Sunday, January 30, 2005
Believing in the Vote
Fred Kaplan is a pretty skeptical guy where the Iraq mission is concerned. When indicates that today's elections in Iraq were a big deal - and in a number of ways a success - that is praise not easily won.
It was easy to doubt the viability of the democratic process in Iraq as the death toll mounted over the last month. But the butcher Zarqawi's pledge to murder Iraqi voters has largely proved hollow. Maybe the banning of automobiles on the day of the vote was decisive, or maybe the eleventh hour raids made by the government and its U.S. allies had a preemptive effect. In any event, the Iraqi people took a deep breath and decided to come out.
Another dramatic election happened last fall in Ukraine, where voters challenged a decade's worth of fatalism to vote out a corrupt government. Elections are what you make of them: in the worst of circumstances, they're divisive and generate cynicism; in the best of circumstances, they're a civic shot in the arm. Ukraine's constitutional system has been revitalized. Iraq could - could - move out of the shadows.
A democratically elected Iraqi government could credibly recruit from amongst its own people. It could also credibly ask the U.S. to draw down its troop presence. A new government will have to weigh the military disadvantages of such a move against its obvious political advantages. The ethnic/religious hurdle remains formidable, but if 80% of Iraq's people are committed to its government, that's a solid start. The Shiites and Kurds do have an interest in seeing this work - the alternative to a messy democracy is a degree of anarchy that will make the last two years seem mild.
As Churchill put it, this isn't the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.
Fred Kaplan is a pretty skeptical guy where the Iraq mission is concerned. When indicates that today's elections in Iraq were a big deal - and in a number of ways a success - that is praise not easily won.
It was easy to doubt the viability of the democratic process in Iraq as the death toll mounted over the last month. But the butcher Zarqawi's pledge to murder Iraqi voters has largely proved hollow. Maybe the banning of automobiles on the day of the vote was decisive, or maybe the eleventh hour raids made by the government and its U.S. allies had a preemptive effect. In any event, the Iraqi people took a deep breath and decided to come out.
Another dramatic election happened last fall in Ukraine, where voters challenged a decade's worth of fatalism to vote out a corrupt government. Elections are what you make of them: in the worst of circumstances, they're divisive and generate cynicism; in the best of circumstances, they're a civic shot in the arm. Ukraine's constitutional system has been revitalized. Iraq could - could - move out of the shadows.
A democratically elected Iraqi government could credibly recruit from amongst its own people. It could also credibly ask the U.S. to draw down its troop presence. A new government will have to weigh the military disadvantages of such a move against its obvious political advantages. The ethnic/religious hurdle remains formidable, but if 80% of Iraq's people are committed to its government, that's a solid start. The Shiites and Kurds do have an interest in seeing this work - the alternative to a messy democracy is a degree of anarchy that will make the last two years seem mild.
As Churchill put it, this isn't the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The World Looks to America, We Look to . . . Chile?
I must confess some befuddlement at reading that Bush's Social Security reform scheme is based on a Chilean model developed under Augusto Pinochet. It's beyond me to assess the success or failure of the Chilean system - the above Reuters article does so to some degree, as does this New York Times article
What is odd to me is this administration citing anything done by another country as a model for us. The new rhetoric of Washington thoroughly eschews looking elsewhere for models. Conservatives roll their eyes when told about European systems. It's true that Latin America is more wedded to the free market than Europe, but this is not an administration that has really paid much attention to Latin America otherwise. In a different era, we might have worked more closely with Vicente Fox or more stringently against Hugo Chavez. Latin America is on the backburner, again.
What the use of Chile as a model suggests is this administration's incredible flexibility. It will use rhetoric premised on American exceptionalism and supremacy for 95% of the time and then turn on a dime and hail another country as a model. This will stupefy advocates of abolishing the death penalty or instituting public health care, but being a Bush administration means never having to worry about intellectual consistency. It must be nice.
I must confess some befuddlement at reading that Bush's Social Security reform scheme is based on a Chilean model developed under Augusto Pinochet. It's beyond me to assess the success or failure of the Chilean system - the above Reuters article does so to some degree, as does this New York Times article
What is odd to me is this administration citing anything done by another country as a model for us. The new rhetoric of Washington thoroughly eschews looking elsewhere for models. Conservatives roll their eyes when told about European systems. It's true that Latin America is more wedded to the free market than Europe, but this is not an administration that has really paid much attention to Latin America otherwise. In a different era, we might have worked more closely with Vicente Fox or more stringently against Hugo Chavez. Latin America is on the backburner, again.
What the use of Chile as a model suggests is this administration's incredible flexibility. It will use rhetoric premised on American exceptionalism and supremacy for 95% of the time and then turn on a dime and hail another country as a model. This will stupefy advocates of abolishing the death penalty or instituting public health care, but being a Bush administration means never having to worry about intellectual consistency. It must be nice.
More on the Rise of the Vigilant Passenger
A deranged man who tried to storm the cockpit of a Southwest flight didn't stand much of a chance:
I'd wager that a large part of the reason that air travel recovered after 9/11 is that passengers knew that future hijacking attempts wouldn't be tolerated (and that Al Qaeda realized that too and abandoned the hijacking tactic).
A deranged man who tried to storm the cockpit of a Southwest flight didn't stand much of a chance:
- Egyed exchanged punches with a flight attendant before passengers joined the scuffle and subdued him, authorities said.
'They used duct tape to tie him up,' FBI spokeswoman Judy Orijuela said.
I'd wager that a large part of the reason that air travel recovered after 9/11 is that passengers knew that future hijacking attempts wouldn't be tolerated (and that Al Qaeda realized that too and abandoned the hijacking tactic).
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
A recent RAND study advises against equipping airliners and airports with systems designed to foil portable surface-to-air missiles. RAND's concern is that the installation of these systems will cost $11 billion, with an added $2.1 billion annual maintenance cost.
That sounds like a lot of money, but consider the cost of an American airliner being shot down by terrorists. RAND did that as well:
That measurement sounds fairly dire, but only talks about the short-term impact of a cessation of air travel. The study is vaguer on the question of long-term impact:
We're still floating around the same number, which seems to minimize the extent to which normal patterns of air travel would be disrupted. The study compares the impact of a downed airliner to the aftereffects of September 11. The analogy doesn't quite hold. 9/11 was a onetime deal - after it occurred, no cabin full of passengers was likely to assume after a plan was hijacked that they would be allowed to live. 9/11 gave rise to the vigilant passenger, as would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid discovered.
The panic a shootdown would inspire would be less easily dispelled, even if the perpetrators were captured. Absent concrete countermeasures, passengers will have no reason to think that future attacks are preventable.
Ever so thorough, RAND considers what passengers would be willing to pay to avoid the calamity of a downed airliner:
Speculative or not, I'd wager that this estimate is on the low end. But $12 billion has the merit of being a bigger number than $11.5 billion. Air travel is one of the pillars of the American economy; its disruption would have societal impacts too myriad to contemplate.
RAND contends that time will allow us to have more cost-effective solutions. How much cheaper do they have to be? How much time can we afford? Admittedly we have an administration too feckless to raise taxes for true homeland security (for that reason, the RAND diagnosis seems fairly savvy). But the only way we can find out the answer to the second question would be waiting until it's too late. RAND also contends that smart terrorists may determine countermeasures against airplane defense systems. Maybe they will, but installing these systems is guaranteed to lower the odds of their succeeding. If countermeasures improve the chance of a plane surviving an attack by 20%, they'll easily be worthwhile.
The costs of prevention, however high they may seem, will be utterly dwarfed by the costs of dealing with the disruption of air travel after the fact. Israel acknowledged this when it began outfitting its airliners in 2002. That we're still thinking this way three years after 9/11 is truly frightening.
A recent RAND study advises against equipping airliners and airports with systems designed to foil portable surface-to-air missiles. RAND's concern is that the installation of these systems will cost $11 billion, with an added $2.1 billion annual maintenance cost.
That sounds like a lot of money, but consider the cost of an American airliner being shot down by terrorists. RAND did that as well:
If we take into account the value of a lost aircraft and a conventional economic valuation of loss of life, the direct cost would approach $1 billion for every aircraft downed. The indirect economic damage from an attack would be far greater. These costs result from the loss of consumer welfare through preemption of a favored travel mode or reluctance to use it, as well as operating losses suffered by airlines subsequent to an attack. These amounts will depend primarily upon two factors: the length of any possible systemwide shutdowns in air travel and any kind of longer-lasting public reluctance to fly. Both factors are difficult to predict, but if air travel were shut down for a week (it was shut down for three days after 9/11), the economic loss would amount to roughly $3 billion during the shutdown itself. Extrapolating from the long-term effects of the 9/11 shutdown, losses over the following months might tally an additional $12 billion, for a total economic impact of more than $15 billion.
That measurement sounds fairly dire, but only talks about the short-term impact of a cessation of air travel. The study is vaguer on the question of long-term impact:
we find it plausible that demand for air travel could fall by 15–25 percent for months after a successful MANPADS attack on a commercial airliner in the United States. A weeklong systemwide shutdown of air travel could generate welfare losses of $3–4 billion, and when losses from reduced air traffic in the following months are added in, the result could exceed $15 billion
We're still floating around the same number, which seems to minimize the extent to which normal patterns of air travel would be disrupted. The study compares the impact of a downed airliner to the aftereffects of September 11. The analogy doesn't quite hold. 9/11 was a onetime deal - after it occurred, no cabin full of passengers was likely to assume after a plan was hijacked that they would be allowed to live. 9/11 gave rise to the vigilant passenger, as would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid discovered.
The panic a shootdown would inspire would be less easily dispelled, even if the perpetrators were captured. Absent concrete countermeasures, passengers will have no reason to think that future attacks are preventable.
Ever so thorough, RAND considers what passengers would be willing to pay to avoid the calamity of a downed airliner:
We estimate that the country would be willing to pay $12 billion to avoid an incident that would seriously affect travelers’ confidence for the next six months. That value increases to over $50 billion for an incident that would affect travel for a year and a half. Admittedly, these future loss factors are somewhat speculative.
Speculative or not, I'd wager that this estimate is on the low end. But $12 billion has the merit of being a bigger number than $11.5 billion. Air travel is one of the pillars of the American economy; its disruption would have societal impacts too myriad to contemplate.
RAND contends that time will allow us to have more cost-effective solutions. How much cheaper do they have to be? How much time can we afford? Admittedly we have an administration too feckless to raise taxes for true homeland security (for that reason, the RAND diagnosis seems fairly savvy). But the only way we can find out the answer to the second question would be waiting until it's too late. RAND also contends that smart terrorists may determine countermeasures against airplane defense systems. Maybe they will, but installing these systems is guaranteed to lower the odds of their succeeding. If countermeasures improve the chance of a plane surviving an attack by 20%, they'll easily be worthwhile.
The costs of prevention, however high they may seem, will be utterly dwarfed by the costs of dealing with the disruption of air travel after the fact. Israel acknowledged this when it began outfitting its airliners in 2002. That we're still thinking this way three years after 9/11 is truly frightening.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Just like four years ago, I skipped the inaugural speech. Reading the transcript is an altogether calmer affair, however.
Bush is clearly quite comfortable in his self-designed role as a crusader for freedom. He has all the confidence of a true evangelist. And, to the extent that he's referencing democracy as an ultimate solution to global ills, I can largely agree with him.
A hint of where he goes awry can be found in his description of the pre-9/11 years as "years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical." The 1990s were anything but quiet. Lest he forget, we had military actions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq and Kosovo. There was also the first stirrings of the war on terror. In declaring the transformative nature of democracy, Bush is really just taking lines from Bill Clinton - the difference is how he's acted on this belief.
One sign of the problem with Bush's speech is the absence of the word "Iraq" in it. That country between Jordan and Iran poses, some might say, a real challenge to this ideology of democratic evangelism. I have unmitigated scorn for folks who think Saddam was the leader who best fit Iraq - that's actually one of the more racist things that can be said of the country. Still, the ongoing war there is a pretty damning illustration of where this whole quest against tyranny will lead us if managed incompetently.
I don't dislike Bush because I don't agree with him about democracy. I dislike him because his administration is intellectually unable to pursue such a vital and challenging mission - they confuse questions about execution with questions about resolve. They adapt poorly and plan badly. When they are done, I fear, they will have thoroughly discredited a noble idea that long preceded them.
Bush is clearly quite comfortable in his self-designed role as a crusader for freedom. He has all the confidence of a true evangelist. And, to the extent that he's referencing democracy as an ultimate solution to global ills, I can largely agree with him.
A hint of where he goes awry can be found in his description of the pre-9/11 years as "years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical." The 1990s were anything but quiet. Lest he forget, we had military actions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq and Kosovo. There was also the first stirrings of the war on terror. In declaring the transformative nature of democracy, Bush is really just taking lines from Bill Clinton - the difference is how he's acted on this belief.
One sign of the problem with Bush's speech is the absence of the word "Iraq" in it. That country between Jordan and Iran poses, some might say, a real challenge to this ideology of democratic evangelism. I have unmitigated scorn for folks who think Saddam was the leader who best fit Iraq - that's actually one of the more racist things that can be said of the country. Still, the ongoing war there is a pretty damning illustration of where this whole quest against tyranny will lead us if managed incompetently.
I don't dislike Bush because I don't agree with him about democracy. I dislike him because his administration is intellectually unable to pursue such a vital and challenging mission - they confuse questions about execution with questions about resolve. They adapt poorly and plan badly. When they are done, I fear, they will have thoroughly discredited a noble idea that long preceded them.
Friday, January 14, 2005
No Thank You, Howard
I have to confess my general lack of enthusiasm for Howard Dean as head of the DNC. I frankly don't see why people are enthusiastic about having him there, unless, of course they are former Dean supporters. The record of Dean's candidacy gives one no ground for confidence that he'd manage the party efficiently. While he showed real success in raising funds, he showed real incompetence in managing them - effectively burning through his warchest by the end of the New Hampshire primary. His campaign's innovative use of the internet had a lot more to do with his choice of campaign manager than anything Dean himself did - it was quickly and successfully mimicked by Kerry, who had stellar success in fundraising after winning the nomination.
When he lost, Dean and his supporters chose to think that they'd been the victims of a diabolical conspiracy by the party elite, which allegedly was frightened out of its wits by the upstart Vermonter. This after he had hired a Washington lobbyist to replace Joe Trippi, after he had gained Al Gore's endorsement, and the votes of a majority of Democratic "super-delegates" (by definition a super-delegate represents the party elite). The leadership of the Democratic party is weak and carries little sway with the base; had it been otherwise, Dean never would have got anywhere. Embracing this victimization narrative enabled Dean to avoid asking hard questions about what mistakes he had made while frontrunner.
Dean is currently talking about running Democrats everywhere - going for offices in the red states. That makes perfect sense. Of course, we should remember that, after his own reverses in Iowa and New Hampshire he forswore campaigning in the South and set his hopes on the distant Wisconsin primary. Elsewhere in his much noted December speech at GWU, Dean said:
May really begin . . . you'd think he missed the presidential election we just had. Kerry had ample opportunity to cave on an issue like gay marriage - actually he was urged to do so by some - but he held his ground and made it clear to advisors that this was a bridge he would never cross.
A DNC chair should be expected both to embody the values of the party, but also to be able to reach out to moderates - who the party depends upon. Dean, on the other hand, remarked
Of course he'll tell you that he does want to reach out. In the same speech he talked about running in all 50 states. Which leads me to conclude that if he's the one doing it, its OK by him; if others do it, they're selling out. Elsewhere he spoke of embracing voters who are anti-abortion. My issue with him isn't his own efforts to reach out to the middle or even parts of the right; it's that he has fostered this idiotic notion that faceless leaders of the party (he never names anyone) want to betray party principles.
That kind of rhetoric poisons the debate, but Dean has never had any problems with doing that sort of thing. His self-righteous attacks on Kerry and Gephardt were answered in kind during the campaign, after which he replied that he was tired of being "the pin cushion." You only get what you give. Dean ended his campaign in a self-righteous tailspin, calling Kerry a "Republican." Classy.
Dean has some good ideas and some very bad ones - its his follow-through that's appalling. His past record makes me doubt that he'll be able to act on the former, as does his remarkable capacity for saying stupid things. His conceptualization of outreach in late 2003 was to remark that the Democrats should be reaching out to people flying Confederate flags - a remarkably dumb way to characterize prospective voters. Others in the running for DNC chair have a better chance of acting constructively on these ideas: running a 50 state party without engaging in the rhetoric of self-righteousness. We've seen Dean run and it's time for someone else.
I have to confess my general lack of enthusiasm for Howard Dean as head of the DNC. I frankly don't see why people are enthusiastic about having him there, unless, of course they are former Dean supporters. The record of Dean's candidacy gives one no ground for confidence that he'd manage the party efficiently. While he showed real success in raising funds, he showed real incompetence in managing them - effectively burning through his warchest by the end of the New Hampshire primary. His campaign's innovative use of the internet had a lot more to do with his choice of campaign manager than anything Dean himself did - it was quickly and successfully mimicked by Kerry, who had stellar success in fundraising after winning the nomination.
When he lost, Dean and his supporters chose to think that they'd been the victims of a diabolical conspiracy by the party elite, which allegedly was frightened out of its wits by the upstart Vermonter. This after he had hired a Washington lobbyist to replace Joe Trippi, after he had gained Al Gore's endorsement, and the votes of a majority of Democratic "super-delegates" (by definition a super-delegate represents the party elite). The leadership of the Democratic party is weak and carries little sway with the base; had it been otherwise, Dean never would have got anywhere. Embracing this victimization narrative enabled Dean to avoid asking hard questions about what mistakes he had made while frontrunner.
Dean is currently talking about running Democrats everywhere - going for offices in the red states. That makes perfect sense. Of course, we should remember that, after his own reverses in Iowa and New Hampshire he forswore campaigning in the South and set his hopes on the distant Wisconsin primary. Elsewhere in his much noted December speech at GWU, Dean said:
- Let me tell you something: there's only one thing Republican power brokers want more than for us to lurch to the left -- and that's for us to lurch to the right.
What they fear most is that we may really begin fighting for what we believe -- the fiscally responsible, socially progressive values for which Democrats have always stood and fought.
May really begin . . . you'd think he missed the presidential election we just had. Kerry had ample opportunity to cave on an issue like gay marriage - actually he was urged to do so by some - but he held his ground and made it clear to advisors that this was a bridge he would never cross.
A DNC chair should be expected both to embody the values of the party, but also to be able to reach out to moderates - who the party depends upon. Dean, on the other hand, remarked
- Here in Washington, it seems that after every losing election, there's a consensus reached among decision-makers in the Democratic Party is that the way to win is to be more like Republicans.
Of course he'll tell you that he does want to reach out. In the same speech he talked about running in all 50 states. Which leads me to conclude that if he's the one doing it, its OK by him; if others do it, they're selling out. Elsewhere he spoke of embracing voters who are anti-abortion. My issue with him isn't his own efforts to reach out to the middle or even parts of the right; it's that he has fostered this idiotic notion that faceless leaders of the party (he never names anyone) want to betray party principles.
That kind of rhetoric poisons the debate, but Dean has never had any problems with doing that sort of thing. His self-righteous attacks on Kerry and Gephardt were answered in kind during the campaign, after which he replied that he was tired of being "the pin cushion." You only get what you give. Dean ended his campaign in a self-righteous tailspin, calling Kerry a "Republican." Classy.
Dean has some good ideas and some very bad ones - its his follow-through that's appalling. His past record makes me doubt that he'll be able to act on the former, as does his remarkable capacity for saying stupid things. His conceptualization of outreach in late 2003 was to remark that the Democrats should be reaching out to people flying Confederate flags - a remarkably dumb way to characterize prospective voters. Others in the running for DNC chair have a better chance of acting constructively on these ideas: running a 50 state party without engaging in the rhetoric of self-righteousness. We've seen Dean run and it's time for someone else.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Newt Gingrich is thinking about a 2008 presidential run. Lovely.
