[posted by charles dodgson at 9:32 AM]:

So, if the new Iraqi government is sovereign and all, and American troops are there to provide security as and when the sovereign Iraqi government requires, why are American commanders negotiating directly with Muqtada's militias in Sadr city?

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[posted by charles dodgson at 9:27 AM]:

Lyndon Larouche has been called many things. Fanatic. Conspiracy Theorist. Fascist.

Well, he's once again got his folks out in Harvard Square, advertising him as a write-in Presidential candidate, and it looks like he's going through a new phase: Dadaist. Slogans on the posters include:

• If Americans understood Beethoven, would George Bush be President?
• No algebraic formula can prove the necessary existence of five Platonic Solids!
• Only classical singing can get Bush and Cheney the fugue out of the White House.

... and this rhetorical coup de grâce:

• If you can't double the cube, your degree is worthless.

Who could fail to be convinced?

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[posted by charles dodgson at 9:14 AM]:

There's a great deal of controversy over Kerry's testimony before the senate thirty-odd years ago, as head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The key passage seems to be this description of the results of a meeting in Detroit called the Winter Soldier Investigation:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

There are two different ways I've seen to smear this statement. The most common is to paint it as simply the wild-eyed recitation of baseless charges that all soldiers were involved in this stuff. In fact, as Kerry's actual words make plain, he was referring to acts which the witnesses in Detroit said they personally committed.

There's a more sophisticated attack against the Winter Soldier Investigation, though, which is harder to counter than the common misquote. You can find it at the site that the "Swift Boat Veterans" against Kerry themselves refer you to for "detailed information about the anti-war activities of the VVAW and John Kerry", www.wintersoldier.com, which has among its "key points",

Later investigators were unable to confirm any of the reported atrocities, and in fact discovered that a number of the witnesses had never been in Vietnam, had never been in combat, or were imposters who had assumed the identity of real veterans.

The question of confirmation of atrocities has got to be a vexed one, given that the officer corps is known to have tried to cover such things up, to preserve the appearance that "relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent". (Those are, in fact, the the exact words that the young Colin Powell used to brush off reports of the My Lai massacre, which he had been assigned to investigate). But the question of whether the witnesses actually were Vietnam veterans would be, one might hope, clearer cut. And indeed, there's a welter of stuff like this, which cites some debunking done by New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, at the time:

Veteran Chuck Onan, for example, claimed he had attended parachute, frogman, and jungle survival schools and had received special training in torture techniques ...

But ... contrary to his fanciful claims, Onan's military record said he had attended Aviation Mechanical Fundamental school in Memphis, not frogman, parachute, and jungle survival school. ... Onan deserted after receiving orders to go to Vietnam, where his lackluster record indicates that, even if he had gone, he would have been assigned to work as a mechanic or to a mundane administrative job.

Another "Winter Soldier" named Michael Schneider testified that he had shot three peasants in cold blood, had been told by a sadistic lieutenant to attach wires from a field telephone to a mans testicles, and was ordered by his battalion commander to kill prisoners. ...

Schneider's stories about his father were bogus, as were those about his own service: Schneider deserted from Europe, not Vietnam.

Convincing? Not quite. These guys did falsely claim to have served in Vietnam. But they didn't do it at the Winter Soldier Investigation. Search the full transcript of the sessions if you like -- I did. Their names are not there; nor are Terry Whitmore and Garry Gianninoto, two other people who are cited by www.wintersoldier.com as false witnesses, who in fact weren't Winter Soldier witnesses at all. According to the Winter Soldier organizers, they couldn't have been -- they explain here (via Arthur Silber) that every witness at Winter Soldier was required to present a DD214 -- the form issued to every soldier on leaving the service -- showing Vietnam service, and have that matched against other ID.

(The fraudulent four actually come not from Winter Soldier, despite the description of Schneider quoted above, but from a 1970 book by an activist connected to it, who had failed to check his sources' claims against military records. Sheehan's debunking was from a review of the book, not coverage of the Winter Soldier Investigation itself. In the year between the publication of the book and Winter Soldier itself, it seems the organizers had learned something).

If you're having trouble sorting out these competing claims, consider the White House attack dog that didn't bark. As we are all aware by now, the Nixon administration put serious effort into discrediting Kerry. Among other things, they recruited John O'Neill to try to discredit Kerry any way he could, and as we now know, it was important enough that Nixon personally met with O'Neill in the White House (though right about now, O'Neill himself probably wishes he could forget). And one of the extant memos about that effort, from Nixon's hatchet man Chuck Colson, promises that

The men that participated in the pseudo-atrocity hearings will be checked out to ascertain if they are genuine Viet Nam combat veterans.

If any of them hadn't checked out, you'd expect that Nixon would have been shouting it then from the White House roof -- and O'Neill now, in his current post with "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" wouldn't have much trouble at all producing the names.

There's one other historian that www.wintersoldier.com goes to for backup -- one Gunther Lewy, who actually backs up the claim that, in Lewy's words,

To prevent the Detroit hearing from being tainted by [false witnesses], all of the veterans testifying fully identified the units in which they had served and provided geographical descriptions of where the alleged atrocities had taken place.

but goes on to cite their failure to cooperate with subsequent official investigations, and to claim once again that an investigation by the Naval Intelligence Service showed that despite these precautions, "several" veterans gave

sworn statements ..., corroborated by witnesses, that they had in fact not attended the hearing in Detroit.

However, Lewy doesn't give a number or, again, cite any names (which keeps anyone from independently checking whether the Naval Investigative Service was just talking to the wrong Jim Smith). And as to noncooperation with official investigations -- if these folks thought any official investigation would be trying to discredit them with malice aforethought, Mr. Colson says they were right.

But does it even matter? Lewy goes on to state -- right in the excerpt from his book at www.wintersoldier.com -- that

Incidents similar to some of those described at the VVAW hearing undoubtedly did occur. We know that hamlets were destroyed, prisoners tortured, and corpses mutilated. Yet these incidents either (as in the destruction of hamlets) did not violate the law of war or took place in breach of existing regulations. In either case, they were not, as alleged, part of a "criminal policy.

(Which isn't enough for another "Vietnam Vets against Kerry" site, which quotes those words out of Lewy's book, and goes on to say that "those responsible were tired [sic] and punished". So no crimes were committed, and the soldiers were punished anyway! What more could you ask for?)

But even in his own bare text, Mr. Lewy does, I'm afraid, protest too much. In fact, as Neil Sheehan -- the same Neil Sheehan cited above -- reminds us,

The worst and most horrendous atrocity was officially sanctioned. The American command coldbloodedly set about to deprive the Communists of the recruits and other assistance the peasantry could provide by emptying the countryside. Peasant hamlets in Communist-dominated areas were deliberately and relentlessly bombed and shelled. Free Fire Zones - anything that moved, human or animal, could be killed - were redlined on military maps.

By 1968, civilian deaths, the great majority from air strikes and artillery, were estimated at about 40,000 a year and seriously wounded at 85,000. The wholesale killing cheapened the value of Vietnamese life in American eyes. It created an atmosphere that fostered the massacre at My Lai hamlet on March 16, 1968, when 347 Vietnamese old men, women, boys, girls and babies were butchered. That same morning another 90 unarmed Vietnamese were slaughtered at a nearby hamlet by a second army unit.

At this point, it's worth stepping back for a minute to see what we are really arguing about. No one denies that some atrocities took place in Vietnam. Even the www.wintersoldier.com "key points" acknowledge that, though they try to minimize the extent. So if your argument is that the experiences described in the Winter Soldier testimony are not representative of the conduct of the war, you could make that case directly. The Winter Soldier witnesses were, after all, a purely self-selected group -- so even granting all their claims, you could still argue that they saw isolated incidents from bad units, and the rest of the war wasn't like that. You'd have a hard time making that case to someone who knows about the free-fire zones -- but that's because of the free-fire zones, not because of anything that happened in Detroit. And you can make that case without calling anyone a liar.

That's not what Kerry's detractors are doing. What they're doing instead is using what, so far, looks like very flimsy evidence to attack the honor of the veterans who went to Detroit to testify to the horrors of their experience of the war. Which strikes me as a strange way to defend the honor of American vets.

By the way, since it seems to matter to participants in this debate, I might as well say here that I'm not a veteran. But it's worth noting that there are veterans on both sides in this fracas -- David Hackworth was another veteran active against the war, who doesn't seem repentant about that now, and I haven't noticed anyone lately calling him a bad soldier. And while veterans -- particularly combat vets -- have earned the respect of the rest of America with their sacrifice, they haven't earned the right to silence their critics.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 8:25 AM]:

And here I was thinking that it would take divine intervention to stave off a disaster in Najaf. All it took was the intervention of a divine:

Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made a dramatic return to Najaf on Thursday and swiftly won agreement from a rebel cleric and the government to end three weeks of fighting between his militia and U.S.-Iraqi forces. ...

The five-point plan calls for Najaf and Kufa to be declared weapons-free cities, for all foreign forces to withdraw from Najaf, for police to be in charge of security, for the government to compensate those harmed by the fighting, and for a census to be taken to prepare for elections expected in the country by January.

Still, conspicuously absent from, at least, this reported summary is the disarmament of Muqtada al-Sadr's militias outside of Najaf -- elsewhere in the Shiite south, for instance, or in the Baghdad slums of Sadr City. If it comes out looking like al-Sadr got what he wanted (withdrawal of U.S. forces), won reparations, and gets to fight on elsewhere... well, that's the kind of truce that looks like a defeat. At any rate, according to this AFP dispatch (via Mark Kleiman), that's how it looks to Iraqis on the ground:

Akir Hassan, 63, woke up at 6:00 am (0200 GMT) to heed a call by his spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to leave his village south of Kut to converge on the revered mausoleum.

Tears ran down his wrinkled face and his feet barely touched the ground as the elated crowd squeezed through the gates and into the shrine`s courtyard.

He and the others were greeted like heroes by the 300 besieged Sadr militiamen inside.

"God is great. This is democracy, this is the new Iraq, this is the greatest defeat we could have inflicted on the Americans. It`s the most beautiful day in my life," he shouted, hurrying inside the main mausoleum to pray.

Which almost certainly does us less damage than the centuries of hatred we would have earned with a "victorious" attack on the Shrine of Ali, but it's still not good.

See Juan Cole, as ever, for comment from someone who actually knows what he's talking about. He has the big losers in this affair as us (looking more brutal and clueless than ever) and Allawi (who comes out looking like our errand boy); he has it as a wash for Muqtada (hmmm... yes, he does have to disarm within Najaf, but he gets no credit from potential recruits for appearing to have fought us off?), and a big win for Sistani.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 8:43 AM]:

Shorter James Schlesinger: failures all the way up the chain of command contributed to the criminal mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- but if Donald Rumsfeld has to resign over that, then the terrorists have won.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 8:41 AM]:

On the right wing of the blogsphere, the "consistently thought-provking and insightful" Dean Esmay inquires of his esteemed readers:

So here's a question for my white (and other) readers: Have you ever noticed how annoying black people can be?

I mean, seriously. Just admit it: sometimes black folks, they get on your nerves. You want to be all "color doesn't matter" and you want to be all "that nasty crap is in the past" and so on and so forth. You also want to sit there saying, "well I don't discriminate!" and "I don't care about color!" and all that. But come on, you big fat liars. Tell the truth.

Black people: don't they annoy you sometimes?

It looks like it took some mild encouragement for his commenters to treat this query with a proper earnestness:

* Update * My God. Have you ever noticed what total wussies most white people are? I asked this question two hours ago and all I get is "hahahaha you're so funny Dean!" and "are you sure you want to ask this?" responses.

* Update 2 * My wife just walked in on me and said, "Are you sure you want to ask this question? Are you crazy?" To which my answer is: YES! Come on, you fishbelly-white, narrow-nosed, thin-lipped jerkoffs. What are you afraid of? What, will God smite you for speaking your mind? Do you really think race relations can get better in America if you don't honestly say what you think?

Oh, all right. I'll 'fess up. Clarence Thomas annoys the hell out of me.

via Prometheus 6.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 9:08 AM]:

Dubya's security initiatives continue to protect Americans from threats from all quarters. Like, for instance, the threat that the text of standing Supreme Court rulings might lead them to distrust the government:

In one of the cases [brought by the ACLU], the government also censored more than a dozen seemingly innocuous passages from court filings on national security grounds, only to be overruled by the judge, according to ACLU documents.

Among the phrases originally redacted by the government was a quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

In fact, some of the material that they have submitted to the court is so sensitive, that even the plaintiffs in the case must be protected from it.

And their protection goes further:

Justice officials also excised language describing one of the plaintiffs: "provides clients with email accounts" and "provides clients with the ability to access the Internet." The identity of the company in question remains secret to the public.

Lest anyone conclude, wrongly, that if their ISP isn't the one that's suing, then their mail isn't being read by the spooks.

via... lost the pointer. Drattit. I hate when that happens.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:16 AM]:

The wingnuts want you to know that the evil done by John Kerry's antiwar activism cannot be overestimated:

It is John Kerry and his ilk who are the baby killers; they have the blood on their hands of the millions massacred by the Khmer Rouge.

An interesting claim. Particularly when you consider that without destablization of Cambodia that came from America's secret missions into that country, Nixon's notorious Christmas bombing, the CIA-sponsored coup by Lon Nol, and the intervention of his government on the South Vietnamese (losing) side, the Khmer Rouge would probably not have come to power. (And the other domino that fell, Laos, was likewise rife with CIA activity which probably did as much to attract trouble as to ward it off).

But Americans have a history of confusion on this particular issue. Even after the Vietnamese had kicked the Khmer Rouge back out of Cambodia, the United States under both Carter and Reagan insisted that the genocidal freaks keep Cambodia's seat in the UN.

But Republicans are clear on some other things... like, for instance, their insistence that there is no visible connection between the "Swift Boat Veterans" who are putting attack ads on the air, and Dubya's presidential campaign. And, indeed, they have a point. When "Swift Boat Veterans" sugar daddy Bob Perry was announced as cohost of a Bush fundraiser, his spokesman quickly denied everything, and if you show up, I'm sure you won't see him there. Likewise, when a member of the campaign's "veterans steering committee" turned up in the ad itself, his name instantly vanished from the official campaign web page -- again, leaving no visible connection. Well, not unless you looked in a google cache. So, to reiterate, there is no visible connection between the Swift vote vets and any official Republican party organization. Well, not on the national level, anyway. No visible connection at all.

Note: I've corrected this post; see comments...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:25 PM]:

A couple of weeks ago, discussing the fighting in Najaf, I wrote

Of course, if there is damage to the shrines, no matter who pulled the trigger, we will be blamed. And of course, our enemies are very well aware of that...

As I write, the New York Times reports:

By early Tuesday morning the shrine was shrouded in smoke from a large fire on the northern edge of the Old City.

The attack did not appear to have damaged the dome of the mosque. But an attack on Sunday night punched a deep hole in the west wall of the shrine and scattered shrapnel and twisted pieces of metal across the area.

Now, some people say that Muqtada al-Sadr's forces desecrated the shrine first, by turning it into an armed camp. They say that Muslims everywhere should be pleased we're chasing Sadr's guys out. These people are idiots. As Prof. Cole explains, the Muslim world at large sees this as, at best, a pitched battle between Muslim thugs and Christian thugs -- and when they see that kind of fight, they'll back the Muslims every time.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:18 PM]:

Ah, how economic theory clouds the minds of men. In the wake of Hurricane Charlie, Mark Kleiman explores a mystery:

Why is "price gouging" the name of a problem?

Florida authorities report a wave of price gouging in the wake of Hurricane Charley, and promise to enforce Florida's anti-gouging laws.

Some of this is fairly straightfoward enforcement against bait-and-switch and false advertising, and raises no conceptual problems.

But from the viewpoint of orthodox economic analysis it's hard to explain exactly why it's wrong, in the wake of a disaster, for someone who has a limited amount of ice or gasoline or tarpaper to sell, and a large number of customers for it, to charge whatever the market will bear.

The textbook analysis has a lot to be said for it: not only does the higher price encourage people to use as little as they can of the temporarily scarce good and encourage potential suppiers to spend what they need to spend in order to rush new supplies to the market, the prospect of higher prices encourages stockpiling in advance of potential disasters by merchants and consumers alike. (Since no one can cause a hurricane, there's no reason to fear perverse incentives.)

But the textbook analysis ignores something that people on the ground find it impossible to ignore: the market, operating freely in this kind of atmosphere, allocates scarce goods not by need, but rather by ability pay. The two generally have nothing to do with each other.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:00 AM]:

Like a lot of folks, I'm used to thinking of the economic disaster in Iraq as being the result of the security mess. So it's interesting to read in Naomi Klein's article in the September Harper's (not on line), how much unemployment there has to do with simple mismanagement:

"The looters were good-hearted", one of [a factory's] painters told me, explaining that they left the tools and machines behind, "so we could work again." Because the machines are still there, many factory managers in Iraq say that it would take little for them to return to full production. They need emergency generators to cope with daily blackouts, and they need capital for parts and raw materials. If that happened, it would have tremendous implications for Iraq's stalled reconstruction, because it would mean that many of the key materials needed to rebuild -- cement and steel, bricks and furniture -- could be produced inside the country.

But it hasn't happened. Immediately after the nominal end of the war, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq, followed by an additional $18.4 billion in October. Yet as of July, 2004, Iraq's state-owned factories had been pointedly excluded from the reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to Western companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction imported at great expense from abroad.

In fact, to a considerable extent, it's the economic disaster that's fueling the security mess:

With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency.

In this context, it's a particular insult that the ubiquitous concrete blast walls separating "coalition" personnel from the populace at large are imported, while Iraq's own cement factories lie idle. And there's more:

It turns out that many of the businessmen who are threatened by Bremer's investment laws have decided to make investments of their own -- in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

At this point, American readers may be asking, "Say what? Businessesmen imposed to investment laws?" Well, yeah. Bremer came in with a notion of privatization as the way to do things, and proceeded to try to privatize -- a plan which ran into a slight snag when too many potential foreign buyers of state-owned firms noticed that under international law, an occupying power was forbidden to sell them. But that idea, and foreign competition generally, was still seen as a significant threat by anyone associated with the businesses that were to be sold -- including, I presume, their private suppliers.

In the meantime, Bremer obviously failed to sell the policy to the Iraqi population at large. (Klein quotes workers in one factory as saying that they will blow it up rather than see it under foreign ownership). And he tried to proceed anyway. Which tells you something about his notion of promoting democracy. Bremer believed that his policy was the right thing to do. But rather than promote it to the people at large, and wait for some kind of consensus, he just went ahead and did it -- the will of the people be damned. And we're stuck with the result.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 9:56 AM]:

So, one of the noises coming out of Dubya's campaign these days (them themselves, not surrogates) is that Kerry's campaign is "coming unhinged" and that Kerry himself looks "wild-eyed". Which is kind of interesting, considering that their guy is the one who reacted to questions about the indictment of Ken Lay by refusing to answer and storming off the dais. But Republicans feel they need to exercise care in drawing only the proper conclusions from the facts in evidence. Witness, for instance, the studied reluctance of David Adensik to go from "the SBVT say these things" and "these things contradict records and their own prior statements" to "the SBVT are lying their asses off." Because that would be an improper conclusion.

Concerning proper conclusions, they have a somewhat lower standard of proof. The latest "Swift Boat Veterans" ad, for instance, tries to paint Kerry's testimony about American atrocities in Vietnam as dishonorable (and right-wingers, of course, gleefully throwing around words like "treason"). Why? Because he said the war was a mistake? Because -- says the Swift Boat ad -- the Viet Cong supposedly read Kerry's testimony to POWs to demoralize them? As opposed to, say, the far more graphic, and undeniably correct, testimony at the trial of Lieutenant Calley, which had already occured; Kerry can't have "given" the Viet Cong anything they didn't have anyway. But hey, maybe the prosecutors who had the effrontery to put Calley on trial for the rape and murder of a few hundred gooks, slicing up defenseless old men with bayonets and machine gunning the occasional baby, were treasonous too. Heaven forfend our enemies get valuable talking points.

In a democracy, when things are going badly wrong, the way they are supposed to get fixed is by people talking about them, in plain English -- and it is never "treason" to suggest the government might have goofed. If Kerry's critics think telling the godawful truth to Congress is dishonorable, then their idea of honor is very different from mine. And I don't think I need to know much more about it than that.

But if you do, Jeanne D'arc has an excellent piece up which considers Kerry's testimony, and some veterans' reaction to it, both in its own right and as a harbinger of unfortunate current events...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:53 AM]:

An index of where we are in civil liberties in America: I was listening to a talk show on the radio yesterday which featured, among others, the executive director of the ACLU, a former Justice Department attorney, Nathan Sales, and Sarah Bardwell, an intern with those notorious terrorists, the American Friends Service Committee, who had had FBI agents snooping around her house for hours. In the interviews, it became clear that they were trying to investigate possible terrorist activity at the RNC -- but these folks had no plans to be there.

Sales tried to defend this by saying that hey, the FBI has to follow up all credible tips. But this was a tip about future violent activities in New York by someone who wasn't even going there. When asked how this could pass the laugh test, he said

I'm not sure that the tip is false... We don't know if the tip was "Sarah and her friends were planning on committing criminal activity", which is obviously not the case -- especially since they weren't even planning on being at the convention -- or on the other hand whether the tip was that Sarah and her friends may know about criminal activity that other people who are planning on going to the convention may be planning to commit...

And he said this after hearing from Bardwell herself that the FBI spent less time talking to them than taking down license place numbers and physical descriptions of bicycles and the like -- all of which had absolutely no relevance once it became clear that they weren't going.

But hey, the laugh test may be a discarded relic of pre-9/11 days. Witness Michael Froomkin's summary of the case of Abdullah al Kidd, a U.S. citizen who had his life utterly destroyed -- marriage broken, foreign study fellowship lost, left unemployable -- by a sixteen-month material witness detention because, the government argued, they needed his testimony to demonstrate that someone else had overstayed his visa. Again, that wouldn't pass the laugh test -- which obviously hadn't been applied by the judge who signed off on this. But hey, he was never put on trial himself, so no due process rights can have been violated. Neat, huh?

But you can understand the government's concern. There are terrorists everywhere. Even in the Senate -- Teddy Kennedy recently found himself on the terrorist suspect "no fly list", and it took three weeks and multiple phone calls straight to Tom Ridge to get him off.

Just remember -- a terrorist is anyone they don't like. And all terrorists are immediate, deadly threats. Then it all makes sense...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:38 AM]:

The usual argument from advocates of our private healthcare system is that private actors in the economy have an incentive to contain costs. The interesting question is, which private actors. It's not obvious that patients do -- even the most hard-core theorist would have trouble naming the exact figure beyond which his daughter's life would not be worth the next marginal dollar. And it's not obvious that the health-care industry itself does -- everybody else's costs are their profits.

But the way our health care system has evolved, the real customers of the health care industry aren't so much the patients as the businesses that pay their insurance premiums. And we can say that they do have a direct, immediate, bottom-line incentive to reduce the amount of healthcare premiums they pay. Which it seems they're now doing, in the most direct and immediate way possible -- by not hiring people.

Thus do market incentives improve the economy.

And for more on market incentives, see a recent kerfuffle among multiple blogs about whether they can replace housing regulations, on which the most sensible statement I've seen yet is here, from Atrios...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:17 AM]:

An exercise in reading the news: yesterday, just after I posted a blog entry which said that our current options in Najaf are "a truce that will be taken as a defeat, or an utterly Pyrrhic victory"). And then marveled as the mediating delegation from the Iraqi National Congress was widely reported, in Western media, to have found a third option, in which Muqtada would disband his militia and abandon the shrines.

Well, I don't mind seeing good news from Iraq. Really, I don't. I'd have been thrilled. But I've learned over the past few months that what with the fog of war, you have to wait a bit before reacting to any news from that part of the world. At least long enough, that is, for Juan Cole to scan the Arab media for those little details that Western reports may miss:

Although Muqtada agreed Wednesday to disarm his militia and leave the shrine if US troops would withdraw from the city first, few expect this siege to end well or easily. The [American] wire services do not appear to have caught on that Muqtada is demanding the withdrawal of US troops as a necessary precondition, but that is what is being reported by al-Jazeerah.

This is, at best, a truce that would be taken as a defeat.

Meanwhile, the latest headlines at Western news sites, as I write, are back to the threats from Allawi's interior ministry of military strikes within hours.

Cole actually spends most of that blog entry reporting on what Muqtada wants, which seems to be a deep mystery to the Western press even though he's explained it repeatedly... and goes on in the blog entry afterwards to report a few details of the Iraqi National Congress meeting which may not get a whole lot of attention from the Western press.

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[posted by charles dodgson at 12:24 PM]:

I'm rushed today, so a few links:

• Ben Stein proposes a new way of arranging for government activities to be funded by rich citizens: sell titles of nobility. Sure, we'd need to change the constitution, which would be difficult and problematic. But the alternative -- taxing them -- is clearly just unthinkable.
• Juan Cole reports developments in the case of outed al-Qaeda mole Naeem Noor Khan; briefly, the U.S. and Pakistani governments are now blaming each other for the leak, and it's not clear who's lying. He also notes reports that the current fighting in Najaf (where our present options are a truce that will be taken as a defeat, or an utterly Pyrrhic victory) was initiated by Marines on their own, without talking to anyone in Washington.
• And Digby (via Jeanne D'arc) let's us know how Americans these days respect the human rights of Iraqis: the soldiers who committed the Abu Ghraib abuses (many of whom had no business being near prisoners at all -- Lynndie England was a file clerk) are being celebrated by their friends and neighbors at home, while Joseph Darby, who reported their abuses, and his family are languishing in protective custody, having heard a few too many casual death threats.

A Norweigian righty blogger recently posted an entry (via Belle at Crooked Timber) suggesting that calls for the complete elimination of the Muslim faith might be just a little bit extreme. He got pilloried in comments. And why not? That stuff doesn't look all that much less sensible than the rest of the news...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 8:54 AM]:

It can be valuable to seek out alternate perspectives on the news. Many right-wing bloggers cite the Belmont Club as a source for analysis of the situation in Iraq, and "Wretchard" who posts there certainly does have a perspective I would not expect to see elsewhere. Here, for example, he explains why the cadres of the Mahdi army are willing to defy what might seem to be long odds taking up arms against the U.S. Marines -- it seems they're getting news about the U.S. armed forces from Newsweek magazine, which has badly deceived them into believing that the Marines are pushovers.

I await with interest his analysis of the motives of the thousands of people who are flocking to the Shrine of Ali to oppose the U.S. Marines with no weapons at all, intending to act as human shields...

(Human shields news via Juan Cole).

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:38 AM]:

The restaurant chain formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken is now calling itself KFC. Due to trends in healthy eating, they rather badly want people not to see the word hiding behind that "F". [Update: or maybe the one behind the "K" -- see below.] For similar reasons, I was interested to observe recently in Harvard Square, posters for pro-revolutionary speeches by Bob Avakian now praise him as the leader, not of any organization named by full English words, but of the "RCP".

I guess they're not above picking up a few marketing tricks from the capitalists...

Update: As noted by a couple of commenters, Snopes has a page describing this as a myth -- but one with a very peculiar origin: it was orignally spread by the company itself:

Back to our story: In 1991, Kentucky Fried chicken announced that it was officially changing its name to "KFC" (as well as updating its packaging and logo with a more modern, sleeker look). The public relations reason given for the name change was that health-conscious consumers associated the word "fried" with "unhealthy" and "high cholesterol," causing some of them to completely shun the wide variety of "healthy" menu items being introduced at Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. The new title and image were designed to lure back customers to a restaurant now offering foods branded as "better for you," we were told.

It sounded good, but the real reason behind the shift to KFC had nothing to do with healthy food or finicky consumers...

... but rather, that the Commonwealth of Kentucky, being very nearly broke, was using legal gimmickry to extort cash from businesses using "Kentucky" in their trade names. So, according to Snopes, rather than embarass the bureaucrats who were contriving to extort cash from them, KFC management instead concocted a remarkable scheme which involved calling their own food unhealthy to conceal the very existence of the dispute.

Maybe so -- there were other name changes associated with the extortion racket. But there were also a lot of complaints at the time about fried food, which Snopes itself cites as the reason for the change on a different page, more recently updated, which doesn't even mention the licensing story. I report, you decide.

Fortunately, the case of Mr. Avakian's group presents no such ambiguity -- the words "Revolutionary" and "Party" were both on the poster, so it's kind of obvious what they'd just rather not tell you about the RCP...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 10:19 AM]:

The news from Iraq has always been a muddle, but the problems are getting more obvious -- as Juan Cole notes, every reporter at the Iraqi National Congress seems to describe a different meeting, with the New York Times and the Washington Post disagreeing most of all.

As you can imagine, the closer the story gets to the fighting in Najaf, the greater the confusion. AFP, for instance reports in a single dispatch that the National Congress will be sending in a delegation to mediate between sides in Najaf, and that Allawi's interior ministry is promising a quick and decisive assault. The Times' man in Baghdad reports meanwhile that

American commanders spoke of tightening the cordon they threw around the Old City last week, but of leaving any attempt to move into the immediate vicinity of the shrine to the Iraqi forces that Prime Minister Allawi said Saturday would now carry the brunt of the Najaf fighting.

By using Iraqi troops, Dr. Allawi and the American officials who are his partners in Baghdad hope to avoid the eruption of fury among Iraq's majority Shiites - and across the wider Shiite world, particularly in Iran - if American troops were seen to have damaged or desecrated the mosque, which is revered as the burial place of Imam Ali, Shiism's founding saint.

Which may not work so well if you believe this Knight-Ridder report (via Kevin Drum) that entire battalions of Iraqi troops, ordered into Najaf, are simply refusing to fire on their fellow Iraqis. (Nor is it clear, to me at least, that Allawi and his American bosses partners are right to believe that Iraqi troops would be less provocative -- if they're perceived as tools of the Americans, then the whole thing still comes off as an American operation, and Allawi and his troops will have merely tarnished themselves by the association).

And the situation immediately around the flashpoint Shrine of Ali, the holiest site to Shiites save only Mecca itself, is particularly muddled, with a late report from the Times which (as I write) relays claims from a Sadrist spokesman that the shrine's outer walls have been damaged. But CNN was earlier reporting that "Twenty-five heavily armed foreigners holed up inside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf have rigged it with explosives and are threatening to blow up the building if attacked"... a claim reflexively dismissed by Cole, who is apparently sick nigh unto death of American attempts to attribute every single problem in Iraq to unspecified foreigners.

Don't expect things to clear up anytime soon. Allawi's government is attempting to get all the reporters out of Najaf. Government spokesmen say that's just friendly advice, but the London Times' man on the scene says he was evicted at gunpoint. (via Crooked Timber).

But, if we can't be sure of the details of the fighting, that just creates a situation where anyone so inclined can legitimately believe the worst. And we can know what senior Shiite clerics are telling their followers about it. And even our former allies there have nothing good to say about it. Distinguished cleric and former IGC president(!) Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum tells al-Jazeera

"The Americans have turned the holy city into a ghost town. They are now seen as full of hatred against Najaf and the Shia. Nothing I know of will change this," the former president of the now defunct council said on Friday.

"I do not understand why America craves crisis. A peaceful solution to the confrontation with Muqtada could have been reached. We were hoping that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi would lead the way, but he sided with oppression."

From outside Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah (from Najaf, now residing in Beirut) is on al-Jazeera calling for Iraqis to use "all available means" to evict the Americans. And from Qom, Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri has reportedly issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from fighting other Muslims on behalf of Allawi's government. Al-Haeri, as you might guess from his current abode, is an ideological ally of the Iranian theocrats -- and yet Juan Cole worries that with all these developments (including mass demonstrations in Iraq and elsewhere -- read his blog for details)

It is not impossible that, given this level of disaffection, al-Haeri will pick up support from Sistani. (Shiite religious authority is in some ways a continual popularity contest, and the laity can switch their allegiance over time.) Al-Haeri is close ideologically to the Khomeinists in Iran and highly anti-American.

When we started this little adventure, Tom Friedman was promoting it as a way to propagandize for Western-style democracy, by installing one and showing how beautifully it works. We have now reached a point that ongoing armed operations are directly supplying propaganda to the most determined opponents of Western-style democracy in the region.

In short, a policy of hard-line assault has left us in the hole. Is it just nuts to suggest that we ought to stop digging?

Tom Friedman has -- he's off the Times op-ed page. Writing a book. With nothing, nothing at all, to do with Iraq...

And speaking of what we can and can't know, and what does and does not matter, Jeanne D'arc offers some very useful perspective on corruption in the Iraqi oil-for-food program, the available evidence appertaining thereunto, and the rightwing blogsphere's disquisitions thereupon...

Update: Just heard an NPR report of American tanks 500 yards from the shrine. Oy.

Yet more: Prof. Cole did a chat on the Washington Post web site, which, among other things, explains some of his more cryptic comments on the blog. It turns out, for example, that the Arab press reported the mining of the shrine of Ali days before CNN -- and without the "foreign fighters"...

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[posted by charles dodgson at 9:10 AM]:

New news today on the remarkable global reach of international terrorism. The FDA has announced the real reason why they want to ban import of drugs from Canada: terrorists might taint the drug supply. And in the New York Times, Bob Herbert notes that Ashcroft has personally intervened to keep a Haitian refugee in detention from being freed on bond, to foil al-Qaeda's dastardly plan to smuggle agents into the United States by teaching them Haitian Creole, and putting them on unseaworthy boats to brave a cordon from the Coast Guard.

So we see the reach of global terrorism: terrorists have managed to involve themselves in everything that Dubya's crew dislikes. Oh, the bastards.

The terrorists, I mean.

(drugs link via Kevin Drum).

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