websites – anything. PDFs are great for documents you don’t want people to be able change (not 99% of people anyway).’
Woodward (Oh – and Should We Abolish the Senate?) April 19, 2004January 21, 2017 But first . . . is your sheep acting a little funny around the other sheep? Reader John Padavic recommends ‘The Truth About Gay Animals,’ a BBC documentary re-airing this Wednesday at 9pm on TRIO (following, one’s inner imp cannot resist noting, ‘The Pet Shop Boys’). And now . . . this interesting tidbit from historian Richard N. Rosenfeld’s cover story in the soon-to-be-released May issue of Harpers: A majority of the people in our country are represented by just 18 senators, or 18% of the body . . . while the 52 Senators from the 26 least populous states represent just 18% of the U.S. population. Big surprise, he notes, that ‘the less populous states have extracted benefits from the nation out of proportion to their populations.’ Of course, if you don’t like getting the short end of the stick, you can always move to Wyoming. But there are other impacts that even moving won’t solve, like the lack of any black or Hispanic faces in the Senate (look for Illinois’ Barack Obama to break that lock this November). Rosenfeld titles his essay: ‘What Democracy? The Case for Abolishing the United States Senate.’ Rosenfeld argues that, just as we have gradually moved toward one-person-one-vote democracy – having begun by allowing only white males with property to vote – so must we now move toward abolishing the Senate, or else significantly reducing its powers (perhaps following the model of the British House of Lords). It seems unlikely that anything will soon come of this. Still, it’s a thought-provoking essay. It turns out that enthusiasm for what high school history students know as ‘the Great Compromise’ was shared by colonies representing only a small fraction of the colonists. 60 MINUTES Did you see the Woodward interview? You will be comforted or unnerved to know that the President, in deciding to attack Iraq, seems to believe he is God’s messenger . . . that he informed Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar about his decision to go to war before informing his own Secretary of State . . . that General Tommy Franks was already five months into planning the war when he told a televised news conference that no planning was underway . . . and that $700 million Congress thought it was appropriating for Afghanistan was actually to be spent on Iraq war preparations. (Woodward suggests this is troubling because the Constitution says Congress shall appropriate expenditures. It’s one thing to keep appropriations secret from the public, with the consent of Congress; another to keep them secret from the Congress.) Something tells me we have not heard the last of Woodward’s book. Tomorrow: Cheapless in Seattle