Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

If waging war on an innocent people purely for political gains and then let them sink into a likely civil war is not evil, then evil has no meaning. If trying to take political profit of the deaths of some of one's own citizens, and volutarily divert scrarce resource away from their protection, while claiming this opposite, is not evil, then evil has no meaning.

Regardless of the obvious cynicism behind this policy, what are the Dems to do? Demand that we stay in Iraq longer?

If it was all about electoral politics, why did Bush take the huge political hit that came with pushing through 19 billions dollars worth of reconstruction aid? What the evil Machiavellian ploy I'm missing behind that?

While I generally agree with your posts, I just don't understand your constantly reposting in full, other people's articles.

Teh whole point of the intarweb was the links. By posting the article in full you seem to deprive most of the value of the link and appropriate the content to yourself. Folks will track you back and not Kevin. Google will raise your pages and not Kevins. Folks will click on your ads and not Kevins.

What is your policy on this?

Sorry for the off topic post.

rd: presumably the administration believed its own bullshit about how the war would be a cakewalk, would pay for itself, and the Iraqis would greet us as liberators.

They might have believed that before the war, but nobody thought that in September, when the aid package was proposed. Indeed, the aid package was an explicit recognition that the rosier scenarios had failed to pan out and that the Administration was going to have to demand politically costly measures to sustain its efforts in Iraq.

rd, i think you're absoutely right as far as you go, but don't forget: this administration is full of people with ideological blinkers on whose bios scream out "i've never made a mistake in my life."

What they still believed feasible at the time of the last iraqi budgeting exercise they no longer believe: they've changed policies several times since then.

Remember, when Bremer arrived, we had two goals: privatize the economy and write a constitution before a power handover. Neither has happened and neither is going to happen: we now have a date-driven release, not a feature-driven release.

Right, but why is it date-driven? For political advantage in America? We're turning over sovereignty, not withdrawing troops in any appreciable numbers. We'll have 100,000 plus there at least through the beginning of 2005. American voters don't give a damn about sovereignty; they do care about troop casualties.
Bush gains not much at all domestically through this. The sovereignty deadline does help with: 1. The international community (eg. UN, France, Germany, etc), who've been yelling for a sovereignty return since Baghdad fell. 2. Major portions of Iraqi society. Critics of the Bush administration have long demanded the internationalization of the effort as the only way to succeed. The firm date for the transfer is the price for more international help, but the critics want to pretend there is some mythical international community that would be willing to help us with a prolonged occupation if we would just be nice enough. It doesn't exist. Everybody wants a deadline, we've given it to them, but now the avid proponents of multilateralism don't want to admit that it might real tradeoffs, as opposed to just better manners.

when in doubt, blame the French, huh?

I am unconvinced.

rd, yes, it is date-driven for political advantage in america. of course it is. whatever makes you think otherwise?

recall the process by which we got here: the initial claim was that we would stay as long as it takes. that was associated with the free market and constitution goals. those were all redefined out of existence when bremer was summoned back for the big white house powwow that led to caucuses and turnover, turnover at the precise moment in time that would allow George Bush to declare mission accomplished all over again.

In the meantime, the mission of the troops will be redefined as "insuring territorial integrity," and they will play even less of a police presence than they are currently. This will alow bush to claim (he hopes) that the force level is down and the caualties are down.

Without question they're doing this for the political advantage of it - it bears no relationship to the early triumphalist intentions for a reason....

US troops will be withdrawn to fortified positions that will enable them to avoid daily casualties but still be available to buck-up whoever fills the vacuum (as well as remain a potent reminder of who the real boss is) and to menace as needed the other failed states in the region. George Friedman of Stratfor called for this months ago.

All of this talk of an Iraq withdrawal assumes that the current economic "recovery" is not as ephemeral as the series of failed recoveries that followed the bursting of Japan's bubble. One can expect that any sign of an economic relapse will be dealt with by the Bushies with more of the same, i.e., an escalation of the war probably involving a large scale push into Pakistan's northwest territories to capture Osama bin Forgotten. This will once again serve to distract the press and the country and dramatically up the ante vis-a-vis the consequences of a miscalculation. Again, thanks to Dr. Friedman and Stratfor for the heads up.

Just an idle question: After transfer, exactly how badly would a sovereign Iraqi government have to mess up before George Bush sacrificed American lives to depose it.

Headline: Bush cheers New President Chalabi at NYC Convention

Headline: Chalabi Militias Ethnic Cleanse Fallujah

Headline: American deposes Chalabi, 14 Americans die, New Interim Governing Council established

I don't like this.

It was obvious when Bremer was called back to Washington in November that the Bush administration was bailing out. It is also obvious to Ayatollah Sistani, who will be jerking them around for the next few months until they give him what he (or his supporters) want. This is what one gets from a bunch of yahoos who can't think strategically.

Whatever's 'happening' in the media, those big
C-140's are still landing at our AFBs every few hours, we saw two land in 20 minutes, and they aren't carrying party favors, that's for sure!

Have you seen the paid 30-second spots to join the Air Force? They're going to have to mobilize the biggest evacuation since Dunkirk here in a few months, then find 100,000 new warm bodies to fly back in again as "peacekeepers". Clearly the greatest airlift since Berlin, under live fire!

With so many out of work, so many, many families broke, Bush won't have trouble finding recruits.

Tstreet's post above is right on. Bush's bailout (bugout) is surely his pollster advisors' latest move to cork Clark, who has no business running for President, but seems to be gaining on the pack (and on the media's political chess board) on the wings of anti-imperialist sentiment.

But with the war problem "solved" in June, Clark will be hamstrung in mid-stream, and the Dem's momentum will collapse. Which is PRECISELY why Clark ran in the 1st place. He's a straw man!

Clark is stealing away the thunder of the war protesters, then he's going to take a fall, leaving the Dem pack without a clear leader, just a bunch of stumblebums on the ropes in November, babbling about the raging deficits Cheney assures us Godfather Ronald deified.

Clark is the guy Bush is relying on to save his bacon, and so keep DoD's budget pumped up far into the future. Get ready for four more years of Bushkreig worldwide, no doubt a cushy post and nice retirement for Clark in Bush's Legion.

Poor Michael Moore is going to be crushed.

Face it, these fundamentalist neo-liberals, for all their faults, are one hell of a lot smarter strategists than we are, and they have the gold and bullets to make sure their wishes come true.
(Where is our gold from Fort Knox now, anyway?)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4873

Au contraire - the 'withdrawal' is nothing if not strategic. It's just that domestic Iraqi politics never figured into the strategic equation. A permanent military presence within spitting distance of Iran and Syria - now that's strategically significant. And it will be no more newsworthy or politically costly than the U.S. bootprint on scores of other countries. The only tricky part is slinking away from the smoldering wreckage of Iraqi politics in a way that A) leaves in place a regime that has no choice but to accept the ongoing U.S. military presence, and resistance forces too weak and fractured to seriously threaten it; B) renders the situation in Iraq sufficiently complicated and puzzling that it gets off prime time news and stays off; and most importantly, C) leaves the U.S. electorate with a vaguely positive sense of closure about the whole affair. This is a tall order, but (with careful news management) an eminently possible one - remember that place called Afghanistan?

I don't think anyone, even the most optimistic in the administration, believes we'll be able to to withdraw troops to sit around around in fortified bases by June. There simply is no credible substitute force available. The current resistance would shred any militia Chalabi could hope to raise.

Mark from Delaware writes:
>
> One can expect that any sign of an economic relapse will
> be dealt with by the Bushies with more of the same, i.e.,
> an escalation of the war probably involving a large scale
> push into Pakistan's northwest territories to capture
> Osama bin Forgotten.

I see no smilies here, which kinda makes me think you're serious. No matter how senile or deluded or cynical anybody in the White House is, I think they *do* realize that a serious attack on Pakistan would the most spectacularly stupid military move since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. I mean, we do that, and Musharef *does* get whacked, we are engaged in mountain warfare with high morale tribal forces *and* we find ourself at war with a nuclear power that's always on the brink of a war with another regional nuclear power.

When you put it that way, what's not to like? More seriously, I don't doubt that the administration would do whatever they thought it would take to get re-elected, but starting a third land war in Asia is really, really pushing it.

rd: bottom line is, look at their track record.

They convinced themselves that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program.

They convinced themselves that we didn't really need a northern flank after we screwed up with turkey.

They convinced themselves that we would be welcomed as liberators.

They convinced themselves that we couldn't possibly need more troops after the war than we did during the war.

They convinced themselves that oil revenues would pay for iraqi reconstruction.

They convinced themselves that we could sit in iraq indefinitely as an occupying power.

They convinced themselves that we could finesse the Kurdish situation.

They convinced themselves that we could finesse the shiite situation.

They convinced themselves that looting didn't mean anything.

They convinced themselves that the resistance wasn't militarily significant.

They convinced themselves that the deaths of saddam's sons would make a difference.

They convinced themselves that the capture of saddam would make a difference.

They convinced themselves that they would never need the UN.

They are, in short, capable of convincing themselves of anything.

> Kevin Drum Joins the Ranks of the Shrill

I'm not sure I understand the title of this post. Is this a show of solidarity with Kevin or a suggestion that his conclusions are not justified.

I admit to reading Kevin's blog regularly so perhaps I'm feeling a bit defensive. Or maybe I'm just really jet-lagged and should be sleeping instead of reading blogs at 5am :-)

Mark, this is prof delong's play on the usual gang of clods and idiots who criticize paul krugman for being shrill. It's part of a continuing series - as some heretofore reasonable person says the exact same type of thing that paul krugman has been saying, the prof refers to them, sarcastically, as "shrill."

In short, "shrill" is the new mainstream....

howard -absolutely convincing. The real test will be to see if there is any flexiblity in The Schedule. (If the UN cooperates on a Sept pullout schedule? or even very generously on a December pullout? ).
I have trouble convincing myself that this arbitrary date is anything but a poke at timing it politically to their best advantage.
And does anyone think that the recently announced permanent tax cuts will make a difference in time for the election? Or will that be a tad premature ( which is how the initial tax cuts strike me now) so that they'll need to announce, say, a cut in the gas tax? If crude prices continue to climb, I could convince myself of that.

I too didn't get the title of the post, and found it confusing.

Brad is right to praise the people he mentions. Unfortunately their heirs today are mostly Republicans. The Democrats are channeling the American Firsters of the late Thirties and the Henry Wallace of the 1948 presidential campaign.

In foreign policy the parties have changed places. The Republicans have become Wilsonian idealists with a realist twist, while the Democrats preach a sour, defeatist, reactionary isolationism.

"I see no smilies here, which kinda makes me think you're serious. No matter how senile or deluded or cynical anybody in the White House is, I think they *do* realize that a serious attack on Pakistan would the most spectacularly stupid military move since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait."

George Friedman of Stratfor (the quoted source) probably means an incursion that is somehow in cooperation with the Pakistani government, not an invasion of their territory.

While Stratfor is a useful source of information, it should by now be apparent that Friedman isn't really a disinterested analyst, he's something of a hawk (of course the realpolitik-is-everything day to day grind of intelligence analysis does encourage such a perspective). He'd be cheering the Bush administration on if they were a bit more competent and less political about what they're doing. I find his understanding of politics to be sometimes pretty blatantly lacking - and in general, Stratfor's predictions about the Iraq war erred toward conventional wisdom and WELL away from the "political disaster for the US" cockup that's actually happened.

This is the guy whose editorials seem to reflect (or did last I checked which was months ago) a genuine belief that the Bush administration's grand strategy is motivated, at the highest level, by the direct aim of fighting Al Qaeda. And who publicly wondered at one point why the Bush administration felt the need to lie about WMDs, because the American people would supposedly just accept it if Bush came out and said that they were invading Iraq to use it as a strategic base to threaten Middle Eastern countries supporting terrorism. Um, right...

"The Republicans have become Wilsonian idealists with a realist twist..." --Joe Willingham

I don't see how anyone could use the words "Republican" and "realism" in the same sentence. Every 2 months these guys have a new plan.

As for whether the hand-over date for Iraq is politically motivated, why don't we ask a neocon?
http://www.middleeastinfo.org/article3680.html

The view that the American elections play a major role in shaping Iraq's political future is widely held among Governing Council members. Ahmed Chalabi, another council member, said: "The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on."

The Republicans have become Wilsonian idealists with a realist twist

This analogy is mistaken, to put it mildly. The purpose of the Bush doctrine is to give other people the government that we want, not the government that they want.

The rest of the world sees this quite clearly. Wilson was extremely popular with ordinary people around the world. Bush is unpopular everywhere, with a few oddball exceptions like Kuwait and Israel.

Oops - the first paragraph in my previous post should have been italicized. Either HTML tags don't work here or I made a mistake.

My quote of the day comes from Hans Blix on lack of WMD.

"I was beginning to wonder what was going on. Weren't they wondering too? If you find yourself on a train that's going in the wrong direction, its best to get off at the next stop."

"Regardless of the obvious cynicism behind this policy, what are the Dems to do? Demand that we stay in Iraq longer?"

While I think the general idea espoused by Clark-Dean-Kerry-Biden et al-- forget the timetables, stay until we're successful, but only as part of a truly international effort-- is correct, I believe there is another possibility which is to get out ASAP and let Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria work out the stability issues. They're the ones most directly affected and would probably do about as well as we have so far. Everybody, except the Kurds would have their strong supporter and probably not get too mashed by the process. As far as our country losing credibility, that's already happened and we could only improve it by getting honest and driving at the quickest cleanest solution. I wouldn't advocate for this without some key improvements, and Kurds deserve better, but a bit of this kind of thinking, might help the US retreat honorably and safely to firmer ground. Iraq is a diversion from our own national security needs.

Diulio said there was NO policy, it was ALL politics. Then he was forced to retract his comments as "groundless."

When Paul O'Neill met Ron Suskind they talked about this, and apparently Secretary O'Neill said "Well, I'm rich, so they can't do that to me."

Anyone who dares to criticize the Bush administration is called "shrill". This began with Krugman - as in "I used to like Krugman's economic pieces, but now his rhetoric is becoming too shrill". They can't attack the message, and so attack the messenger. Krauthammer the psychiatrist assures us that anyone who dislikes Bush is crazy.

The handover date is pretty strong confirmation that Snow and Dilulio are telling the truth about policy formulation in the Whitehouse. That said, taking out Iraq was always more likely to be a political landmine than stepping stone. Democracies don't take casualties lightly. This fact hasn't been lost on W's political opponents. It is "interesting" to hear these recriminations about putting politics above policy in the this regard.

Might it not be possible that the administration is playing chicken with the EU/UN?

If you don't cough up what we consider necessary to make this adventure work, we'll leave Iraq to its fate.

One thing that does seem to be the case is that the administration really believed its own rhetoric about WMDs. Nothing else seems to make much sense.

"One thing that does seem to be the case is that the administration really believed its own rhetoric about WMDs. Nothing else seems to make much sense."

Posted by: George Shaner on January 26, 2004 10:16 AM

Not necessarily. Remember (as Brad pointed out months ago), the administration's policy:

1) Loudly and clearly say that they were going to take Saddam out - not just slap him down a bit, but finito.

2) Assemble the troops needed to do so.

3) Speak loudly enough about this so that the administration would be in trouble if they didn't go ahead.

4) Work really hard to get the rest of the world in line or pissed off, which ever - blowing alliances like they were nothing.

5) Give Saddam several months in which he could plan and carry out the mother of all revenges, by furnishing hundreds or thousands of tons of chemical/biological agents to a number of terrorist organizations.

And then, during/after the war, we saw:

6) Not make the securing of suspected sites a #1 priority when the war actually started. You know, as if hundreds or thousands of tons of chemical/biological weapons getting into the hands of terrorists was a threat.

7) Not make the securing of suspected sites a #1 priority when the major combat phase of the war ended.

It doesn't add up.

Just an idle question: After transfer, exactly how badly would a sovereign Iraqi government have to mess up before George Bush sacrificed American lives to depose it.

Look at the regime the US sides with in, say, Uzbekistan to get an idea of how much latitude they might have.

Fatalities

American soldiers 373
British soldiers 24
Coalition soldiers 40
---
437 Since May 2

American 512
British 57
Coalition 40
---
609 Since March 20

Wounded

American soldiers ~2916 Since March 20

Note: American forces have fallen to 130,000
British forces have risen to 12,000
Coalition forces have risen to 12,000

We more or less have abandoned Afghanistan. Why would we not abandon Iraq? It is not as if Bush and the GOP cares a hoot about the Iraqis.

How can they be that craven? I would not underestimate them.

The greatest administrators do not achieve production through constraints and limitations. They provide opportunities.

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.

Even a philosopher gets upset with a toothache.

Nice site. Keep up the good work.

That which does not kill us makes us stranger.

Quomodo cogis comas tuas sic videri? - How do you get your hair to do that?