Recommended: Math Lessons for Locavores

Its amazing how gullible we all are. We the general public have been taken time and time again by plausible-sounding but fallacious arguments, usually completely unsupported by any credible evidence. Remember the popular advice to drink 8 glasses of water a day (the invention of a Senate staffer, it turns out)?

Stephen Budiansky has written about this in today's New York Times Op Ed page, with a piece about the current fad to "save the environment" by eating only locally-grown foods. His piece Math Lessons for Locavores points out that despite the hype, transportation costs account for only a very small part of the total energy cost of growing and preparing food. And fertilizes and agricultural chemicals account for an even smaller portion. The real energy hogs in the system, it turns out, are our own home preparation and storage energy uses (driving to the store, refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, ovens).

Recommended: U.S. deficit forecast masks true scope of problem

Reuters Online today has an interesting short piece entitled
U.S. deficit forecast masks true scope of problem. It makes the point yet again (with numbers) that Congress and the administration are doing their best to cover up and keep from the public a very serious fiscal problem, by playing the same accounting games the government has been playing for decades, under both Republicans and Democrats.

The future liabilities for Social Security and especially for Medicare are truly staggering -- $107 TRILLION as of 2009. That is about seven times the size of the U.S. economy and 10 times the size of the outstanding national debt. The nation's finances are already in worse shape than Greece's finances, and we are only insulated from a Greek-style crisis by the fact that the world is still willing to loan us money at low interest by buying our Treasury bonds. That cannot continue indefinitely, and when they stop buying our bonds, or begin to demand a much higher interest rate, we will be in "deep kimshe" (translation: a world of hurt) very quickly.

I can't help but be annoyed that the Washington political elite that got us into this mess (both parties, this is not a Republican vs Democrat thing) are absolutely insulated from the effects of their bad decisions. There is absolutely no accountability for members of Congress, all of whom have their own generous pensions and health plans unaffected by the chaos their poor decisions have created for the rest of us. I can't help but be annoyed, for example, that House Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank (D. Mass) is still pontificating about how Bush created the fiscal crisis, when it was he himself who blocked the Bush administration's attempts to regulate Fanny Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddi Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), the institutions that set off the whole crisis by massively buying subprime mortgages (as they were instructed to do by Congress, especially Rep. Barney Frank).

To Bomb or Not to Bomb......

The Atlantic Monthly September 2010 issue has a lead article by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled "Israel is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran: How, Why - and What It Means." This article has sparked a vigorous debate in Washington and in the blogosphere. A good summary of recent comments and reactions can be found here.

I am impressed at the confidence with which some writers dismiss the Israeli worry about Iran's nuclear capability. We are all, of course, biased by our own experiences, and those who dismiss Israel's worries as overblown are clearly not people who ever lived through a holocaust, or under the constant threat of Hamas rockets and Hezbollah suicide bombers. I'm sure there were those in the late 1930's who thought worries about Hitler's ambitions were overblown.

I suspect that American writers and politicians, sitting safely in their comfortable offices here in America, are poorly equipped to understand either an Israeli fear of another holocaust or yet another major assault by their Arab neighbors, or the apocalyptic visions of the mullahs and their thugs in power in Tehran. We might not view a nuclear Iran as a serious threat, but their nearby neighbors certainly will so long as Iran is led by religious fanatics.

Recommended: How to Win the Clash of Civilizations

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written an interesting Op Ed in today's Wall Street Journal: How to Win the Clash of Civilizations. She argues that those who predicted a post-Cold War world in which every nation gravitated toward a liberal, Westernized democracy (Fukuyama's "The End of History") are wrong. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" is proving to be a more accurate prediction, in which nations coalesce into groupings around shared religious and cultural backgrounds, and then struggle with other groupings for power and influence. I find her arguments persuasive, and certainly recent history supports this view. More than that, world history supports this view. World history has been an almost unremitting struggle of competing civilizations and religions and ideas for dominance, and although some progressives would like to believe we have outgrown that phase, there is absolutely no evidence for that view.

I like her lead sentence: "The key advantage of Huntington's famous model is that it describes the world as it is—not as we wish it to be."

President Obama's Problem

Things don't look very good for the Democratic majority in the upcoming mid-term elections. Left-wing columnists try their best to find a positive spin on events, and there certainly are a constant swirl of side issues to excite the press, such as the current debate over President Obama's comments about the proposed New York mosque. But in the end, one issue and one issue only is going to dominate the election results, and that issue is the economy.

Unemployment is high, and shows no signs of easing anytime soon, and certainly not before the election. Economic growth is slowing, falling well below the administration's predictions earlier in the year. The projected federal deficit, already astronomically high, is growing steadily as a result of the lower than expected tax revenues.

Democrats will try their best to blame this on the previous administration, but by now Democrats own these problems in the public mind, so the blame-Bush argument doesn't resonate very much anymore.

Other issues will have a peripheral effect -- public discontent with the health care bill, anger at the outsized Wall Street bonuses for the very people who set off the financial crisis, worry about the massive spending spree of this Democratic Congress, worry about the huge federal debt, discontent over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- but in the end it will be the state of the economy that decides the overall election results, and the economy isn't likely to be any better in the next few months.

The Republicans may or may not take control of one or both houses of Congress, but they will certainly make enough gains to halt any further left-wing programs, and perhaps even enough to allow them to deny funding for things they don't agree with, like the health care bill.

The interesting question is whether President Obama will react to loss of control of Congress by moving to the center, as did President Clinton, in order to at least get some bills passed. That would, of course, infuriate his far-left supporters, but might begin to pick up some bipartison support. Or will he remain ideologically committed to more liberal programs that simply can't get the votes anymore in Congress? It poses an interesting problem for the president.

The Problem of a Nuclear Iran

There is no doubt that the nuclear threat posed by Iran is a difficult problem. Once Iran has a working nuclear weapon, the already-impossible Middle East becomes several orders of magnitude more difficult, and the range of policy and military options open to ourselves and our allies is sharply reduced. There are no good options open to us now, but once Iran has a nuclear weapon, there are only very bad options left.

Consider. If we do nothing, Iran gets a working nuclear capability in perhaps 1-3 more years. Once Iran has a nuclear capability, probably many of our smaller Middle Eastern allies will find it safer to side with Iran than ourselves, and our support will rapidly erode, while Iran’s influence, already greatly increased by our own Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures, will blossom. Now Iran, together with its proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, will dominate the oil-rich Middle East and be in a position to control a major part of the world’s oil supply.

One could, of course, hope that new sanctions will finally work, but there is little evidence either that the current sanctions have made any significant difference, nor that world governments can agree on new sanctions that will have any more teeth than the current ones, nor be observed any better than the current ones.

Suppose our inaction finally drives Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear sites out of desperation – after all, Iran’s publically-stated and oft-repeated policy is to annihilate Israel, and I can hardly see the Jewish state allowing a second holocaust if they can prevent it. One might think we are well out of it, but of course we aren’t. No one in the Middle East will believe we didn’t help the Israelis, so we (including our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan) will suffer retribution along with Israel.

More than that, a strike on Iran will no doubt unleash a blitz of rocket attacks on Israel, followed of necessity by a massive retaliation by Israel, and we will soon have a third full-blown Middle Eastern war on our hands. And of course Iran can bring the world’s oil supply to a halt in hours by simply mining the Strait of Hormuz.

Nor is there any realistic prospect that we can stay out of the conflict once it starts. Could any American president or political party survive if it allowed Israel to be destroyed by its neighbors? Could any administration survive if it refused to help a democratic ally, and a Jewish one at that, prevent a second holocaust? Could any American government allow the nation’s oil supply to be cut off without a military response? I think not.

About the only workable option we have at the moment is to credibly threaten our own military action against Iran if they don’t desist in the nuclear development in ways (meaning intrusive inspections) that assure everyone they have really quite the business. The Iranian leadership isn’t dumb. They want to stay in power. Faced with complete destruction or staying in power with all the wealth and perks it seems to be bringing them, they will probably (though with much bluster) back down.

The key word is “credibly”. If they don’t really believe us, the threat is meaningless. Unfortunately, our political class doesn’t seem to be capable of issuing credible military threats. So their timidity in the face of a really serious threat will probably eventually lead us into just the nightmare military confrontation they are trying to avoid.

This is another case where having the capability to deploy massive military power can actually prevent a war, but only if the opposition thinks our government is really willing to use force if it must.

Recommended: The Future of the Armed Forces

The American Interest, Sept-Oct 2010, has a good collection of articles on The Future of the The Armed Forces, one article on each of the service branches. Well worth reading. There are three major dynamics at work here - the effect of the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the shift in mission to counterinsurgency, and the budget problems. These articles help one to understand these dynamics.

Recommended: The trouble with Tel Aviv....

Daniel Drezner has a provocative new post on his blog Foreign Policy . It is entitled The trouble with Tel Aviv.... Israel's demographics pose as serious a long-term problem for the nation as does its geography. And both of these drive its politics, not always in productive ways.

The New York Mosque Issue

As most people know by now, an Islamic group wants to establish an Islamic Center in a building quite near the site of the 9/11 World trade Center attack. This has naturally upset a lot of the 9/11 victim’s families. It does certainly seem to reflect a certain insensitivity on the part of the Islamic community, a sort of “in your face” attitude. And in today’s overheated politics it has of course become a major political issue. But the real question is not CAN it be forbidden, but rather, SHOULD it be forbidden?

On one side opponents observe, correctly, that should Christians want to establish a church in the shadow of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, Muslims would be outraged, and would no doubt see to it that it didn’t happen. Indeed, non-Muslims aren’t even allowed to visit Mecca.

On the other side, proponents argue, correctly, that one of the major things that distinguishes America from, for example, most Middle Eastern states, is the principle of individual freedom, including religious freedom. It may be insensitive of the Muslims to choose a spot so near the World Trade Center site, but it is nevertheless their right in America.

I’m inclined to agree with the latter group. As a practical matter, an Islamic Center near the World Trade Center side is no real danger to anyone. Indeed, Muslims were among the 9/11 victims.

There is some question about whether the Mulim group involved is moderate or not. Feisal Abdul Rauf is the imam behind the proposal, and he authored a book entitled (in the US) What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America. That sounds moderate enough, until one finds that the book was originally entitled A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11 when it was published in Malaysia. (Dawa means proselytism).

The American version of the book, with the less confrontational title, was published with the support of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Both ISNA and IIIT have been involved in the promotion of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, which is pledged by charter to the destruction of Israel. In fact, both ISNA and IIIT were cited by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in a crucial terrorism-financing case involving the channeling of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas through an outfit called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. Such support doesn’t prove that Feisal Abdul Rauf condones terrorism, but it does make one wonder.

Still, I think President Obama was correct when he observed that in America, religious freedom allows religious groups to build wherever they like, provided they meet the zoning requirements. He may pay dearly for that in the next election, but I think he is right. Becoming as oppressive as the regimes and religions we don’t agree with doesn’t help our cause.

Recommended: The Right Defense Cuts

Ralph Peters is a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and author both of fiction and of serious military non-fiction, including Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (1999)and Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World (2000), both excellent books. His recent New York Post article The right defense cuts is right to the point.

C. Northcote Parkinson, author of the famous "Parkinson Laws", noted in one of his books that at one point the British Navy had more Admirals than ships, the result of bureaucratic creep. Gates, one of the few level-headed people in Washington in either party, has observed much the same about today's military, and intends to try to do something about it.

The question is, will Congressional delegations and influential defense contractors manage to defeat his attempt to bring sanity to the militarily budget.

Recommended: Cheering Immaturity

Thomas Sowell writes good common sense in all his articles and books. His article today on RealClearPolitics Cheering Immaturity is an example. I worked at one time at Educational Testing Service, and saw close up the common complaints that "SAT tests are unfair". Of course, the tests aren't unfair - they predict with a high degree of accuracy who will do well in college and who won't. The college curriculum may or may not be "unfair" in what they emphasize and what they ignore, but the tests certainly aren't the source of that "unfairness".

Similarly, some cultures put more stock in hard work and education than others. There is nothing "unfair" about the fact that cultures who emphasize hard work and education tend to do a lot better in the real world than those who don't. Just as there is nothing "unfair" about the fact that the gazelles who run faster tend to get eaten by lions a lot less frequently. That's reality!

Obsolete weapons

In The Future of War: Power, Technology & American World Dominance in the 21st Century, by George and Meredith Friedman (see book list on sidebar, 1996), the authors trace the lifecycle of new weapons, from their first appearance on the battlefield when they are a game-changer, to their eventual obsolescence when it costs far more to defend them than they are worth. Airplanes, tanks and aircraft carriers have all been through this cycle. 100 million dollar fighter planes can now be destroyed by a cheap shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile like the US Stinger or the Russian Strela-3 missiles. 50 ton tanks can easily be put out of action by cheap shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles, as the Israelis learned to their cost in the recent war in Lebanon.

In the case of a aircraft carrier, today’s aircraft carrier carries about the same combat power that a World War II carrier carried, in terms of deliverable bomb load, but now requires a full fleet of dozens of escort ships and submarines to protect it. We currently have 11 “battle groups”, as a carrier and its accompanying escort ships are called, and while extraordinarily expensive to build and run, they have proved useful in recent years supporting air power against minor opponents.

But they are no longer of any real use against serious opponents like China or Russia. Against serious opponents, one might as well just paint a bull-eye on the carrier, and so we probably ought to begin to think of a new way to project US sea power around the world.

The French Exocet anti-ship missile that caused such havoc among the British ships in the Falkland War with Argentina has been followed by a variety of improved designs, such as the Chinese Silkworm missile. And US ships have struggled to build effective defenses against such threats, including the AEGIS combat system with its SPY-1 air-defense radar, and the Phalanx Close-in Ship Defense Guns, which spew a stream of radar-guided depleted-uranium slugs into the path of an oncoming missile.

But now there are two weapons in the world which probably finally make carriers obsolete. One is the new Chinese DongFeng 21D missile, which can reach out and strike a carrier 1500 or more miles from shore.

The other threat is the Russian-made VA-111 Shkval hypersonic torpedo (also being worked on by Iran), which rides within a vacuum bubble caused by hypersonic caviation at speeds reported to be in excess of 200 knots (220 mph), and could strike a carrier from 20 miles distance.

Both are in the final stages of development, and will no doubt be deployed within a few years, if they aren’t already in the field. Both cost many orders of magnitude less than the aircraft carriers they can destroy.

The question is, how soon will the US Navy rethink its approach. Historically military forces have been slow to recognize and adapt to significant changes like this. No doubt the US is working on similar weapons, and may even be ahead of the Russians and Chinese in their development, but in any case they certainly make the expensive carrier group, whether US or foreign, obsolete against serious opponents.

Recommended: How to Lower Unemployment

William Galston in The New Republic has an interesting proposal in his article How To Lower Unemployment.

We certainly need to invest in updating our infrastructure in this nation - our roads, bridges, water systems, electric grid, railroads, etc, etc. Most are in poor shape after years of neglect and underfunding. I agree with his approach - put money into infrastructure, covering the cost partly with user fees and partly with public investment. That will prepare the nation to remain competitive in future years, while giving people badly-needed jobs right now.

The problem is, as he points out, that this process has to be divorced from politics. One can't trust Congress on this, because they will simply allocate funding on the basis of politics, not on the basis of a rational assessment of priorities. An empowered independent non-political body needs to make the calls. But will Congress ever give up that lucrative power to anyone else? I doubt it.

Still, it is an interesting and rational proposal.

About Tax Cuts

There is a strong debate in progress about whether to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire or whether to renew some or all of them. At the heart of this debate is the question of whether lower taxes stimulate the economy or not, an issue that divides even professional economists.

A few things are clear, however:

1. We have a frighteningly high Federal debt, and a truly monumental Federal deficit not only this year, but for the foreseeable future under current policy.

2. Taxes alone can’t close the deficit or pay off the Federal debt. It will take massive cuts (probably 30-40% or so) in Federal spending to make a dent in the problem.

3. While it may not be clear if tax cuts help the economy, it is pretty clear that tax increases don’t help it. Higher taxes mean higher costs for businesses, and hence a less competitive position in the market. Higher taxes mean less disposable income for individuals, and hence less purchases.

Nonetheless, cutting taxes at a time when we are running such a high deficit seems counterproductive, except for one more factor – what would Congress do with the extra revenues if we didn’t extend the Bush-era tax cuts? If they would use it to reduce the deficit or pay down the Federal debt, the tax increases would be sensible in the long run. But there is no evidence that Congress would do anything that sensible with the additional revenue. Historically, under both parties, Congress has never shown any sensible restraint in spending, and certainly the current Congress has shown no restrain at all.

What is needed are drastic cuts in the size of the Federal government, coupled with tax increases, coupled with some ironclad method of ensuring that Congress won’t just spend the additional tax revenues on popular new vote-getting programs.

But there seems to be no way to impose an ironclad agreement on Congress. Congress already has the PayGo rule (new program costs must be matched with new revenue sources), and they ignore it all the time. Congress already has a legal cap of the Federal debt, and they simply vote to increase it every few months. Congress already has a “lockbox” for Social Security funds, and they raid it anyway every year to pay for popular programs.

So the real debate ought not to be about tax cuts. The real debate ought to be about how to restrain a spendthrift Congress. If we can’t restrain Congressional spending, it hardly matters what we do about taxes.

Recommended: Why realists don't go for bombs and bullets

There is an excellent short post on Stephen M. Walt's blog Foreign Policy (Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international relations at Harvard University.), by David M. Edelstein (himself an associate professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University), entitled Why Realists Don't Go For Bombs and Bullets. And Walt has en equally excellent follow up in his posting Hawks, doves, and realists.

I agree with them, and with the realists in general. War is expensive, unpredictable, and usually produces unexpected and unpleasant side effects elsewhere in the international order. War is very occasionally really necessary, but only very, very occasionally.

That doesn't mean I am a dove. I think our nation ought to have a very strong military, and very strong alliances to make that military power even more formidable. As the Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus said thousands of years ago, Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war). Anybody who ever lived in a neighborhood with a bully knows that nothing prevents fights better than being seen to be a formidable adversary.

But the real point of having that formidable military is to deter opponents from forcing us to use it. That is exactly what happened during the Cold War. Our huge military strength prevented a war with the Soviet Union. Does anyone really think Stalin would not have tried to conquer Western Europe if he thought he could get away with it? Does anyone doubt that World War II could have been prevented if Hitler had thought the allies were strong enough and determined enough to beat his armies? If we actually have to use our military force, we have probably failed somewhere in our foreign policy, because the threat of military action should have been enough to keep us from having to use it.

I also note in passing that, despite some common perceptions, it is not the military who favor using military force, it is the non-military politicians. The military knows all too well the costs, the difficulties, the losses and the uncertainties of wars. It is the politicians who send young people (but not their own children) to war and spend huge amounts of money (but not their own money) on military adventures. They have done it before in history (in fact, world history is a repeated chronicle of ambitious leaders squandering their people's lives and wealth on wars), and our own leaders in Washington are doing it now in Iraq and Afghanistan.