Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

That' how you escape getting killed. When you move from building to building you don't take your weapons with you. We can't tell you apart from the other Iraqis. We can arrest you and put you in a prison camp if you try to escape. That appears to be our policy for 15 to 50 year old males now leaving the city.
Where you will be safe from dying for the rest of the war. Sort of the Baathist version of the Texas National Guard.

Do they use dynamic scoring in their casualty estimates?

You guys kill me. The answer's staring you in the face. Blood trails!!! It worked in Vietnam. it'll work . . . oh, sorry, I forgot again.

Can't we just claim one dead insurgent for every weapon found? If you fail, redefine success.

This reminds me, sadly, of the Vietname body count poster my church put up in my pre-teen days. I wasn't aware at the time, but assume now, that the poster was put out by opponents of the war. It listed deaths in three categories: N. Vietnamese combatants (I don't recall the specific term used), S. Vietnamese combatants, and U.S. military. The count was updated monthly.

What makes me sad is my memory of how I interpreted the poster at the time. I added the U.S. and S.Viet deaths. To the extent that the total was less than the N.Viet deaths, we were winning.

Brad et al are right to see these changes as helping the rich at the expense of the middle class. And they are probably right about the Administration's distributional aims. But let's be fair about this.
The dominant view among tax academics is that allowing deductions for individuals' state and local taxes is probably a bad idea, because it is generally more reasonable to assume that taxes are a proxy for untaxed personal benefits than to assume that the two are totally unrelated (although admittedly the relationship is quite rough). So the deduction provides a tax incentive for public provision of services at the state and local levels even where private provision would otherwise be better.
The exclusion for employer-provided health insurance (which I take the Administration to be targeting indirectly if it denies business deductions) encourages over-insurance for routine expenditures, while also structuring the insurance market to worsen the difficulties for those who aren't insured through work. Recent empirical work by economists suggests that the exclusion has done more to promote over-insurance for the routine items than to increase the percentage of people who are insured, although admittedly it does some of each.
The third idea, eliminating the AMT rather than just restoring it to its 1986 levels, also makes sense, all else equal (an important caveat). Nuremberg-style confession of the day: I helped draft the AMT, and also wrote about it way back when [The New Alternative Minimum Tax: Perception, Reality, and Strategy, 66 Taxes 91 (1988) - see also Tax Simplification and the Alternative Minimum Tax, 91 Tax Notes 1455 (May 28, 2001)]. But I realized early on that no sane tax system would include it, all else equal. The only good case for having it is that clearly superior alternatives, such as trading it in for a somewhat better regular tax, might be politically unavailable.
Anyway, all these are to a degree good tax policy ideas. At least, they are good in efficiency terms. In principle, moreover - another important caveat - they wouldn't have to result in a bad package distributionally if there were proper adjustments elsewhere.
There will be plenty of time to snicker (or cry) later if the Administration's tax reform package lives up to the worst expectations of its critics. By the way, no knowledgeable person could reasonably prefer a national sales tax to a VAT unless she considers facilitating evasion a positive good. But let's keep straight about the details, if only in the surmise that sometime in the distant future, when the Republican Party has returned to its senses (a la Reagan, who repeatedly cooperated with the Democrats in tax and entitlements policy from 1982 through 1988) a reasonable bipartisan package will be feasible.

Daniel:
Saddam was a bad man, so getting him out of power was a good thing. I think you know where I'm going with that line of thought.

There is zero indication that Bush is motivated by sound economic theory.

This is not a criticism of what you wrote, as you clearly don't anticipate good results from Bush's plan.

"Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Fools?"

Ummmm...it's called "democracy," Brad. A majority of voters on November 2 voted for "four more years."

Sorry you don't approve of the choice of the majority of the electorate. I guess they just don't have your wisdom.

;-)

Well, you know, Mark, frequently they don't. Consider, as just one example, the landslide for Warren Harding. (And of course there was that awkward business in Germany, and the South's enthusiasm for George Wallace...)

In the case of Bush vs. Kerry, however, I don't regard it as being as pure a triumph of Evil over Good as Delong does, because I have seen no reason to think that Kerry wouldn't be as incompetent as Bush in foreign affairs -- although of course in an entirely different way. As Graham Allison -- whose book on nuclear terrorism, which I am now reading, is even scarier (and more condemnatory of Bush) than I thought it would be -- says: if you accompanied these guys on a tiger hunt, the danger would be that Kerry would try to reason with the tiger while Bush aimed the wrong end of his gun at it and blew his own head off.

So, confronted with Tweedledum and Tweedledumber on foreign policy, I voted for Kerry on domestic-policy grounds, and still have no regrests at doing so. Once the Dems start taking defense policy genuinely seriously again, they'll start winning again. But if they DON'T do so, they also can't rely on the GOP continuing to nominate candidates as nitwitted as Bush. If he hadn't bungled the Iraq war beyond the wildest dreams of both his supporters and his opponents, the Dems would not now be mourning a narrow loss; they'd be picking themselves up with a spoon.

Followup note on the original subject: Phil Carter sent me the following brief E-mail last night:

"Yeah... I'm no fan of body counts. After writing this, I'm even less
of one. There's no fidelity in the numbers whatsoever."

As for the success of the operation as a whole, see the sour conclusions of the US military's own appraisal report at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/international/middleeast/18troops.html?ei=5094&en=6b27992e86a60966&hp=&ex=1100840400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position= . (This came out, by the way, BEFORE virtually every Sunni party in Iraq announced today that they will boycott the elections: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-111804iraq_lat,0,7201149.story?coll=la-home-headlines . )

And, as one final note on Mark: one does wonder whether he was singing the same tune about the Wisdom of the People during the elections of the 1990s (in which, by the way, the polls all show that Clinton would won by about the same margins if Perot had stayed out of the races). Actually, come to think of it, one doesn't wonder whether Mark was doing so.

Refering back to Ottnott’s original post, it brought back some memories . . . During the Vietnam war the Military Assistance Command used to prepare detailed weekly activity summaries. You could pick these up at the JUSPAO building in Saigon.

I happened to keep a couple of these, and the one I am looking at now covered operations from 15-21 January 1967.

There are several pages of statistics covering everything, from “GROUND OPERATIONS” broken down into “Major Operations” and “Major Operations W/contact” to “AIR OPERATIONS North Vietnam” by 7th Air Force, 7th Fleet and 1st Marine Air Wing, and fixed-wing and helicopter sorties in the South by the Army, Navy and Marines. Mind-boggling stuff when you see that there were 83,877 Army helicopter sorties in that not-exceptional week of 15-21 January.

Anyway, at that time there were more than 400,000 members of the American armed forces “In-Country”.

The American casualties listed for that particular week were 123 Killed In Action and 716 Wounded. There were also 340 South Vietnamese KIA, and 11 from other friendly forces. The claimed enemy dead were 1681. (No enemy shown as wounded or captured.)

There was never any way to check these figures. Some people treated them with scorn, maybe others treated them as gospel.

If you looked at the “kill ratio”, as it was known, they did prove that we were winning the war. And to establish the kill ratio the military used much the same method as Ottnott – “US + FWMAF [Free World Military Armed Forces as I recall] + RVNAF divided into enemy” (that's exactly how it's described in an explanatory note in the summary).

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So, when we take the enemy's territory and capture his weapons, you conclude we have failed. Brilliant.

Really, Patrick. The enemy's territory -- as that Pentagon report I just mentioned concludes -- is the entire goddamn country, given the fact that we haven't got remotely enough troops to occupy more than a few blotches of the Sunni region at a time -- and the weapons we got in Fallujah (which don't include the very large number carried out by the insurgents who fled Fallujah during the weeks before our highly pre-publicized invasion) are only a tiny fraction of the utterly endless supply of them spread all over Iraq; far more than that which the total number of insurgents could ever possibly need. (Do the math, please. There are about 20,000 insurgents by the Pentagon's estimate, which may be seriously low. Let's assume, for the moment, that it's 50,000 instead. Even that's 8 tons of mostly-unguarded potential weapons for each insurgent. I don't think they're likely to miss the ones they lost in Fallujah.)

On this subject, see Phil Carter back on Oct. 25 ( http://inteldump.powerblogs.com/archives/archive_2004_10_21.shtml#1098716907 ):

"I can't put this point bluntly enough: our failure to provide effective security in the early days of the post-war aftermath allowed this materiel to be looted. The effect of that failure is that the insurgents were able to acquire significant amounts of high-quality explosives. They are now using that material against us. It would be hard to find a more clear case of how our failure to plan for the post-war aftermath set the conditions for the Iraqi insurgency, and allowed that insurgency to gain strength. Our other decisions, such as that to disband the Iraqi army and de-Baathify the Iraqi government, over the objections of men like then-MG David Petraeus and countless SF teams working with the Iraqis to secure the country, added another component of the insurgency triad. And of course, once you've got those two things, it only takes a spark, something readily provided by Shiite and Sunni insurgents seeking to eject us and retake the country in their own name.

"What can be done now? Nothing — it's far too late to stuff this cat back in the bag. We now need to recognize the extent of the threat we face in Iraq. The Pentagon revised its estimate last week of the insurgency's strength — it now includes 12,000 individuals around the country, or roughly the strength of one U.S. light infantry division. As this report makes clear, the insurgency has access to a great deal of warfighting materiel, and it continues to use this stuff against us in ambushes and IED attacks. We need to gird ourselves for a long fight, and we need to prepare the Iraqis for a long fight, because this fight ain't going to end for a long time, no matter what happens next week in the U.S. election.

"Update I: The always informative trade journal 'Inside the Army' (subscription required) reports this morning that one of the Army's top procurement officials sees improvised explosive devices ('IEDs') and car bombs as the most important threats facing U.S. forces in Iraq today:

" ' "We focus a lot on IEDs, but probably the most significant problem, and the one that concerns me the most is car bombs. While we have an idea of what we need to do with IEDs, car bombs are much more difficult. Any vehicle on the highway or on the road can be a car bomb. And how do you tell one from the other?" Maj. Gen. John Doesburg, commander of Research, Development and Engineering Command said in an Oct. 21 interview with Inside the Army.' "
________________________

Now add the fact -- as pointed out by myriads of observers -- that we don't have forever. Iraq's Sunni population is turning more and more against us, Allawi and the Shiites -- it's now certain that most of it will boycott the upcoming elections. And now add the fact that -- while we have been expending our strength on this red herring, thanks to the Bush Administration's initial stupid overconfidence of an easy war and its stubborn refusal ever since to admit its initial mistake -- Iran is rapidly acquiring its own very real Bomb and busily augmenting its own supply of biological and chemical weapons.

Of course Fallujah is a military "victory", but that was never in doubt. But now, having taken "the enemy's territory" (and some of his weapons), how are we going to hold it, and for how long? The idea of leaving security to an Iraqi force, whether police or military, seems unrealistic to me.

November 19, 2004 - Friday

I thought life was not worth 10-cents in Iraq;
I was wrong.

The insurgents announced reward bounties on 3 groups of people:

1.) $1,000 for a Shiite
2.) $2,000 for a Iraqi National Guardsman
3.) $3,000 for an American/ or US soldier.

*This means 2 things: 1.) if any Shiite citizen is now an enemy of the insurency- this is now a civil war almost full-blown

2.) Who says Americans are not best, most wanted and most valuable commodity as the civil war blooms, plus with different sects about to boycott elections/ BBC.com reports many middle east countries now bracing themsleves for Iraq spinning completely out-of-control
as election looms as a another mis-step. Of course our media is not even aware of this, or it is not allowed to speak the truth anymore.

ohh of plans of mice and men.

Juan Cole on this subject ( http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/did-fallujah-sink-elections-among.html ):

"It seems likely... that the Fallujah offensive has so deeply alienated the Sunni Arab populace of Iraq, which is probably 4 million to 4.5 million strong, that it has ensured that they will boycott the polls as American-sponsored. The political goals of the Fallujah campaign, in other words, were foredoomed to failure, even if military objectives were met, with the capture and destruction of thousands of pounds of explosives intended for other cities. (Most of the military goals probably weren't met either, however, since the guerrillas could easily reestablish themselves and the guerrilla war seems likely to go on at much the same pace as before for the foreseeable future. There are after all 250,000 tons of explosives and ammunitions unaccounted for in Iraq, which the US allowed the guerrillas to raid and store)."

Regarding the latter comment: while a large amount of this stuff was dispersed in small caches that it would have been hard for the US to guard, a lot else was stored in big, concetrated caches that would have been relatively easy to guard -- including Al-Qaqaa, which was also known from the first to be one of the places where any Iraqi CBWs were likely to be stored. On this subject, see John Pike ( http://www.ericumansky.com/2004/10/alqaqaaa_not_so.html ):

" 'There are about 900 ammo dumps around the country and a bunch of these places still aren’t guarded.

" 'To my mind the core element of the story is: The U.S. concept of operations did not account for the possibility of an insurgency and did not encompass a need to secure ammo dumps as they went through,' says Pike. 'You probably wouldn’t need that many GIs to protect the depots, just a deterrence presence, say 20 soldiers per dump. That’s a total of one extra division. It wouldn’t have broken the bank.

" 'The government’s negligence here is just bewildering. You almost think the enemy has infiltrated our decision making process. It’s the only explanation.' "

No it's not -- the other one is that we're being run by a faith-based administration. It's conceivable that they're practicing a sort of military version of Christian Science: if you just pray hard enough, the enemy will vanish.