Put Away That Question Mark

Here we are. It's no longer: Iraqi Civil War? It's Iraqi Civil War. Juan Cole writes:

Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War

Much of the American press has reported the Tal Afar campaign as a strike by the new Iraqi Army, supported by US troops, against foreign infiltrators in the largely Turkmen city of 200,000.

As Jonathan Finer makes clear in the Washington Post, however, the operation looks different if we know some details. The "Iraqi Army" leading the assault turns out to be mainly the Peshmerga or Kurdish ethnic militia. Along for the ride are local Turkmen Shiites who are being used as informers and for the purpose of identifying Sunni Turkmen they think are involved in the guerrilla movement (apparently they sometimes make false charges to settle scores). Tal Afar was 70 percent Sunni Turkmen and 30 percent Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen had thrown in with Saddam, and some more recently had turned to radical Islam. The Shiite Turkmen lived in fear of their lives.

So Kurds and Shiites are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of Sunni Arabs. That is what is really going on. The number of foreign fighters appears to be small, and US troops that had been guarding against infiltration on the Syrian border were actully moved to Tal Afar for this operation. It is mainly about punishing the Sunni Turkmen for allying with the Sunni Arab guerrillas. That the attack came in part in response to the pleas of local Shiite Turkmen helps explain why why Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (Shiite leader of the fundamentalist Dawa Party) authorized it, and went to Tal Afar on Tuesday for a photo op.

The US will never get stability in Iraq if it is merely an adjunct to a Kurdish-Shiite alliance against the Sunni Arabs and their Turkmen supporters.

A while back, I wrote "There is going to be an Iraqi civil war, whether the Americans leave now or later. The only choice remaining for the US government is which side to back. My guess is the Kurds are going to get screwed, again." Well, I was right that the US would pick a side. Obviously, I was wrong about the Kurds getting screwed... so far.

Foreign Affairs Is Interesting

If you've ever done any reading about it, it's not hard to be convinced that GDP is a useless measure of an economy's health. But, reading an article in Foreign Affairs really hit that lesson home, albeit not deliberately:

Consider that the United States continues to lead other developed countries in economic growth, technological innovation, productivity, research and development, and the ability to cultivate human talent.

Despite serious problems such as swelling trade and fiscal deficits, illegal immigration, inadequate health care, violent crime, major income disparities, a declining educational system, and a deeply divided electorate, the U.S. economy is healthy: last year, U.S. GDP grew an estimated 4.4 percent, and this year the growth rate is expected to be 3.5 percent, much greater than the corresponding figures for the eurozone (2.0 percent and 1.6 percent). Barring an unexpected sharp economic downturn, the size of the U.S. economy as a proportion of the global economy is likely to increase in the years to come.

-Wang Jisi, "China's Search For Stability With America", Foreign Affairs, (Sep/Oct 2005)

First off, consider that logic - despite numerous social ills - including laughable health care, ironically - the US economy is described as healthy. Bizarre.

But note the final sentence - the US's proportion of world GDP is going to... increase? The sentence is a bit vague, but this is obviously impossible, certainly over anything more than the immediate future - China and India combined are almost as large, GDP-wise, as the US. Throw in Japan and it's definitely larger. In any case, China and India's economic growth will almost certainly continue to erode America's percentage of world GDP. This isn't a bad thing, just a statistical fact.

The US's percentage of world GDP has been declining, long-term, since 1945 where the US alone made up half of world economic activity. Even in the best-case scenario, we can only expect this to continue. In the real best case (and probably impossible) scenario, the rest of the world would enjoy a standard of living more or less equal to America's, giving the US... 5% of world economic activity, exactly what their population would suggest. This is hardly a bad thing. Though I wonder if Americans would agree with that?

There are further problems with the article.

DESPITE ITS many advantages, the United States is not invincible. The war in Iraq, for example, resulted in international isolation of a sort that Washington had not faced since the beginning of the Cold War. The invasion was strongly condemned by people all over the world and explicitly opposed by the great majority of nations. Washington split with many of its traditional allies, such as Paris and Berlin, which refused to take part in the operation. And tensions with Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world, increased dramatically....

Nonetheless, the points in common between these powers and the United States in terms of ideology and strategic interests outweigh the differences. A pattern of coordination and cooperation among the world's major powers, institutionalized through the G-8 (the group, of leading industrialized countries), has taken shape, and no great change in this pattern is likely in the next five to ten years. To be sure, some of the differences between the United States and the EU, Japan, Russia, and others will deepen, and Washington will at times face coordinated French, German, and Russian opposition, as it did during the war in Iraq. But no lasting united front aimed at confronting Washington is likely to emerge.

Honestly, I'm not sure if this is correct. If another Republican is elected in 2008 (please God no) I think the rest of the world is going to continue the process of balancing against Washington. It's worth remembering that, sad to say, there are three... more... years of the Bush Administration. Given how badly they fucked up relations with allies in the first three years, how much worse can it get?

One of the major accomplishments of US foreign policy in 2003 was to drive a deep wedge between Washington and it's European allies. Interestingly, this has long been an objective of Russian (and before, Soviet) grand strategy. Fascinating that Bush has succeeded where Stalin, Kruschev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin all failed. Hopefully (and I say this sincerely) Bush's success at souring the North Atlantic Alliance is as ephemeral as all his other "successes".

Aside from this flawed article, there's an excellent article in the same issue about the very questionable link between authoritarian states and terrorism:

THE UNITED STATES is engaged in what President George W. Bush has called a "generational challenge" to instill democracy in the Arab world. The Bush administration and its defenders contend that this push for Arab democracy will not only spread American values but also improve U.S. security. As democracy grows in the Arab world, the thinking goes, the region will stop generating anti-American terrorism. Promoting democracy in the Middle East is therefore not merely consistent with U.S. security goals; it is necessary to achieve them.....

Given such incomplete information, only preliminary conclusions from the academic literature are possible. However, even these seem to discredit the supposedly close link between terrorism and authoritarianism that underlies the Bush administration's logic. In a widely cited study of terrorist events in the 1980s the political scientists William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg demonstrate that most terrorist incidents occur in democracies and that generally both the victims and the perpetrators are citizens of democracies. Examining incidents from 1975 to 1997, Pennsylvania State University's Quan Li has found that although terrorist attacks are less frequent when democratic political participation is high, the kind of checks that liberal democracy typically places on executive power seems to encourage terrorist actions. In his recent book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape finds that the targets of suicide bombers are almost always democracies, but that the motivation of the groups behind those bombings is to fight against military occupation and for self-determination. Terrorists are not driven by a desire for democracy but by their opposition to what they see as foreign domination....

Comparing India, the world's most populous democracy, and China, the world's most populous authoritarian state, highlights the difficulty of assuming that democracy can solve the terrorism problem. For 2000-2003, the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report indicates 203 international terrorist attacks in India and none in China. A list of terrorist incidents between 1976 and 2004, compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, shows more than 400 in India and only 18 in China. Even if China underreports such incidents by a factor of ten, it still endures substantially fewer terrorist attacks than India. If the relationship between authoritarianism and terrorism were as strong as the Bush administration implies, the discrepancy between the number of terrorist incidents in China and the number in India would run the other way....

The United States' major foe in the war on terrorism, al Qaeda, certainly would not close up shop if every Muslim country in the world were to become a democracy. Osama bin Laden has been very clear about democracy: he does not like it. His political model is the early Muslim caliphate. In his view, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan came the closest in modern times to that model. In an October 2003 "message to Iraqis," bin Laden castigated those in the Arab world who are "calling for a peaceful democratic solution in dealing with apostate governments or with Jewish and crusader invaders instead of fighting in the name of God." He referred to democracy as "this deviant and misleading practice" and "the faith of the ignorant." Bin Laden's ally in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, reacted to the January 2005 Iraqi election even more directly: "The legislator who must be obeyed in a democracy is man, and not God....That is the very essence of heresy and polytheism and error, as it contradicts the bases of the faith and monotheism, and because it makes the weak, ignorant man God's partner in His most central divine prerogative--namely, ruling and legislating."

-F. Gregory Gause III, "Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?", Foreign Affairs, (Sep/Oct2005)

Excellent article. If you have access, I'd reccomend picking up the magazine.

Odd Article

Okay, we all know Ralph Klein can be blunt. So this isn't a surprise:

CALGARY — Alberta Premier Ralph Klein says the rest of Canada can forget about getting an extra slice of the province's energy windfall.

Klein dismissed a poll that suggested Canadians outside his oil-rich province want a share of the wealth being generated by soaring energy prices.

The situation is no different now than it was in the boom of 1980, he said.

"The rest of Canada was saying the same thing then: 'Give me, give me, give me,' " the premier said Friday.

"Then the price of oil went down and the rest of Canada was wringing their hands in glee saying, 'You deserved it.' "

And we were right. And perhaps he's right now - Alberta may find itself overburdened with tar-sands oil that is too expensive to sell once oil goes back to $20/barrel.

Ahem. I think I just heard to flapping of pork wings.

Now, I actually don't think that the feds should interfere in Alberta's energy simply to benefit Canada's drivers. If you're a fed up driver and you want to stick it to Alberta, then simply start using your car less. Below $40/barrel, tar-sands oil is only marginally profitable.

Long term, start voting for parties that actually want to reduce our dependence on oil. Vote for more public transit, and better fuel efficiency standards.

All that said, this little paragraph stunned me:

Many outside the province don't realize Alberta's cities, schools and hospitals are mired in debt amassed over the belt-tightening years of the early 1990s, when Klein took steps to eliminate the province's debt.

At first, I could have sworn this wasn't an English sentence. After all, how can Alberta be debt-free if Alberta has amassed massive debt? And then I got it, and the scales fell from my eyes:

Klein, and the people who vote for him, are full of shit.

It's so simple - all the talk of Klein's good fiscal policies, all of the snide remarks from Albertans about how proud they are for their debt-free province, it's all crap. All Klein seems to have managed is the same shuck and jive Harris managed in Ontario: Offload provincial spending on to the cities, force them to raise taxes and cut services, and proudly declare the deficit gone.

I'd love to see some numbers on how much net debt Klein has actually managed to eliminate.

Why We Need To Start Now

As if the previous news about Arctic ice wasn't enough, this shows why we need to start reducing CO2 now:

GENEVA (Reuters) - The hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica has grown to near record size this year, suggesting 20 years of pollution controls have so far had little effect, the United Nations said on Friday.

In a bulletin on the seasonal depletion of ozone gas, which filters harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancer and cataracts, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the hole would peak within a couple of weeks....

U.S. scientists reported last month that the ozone layer has stopped shrinking but it will take decades to start recovering....

Many CFCs, once commonly used in refrigeration, air conditioning and industrial cleaning, were banned by the Vienna Convention, signed exactly 20 years ago, and its Montreal Protocol clinched in 1987....

In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that the 189 states to have ratified the Montreal Protocol had eliminated more than 1.5 million tonnes of annual production of chemicals that destroy the ozone layer.

But developing countries were "only at the half-way point in many of their obligations" under the pact, while in wealthy countries a number of chemicals still needed to be phased out.

Get it? We started banning CFCs shortly after I was born - with far less scientific consensus about the ozone layer than exists now about climate change - and we're still at it. We need to vastly surpass our Kyoto targets, and we need to start now.

Immanuel Wallerstein Speaks

And if you recognize his name, you've probably taken Political Science. Otherwise, this may be of little interest to you. Still, he's got a good line or two:

The real question is what now? I am not asking this about the victims, who are suffering in multiple ways and are likely to suffer for some time to come, since they are scattered across the country, without money or jobs or homes. I am asking what now, first for President Bush and secondly for the United States? Bush's ratings, which are already extremely low (by comparison with past presidents), are likely to go lower still. The war in Iraq is every day more unpopular at home and more unwinnable in Iraq. Bush cannot find a way to exit gracefully. The economy is not in good shape at all - oil prices are surging upward, and Katrina surely did not improve things, since New Orleans is a key port in the import and export of U.S. goods, and since both oil wells and natural gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico have been badly damaged. And since the U.S. is now estimated to need to increase its debt by $200 billion to do the necessary reconstruction, the Chinese and other buyers of treasury bonds must be getting more hesitant than ever about subsidizing the improvident Bush regime.

But it is the image of the U.S. that will be the most affected. When El Salvador has to offer troops to help restore order in New Orleans because U.S. troops were so scarce and so slow in arriving, Iran cannot be quaking in its boots about a possible U.S. invasion. When Sweden has its relief planes sitting on the tarmac in Sweden for a week because it cannot get an answer from the U.S. government as to whether to send them, they are not going to be reassured about the ability of the U.S. to handle more serious geopolitical matters. And when conservative U.S. television commentators talk of the U.S. looking like a Third World country, Third World countries may begin to think that maybe there is a grain of truth in the description.

Do Globe Writers Even Read Their Own Paper?

The Globe and Mail, 9/16/2005 4:39 PM:

The demonstration showed WiMax can fulfill at least some of its many promises.

It's been hyped as an affordable way to bring the Internet to poorer and rural regions around the world, break the broadband duopoly of cable and phone companies and eventually cover entire countries with seamless high-speed Internet access for viewing video, making phone calls and completing other data-intensive tasks.

The Globe and Mail, 9/16/2005 12:03 PM:

Bitter rivals Rogers Communications Inc. and Bell Canada have agreed to jointly build and manage a wireless high-speed Internet network that is expected to reach more than two-thirds of Canadians in less than three years.

The two communications companies will pool their wireless broadband spectrum into a joint venture called Inukshuk Internet Inc. The network will cover more than 40 cities, and 50 rural and remote communities across the country. Users will be able to access the Internet and use voice, video streaming and data applications both inside their home, as well as on the go.

Oh yes. Wireless technology will break the Cable/Phone duopoly. Absolutely. Morons.

The only way we'll ever get serious competition for the Internet in this country is when we elect a government that's serious about forcing open the two monopolies. Technically, Bell is still (I believe) bound by common-carrier rules, whereas Rogers isn't. "Common carrier" means that a major network owner is required - for a profitable fee - to allow outsiders to use it's network. For example, Bell is required to let competitors use it's phone lines, provided they pay. It's illegal for Bell to ban paying competitors from its lines. Both companies need to be bound by the same rules, and that means we need to force open the cable lines in this country. Japan did this, and you can reliably get speeds from 40-100mbps there, compared to a maximum of 5 from Rogers.

Meanwhile, my mother has just moved in to a part of Ottawa that, for some reason, cannot get access to either DSL or Cable. It's like she's living in the dark ages or something.

Oh, and as much as I like the idea of a nationwide wireless internet, Bell and Rogers should be forbidden from owning it. Rather, the government should build and operate it. That would actually serve to break up the duopoly in this country.

Responsible Sweden

It's not just China that's trying to come up with a comprehensive plan to get off of oil:

STOCKHOLM (AP)--Prime Minister Goran Persson said Tuesday that Sweden will try to end its dependency on fossil fuels in 15 years by boosting research devoted to alternative energy sources.

Persson, addressing lawmakers returning to Parliament after the summer recess, said global warming was a growing concern.

"We are frightened by climate change today," Persson said as he laid out government policy for the next 12 months. "The mean temperature of the earth is rising, and it is rising most nearest to the poles.... A new goal will be set: creation of the conditions necessary to end Sweden's dependence on fossil fuels by 2020."

Persson said the government will increase spending on energy research and will start subsidizing exports of environmental technology. Wind power will be extended and a tax regime promoting renewable energy sources would continue, he said. For example, taxes would be reduced for cars running on natural gas instead of gasoline.

Persson also said 35% of the cars driven by government employees would either run completely on electricity or renewable fuels, or be hybrid cars.

Good stuff. One wonders, though - if Sweden (per capita GDP: $28,400) can afford this, why can't Canada ($31,500) or the US ($40,100)?

Farming in Yellowknife

...looking less and less far-fetched. Also, the Northwest Passage may finally be open year round. Somehow, I'm totally un-enthusiastic.

Global warming 'past the point of no return'
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 16 September 2005

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.

Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average....

Sea ice naturally melts in summer and reforms in winter but for the first time on record this annual rebound did not occur last winter when the ice of the Arctic failed to recover significantly....

Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.... "If anything we may be underestimating the dangers. The computer models may not take into account collaborative positive feedback," he said.

It's funny, no matter how many times the scientific community uses the words "first time in recorded history", the climate psychopaths continue to denigrate the idea of science.

It's worth noting that, as the arctic ice caps sit on water anyways, this probably won't have a noticeable effect on it's own on sea levels. Of course, as the article points out, we aren't incorporating positve-feedback in to our models yet.

I wonder if Canadian and Russian farmland can expand fast enough to make up for drought in southern countries? It looks more and more like we'll be the only ones left with arable land...

Shockingly, Condoleeza Rice is Wrong Again

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the General Assembly at the beginning of its session on Saturday that countries like Iran threatened the "effectiveness of the global non-proliferation regime".

Actually, physics threatens the non-proliferation regime. The problem is, as I've written before, that under the current non-proliferation regime, you can get 90-95% of the way towards having a nuclear bomb - without violating a single letter of international law. (See Japan.) Part of this is because the physics we invoke to make weapons are often the same physics we invoke to make electricity.

In a wider view, this is why we should be working towards a nuclear-less world. So long as the electrical uses remain, nuclear technology will have a veneer of legitimacy that it doesn't deserve. Get rid of the civilian uses, and it's much easier to prosecute - if a country is building a nuclear reactor, then by definition it's looking for trouble.

My Favourite Author Speaks

On the US President in his latest novel:

"And in terms of the president, there are similarities, but I wanted mine to be much nicer. The current guy [yup, Bush] is worthless, probably the worst president in American history. There's a sort of stupid, small-minded meanness - a pathological assholery - to him. I think he likes doing bad things. And I think a fair amount of his base approves of that resentment - against the idea of progress, against the future, against the rest of the world."

That's my new favourite adjective. Pathological assholery. I love it.

Maquiladoras Come (back?) To The Gulf

What to say of Bush's speech to the nation? This part caught my eye:

To meet this goal, I will listen to good ideas from Congress and state and local officials and the private sector. I believe we should start with three initiatives that the Congress should pass. Tonight, I propose the creation of a Gulf opportunity zone, encompassing the region of the disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama.

Within this zone, we should provide immediate incentives for job-creating investment; tax relief for small businesses; incentives to companies that create jobs; and loans and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises, to get them up and running again.

Of course, this kind of plan has been used throughout the developing world in a somewhat vain attempt to spur investment. The main result has been zones like the border towns of Mexico, or the EPZs in Malaysia. Whether they actually contribute to growth is more questionable than you'd think.

And of course, it wouldn't be the Bushies without a massive federal giveaway:

Under this approach, we will identify property in the region owned by the federal government and provide building sites to low-income citizens free of charge, through a lottery. In return, they would pledge to build on the lot, with either a mortgage or help from a charitable organization like Habitat for Humanity.

I hope you didn't like that national park.

Let's Not

via Mike at Rational Reasons, we see that people are urging the government to cut taxes on gasoline:

The second way consists of reviewing the manner in which both the federal and provincial governments tax gasoline. Combined federal-provincial taxes represent between 40 to 50 per cent of the price of gas in Canada, as compared to 20 to 30 per cent in the U.S. We believe that the overall level of tax on gas in Canada is too high and should be brought closer to the U.S. rate. In the wake of hurricane Katrina, some U.S. States have instituted a moratorium on state fuel taxes to alleviate the impact of higher fuel prices. The federal and provincial governments should give serious consideration to a similar measure.

Look, I know that some people are hurting, and can't do without driving. But gas prices aren't high because of necessary use. If urban consumers would even drive less, we'd make far deeper cuts in the price of gasoline than the government can afford. Oil prices aren't coming down (if at all) until the west starts using less in a big way. In short, stop your bitchin'.

Meanwhile 8 out of 10 people think SUV drivers should give up their boxy monstrosities. Given the percentages of SUV owners, almost certainly some of this is "I think other people should give up their SUVs." And that's part of the problem.

On Inevitability

China has, unsurprisingly, surpassed Canada as the US's largest trading partner. For reasons that defy explanation, this has some people excited:

"This is perhaps the wake-up call that people need," said Nancy Hughes Anthony, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. "We have to take it very seriously and be prepared to compete."

Okay, first off, Nancy Hughes Anthony has too many names. Secondly, she apparently can't do basic math.

Canadian GDP: $1 trillion
Chinese GDP: $7 trillion

Foreign trade is always relative to the size of the overall economy - Canada simply cannot compete with the Chinese in terms of overall dollars. We shouldn't even be trying. Frankly, it's amazing that we've managed to keep up with the Chinese until now. Things we can derive from these basic numbers, however: Canada's trade is far more dependent on the US's economy than China's. That's something we should remedy, and quickly. Especially with the uncertain future created by the Bush Administration, Canada should be working hard to lessen it's dependence on American goodwill.

Fortunately, in the same article (albeit much lower) the Globe quotes someone sensible - who incidentally explains how we've become so vulnerable to a US shock:

Although Canadian politicians will no longer be able to trumpet their first-place status with the United States, other Canadians shouldn't worry too much, said Michael Hart, chairman of trade policy at Carleton University's school of international affairs.

Because China and Canada differ so much in the types of exports they sell to the United States, Canada should not feel threatened by China's ascent, he said.

Most of Canada's exports to the United States are a result of cross-border industrial production, Mr. Hart said, and North American supply lines are "deeply integrated" and not about to disappear.

"North American supply lines are 'deeply integrated'". Thank you, Brian.

The Limits of Social Sciences

Brad Delong, after a long post on the possibilities of a US dollar crash, writes:

...Each side had its own preferred models that functioned very well at explaining the past historical cases that they focused on. But there was no way right now of settling, empirically, whether a model built to explain the U.S. in 1985 or Korea in 1998 was more applicable to the U.S. in 2006--you had to make a bet, either that continuities in U.S. economic structure were important, or that financial globalization was important, in choosing your model and your terms of analysis.

It was very interesting. And very disturbing. Brilliant economists, thinking hard, unable to reach even the beginnings of analytical agreement about how to model the distribution of possible futures.

Not exactly reassuring - Brad and co either are or were in many cases top government advisors. And he admits that not only don't they agree, they don't agree on the basis of their disagreement.

Now, extend the metaphor to the study and practice of internation relations. Is the model for Iraq: Kosovo (humanitarian enterprise, leading to more stability in the region) or something more like Iraq, circa 1920 (imperialist adventure to seize oil reserves)? After two and a half years, the war is looking less like either. But before the war, I think it's fair to say that these were the camps. That said, how bad does this look? For all the pretensions to "science", how valuable can they be for predictions?

Now, THIS is why I blog

W asks for permission to potty:

Link here.

1,001!

Happy 1,000th Post To Me

Hooray!

Seriously - I can't believe how much writing I've done in just about nine months. Hell, in that much time I could have been a father. Except that I couldn't.

On to 2,000!

The Republicans Continue To Suck

As the president has repeatedly said, this is a new kind of war. If anything, he and his top aides have indicated, it is more comparable to the long, ideological struggle of the Cold War than it is to WWII. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has likened herself to her Truman-era predecessor, Dean Acheson, who wrote that he was "present at the creation" of Cold War containment strategy.

But here too the comparison is not flattering. Containment doctrine evolved swiftly after WWII. It began with George Kennan's famous Long Telegram in February 1946, in which he described what he later called "the sources of Soviet conduct," and culminated in NSC-68 in the spring of 1950. NSC-68 was no boilerplate: This internal policy document included precise requests for defense spending and projections for how America could outspend the Soviet Union. In just about four years, America had developed a strategy that ultimately prevailed.

Truman's Republican successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was also an obsessive planner, dating from his days as Allied supreme commander. Within six months of taking office, in June 1953, Eisenhower convened a top-secret "Project Solarium" (named after the room where Ike decided on the approach) to forge a Cold War strategy in five weeks. Even Kennan later remarked that Ike had shown his "intellectual ascendancy over every man in the room" by taking command of the final meeting, accurately summarizing the three main approaches, and opting for Truman-style containment.

In December of 2003, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz presided over a secret "Solarium II" meeting to develop a grand strategy. But Bush wasn't there and participants said Wolfowitz himself read unrelated briefing papers during presentations.

-The Washington Post

So two years after 9/11, not only had the White House not found a strategy for the new war, but it showed no real passion to find one. These morons talk a big game, but as I've said before, they have no follow-through.

We need Democrats, people. It's the only way this war will ever be won.

The Next President

Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration - including the president, the vice president and Gen. Tommy Franks - have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora in December 2001. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp." It was not until this spring that the Pentagon, after a Freedom of Information Act request, released a document to The Associated Press that says Pentagon investigators believed that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that he escaped.

-The New York Times

You should all remember this: Tommy Franks will at the very least run for the GOP nomination for President in 2008. I feel very confident making this prediction. He's put out a book, he spoke at the last GOP convention, and he's got oodles of name recognition. And as the above passage demonstrates, he has already demonstrated the needed qualification for a Republican - the ability to lie with ease and frequency to the American people, especially if it hurts Democrats.

Unless Iraq and Afghanistan both turn in to even more gigantic clusterfucks than they already have, and maybe even then, Tommy Franks will run for President. And I'd be surprised if he didn't win.

In any case, the GOP will never, ever run anyone who isn't a kool-aid drinking Iraq hawk. So how do the Dems win? You can't out-hawk the GOP. This is why the Dems need - not should, not I want, but need - to run an anti-war candidate. It's the only alternative. Besides, Iraq and possibly even Afghanistan are likely to collapse on the US. But 2008 can only work is the Dems start running against the war now.

Responsible China

Please tell me how it's China's "fault" that gas prices are so high:

Alarmed by high world oil prices and sporadic shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel in big cities this summer, China's leaders are drafting plans to impose steep taxes on cars and sport utility vehicles with gas-guzzling engines.

The taxes would add as much as 27 percent to the price of vehicles with big engines, notably sports cars and SUVs, auto-industry officials and people advising the government on the plan said. At the same time, taxes may be cut slightly for models with the smallest, most efficient engines, though the details of these cuts are still under discussion, they said....

Meanwhile, China is working hard to reduce it's CO2 emissions.

BEIJING (Reuters) - The European Union agreed on Monday to give China the technology for a coal-fired power station designed to combat global warming as part of a wider accord on energy issues and climate change.

The clean coal-power plant will employ carbon capture and storage technology through which the coal plant can capture its own emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), burying them in porous rock underground for long-term storage.

It should be noted that China has no obligation yet to reduce it's CO2 emissions under Kyoto - though this is not the same as saying there are no obligations whatsoever. Rather, China will be obligated as it's economy begins to approach developed-country levels. Still, despite the fact that China's got no legal need to reduce CO2 emissions, it's doing more to reduce emissions than the US is. Interestingly, it's also doing more (so far) than Canada is. Do we have a Kyoto plan from Paul Martin's Liberals yet?

Not Quite Finished With Katrina

The Rightful President:

In the early days of the unfolding catastrophe, the President compared our ongoing efforts in Iraq to World War II and victory over Japan. Let me cite one difference between those two historical events: When imperial Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt did not invade Indonesia.

Yes, it's Al Gore.