Libertarian Leanings

It's all wrong

New York Times columnists are pitching a fit today.  When aren't they, you ask?  Point taken.  First Maureen Dowd reprises the anti war arguments against going into Iraq.  The occasion of her tantrum is the completion of work by a commission examining America's intelligence failures that, as reported by her very own paper, "found no evidence that political pressure from the White House or Pentagon contributed to the mistaken intelligence."  That can't be right, says she.

Dick Cheney and the neocons at the Pentagon started with the conclusion they wanted, then massaged and manipulated the intelligence to back up their wishful thinking.

As The New Republic reported, Mr. Cheney lurked at the C.I.A. in the summer of 2002, an intimidating presence for young analysts. And Douglas Feith set up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon as a shadow intelligence agency to manufacture propaganda bolstering the administration's case.

...There are, after all, more than 1,500 dead American soldiers, Al Qaeda terrorists on the loose and real nuclear-bomb programs in Iran and North Korea that we know nothing about.

But it's not as if Dowd has any proposals for doing anything about Al Qaeda, Iran, or North Korea.  In the New York Times Utopian dream, weapons inspectors would still be wandering through Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and at the UN there would be round after round of Security Council Resolutions.  And if it were possible for serenity to exist during a Republican administration, it would prevail at the Grey Lady.

Thomas Friedman, on the other hand, believes reform in the Middle East is the right to path to take.  But for him it was done all wrong, and done for the wrong reasons.  Friedman could often be heard on Imus in the Morning railing at the criminal incompetence in the prosecution of the war.  Now that things seem to be working out as he hoped they would, in spite of the hopelessly incompetent administration, it turns out it was all done for the wrong reasons.

For the last month or so, the Bush team has been doing a victory lap, taking credit for the outbreak of democracy in the Arab world. While I disagree with many Bush policies, I think the president does deserve credit for unleashing something very important in the politically moribund Arab East. Many of the necessary elements for democratization are now in place in Iraq (free and fair elections), in Lebanon (a Syrian withdrawal from Beirut), in Egypt (President Mubarak's commitment to multicandidate presidential elections) and in Gaza (an Israeli commitment to withdraw and Palestinian elections).

But while the necessary conditions may now be in place, the sufficient conditions for democratization are still not present in any of these arenas.

Can anybody figure out what that last sentence means?  Can something be in place but not present?  But I digress.

...In history, a lot of good has started with people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. But you will only have self-sustaining democratization in the Middle East if people start to do the right thing for the right reasons - if the different sects in Iraq and Lebanon really do hammer out a shared vision and set of rules for their two countries. If Egypt recognizes it can't thrive without liberalizing its economy and political institutions. If Israelis and Palestinians really do come to terms with each other's nationalism. Otherwise, you'll have constant backsliding.

Trying to make any one of these democracy projects self-sustaining - and that is the test - would be a career. Secretary Rice's challenge is to do all four at once. The burden is not hers alone. The parties themselves must carry the lion's share. But her responsibility is undeniable. Does she have the toughness to deal with Ariel Sharon? She has not shown it up to now. If the Bush team lets Mr. Sharon trade Gaza for the West Bank, the whole U.S. democratization agenda in the region will be set back. Does she have the moxie to restrain the Kurds and Shiites from overreaching in Iraq? The steel to deal with the Syrians? The will to move the Egyptians?

Does she have the moxie?  A better question would be, does anybody at the New York Times have a brain?  Or perhaps an ounce or two of integrity?  If they do, they have not shown it up to now.  One would certainly be hard pressed to accuse Dowd or Friedman of having either.

Former diplomats oppose Bolton

Fifty-nine former diplomats have signed a letter to Senator Richard Lugar urging the Senate to reject the nomination of John R. Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

"He is the wrong man for this position," they said in a letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Indiana Republican has scheduled hearings on Bolton's nomination for April 7.

"We urge you to reject that nomination," the former diplomats said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press and dated Tuesday.

I can't wait to see those confirmation hearings.  I wonder if they'll filibuster.  April 7th.  Mark your calendars.

In the letter, the former diplomats praised Bush's efforts at the start of his second term to improve relations with European allies and with the United Nations.

It is for that reason, they said, "we write you to express our concern" with Bolton's selection.

They ticked off a number of treaties they said Bolton had opposed and said he had made "unsubstantiated claims" that Cuba and Syria were working on biological weapons.

Also, they said Bolton had worked as a paid researcher for Taiwan and supported recognition of it as a sovereign state, and said he was skeptical of U.N. peacekeeping operations.

"Given these past actions and statements, John R. Bolton cannot be an effective promoter of the U.S. national interest at the U.N.," the former diplomats concluded. "We urge you to oppose his nomination."

Sounds like an endorsement to me.  Who are these people and how did they ever get to be representatives of U.S. national interests?

Carnival of the Vanities

This week's host for the Carnival of the Vanities is Eric Berlin.  Lots of good stuff.

Perspective

A sampling of headlines:

Annan Cleared of Wrongdoing

Oil-for-food report doesn't clear Annan: former CSIS chief

Oil for food inquiry clears Kofi Annan of corruption

UN: Inquiry Clears Annan, But Faults Management On Iraq Program

Probe faults Annan

Predictable.

Language of the UN

New Sisyphus recently posted his critiques of the Report of the Secretary-General.  His conclusions are not generous.  First this:

Nevertheless, the Secretary General proposes we set aside our bickering and agree to agree on his definition of “terrorism.” And what a definition it is:

"I endorse fully the High-level Panel’s call for a definition of terrorism, which would make it clear that, in addition to actions already proscribed by existing conventions, any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a Government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act."

...If the U.S. signed on to this definition, it would be giving comfort to the “human rights” and “international law” organizations that have been itching to declare the U.S. a terrorist state. The fact that the Secretary General can propose a definition that would catch the U.S. in its net is more than evidence of bad faith, it speaks to a willful hatred of the United States and its military actions over the past years.

Then this:

If this report is the best the U.N can come up with in the face of the loss of confidence it it as an institution by the world’s leading democracy, founding member, host nation and most important contributor, then perhaps it is further gone than even American conservatives have guessed.

Is it any surprise?  Hardly.  But, one of the interesting things to note is how Kofi Annan's report relies on the language of the left, the language of deceit.  Beginning with the title we get euphemistic newspeak, "In larger freedom:  toward development, security, and human rights for all."  And what exactly are the larger freedoms?  Life?  Liberty?  Pursuit of happiness?  Well, no.

In a report that would make the most leftist of our academics proud, here are the larger freedoms.  They are presented in the form of report section titles.  There is the "Freedom from Want", which has such sub headings as "A shared vision of development", "Ensuring environmental sustainability", and "Other priorities for global action".  Along with his larger freedom from want, he addresses a need for "Freedom from fear", and "Freedom to live in dignity".  It's like it was lifted right out of George Orwell's 1984.

Early on, the leftists found success in co-opting the language of liberty. The term "liberal" use to refer to 19th century classical liberals who favored free markets, free trade, and unalienable rights.  These are things that border on evil according to today's liberals.  People shouldn't have property rights because there's a risk they might use their land in a way that could imperil the larger freedom for sustainability.  In the leftist view, one person's right to be free from want becomes the obligation on all people to waive claim on the money they earn, so it can be available for redistribution.  Another person's freedom from fear is the obligation on us all to give up the right to keep and bear arms.  In fact, right after a section on "Peacebuilding" (no kidding) Annan proposes "a legally binding international instrument to regulate the marking and tracing of small arms".

The language of the UN is the language of the left, and the language of the left has always been the language of deceit.  Is it any surprise that two of our leading leftists, Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff, are linguists?  To them language is a weapon in their fight for "social justice".  The strategy is to entice those they consider to be in the lower classes.  The lesser people must be persuaded to choose what is in their best interest, and in the leftist view, those interests would best be served if they chose security over liberty.  They argue that it's necessary to restrict, and they do it in the name of freedom.

And that is the core of the deceit.  Kofi Annan and the rest of the lefties would have you believe there is a legitimate trade off.  Give up a little liberty in return for security.  History says over and over, give up a little liberty, then give up a little more, and after a while you have neither liberty nor security.

A real danger in Iraq

Strategy Page gives us something to think about.

IRAQ: There Is Something Worse Than Terrorism

March 28, 2005: Terrorism isn’t the biggest problem in Iraq, nor is political instability or the high crime rate. All of those are easy to solve compared to the biggest, and most persistent problem; corruption. Lack of fair and efficient government has been a problem in this region for thousands of years. When the officials were honest and efficient, mighty empires flourished. But most of the time, the bureaucrats are on the take, and everyone suffered. It’s been going on for so long that it’s been accepted as the way things are. But one of the unexpected side effects of global communications (especially email and satellite news) is that most Iraqis now know that it doesn’t have to be that way. To reinforce these heretical views, visitors, or migrants, to these distant lands of honest government, come back and tell wondrous tales of cops who are not crooks, and politicians going to jail for taking bribes.

But the current reality in Iraq is that of thieves getting back into power. The worst of the lot are the Sunni Arabs, because they have had the most access to government jobs, and public money, for so long. This has been going on since the 16th century, when the Sunni Turks conquered the area, and tossed out the Shia Iranians. The Turks let the Sunni Arabs run the place. As long as the locals remained reasonably quiet, and a sufficient amount of taxes went back to Constantinople each year, the Sunni Arab officials could do as they pleased. And they mainly pleased to steal from anyone not strong enough to resist. This included other Sunni Arabs, but mostly it meant sticking it to the Shia Arabs, Kurds, Jews and Christian Arabs. There used to be a lot of Jews and Christian Arabs in the area, but most of the Christians, and nearly all the Jews, have since emigrated to more hospitable lands (Europe, North America and Israel), along with a lot of Shia Arabs and Kurds.

When Saddam and his Baath Party were overthrown in 2003, it quickly became apparent that there were not enough trained (and experienced) Shia Arab and Kurdish bureaucrats to run the whole country. So Sunni Arab officials were brought back in. And then the thieving began. Billions of dollars went missing. There were Shia Arab and Kurdish thieves as well, but they were not as experienced, or as ruthless, as the Sunni Arab officials. Case in point is the use of Sunni Arab gangs as hit men, to eliminate honest officials who are trying to crack down on corruption.

Another problem is family relationships. Family ties are important in Iraq, and the families tend to be large and expansive. A Sunni Arab police commander might easily have a cousin working for a terrorist group, and another who’s a banker in Europe or Egypt. The police commander can use these connections to get a corruption investigator murdered, and to get stolen money out of the country and laundered in a foreign bank. There are at least a few thousand Sunni Arabs involved in corruption in a big way (many more in smaller ways), and several billion dollars, at least, that have been stolen so far. Do the math. How do you think people are paying for all those new luxury cars and mansions? The crooks are smart. They spread the money around in the family. That buys protection, and places to hide when the going gets very rough.

Much more money has probably just been lost track off during the chaos of the last two years. But that’s an easy problem to fix. More difficult is curing people of the notion that they can use bribes and murder to deal with anyone trying to stop the stealing. Worse yet, anyone not in the family, and that includes just about everyone else in a country of 26 million, is considered a potential victim. And everyone else knows it. It’s hard to run an efficient business when, at any moment, some new bureaucrat can come in and demand a large payoff for the privilege of staying in business. Happens all the time, and Iraqis are tired of it.

But the ancient Babylonian “writing on the wall” (“Mene mene tekel upharshin,” or “you have weighed in the balance and found wanting”) is being seen again. As long as the coalition is around, the clean government crowd has a fighting chance of putting the crooks out of business, or at least on the defensive. For example, the coalition gangbusters effort has developed a lot of evidence of corrupt officials working with the anti-government terrorists. Now that Iraqis have elected a parliament, and are about to make some of those people government ministers, expect to see headlines about which one got caught with his hand in the till. Coalition criminal investigators are a corrupt Iraqis worst nightmare. You can’t bribe them (this is attempted regularly), and they are hard to kill. Some American civilian workers are thought to have been murdered for complaining about corrupt officials, and the heat is on to find the killers, and who paid for the hit. Corrupt elected officials will make a big issue of curbing the ability of coalition forces to investigate crimes and corruption. All in the name of national sovereignty, of course, and making it easier to steal and get away with it.

Iraqi media is another target of corrupt officials, and terrorists as well. Journalists reporting on corruption and terrorism often get killed by those they are reporting on. But the world wide web, and satellite television shows make it impossible to stop the accusations from getting reported. Email not only brings in news of how people can live without corruption and terrorism, it also allows the victims to get word out, quietly and without attracting the attention of hit squads serving terrorism and bad government.

While many Iraqis are willing to pay any price for peace and quiet, and many others are willing to accept intimidation, an increasing number are willing to put their lives on the line for clean government. People know that this will eventually bring rule of law and safety. But first, it’s a fight to the death between groups of Iraqis who have very different views of Iraq’s future. A happy ending is not assured. If enough Iraqis do not step up for honest government, the country will end up with another Saddam.

Seymour Hersh on Congress

In a speech at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut last week Seymour Hersh had this to say about Congress.

"We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's."

I suppose he thinks the vastly more intelligent Congress of the 1960's stood up to LBJ.  As so often happens, the remark says more about Mr. Hersh than about either set of congressmen.

Minimum wage

Walter Williams takes a dim view proposals to raise the minimum wage.  I wonder that this topic keeps coming back.  By now I would have expected literate people to realize that raising the minimum wage pushes low end wage earners off bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment data confirms the economic prediction about minimum wage effects. Currently, the teen unemployment rate is 16 percent for whites and 32 percent for blacks. In 1948, the unemployment rate for black teens (16-17) was lower (9.4 percent) than white teens (10.2 percent). Plus, black teens were more active in the labor force.

How might we explain that? How about arguing that there was less racial discrimination in 1948, or back then black teens were more highly educated than white teens? Of course, such arguments would be nonsense. The fact of the matter is that while there was a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour prior to 1948, it had been essentially repealed by the post-World War II inflation; however, with successive increases in the minimum wage, black teen unemployment rose relative to white teens to where it has become permanently double that of white teens.

To believe in a beneficial effect of having a minimum wage you have to believe that a segment of society is permanently and severely incompetent.  Of course, if you can exert some control over education systems, as teachers unions do and as the lefty politicians they support do, you have some chance of making that belief a reality.

She's out

In Major League Baseball you often see a player or manager get tossed from a game for arguing balls and strikes.  It's simply not done, against the rules.  The arguments over Terri Schiavo remind me of it.  A judge has decided that her husband can speak for her, since she didn't leave written instructions on what to do now that she can't make her wishes known.  That decision having been made, no other judge seems to want to question that call.  Special legislation moving the case from state to federal court failed.  The federal judge refused to question the call.

But that's the call I question.  At some point in 1992 or 1993 the husband changed his mind about taking care of Terri and gave up hope she would improve, taking the position instead that it would have been her wish to die.  There are a number of reasons that the judge should not let the husband make that decision, but the biggest one is that he is really no longer the husband.  He left and started a new family.  That in itself presents enough of a conflict of interest on his part that he should not be part of the decision whether Terri lives or dies.  He stands to gain when Terri dies.

That's the decision that should have been revisited, but won't be.  It's remarkable, the presumption on the part of the Florida courts to now know after 15 years that this is what Terri would have wanted.  The judge has decided.  You can't argue balls and strikes.

Da Weft Wing

Tom Maguire continues his entertaining commentary on the the Valerie Plame/Ambassador Joe soap opera, which now approaches its second anniversary.  Who could have imagined this story would be such a gold mine?  You just can't make this stuff up.  I'm convinced Hollywood is ignoring a sitcom mother lode.  They could call it "Da Weft Wing".  But that's another story.

Here we are today with Da Weft (in your mind's ear think Tom Brokaw) up in arms because a crime has not been committed.  Or so they say.  And since they're now quite certain that a crime has not been committed they demand that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald stop asking reporters any more questions about the outing of Valerie Plame.  Just go away, Patrick.  Why are you tormenting our reporters?

A federal court should first determine whether a crime has been committed in the disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's name before prosecutors are allowed to continue seeking testimony from journalists about their confidential sources, the nation's largest news organizations and journalism groups asserted in a court filing yesterday.

The 40-page brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, argues that there is "ample evidence . . . to doubt that a crime has been committed" in the case, which centers on the question of whether Bush administration officials knowingly revealed the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in the summer of 2003. Plame's name was published first by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak and later by other publications.

About a year and a half ago Da Weft was up in arms because they were quite certain a crime had been committed.  Or so they said.  OpinionJournal excerpts sentiments of prominent Times columnists at that time:

Maureen Dowd, Oct. 2: "For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a bludgeon on critics, you'd think that doing something as unpatriotic as outing Mr. Wilson's wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts would be enough. Nah. The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its own spy when self-preservation was at stake."

Paul Krugman, Oct. 3: "In any case, Mr. Wilson's views and character are irrelevant. Someone high in the administration committed a felony and, in the view of the elder Mr. Bush, treason. End of story."

Bob Herbert, Oct. 3: "The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration. The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom. The problem it faces now is not just the criminal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, but also the fact that the public understands this story only too well. Deliberately blowing the cover of an intelligence or law enforcement official for no good reason is considered by nearly all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to be a despicable act."

Nicholas Kristof, Oct. 11: "We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it."

Here's a bold prediction.  Once reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper are beyond Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiries, whether by escaping jail or spending time in it, it'll be a crime again.  In fact, crime is making its comeback now.  Editor & Publisher think its a crime that reporters might go to jail while the real criminal goes free.

Paradoxically, there is now little expectation that Fitzgerald will succeed in identifying the person or persons in the Executive Office of the President who was first to knowingly and intentionally violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing Valerie Plame's covert CIA identity to journalists.

The shift begins.  Da Weft will again conclude that there's a crime in there somewhere and try to bludgeon the administration with it.  But I've been wondering for a while what that crime might be.  Everybody keeps quoting this Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but what if it's something else.  Perhaps somebody could help me here.  What happens with a grand jury when it turns out that the original crime under investigation never happened, but a different crime is uncovered?  Don't they pursue it?  Grand jury procedings are secret, so would we even know if the criminal investigation took such a turn?

Maybe our cockamamy sitcom could have a surprise twist at the end that Ambassador Joe and wife Val, the brilliant mastermind, are revealed as the sources of the leak.  Is it a crime to out yourself?