Surging For Shelter

By Cernig

The Iraqi government has imposed a two-day curfew, with no unauthorised person allowed on the streets, over the weekend in Baghdad. US personnel in the Green Zone have been told they must not leave hardened shelters at any time - for work or to sleep - unless for "essential reasons".

And Bush is headed, between GOP fundraisers, for the old "the Dems are to blame" shelter from the consequences of his own policies.

"Some members of Congress decided the best way to encourage progress in Baghdad was to criticize and threaten Iraq's leaders while they're trying to work out their differences," Bush told a military audience at the cavernous U.S. Air Force museum.

"But hectoring was not what the Iraqi leaders needed," Bush said. "What they needed was security and that is what the `surge' has provided."

So secure, indeed, that US personnel are hunkered in shelters 24/7 and Iraqis cannot walk the streets of their own capital (again). Meanwhile, those Iraqi leaders are now taking the opportunity to "work out their differences" at gunpoint.

Honestly, why aren't people laughing in Bush's face by now?

The Uncommitted Republican

By Cernig

Chuck Hagel is almost the model of a sane and moderate Republican, the kind we Lefties wish more of those across the political divide were like. He's also a decorated Vietnam veteran and a widely-respected moderately-conservative voice on American foreign policy. Which makes it interesting indeed that he won't endorse John McCain, citing fundamental foreign policy disagreements. ABC yesterday:

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R - Neb., said this morning he is not ready to endorse Sen. John McCain, R - Ariz., for president.

"I think endorsements, at least when I endorse someone, or when I work for someone, or commit to someone, I want to be behind that person in every way I can," Hagel said in an exclusive "This Week" interview.

Hagel pointed to their differing views over foreign policy in explaining his hesitation. "I've obviously got some differences with John on the Iraq war. That's no secret. I want to understand a little more about foreign policy, where he'd want to go. Certainly doesn't put me in Obama or Clinton's camp. But John and I have some pretty fundamental disagreements on the future of foreign policy," he said.

Like Hagel counts the Iraq occupation as one of the five biggest blunders in American history while McCain would be happy if it continued for another 100 years. Hagel thinks Bush's policy in Iraq is "ping pong game with American lives" while McCain wants more of the same. And despite the crowing of the pro-Surge crowd, who have ignored all Petraeus' warnings in their rush to cry "mission accomplished" once again, it looks like the window of opportunity is nearly closed and Hagel will be proven right.

Tensions are simmering again in once bloody Anbar province, Washington's prize good news story for security in Iraq.

Along the main road through Anbar's second city of Falluja, a former insurgent stronghold and scene of fierce battles with U.S. forces in 2004, markets and car workshops are re-opening for business.

But many say that growing anger at a lack of jobs, basic services and political progress threatens to shatter peace in the western province, which makes up about a third of Iraq.

"The situation till now is still not certain in Anbar, and the peace is only relative to before. Calm always comes before a storm," Sunni tribal leader Sheikh Yaseen al-Badrani said.

The U.S. military said in January it could transfer security responsibility for Anbar to Iraqi forces as early as this month, but now it is more cautious.

In an interview with Reuters, Major-General John Kelly, commander of U.S. forces in Anbar, would give no time-frame, saying only that the handover would take place soon.

Sunni tribal leaders, credited with cutting violence in Anbar by ordering their men to turn on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, are growing increasingly impatient with politicians.

"We thought that when security was established in Anbar, then the situation would turn to development and reconstruction, but we're surprised to see neglect from the government," said Kamal Nouri, a member of Anbar's tribal council.

Sawhar councilmen are already calling for a national strike of Awakening members - something the central government will either ignore or see as a threat to its authority. The first will see a slow return to insurgency of non-cooperative Sunni militias, the second will see that happen swiftly and explosively. At just the same time, Muqtada al-Sadr's feud with the central coalition of Dawa and SIIC parties has become impossible for Ayatollah Sistani to continually manage and defuse. There's a storm coming in.

I'm going to be called a doom-monger and defeatist by the pro-occupation Right for this, I know. They said the same when their belief that US troops would be greeted as liberators was questioned, when they were told that the insurgency was more complex than just Al Qaeda foreign fighters, when people wrote that the glaring gaps in the Iraqi constitution would lead to sectarian violence, when we said Mookie wasn't dead yet (repeatedly), when we said that the Sunni Awakening was an aliance of convenience...

McCain Cast As Uniter, Not Divider

By Cernig

There are two puff-pieces touting McCain's "centrist" character today. One from the NY Times on McCain's press-the-flesh abroad (where he's been all things to all people and called for America to sign a new Kyoto deal) and another from The Politico which touts McCain's friendship with Joe Lieberman as proving his bi-partisan credentials (they seem to have forgotten Lieberman isn't a Dem anymore, having left the party over his support for Bush's policies).

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog is all over both stories, especially the second one, but notes:

John McCain plans to worry less about shoring up right-wing support and concentrate more on selling himself as only kinda-sorta Republican and really really really not like George W. Bush at all.

...McCain clearly thinks GOP voters will be with him no mattter what, and his best strategy is to persuade centrists that he's not really a Republican. I wish I thought it wouldn't work.

I've the same worry that Steve does, especially with the mainstream media pushing the meme just as hard as they can - but c'mon, how gullible can the American public be? Even the underlying rhetoric is the same.

Remember this? "I'm a uniter not a divider".

The man should be a lame duck before he's started, based entirely on his embracing of Bush.

The Source Of Bush's Delusion

By Cernig

Both the WaPo and McClatchy have noticed that Dubya erroneously claimed that Iran had said that it wants "to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people” (Dubya's words).

The claim came in an interview with Radio Farda in which Bush also acknowledged Iran's right to have a peaceful nuclear program, but said he wanted Iran to entirely outsource its enrichment to Russia. Iran has rejected this approach mainly because of Russia's track record in using energy supplies to hold customer nations hostage on political matters.

Bush cited his "belief that the Iranians should have a civilian nuclear-power program. It's in their right to have it." But he added: "The problem is that the [Iranian] government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because, one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now -- who knows? And secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some -- in the Middle East."

Iran has consistently said that its uranium-enrichment program is aimed only at producing energy, but the United States and some allies fear Iran is seeking the capability to develop nuclear weapons.

"There's a chance that the U.S. and Iran can reconcile their differences, but the government is going to have to make different choices," Bush said. "And one [such choice] is to verifiably suspend the enrichment of uranium, at which time there is a way forward."

The UN Security Council has passed three rounds of sanctions against Iran in an effort to pressure Tehran to halt its enrichment activities.

"What is acceptable to me is to work with a nation like Russia to provide the fuel so that the plant can go forward, which therefore shows that the Iranian government doesn't need to learn to enrich [uranium]," Bush said.

So where is Bush getting this delusion that Iran has said it wants a nuke? Look no further than the influential neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which has constantly banged the drum for war with Iran. Over at National Review's "Corner" blog today, Michael Rubin - a resident scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI - cites....Michael Rubin...as a source for such claims.

On examination, too, one of Rubin's key sources in his self-referenced article for the AIE turns out to be an Iranian Hezboullah hardliner arguing against then-President Rafsanjani, telling him what he should be doing but isn't. Another is by the Daily Telegraph's neocon serial fabulist Phil Sherwell and although Rubin says the cleric involved later "backtracked", what actually happened is that the cleric said he'd been outrageously misquoted and denied ever making the statement Sherwell claimed.

Self-reference and the misuse of sources can be bad blogging - but coming from a highly influential warmonger like Rubin who's scholarship has been questioned in the past - for not revealing his involvement in Bush administration propaganda efforts in Iraq - they are positively dangerous. With such organisations as the AIE and the Heritage Foundation feeding him their highly-spun version of events and issues, Bush is living in a reality of their making. Thus comes the source of his delusion.

Glad we live here and not some banana republic....

Otherwise I would have to be concerned that government collected information and resources could be used for political purposes. But since we live here, I don't care if the President can authorize on his say so wiretaps, or have investigators look at my e-mail, or low level contractors take a look at my passport files (how uninteresting that one is, except for the picture as it was taken during my Amish beard look-alike period). Nahhh... no need to worry, we can just trust them.

So I'll accept it as an honest mistake and imprudent personal curiousity when Barack Obama's passport files were repeatedly opened by unauthorized indviduals just as the campaign season was heating up.

Two State Department employees were fired and a third has been disciplined for improperly accessing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file, the State Department announced Thursday night.

Senior Department officials said they learned of the incidents only when a reporter made an inquiry Thursday afternoon. They said an initial investigation indicated the employees - all of whom worked on contract - were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."....

After seven years of being a paradigm of ethics and virtue, I trust everything that comes out of a Federal official's mouth. When have they failed to utter the complete truth in a comprehensive context... never... and when I see that passport records have been opened by unauthorized personnel in the past, it must have been an honest mistake...

The computer monitoring system, which focuses on politicians and celebrities, was put in place in recent years after the State Department became embroiled in a scandal involving the access of the passport records of Bill Clinton in 1992, when he was the Democratic presidential candidate.

Can't be a pattern here as that would require me to believe that government power is used politically, and we know that the Bush Administration never does that. It is just random luck that two charismatic, young, successful Democratic politicians have seen the State Department screw up on their own internal security procedures by having unauthorized individuals access their files in the midst of their presidential bids... just blind luck....

No Regrets?

By Cernig

Dubya says he has "no regrets" about invading and occupying Iraq.

Not one?

Not the fixing on intelligence around the policy to enable the invasion in the first place? not the setting of a dangerous precedent for other nations by invading without a UN authorisation? Not the disbanding of the Iraqi armed forces? Not the backing of corrupt exiles or the attempt to set up an Iraqi government without a democratic process? Not the failures in drafting a fair constitution that have made reconciliation a pipe-dream? Not the deplorable situation where the world's most powerful army is paralysed by the thought of a Bin Laden press release claiming his own victory if they withdraw? Not the outrageous domestic spying, the torture, the rollback of the rule of law, that have attended Bush's grand adventure? Not the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and not the trillions of dollars in deficit spending that have created a recession?

Not one?

I'm forcibly reminded of the Kerry/Bush debates of '04 when Dubya couldn't think of a single mistake he'd admit to. Sociopathic or pig-stupid, take your pick.

As for declaring the Surge a "major strategic victory in the broader war on terror" because the Awakening is now turning its back on Osama - when the Awakening had nothing to do with the Surge in the first place and when all those insurgents who now form the Awakening wouldn't have climbed on Osama's bandwagon without the U.S. invasion/occupation in the first place...

...well, that's just plain dishonest.

Iraq, aims and evaluation

I am an evaluator and analyst by training and profession. When I have an initial meeting with the stakeholders who want me to do an interim or a post-facto outcome evaluation of a big project I ask three initial questions.

1) Is it okay to park where I parked?
2) Where's the coffee?
3) What were the reasons/objectives that this project/program was started and what are the desired end-states?

The third question allows me to start building an analytical framework to see whether or not the project was able to achieve desirable outcomes. Any action has to be fitted into a matrix of past history, surrounding environment, capabilities, constraints, worldviews, resources, and value based outcomes. Actions should be taken that further goals, and these goals should fit into a comprehensible and coherent strategy of change. Benchmarks, way points, quick-look dashboards, indicators of some sort should be built into every phase of a project so that the basic question of 'does this action make sense in relationship to a larger goal' and ' is this doing what needs to be done' can be asked and quickly answered.

A good indicator of a program in trouble is one in which the benchmarks frequently and randomly change, low accountability is rampant, individual actors are engaged in activities that are mutually contradictory to any strategic outcome and evaluation does not occur or is a farce. This basic policy analysis framework can and should be applied to most public policy problems and programs, including an analysis of the war in Iraq.

Tigerhawk, a proud 24%-er is kicking the goal posts so far that soon American football will be played on a cricket pitch as he engages in both objective re-setting and evaluatory punting

other than to say that the many contemporaneous objections to OIF -- including fatuous assertions by presidential candidates and their surrogates that it was the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history -- will shrink into nothingness upon the full rendering of the verdict of history. That will depend on one result and one only -- whether the Persian Gulf and the Arab world are much changed in the time elapsing before the writing of that history and whether that change has a salutary impact on the many in competencies of that region, or not. And who will write that history? A young scholar who was born too late to have experienced the passionate arguments and sharp politics of the last five years.

He is arguing that we can not evaluate properly for at least another ten to fifteen years (figure a 10 year old in 2003 will be finishing up his dissertation when he is between 27 and 30) and only if we assess against one, often unstated, metric of success that was not central except to a bunch of fringe bureaucratic infighters. And also while we ignore any concept of opportunity cost. Wow, Tigerhawk had a reputation a couple of years ago as a 'smart' warhawk.

Let's go back to the tape and see what the stated war aims were. Let's see what case Congress thought it was authorizing, what President Bush stated in his biggest address to the country concerning Iraq, and what was stated the night the war started. I think this is a fair collection of documents to read to discern the stated intentions of the United States government.


From the March 19, 2003 pre-war speech by President Bush ---

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the
early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to
defend the world from grave danger....
The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

Okay, so we got the precursor of 'fight them over there so they don't come here' as well as fear mongering on WMDs. We also get a hint of liberating the Iraqi people, although as soon as they wanted early local elections in the summer of 2003, we quashed that notion of local autonomy. But the primary stated purpose of this war was disarm Iraq. Iraq was already effectively disarmed years ago and the UN was able to verify that this process was nearing completion. Whoopsie!

From the 2002 Joint Authorization to Use Military Force (CSPAN PDF)

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized to use the
Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary
and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against
the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council
resolutions regarding Iraq.

The pre-amble full of Whereas... is not legally binding but it mostly contained statements on disarming Iraq, enforcing UN sanctions or allegations (cleverly worded of course) on the connections between Iraq and Al-Queada. Again, this is being framed as a war of self-defense against a terrifying threat of a secretly re-armed Iraq.

Let's move to the next selection to see what the stated war aims are.
2003 State of the Union

America is making a broad and determined effort to confront these dangers. We have called on the United Nations to fulfill its charter and stand by its demand that Iraq disarm. We're strongly supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency in its mission to track and control nuclear materials around the world.....
The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.
Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations. Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families....
If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him....
And as we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom.

Again, the war aims here are disarming Iraq and assisting the United Nations in enforcing its resolutions and sanctions. Nothing is written in the official war aims as promogulated by both Congress and President Bush in his two biggest speeches about the war concerning the creation of a cascade of positive externalities (which btw we aren't seeing) in the entire region.

Furthermore his analytical framework excludes both opportunity cost and the closely related concept of the counterfactual which are some of the core tenets of anything that vaguely wants to be called high quality policy analysis. As an whimper of begging for intellectual mercy, Tigerhawk and the sentiment he expresses of neglecting the next twenty years so that it can be properly analyzed while continuing on the same path is a joke, and not even a particularly funny one at that.

A good day for The Grey Lady

By Libby

The NYT is on a roll today. As Cernig noted this morning they had a good editorial on Bush's criminal circumvention of the rule of law on domestic surveillance, but they didn't stop with that. Another editorial accused him of lying about the economy. And even more surprising, MoDo actually took a break from her usual vacuous sniping at Democrats to do a little Bush bashing of her own.

I agree with Avedon that this doesn't absolve MoDo or the Times for their past transgressions but nonetheless it is nice to see them doing their job for a change and calling out the president on his contemptible conduct.

Bush's Karaoke Moment Hits You-Tube

By Cernig

Libby, I'm happy to tell you that you were wrong - someone did leak footage of Dubya's karaoke moment at the Gridiron Club. Thanks very much to "The Lede":

Did they really think it wouldn’t make You Tube? President Bush has turned up on the popular Internet site singing an off-key spoof of “The Green Green Grass of Home,” which he performed Saturday night at the supposedly off-the-record Gridiron Club dinner in Washington.

And so without further ado:

Bush says he'd go to Afghanistan if he were younger

By Cernig

A Reuters correspondent got to sit in on a videoconference between the White House and US military and civilain leaders in Afghanistan. At the WH big table were Bush, Cheney, Gates Negroponte and others. Like the Decider he is, Dubya hogged the remote.

And told the folks in Aghanistan this:

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Ah, George, you're not too old. And a greatful nation would pass the hat around for your one-way airfare.

But what a great example to set to the Fighting Keyboardists. Bush is 62 this year - how many are younger than that? They should put their asses where Dubya's mouth is and set off for Helmsland Province immediately.

Throwing Bush Under The Bus

By Cernig

Today in the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Bell from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (an outfit set up to promote "the Judeo-Christian moral tradition" over secular humanism in public policy) puts forward the Republican game plan for throwing Dubya under the bus while still managing to claim that Bush's policies could be effective if someone with the backbone to see them through (like McCain!) is elected. Scott Johnson of Powerline has already endorsed it and no doubt other extreme Right apparatchiks will follow.

It begins (emphasis mine):

The failure of the Bush presidency is the dominant fact of American politics today. It has driven every facet of Democratic political strategy since early 2006, when Democrats settled on the campaign themes that brought them their takeover of the House and Senate in November 2006. Nothing--not even the success of the American troop surge in Iraq--has altered or will alter the centrality of George W. Bush and his failed presidency to Democratic planning in the remainder of 2008.

Until very recently, it was in the Republicans' interest to find ways of sidestepping or finessing this central political fact. Congressional Republicans sensed that open acknowledgment of the failure of the Bush presidency could cause a collapse in floor discipline, perhaps leading to a series of veto overrides and even forced surrender in Iraq. Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had to deal with the fact that in our polarized politics, Republican primary voters are still predominantly pro-Bush. From the beginning of this cycle, GOP campaign strategists were aware that presidential candidates openly contemptuous of the Bush administration would go nowhere in the primaries (Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo) or prove to be nonstarters (Chuck Hagel).

John McCain's clinching of the Republican nomination changes many if not most of these GOP calculations. If Republicans are to accomplish the unusual feat of winning a third consecutive presidential election in the context of an unpopular administration of their own party, they will have to develop a narrative that takes into account the failed presidency in their midst while at the same time making a plausible case for a new Republican presidency and continued Republican strength in -Congress. This in turn requires an understanding of Bush's failure that is not self-discrediting for Republicans.

If you think that's going to take mental twisting amounting to deliberately induced schizophrenia, you're right. The GOP, like a crude oil supertanker, has a wide turning circle and getting everything travelling in a new direction is always a messy business.

But, in short, Bell wants Republicans to believe - both at the same time - that while Bush has been a wonderful President and Commander in Chief he has also been a failure for: not hating Teh Gay enough; not giving enough away to the richest 5% and corporations; making of Iraq both a quagmire and a surging success and for allowing Patrick Fitzgerald to use his investigation of the Plame outing to pursue "only people who were hawkish on Iraq and never people who were dovish on Iraq" thus "criminalizing or semi-criminalizing effective defenders of the Iraq invasion" and driving them from the administration.Nary a mention of the possibility that it's the hard-Right's policies and operators who are flawed, rather than Bush's enabling of them.

Go read the whole thing for the entire muddled split-personality effect of seeing the folks in jackboots try to lockstep in two opposite directions at once. Delicious.

Bush Dogs innoculation votes fail

There are 39 Bush Dogs --- Democrats in Congress who, on big, partisan issues, vote to trust George W. Bush and his judgment against the rest of the Democratic caucus and 80%+ of the Democratic electorate. The Bush Dogs make up 16.8% of the Democratic House caucus. On national security issues, this group allows for conservative control of the process as Speaker Pelosi is operating under a majority of the whole instead of a majority of the majority rule set.

Most Bush Dogs are either Blue Dogs or New Dems, and they have formal internal party caucuses. The first purpose of a caucus is to have members help each other out. This often means electoral assistance with the goal of winning re-election. I have no problem with this, as the CBC, the Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus attempt to do the same thing with varying levels of effectiveness. People join caucuses on the basis of common identity and goals. So these two groups that vote against Dems believe that this is useful behavior to their own goals.

Why do they vote this way? It can be either that they personally believe in George W. Bush's judgment and vision for a cowering America, which is a harsh indictment of their own judgment. Or they believe that they are in districts which demand these reactionary votes, either from the point of view of voters, or more likely from their probable donor base. In this projected political calculation, a Bush Dog calculates that voting with the rest of the Democratic Party is very dangerous to their future political careers, so voting for Bush is a political innoculation to prevent a strong reactionary Republican challenge.

Yet this strategy is not working. One would expect that if Bush Dogs are voting their districts in voting for George W. Bush's policies and contortions of the Constitution, they would be on average, no more vulnerable to a challenge than most non-packed and stacked district Democrats. The National Republican Congressional Committee has released its initial target list of twenty four Democratically held seats it wants to field first string challengers against.

If the innoculation strategy works, one would expect roughly four Bush Dogs to be challenged, as that is the proportion of the Democratic Caucus that they compose. Instead a third of all of these 'first tier' challengers will be against Bush Dogs, for a relative risk of 2.0 for a Bush Dog compared to a generic House Democrat. That is a signifcant increase in risk if we assume that first tier challengers have a substantially higher probability of knocking off an incumbent than non-first tier challengers.

For the innoculation strategy to still be a viable strategy, one must assume that there are more Bush Dogs who the NRCC looked at and said 'Hmm, he is an entrenched incumbent with great constituent support, amazing fundraising and if only he had voted against telecom immunity we could beat him this year instead of the past eight attempts in a very favorable district....'

I don't think there are that many marginal Bush Dogs where one or two votes matter. So either the political calculation for innoculation is wrong, or their judgement is wrong as exhibited by supporting George W. Bush on a couple of crucial partisan matters.

Vote McCain for a Third Bush Term!

By Cernig

Dubya hi-jacked the Straight Talk Express today as he endorsed McCain for the White House.

In a press conference after a private lunch, a reporter asked the duo how McCain would “make the case that you’re going to provide the change that the voters seem to want.”

Bush quickly cut in, declaring that McCain is “not going to change”:

BUSH: And the good news about our candidate there will be a new president, a man of character and courage, but he’s not going to change when it comes to taking on the enemy. He understands this is a dangerous world.

Following up on the press conference, Rich Lowry of the National Review said on Fox News that Bush is framing McCain as embracing his old platforms, “someone determined absolutely to take on our enemy and someone with a big heart who cares for those who hurt.” Lowry said McCain was shaping up to be Bush’s “successor”.

So there you have it. The would-be moderate, "maverick" McCain has now been entirely co-opted by the wingnut base of the GOP, who insist that there be no change. Just another ventroloquist's dummy in an expensive suit.

Rove's Math is faulty again

One of the M.O.'s of George W. Bush's political and business careers is the ability and willingness to create an 'after me, the deluge' so don't replace me situations. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is created so that although Bush and his associates have created a bad situation, the FUD keeps people from being willing to switch to other management for the fear of the higher associated costs of cleaning up after Bush. This was best captured by the Economist [h/t Unqualified Offerings]

In 2000 he beat an incumbent vice-president after eight years of peace and prosperity: the wry slogan among his inner circle was: “Things have never been better. Vote for change.” Four years later, with the economy stalled and Iraq in flames, he won again. This time, the backstage slogan was: “Things have never been worse. Stay the course.”

And we are getting the same playbook in Iraq. It is a clusterf*ck, the state has been delegitimatized to a ridiculous Nth Degree, the US is funding both the insurgency, and the counterinsurgency efforts (usually the same people), Iran's President was welcomed with flowers and chocalate while President Bush, Sec. State Rice and Sec. Def Gates have to make nighttime unnanounced visits and the success that is being trumpeted is returning to violence levels of 2005 when Iraq had already become a failed state. Oh yeah, two major US allies (Turks and Iraqi Kurds) are setting themselves up for a multi-division slug-fest once the ground dries out in the spring.

And yet, Bush allies are arguing that doing more of what Bush is doing with the same management team is the course with the lowest cost of action. Karl Rove is arguing that pulling out of Iraq would send oil to $200 a barrel. This after seeing the price of oil triple in the past five years, and ignoring either a static or dynamic analysis of the situation.

If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy?

This is wrong on several levels. First, Al-Quaida as the right's talking points like to trumpet this week, is not that strong in Iraq. It never has been until it was a convienent bogeyman. Instead the primary combatants shooting at the US in Iraq have been native-born Iraqis, Sunni Arab nationalists/revanchists/Ba'athists, [at least one, usually two, sometimes all three], Sadr's Mahdi Army which is overwhelmingly urban Shi'ites, and criminal/smuggling operations. The foreign fighters have been at times extremely useful idiots, but always idiots in the eyes of the Sunni Arabs. Al-Queada can't take over the central government; their best objective is hollowing out the central government.

Secondly, the economics don't work out. Iraq is exported in 2007 an average of 1.6 million barrels per day. More recently Iraqi oil exports were roughly 1.9 million barrels per day out of total production of about 2.4 million barrels. Global oil and oil near substitute production in January 2008 was 87.2 million barrels. Iraq produces 2.7% of global crude in January 2008.

If we were to assume for the argument that complete US withdrawal would lead to a complete shutdown of Iraqi oil production and exports and thus lead to a doubling in spot prices, this implies an elasticity of demand of less than .03 in the short run. Elasticity of demand is an economic concept that estimates how much prices would change in response to a percentage change in supply. For instance an elasticity of demand of 1.0 would have prices increase 1% for every 1% of a good that is no longer available. An elasticity of demand of .5 would have prices increase by 2% for every 1% of supply removed from the market etc.

The best short run estimates of the elasticity of demand for crude oil range from .10 to .16. Over the longer run, these elasticities increase, but in the short run using the lowest accepted estimate, removing all Iraqi oil from market would lead to a price increase of 27% +/- a bit, and using the .16, removing all Iraqi oil from market would lead to a price increase of 17% +/- a bit.

And these estimates assume all Iraqi oil comes off the market when we have proven history that there is a good deal of capacity for limited Iraqi production no matter how many people are being shot and pipelines being blown up.

And this is just the simple static counter-argument against Rove. If one wants to get a little more complex and attribute at least a portion of the nominal dollar price increases in oil over the past five or six years to a weakening US dollar, and low US interest rates, we can construct an interesting counterfactual. Right now the entire Iraq expenditure is being placed on the US credit card. Iraq is costing in cash terms about $200 billion per year right now. Removing a significant amount of that cost from our ongoing and recurring expenses will reduce US debt loads, and marginally reduce the downward pressure on the dollar. A strong US dollar means US consumers pay less per gallon/barrel than in a scenario with a weaker US dollar.

This part of the argument that Joseph Stiglitz has been making recently. The Federal Reserve failed in 2003/2004 to counteract the massive fiscal stiumulas of war spending by tightening monetary policy. This led to a bubble, and the subsequent credit crunch.

The war has fed into the weakness of the wider economy, he said, adding, "To cover that up, the Fed and the regulators flooded the economy with liquidity - giving cheap money to anybody this side of a life support system."

He said there was a direct correlation between the extent of the current crisis in financial markets and the cost of the conflict.

So in this counterfactual, the US dollar is a little stronger and oil is a little cheaper. Rove is factually wrong, but he is throwing out a marker of blame against anyone advocating that they want to clean up George W. Bush's failures. Par for the course.

Snark of the week

Via Cunning Realist

Given current trends and the obvious needs in the ranks of U.S. management, I'd expect Harvard Business School to make a new course available shortly: Heckuva Job: Wars, Occupations, and Natural Disasters for the 21st Century Executive. There's a high-profile graduate available for guest lectures soon.

Bush finds sartorial love in Tanzania

By Libby

The article is not at all interesting. It's no big surprise that Bush is being welcomed to Tanzania when he comes carrying a big check and pledges billions more of our tax dollars for his successor to dole out. (By the way, am I the only one who notices that his game plan this year seems to solely consist of saddling the next administration with his own failed policies and twisted pipe dreams?) Neither is it surprising that Africans are taking an interest in the Democratic primary. The whole world is watching this race and obviously Obama's African ancestry would add to that.

But the reason you should click over to the piece is to see the photo. O.M.G. Those dresses are really something.

BAE, Bandar, Blair - And Bulls**t

By Cernig

The UK government's excuses for halting corruption investigations into an arm deal with Saudi Arabia just took an overly-dramatic turn.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government.

The government's lawyer said the threat to national security was a clear one:

Philip Sales QC, appearing on behalf of the director of the SFO, Robert Wardle, said that since Saudi Arabia was not subject to British law, nothing could be done.

He said it was legitimate for Wardle to take into account the fact the state "did not have the resources to meet the threat in the ordinary way".

..."What you are saying is that the law is powerless to protect our own sovereignty - the law cannot be deployed as a weapon to protect the sovereignty of this country," said Lord Justice Moses.

Yesterday, Moses asked why the Saudis had not been told, "You can't talk to us like that", and said the threats would have been a criminal offence in British law.

Today, Moses asked Sales if he thought nothing could be done to resist such threats from powerful foreign states.

Sales said: "Correct - we cannot compel Saudi Arabia to adopt a different stance." He said it was "a fact of life" and said the director could not "magic this situation away".

"The director has made it clear how important he thought the security implications were," Sales said. "He accepted what he was advised as to the imminence of the threat. It cannot be said that he acted irrationally."

Hang on. We're expected to believe that such serious threats caused the government to order bribe investigations dropped - - but that the government then pressed ahead anyway with a 40 billion pound sale of advanced Eurofighter Typhoon fighters to the nation that had just threatened Britain's security. What an amazing admission.

Either these "secret papers" are utter BS or Blair himself was amazingly, criminally, incompetent in continuing the sale. I'm personally betting the former - possibly both. Especially considering the many cash for honours scandals that surround Blair's time in office and his obvious avarice nowadays.

And before my American friends write this off as a purely British scandal - recall that much of the bribe money Prince Bandar is alleged to have received from the UK over the years was funnelled through the now-defunct Riggs Bank in Washington. Let's also not lose sight of the certainty that Bush would certainly have been told about the Saudi threats to Britain but went ahead anyway with his own massive arms sale to a nation that had so threatened an ally and fellow NATO member. This one is going to be the scandal that keeps giving.

Through the looking glass

By Libby

Often times in the last seven years I've felt like we're living in Orwell's vision but this odd synchronicity feels more like Lewis Carroll. Bin Laden's approval rating in Pakistan has dropped to 24% which about mirrors the approval rating for our bi-partisan Congress and reflecting our president's current approval status, 70% of Pakistanis would love to see Musharraf quit his office.

As I often say, life is funny, but it's not a joke.

Bush Steals Purse

By Cernig

Not content with stripping the Treasury only to hand it to his pals as corporate welfare, Bush has now stolen Congress' power of the purse. According to Bruce Fein, deputy AG to Reagan, in the Washington Times today:

Jan. 28, 2008, is a date that will live in congressional infamy. Congress surrendered the power of the purse over national security affairs to the White House.

President Bush appended a signing statement to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 denying the power of Congress to withhold funds for establishing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, or to control its oil resources. The statement tacitly averred that Congress was required to appropriate money to support every presidential national security gambit, for example, launching pre-emptive wars anywhere on the planet or breaking and entering homes to gather foreign intelligence.

....The National Defense Authorization Act's restrictions on President Bush in Iraq were no novelty. Congress has repeatedly legislated to constrain the president's projection of the military abroad or has otherwise overridden his national security policies.

...Yet Congress acquiesced. It did not pass a resolution disputing Mr. Bush. It did not threaten impeachment. It meekly surrendered its national security relevance. Under the precedent it left undisturbed, the president could flout congressional prohibitions on spending funds to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, to invade North Korea, to conduct military offensives in Iraq, to install an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, or to assist Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

A combination of congressional inertness and imbecility has crippled the power of the purse to check executive abuses and craving for perpetual war. Mr. Bush is now crowned with more power than the Stuart kings.

Welcome to the Sixteeth Century, folks.

Bush & Romney Backer Suspected In French Insider Dealing

By Cernig

A friend of George Bush who has been a major donor to both Bush and Romney could face a criminal investigation into insider share dealing after selling £100million of shares just days before Societe Generale's rogue-trader losses were reported.

Robert Day, a member of the French bank's board, disposed of a million shares on January 9 and 10, plus a further 500,000 on January 18, according to official disclosures to Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF), France's market regulator.

The £3.7billion losses at the bank were not disclosed to the public or investors until January 24, despite reports that Societe Generale bosses were aware of the crisis several days earlier.

The AMF is investigating after complaints by minority shareholders who claim some protected themselves at the cost of less influential investors. A source confirmed that Mr Day's share dealings are part of that investigation.

A file lodged with public prosecutor Francois Foulon also demands an inquiry into alleged insider trading and fraud.

The claims were submitted by Frederik-Karel Canoy, a lawyer acting for 100 shareholders, who alleges that Mr Day acted after consultations with "three or four" other key figures in the bank to discuss the looming crisis.

Their meetings were held at Paris restaurants rather than over the phone or by email, Mr Canoy claims.

Mr. Day, of course, has denied the allegations and through a spokesman said he had no idea the bank was in trouble until a board meeting on January 20, two days after the last of his share sales. What coincidentally convenient timing.