Year: 2004

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 . . .

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”

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 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

IF YOU OWN APPLE LEAPs

On November 25, I suggested buying some January 2005 Apple 20 LEAPs (long-term options to buy Apple stock at $20 a share). On March 31, with the LEAPS having a little more than doubled, I suggested selling half so that, from here on out, you’d be playing with ‘the house’s money.’ Yesterday, Apple reported good earnings and the stock jumped . . . so if you didn’t sell half, you have another even nicer chance to do so.

I’m holding the rest of mine – a speculation, to be sure, but Apple is one of the best brands in the world, selling at a not entirely crazy price.

One other reason to hold on is that, if everything else stayed the same (which it won’t), you come out ahead waiting to have your profit taxed at the lower long-term capital gains rate. I should stress, though, that there is a countervailing force at work here, summed up in the old saw that ‘On Wall Street, the bulls make money and the bears make money – but not the pigs.’ Many a dollar has been lost by investors – certainly including this one (oink! oink!) – who couldn’t bring themselves to sell and pay the higher tax.

IF YOU OWN TIPS

A couple of weeks ago I suggested lightening up on our 30-year TIPS. You might want to reread that and, now that they’ve dropped from 132-and-change to just under 124, think about buying them back. My guess is that they may go a good ways lower still – they are still not cheap here. But the reason to own them (in your retirement plan, to avoid their unfortunate tax twist) is not to make every last cent of profit, but to have a core holding that is completely immune to credit risk and largely immune to interest-rate/inflation risk. At today’s level, some of the excess air has been let out of the tires, and – speaking of pigs – maybe we should be grateful for the little 8-point pick-up we’ve made in less than three weeks. (If you sold $100,000 of these in your retirement plan at 132 and now buy them back at 124, you are $8,000 ahead.) I plan to buy back some of what I sold and hold off on the rest, hoping for an even lower reentry point.

INSPECTING CONTAINERS

Bob R: ‘You wrote: shouldn’t we be inspecting more of the containers coming into this country? An awful lot of experts seem to think so.‘ No we should not! I have a container of household items which was supposed to have arrived recently (I’m moving back from Hong Kong). I was just informed that it is delayed 4 weeks because I got ‘randomly’ selected to be searched. The kicker is that I apparently have to pay the government up to $1000 for the privilege of protecting the country from myself and my furniture.’

☞ OK, until we can inspect containers without delaying someone’s furniture, we should accept the risk of a nuclear explosion in one of our large cities. But as soon as there’s a way to do this expeditiously, we should inspect more containers.

DUE DILIGENCE

Don Culp: ‘You have lost the ability to objectively weigh both the pros and cons of political issues. Your relentless Bush bashing and constant failure to address both sides of political issues has become overbearing. I realize this is your site and you may be just trying to offset Republicans who think the current administration can do no wrong, but even a little more objectivity might encourage some of us to spend more time reading your political comments as part of our ‘due diligence’ in helping us decide who to vote for in 2004. I voted for Al Gore in 2000 and have not made a decision yet for 2004. Here‘s what I feel is a fair commentary from someone who hasn’t lost his objectivity that you might want to share with your readers.’

YOUR WEEKEND MOVIE

If you do read the David Broder column Don referred us to, you will see that it acknowledges the good in what President Bush is trying to do. Wouldn’t it be great if there were one day a prosperous, free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East? It would indeed! That’s the primary reason I generally say things like, ‘whether or not one thinks we should be in Iraq’ – because there are reasons to be there, even though they are not how the war was sold.

The question is: Is this effort worth the cost in the tens of thousands killed and wounded, the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the loss of global goodwill? And could not the same end have been achieved (if we do achieve it) at far less such cost? Whatever your answer to the first question, the answer to the second question, I think (as David Broder and so many others seem to agree), is – yes.

You will find none of the ‘pros’ – only the costs – in this weekend’s movie. But the side of the argument it presents is not unimportant.

(If you do watch, watch it remembering that during his press conference the President couldn’t think of a single mistake he’s made. And that ‘doing Iraq’ was on the Bush agenda long before September 11 . . . even though, as a humble-foreign-policy candidate, he chose not to mention it.)

Monday: Cheapless in Seattle