Confirm Chuck Hagel

Presidents, regardless of who the president is at any given time, can and should be afforded broad latitude in who he chooses to sit in his Cabinet. Cabinet officers are different from Supreme Court nominations in that the president sets policy and the Cabinet leaves with the president, neither of which is true of the High Court. Unless there's something in a nominee's history that is indisputably disqualifying, the president should have whomever he wants.

Again, you don't have to like the nominee or be happy about the nomination, but elections, as they say, have consequences. Congress should not be dictating executive policy - especially war policy - to a duly elected president, which I remember any number of Republicans telling me about a decade ago.

That's particularly true of a nominee who comes from the Senate. Sitting and former senators are afforded extraordinary deference during confirmation hearings. The only former senator denied confirmation that I'm aware of was John Tower, who the first President Bush had nominated to be Secretary of Defence. Tower had a drinking problem, which reasonable people can see as a disqualification for someone in the military chain of command.

It would be unprecedented for Republican senators to vote against the confirmation of President Obama's nominee for Defense, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

If you're a modern Republican, you see Hagel as a contrarian pain in the ass, especially if you're of the neoconservative foreign policy school. Senator Hagel was an early opponent of the Iraq War (although he voted for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force in October 2002), he's for cutting the Pentagon's budget, and he has interesting views on America's relationship with Israel.

All three of these things are not only perfectly defensible, they're admirable.

LIke Hagel, I initially supported the Iraq War. This was mostly because Saddam was going to have to be taken out sooner or later, and better to do it when he was weak than after the sanctions disintegrated and he strengthened his military capability. But I thought that the Bush Administration was lying about all of that democracy nonsense. I also assumed that enough force would be deployed to secure the peace after the war. Had I had known otherwise, I would have opposed the war.

Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than any other country. It was thrown together against the will of the ethnically diverse population and held together by tyrannical force. Just as happened in Yugoslavia, when Iraq's people were given a measure of freedom, they immediately began slaughtering one another.

Traditionally, when the United States overthrows a foreign government, they install a military junta that governs the country to the satisfaction of the White House. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule, such as Germany and Japan, but there aren't many, and none in countries as confounding as Iraq.

Instead, Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority called for elections, disbanded Iraq's police and military, and implemented a flat tax before there was even the most basic security in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. In attempting to turn an unnatural country into a laboratory for the Heritage Foundation's ideas, Bush created the ideal conditions for the civil war that would soon engulf Iraq, cost 4,500 American lives and create upwards of 4 million refugees. Moreover, it turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign jihad insurgents who are now set to overrun neighbouring Syria.

The single biggest reason that the Democrats have the upper hand on the issue of national security (which they haven't enjoyed since at least the Kennedy Administration) is the GOP's reflexive and wrongheaded support of George W. Bush's disaster in Mesopotamia. Had Republicans not had such a herd mentality over the war, they wouldn't have all gone over the cliff together. Hagel was almost alone among Republicans for calling it exactly as he saw it early on.

As I've said repeatedly in this space, because military budgets are wholly dependent on a given nation's foreign policy, they are the very definition of discretionary spending. A country that will soon be unable to pay its own bills has no business "remaking the world in its image."

For all of the talk about Hagel's ideas being "out of the mainstream," it is the Republican Party itself that has moved out of the mainstream. In the last dozen years, the GOP has shunned the foreign policy conservatism of Eisenhower and Reagan, to say nothing of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines, and adopted an almost evangelical Wilsonian foreign policy. The Republican answer to any foreign challenge seems to be "bomb first and ask questions later." And we've seen how well that worked in Iraq.

An interventionist American foreign policy was excusable during the Cold War, when the economies of the former great powers were shattered by the Second World War. That is no longer true. There is no threatening global hegemon that requires an American military presence in each of the world's time zones. Even at the height of their power, al-Qaeda did not pose the threat that the Soviet Union did, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not to be taken seriously.

Republicans, as enamoured as they are with "the Founder's intent," should be the first people to recognize this. The Founders didn't agree on much, but they were in universal agreement on what President Washington later called "foreign entanglements." The Constitution gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" (note the plural) specifically because the Founders unanimously opposed a permanent standing army and repeatedly warned against the establishment of one.

The idea that entitlement spending can be slashed while defense is increased as a proportion of GDP is ridiculous and politically suicidal. That supposedly conservative politicians make assertions to the contrary is further evidence of how delusional they've become.

To avoid a wholesale meltdown of the U.S economy, deep and immediate cuts are going to have to be made, but the Pentagon cannot be spared. This is obviously going to require a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy and what constitutes a "vital national interest."

For most of America's history, its vital national interests were limited to Mexico, Canada and keeping sea lanes open for international trade. The Middle East only became a factor during the Second World War, and only because denying Nazi Germany the region's oil was a military necessity. Afterward, the Soviet threat to the region necessitated U.S engagement. However, the blowback of American support for despotic Arab and Persian regimes was the jihadi threat the United States faces today.

Then there's Israel, which seems to be the epicentre of Republican opposition to Senator Hagel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the U.S foreign policy establishment understood that American support for Israel had to be balanced against its interests in the Arab world.

There is a difference between a moral interest and a strategic interest. Support for Israel couldn't be more of a moral interest, which very few sane people would dispute. However, there are 100 million Arabs, who have oil and would very much like nuclear weapons. There are another 80 million Persians of whom the same thing could be said. That is the the definition of a strategic interest.

As a supporter of the Jewish state, I question the the morality of  backing Israel regardless of the wisdom of its policies and how damaging they might be to U.S interests in the Arab world.

First, it's ahistorical. The presidents that took the hardest line on Israel were Eisenhower, Reagan and the first Bush. All of them, to one degree or another, threatened the continuing relationship to protect America's Arab interests and none of them were labelled as anti-Semites, as Chuck Hagel recently has.

For all the rhetoric regarding the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, Obama hasn't threatened the diplomatic abandonment of Jerusalem (which Eisenhower did over Suez,) describe their military actions as a "Holocaust" (which Reagan did regarding Lebanon,) or cut off loan guarantees (which Bush 41 did when Israel expanded settlements.) Obama has been more tolerant of Israel's conduct than any Republican president except Nixon and the second Bush.

Second, unquestioning American support for Israel; military, diplomatic and financial is only significant if there's a reasonable chance that that support will always be there, and that can hardly be guaranteed at this point. We're are not long from the day when serious people will begin to question whether the United States can afford to provide $3 billion in foreign aid every year. Without that aid, Israelis will be forced to choose between their defense and their economy because they won't be able to afford both.

Washington has to persuade Jerusalem that it is in its long term interest to make a deal with both the Palestinians and the hold-out nations of the Middle East, if only because they can't and won't be subsidized forever. Europe is less accommodating of Israeli intractability every day, and the Chinese and Russians are fully allied with the Arabs and Iranians. Who does that leave in Israel's corner?

It's hard to imagine many Americans tolerating cuts to their Medicare and Social Security benefits while their government provides billion in military aid to an ally that thinks that it doesn't have to make a serious bargain with its neighbours. I believe that's more than the domestic political traffic will bear once America's economic decline becomes a recognizable reality.

Israel can make a tolerable deal now, or a considerably worse one later, when they've been financially and diplomatically abandoned. It is deeply immoral for a nation rapidly facing bankruptcy to provide assurances to the contrary to Israel.

Senator Hagel's views on a possible conflict with Iran are not unlike my own. Military will not destroy the Iranian program, only delay it and paradoxically prove to Tehran that it's necessary. Even if the current theorcacy were replaced tomorrow, Iran's security situation would still be such that it would feel it needed a nuclear deterrent because any country in Iran's position would feel that way.

Given the geography and demographic facts, war with Iran would be much more challenging than the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan are by several degrees of magnitude. The American people might support armed action in theory, but the reality is almost certainly going to be quite different. Sending troops in there when public support will evaporate almost immediately isn't just unfair to the military, it's immoral.

Bob Woodward wrote an interesting article about Hagel in yesterday's Washington Post;

This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is an option, but very much a last resort.

So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.

The bottom line: The United States must get out of these massive land wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, if possible, avoid future large-scale war.

Although much discussion of the Hagel nomination has centered on his attitudes about Iran, Israel and the defense budget, Hagel’s broader agreement with Obama on overall philosophy is probably more consequential.

Hagel has also said he believes it is important that a defense secretary should not dictate foreign policy and that policy should be made in the White House.

He privately voiced reservations about Obama’s decision in late 2009 to add 51,000 troops to Afghanistan. “The president has not had commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was president,” Hagel said privately in 2011.

The Republican party line on Hagel is that "his views are out of the mainstream." But if there's one thing that's proven indisputably true over the last fifteen years, it's that the "mainstream" isn't just wrong, it's increasingly dangerous and unaffordable.

How well has "the mainstream" served American strategic interests in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both countries are almost certainly going to worse than the United States found them a decade ago, and the potential for both destabilizing their neighbours in unpredictable ways is enormous. "Mainstream thinking," particularly in the GOP, is precisely what put America where it is today: broke and militarily broken.

Hagel describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican. President Eisenhower also stood outside of the mainstream and in direct conflict with the military he commanded and the prevailing political attitudes of both his party and the country. Ike understood that the greatest threat America faced was the unintended consequences of poorly considered action.

Had Eisenhower remained in office, it's impossible to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring because the series of events that led to it never would have been set in motion. It's entirely possible that the Soviets would have reacted militarily to the British, French and Israeli hostilities in the Suez Canal if Eisenhower hadn't stopped it first.

If the United States is to survive as anything resembling the country we recognize today, it had better start adopting views "outside the mainstream" immediately.

For that reason, the Senate should confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

Don't bomb Iran, Part One: Some recent history

I figured that this was going to be a nice easy essay to write, based entirely on current events.

Sadly, I know how the blogosphere works, and I know that you can't do that. When you have opinions like mine, particularly when you're of the political bent that I am, you need to explain where you're coming from. Not that it often does very much good.

So this has to be a mutli-part article, much longer than even my ordinary posts, and far longer than anything else you'll read on the blogosphere. As much as I'd like to write RedState or The DailyKos - because it would be so easy to preach to the converted every day - I wouldn't have any fun doing it. Also, political parties won't send me their talking points because I'm a dick.

Instead, I want you to understand what I think the problems are, as opposed to what party-line bloggers and media think you should believe.

You have every right to disagree with me and to say so in the comments. I have a pretty good history of not deleting anything, except in the most extreme circumstances. Frankly, I want to debate with you. Otherwise, I'm talking to myself, which I can do without all of the typing. Did I mention that I'm a two-finger typist and that this is a lot more work than it looks like?

There comes a time in the life of every rational country when it asks itself how many pointless, unwinnable wars it can fight without destroying itself. Those countries that don't ask themselves that question have tended to find themselves a part of history, rather than the present or the future.

By almost any measure, the war in Iraq has failed. It has taken some time to come to that conclusion, if only because there were so many publicly presented (and often contradictory) pretexts for that war (which, I should also note for my newer readers, I vehemently defended for it's first two to three years.)

Iraq is an unnatural country, comprised of people that deeply hate one another, that was imposed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles. It always followed that if you introduced democracy there, the people would follow their democratic impulse to murder one another. This, by the way, is exactly what happened in the former Yugoslavia a decade prior.

The "surge" stopped that for a time, but all of the bad actors knew that the surge would someday come to an end. When the surge was proposed as a policy option, it was posed as a means of allowing a political reconciliation between the various factions that was foolish to expect. Two years of  a (comparatively) increased troop presence cannot be expected to overcome a thousand years of history. And the only people who didn't know that were the Americans. The British, as experienced as they are in the region, got the hell out as soon as the surge was announced.

Weapons of Mass Destruction was also a false argument. Saddam Hussein was evil and given to massive strategic miscalculation, but he was far from suicidal. If he was, he would have used WMD - or passed them on to terrorists - in the first Gulf War, when there was absolutely no doubt that he possessed them, and there was a very real chance that the Coalition would march on Baghdad. A regime is ordinarily only willing to commit suicide when it knows that it's going to die anyway.

For that reason, the United States couldn't have been luckier that Iraq's WMD program didn't actually exist. After all, the military build-up in Kuwait took six months, during which time Saddam could have easily transferred weapons, had they existed. If, as was initially thought by the United States and United Kingdom, the WMD was so easily hidden from the invading troops, it could have just as easily been given away to even more malign forces. And perhaps it was. We may not know that for years to come, if only because that's an assertion that can't be proven or disproved at this point.

I supported the war for the very reason that it was illegal, because it was preventative. The Bush administration painted it as a preemptive action, which was nonsense. Preemption legally requires an imminent threat, and there was no plausible case for an imminent threat to the U.S directly from Iraq unless the U.S attempted to overthrow the Iraqi regime.

History, however, is a complicated thing. Saddam had a long history of waking up one morning and saying "Hey, let's invade Iran! What could happen?", or "Hey, let's annex Kuwait! What could go wrong?"

But by 2002, the sanctions regime was evaporating rapidly, and there was no indication that Saddam had learned his lesson. There was every indication that once the international arms boutique had once again been open to him, his adventurism would resume, necessarily requiring the West to intervene and eventually remove him once and for all. I thought it was the better part of wisdom to do that when he was weak, rather when he was strong. But I never pretended that it was any different than Pearl Harbor or Hitler's invasion of the U.S.S.R, both of which operated on the same premise.

I also figured that the aftermath of the war would be in line with traditional U.S foreign policy in the banana republics in its sphere of influence, which is to say that they would talk a lot about democracy,and then install a military junta that would mind its own business and repress the Iraqi people just enough to keep the country together. Always remember, it was only the fall of communism that permitted the horrors of Bosnia and Kosovo.

If foreign powers are going to oppressively create an unnatural nation, an oppressive native state is going to be required to keep it together, particularly if you believe that the human spirit yearns to be free. Had I have known that the Bush administration was actually serious about democracy in Iraq, I never would have supported the war and probably marched in the streets against it. You cannot have "whole, democratic and free" Iraq, when granting it's people the inherent right to national self-determination when all they want is to be free of one another.

President Bush doomed Iraq to at least two decades of anarchy, until the country finally decides to split apart, the way that Yugoslavia did. But Yugoslavia didn't have oil or Israel in the eqation, which complicates matters greatly.

It was argued at the time that a democratic Iraq would stabilize the international oil market and be friendly to Israel.

Well, do the international oil markets seem more or less stable than they were in 2003? And Iraq had its first democratic elections seven years ago, yet the government still doesn't recognize the right of Israel to exist. Moreover, it still refuses to call Hamas or Hezbollah terrorists.

Are the same voices that promised a wave of peace and freedom rolling through the Middle East recognizing the Arab Spring as that?

Of course they aren't. Some of them refuse to do so simply because it happened too late into the term of a Democratic president to credit it as a victory. But some are recognizing the fact these "democratic revolutions" don't nicely align with American foreign policy objectives, so they therefore aren't democratic at all. It never occurred to the Bush and Obama administrations that these people could democratically decide to despise Israel and the United States.

I believe that those attitudes will change, but it will take years, if not decades, of  work on the part of both the United States and Israel to accomplish it. This won't be as easy as placating a tyrant with money, jet fighters and the training of the training of their monstrous secret police, as was true during the Cold War. Nor will Israel be able to secretly negotiate with monsters and monarchies as they harangue each in public. A great deal of very public daylight over a long period of time is going to necessary.

Then there's Afghanistan, which even very conservative Republicans are starting to understand is never going to be the swarthier version of Connecticut that they imagined it would be.

In transitioning the goal of the war as removing Arab terrorists that are hostile to the West into a place where girls go to school, the Bush and Obama administrations exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of what Afghanistan actually is: a place where foreign intruders are eaten alive, so that they better settle their scores with one another. The Soviets tried to fundamentally tried to reorder Afghan society, too. Remember how well that worked?

Even if you assume that obliterating the Taliban should have been prime objective of the war, a counter-insurgency in a country of that size with the force that we had put in there couldn't have been done. This war was lost seven years ago when we didn't stop the Taliban resurgence in its tracks. How many more of our kids are we going feed into a meat grinder and still not meet any of our self-declared objectives?

In less than a decade, the West has put itself in two intractable wars in the Middle East that it cannot extract itself from without all of it's war aims falling around our ankles in shambles.  Does anyone need a third?

Prisoners of History & Freedom's March

Unlike most observers and bloggers, I've spent the last several years afraid of widespread "democracy" protests in the Middle East. Because so many people are so ignorant of the history of the region, or just overly optimistic, they don't understand what the ramifications of what we're seeing today.

To be fair, President George Walker Bush didn't understand the ramifications of democracy, either. After the death of Yassir Arafat, Bush pushed for elections in the Palestinian Authority, over the objections of both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and PA President Mahmood Abbas, who feared that Hamas was poised to win large majorities. Bush prevailed and, predictably, Hamas won large majorities. The same thing happened in Lebanon after the Syrians evacuated, and Hezbollah won the balance of power.

Democracy, especially in the Middle East, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just look at Iraq, an artificial country with deep sectarian divides. Freedom unleashed those divides and they proceeded to kill as many or more innocent people as Saddam did. Let's assume that Iran became a true democracy tomorrow. There is absolutely no evidence that this would cause Tehran to end it's nuclear program or abandon its enmity toward Israel. Sure, there's a lot of wishful thinking to that effect, but no actual evidence.

The great Dr. Dawg, who I like and respect, wrote an eloquent, if slightly misleading article about the attitudes of people such as myself toward the recent protests in the Middle East.

I think it’s fair to observe that the commenter in question sums up rather well the conservative case against democracy.

The problem with democracy, of course, is that the people get to make choices, and not all of those choices are ones we would support ourselves. Indeed, they themselves might eventually regret the choices they made. The people, therefore, cannot be trusted—well, those people, anyway.

(...)

Hence the conflation of Iran with Egypt—those Muslim countries all look alike. The conservative viewpoint is clear: democracy is for smart white folks like us, not for swarthy crypto-jihadis waiting to burst forth and win elections and whatnot.

I was disappointed to see this rhetoric from Dawg, who is one of the more rational and thoughtful commentators on the left. While I'm sure that it does reflect some quarters of the right, I don't think it reflects a majority, or even a strong minority of conservative opinion. After all, the right couldn't have been more supportive of President Bush's "Democracy Agenda" and the 2009 Iranian protests. I disagreed strongly with it and I did so in public, but race, religion or ethnicity had nothing to do with that disagreement.

Democracy doesn't just flower overnight. Most Republicans who suggest that it does point to Japan after the Second World War, overlooking the fact that the Japanese were under military occupation for nearly a decade and that their democratic constitution was written for them by Douglas MacArthur.

The success or failure of a democratic experiment is almost wholly reliant on the historical circumstances under which it is carried. Egypt's recent history, like that of the entire Middle East, is ghastly and suggests that democracy can only produce more war, terrorism and hatred, not less.

After the war, the British adopted the monarchy as a figurehead government and trained and funded its secret police to destroy their enemies, among them, the then-moderate Muslim Brotherhood. After the 1952 revolution toppled the monarchy, the Soviets filled that role for Nasser. And then Sadat and Mubarak became the puppets of the Americans.

One thing that never changed was the foreign sponsorship of government terror and the regime's political enemies. Any organized, democratic opposition was jailed, tortured, murdered or exiled years ago, which was not only tolerated by the West, but funded by it as well. That leaves the dangerous radicals as the only organized alternative to the Mubarak regime.

The example of the Iranian Revolution is also instructive. The Revolution was actually a coalition between the Islamists and various Marxist groups. Within a year of the Shah's exile, the Mullahs simply had the democratic Marxists killed. Organization isn't just the most important thing in the aftermath of a revolution, it's the only thing.

Assuming that what's happening in Cairo and Alexandria is a democratic revolution, it almost certainly won't stay that way for very long. If, in fact, Mubarak's days are numbered, it is just as likely that the military will take over as it is that there will be "free and fair" elections, which democratic forces would almost certainly lose. That also assumes that elections would even occur.

Revolutions are an unpredictable business. In many ways, we - people who genuinely hope for stable and prosperous democracies in the Muslim world - are prisoners of our own history and our own past bad deeds. The same thing happened in Africa after decolonization. Free institutions were never built or smothered in their cribs and kleptocracies flourished for a half century, and that happened with our blessing. Kleptocrats like Mobuto, you see, better served our strategic interests than did the possibility of communism.

More important is the fact that radical groups have learned to become an attractive alternative to existing regimes. Hamas provided vital social services to the populace of Gaza that the Arafat government refused to. Hezbollah did the same thing in southern Lebanon, rebuilding Beirut after the 2008 war faster and more thoroughly than the United States has rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The worst possible scenario is a weak, ineffective democratic government that doesn't control the country. If that happens, Islamist elements will use the lack of internal security to attack Israel with impunity, knowing that Israel will respond against the Egyptian people. It is in no one's interest that we return to the bad old days before Camp David, when war was a regular feature of life in the region.

I'm sure that Dr. Dawg doesn't wish to see radical groups seize control of Egypt, nor do I think that he sees them as a truly democratic alternative. The only problem is that they are the only plausible alternative, at least they are right now. Dawg may well believe in a triumph of the human spirit, which heroically overcomes the high hurdles of history. I don't. I believe in what is likely in the immediate future, given the cards that history has dealt us.

Democracy might well flourish in Egypt and in the broader Middle East, but that will take years, if not decades. The Soviet Union did not immediately transition from Stalinism to democracy and it's unrealistic to think that it will happen in the Muslim world. That's not racist or anti-Islamic, it's just how history tends to work.

We could have embraced, nurtured and moderated democratic alternatives to the autocratic regimes of the Arab and Muslim world's during the Cold War. We didn't and we see the ramifications of that today. We're trapped with heinous and awful "allies" like the House of Saud because the alternatives are so much worse than we are.

We're all prisoners of history - you, me, Dawg, Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian people - we might not like that history and do our best to hide from it, but it always catches up with us.

The Most Dangerous Game

One of my main objections to continuing military operations in Afghanistan is that there has been little, if any, planning on how to prevent the war from spilling into Pakistan. That the fragile Zadari government has been able to largely quell domestic dissent over U.S drone attacks is perhaps the most surprising development of the last two years.

Unfortunately, that isn't going to last forever. While the drone attacks have killed a good number of al-Qaeda and Taliban figures, they have done little to wind up the fighting in Afghanistan. Indeed, it seems as though the enemy's command and control has moved closer to Pakistan's major cities as the aerial bombardment of the tribal areas intensified.

If, in fact, the enemy is being controlled from Pakistan, and drone attacks aren't as effective as they should be, there is little option but to eventually move ground forces into that country. At that point, all bets are off. There is no way that the Islamabad government can be seen supporting that and the chances of major urban upheaval that could result in the overthrow of the Zadari regime are high. Worse, the odds of a replacement government that would continued to be allied with the United States and NATO are low.

More importantly, a NATO excursion into Pakistan would require the consent of the NATO membership, which is unlikely at best. In all likelihood, the pressure to obtain a UN Security Council resolution would be almost impossible to avoid, and China would almost certainly veto it.

So it appears that the Obama administration is doing the next worst thing.

The United States has renewed pressure on Pakistan to expand the areas where CIA drones can operate inside the country, reflecting concern that the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is being undermined by insurgents' continued ability to take sanctuary across the border, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

The U.S. appeal has focused on the area surrounding the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban leadership is thought to be based. But the request also seeks to expand the boundaries for drone strikes in the tribal areas, which have been targeted in 101 attacks this year, the officials said.

Pakistan has rejected the request, officials said. Instead, the country has agreed to more modest measures, including an expanded CIA presence in Quetta, where the agency and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate have established teams seeking to locate and capture senior members of the Taliban.

Quetta is a city of nearly a million people, and Islamabad is reacting to the request about as well as Washington would if a country asked if it could bomb the suburbs of, say, St. Louis. That would fly in the face of Pakistani public opinion and very probably expand the war in unpredictable ways.

The disagreement over the scope of the drone program underscores broader tensions between the United States and Pakistan, wary allies that are increasingly pointing fingers at one another over the rising levels of insurgent violence on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Senior Pakistani officials expressed resentment over what they described as misplaced U.S. pressure to do more, saying the United States has not controlled the Afghan side of the border, is preoccupied by arbitrary military deadlines and has little regard for Pakistan's internal security problems.

"You expect us to open the skies for anything that you can fly," said a high-ranking Pakistani intelligence official, who described the Quetta request as an affront to Pakistani sovereignty. "In which country can you do that?"

This is also true. Because of the impossibly low NATO troop levels in Afghanistan, there is almost no control over the insurgent elements, particularly in the border region. The drone attacks also tend to kill a dozen civilians for every enemy leader they take out. Expanding the attacks to more urban areas will drive up the ratio of civilian-enemy kills, creating an impossible political situation for Zadari. That's even more true when the violence on the Afghan side of the border continues unabated.

Pakistani history makes this worrisome. The country has had eight military coups in it's sixty years. Unlike India, which was built around the concept of political parties, Pakistan centers on a strong military that brings order when democracy goes off the rails. Those coups don't tend to be unwelcome by the people, although they have been known to overstay their welcome.

A coup by jihadi-sympathizing elements of the military or ISI would also heighten tensions with India, whom both the Bush and Obama administrations have been reaching out to. That outreach to New Delhi hasn't gone unnoticed by Pakistan's government or it's increasingly critical media. Part of the reason that the ISI supports the Taliban in the first place is because it fears growing Indian influence in Afghanistan and the potential for encirclement when the next war comes. In publicly tilting toward India, the United States is doing nothing to quell that impression in Pakistan.

In interviews in Islamabad, senior Pakistani officials voiced a mix of appreciation and apprehension over the U.S. role in the region.

The high-ranking Pakistani intelligence official said the CIA-ISI relationship is stronger than at any times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that the two spy services carry out joint operations "almost on a daily basis."

"I wish [our] countries understood each other the way the CIA and ISI understand each other," the official said. But he also traced Pakistan's most acute problems, including an epidemic of militant violence, to two decisions by the government to collaborate with the United States.

Using the ISI to funnel CIA money and arms to mujaheddin fighters in the 1980s helped oust the Soviets from Afghanistan, the official said, but also made Pakistan a breeding ground for militant groups.

Similarly, Pakistan's cooperation since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been key to the capture of al-Qaeda operatives and the success of the drone campaign. But it has inflamed radical elements in the country and made Islamabad a target of terrorrist attacks.

"We'd not have been here if we had not supported the Afghan jihad, if we had not supported [the response to] 9/11," the official said, adding that it was "our fault. We should have stood up."

Remember, this isn't some "man on the street" interview, this is a senior intelligence official. Remember also that the Pakistani military and intelligence haven't been traditionally subservient to the civilian government. Rather, the civilian government has historically served at the pleasure of the military. That senior ISI people are speaking this openly to American reporters is a clear sign that Pakistan's cooperation might be coming to an end.

ISI has been playing both sides against the middle for years now. But it's becoming increasingly clear that they won't be able to do it much longer, not with the Americans wanting to bomb near major population centers.

There's a lot more at stake here than just the war in Afghanistan. A nuclear power in South Asia can go either way, which way it goes greatly impacts two other neighboring nuclear powers (China and India) and a potential third (Iran.) And Washington and NATO don't seem to have considered the many ways that things can go wrong, or planned for the possibility that they might.

What if You Had a Debt Commission and No One Listened to It?

It was perhaps the last good governing idea the GOP had. Throughout 2009 the Republicans in the Senate stomped their feet and demanded a statutory debt and fiscal responsibility commission of esteemed elder statesmen who would present their recommendations and Congress would vote on them without amendment. Of course, when Obama agreed to it, seven of the same Republican senators that demanded it, filibustered it.

If you wondered if there was a precise moment that I realized that the United States was doomed, that was it. It became clear at that moment that no one was truly serious about the issue and that the Americans would wait for the bond market to rectify the problem for them, like they did in Greece. As you may have noticed, Greeks didn't react well to it and neither will Americans. The only difference is that Greeks don't have many guns and Americans do.

I'll grant the Tea Party one thing: They talk a good game about debt. The only problem is that they don't know what they're talking about. While they have mastered the process of dethroning otherwise reliable Republicans, like Lisa Murkowski and Bob Bennett, they don't know the first friggin' thing about economics or history.

They believe that the national debt - which is more of an existential threat than the Soviet Union was, let alone terrorism - is simply a spending problem, and they're not even half right. The fact is that American taxes have been cut by nearly two-thirds since the Kennedy administration, while entitlements and foreign military commitments have expanded well beyond the government's ability to finance them. Cutting $50 billion in fucking earmarks or a few hundred million from National Public Radio isn't going to even begin to address the fundamental problems. Even conservative economists will tell you that the Tea Party's idea are retarded.

Anyhow, after the Senate Republicans exposed themselves as craven assholes, Obama created the debt commission by executive order and it began its work. This is problematic in that when its recommendations are submitted, Congress can amend it out of existence, which could actually make the problems worse.

The panel's co-chairs, Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson yesterday leaked their draft recommendations. And I have to say, they're brutal enough to actually be effective.

The plan calls for deep cuts in domestic and military spending, a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax, limiting or eliminating popular tax breaks in return for lower rates, and benefit cuts and an increased retirement age for Social Security.

Those changes and others, none of which would take effect before 2012 to avoid undermining the tepid economic recovery, would erase nearly $4 trillion from projected deficits through 2020, the proposal says, and stabilize the accumulated debt.

(...)

The plan has many elements with the potential to draw intense political fire. It lays out options for overhauling the tax code that include limiting or eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit. It envisions cutting Pentagon weapons programs and paring back almost all domestic programs.

The plan would reduce cost-of-living increases for all federal programs, including Social Security. It would reduce projected Social Security benefits to most retirees in later decades, though low-income people would get higher benefits. The retirement age for full benefits would be slowly raised to 69 from 67 by 2075, with a “hardship exemption” for people who physically cannot work past 62. And higher levels of income would be subject to payroll taxes.

A good way of judging the seriousness of a plan is who it upsets, and the Bowles-Simpson draft has all the right people (meaning everybody) bouncing off of the fucking walls. Everybody from Nancy Pelosi to Tea Party blogger-in-chief, Erik Erikson are furious, which means that the plan could actually work if implemented.

Social Security, in particular, needs to be reformed and revenue has to be raised. The best way of doing that is to reform the tax code. You actually can have lower overall rates if you eliminate the childish deductions that the middle class currently enjoys, such as mortgage deductability, which no other industrial country has. If it were up to me, charitable and political contributions would be gone, too. I've never been able to intellectually justify the government subsidizing your charitable and political decisions and the situation is now too dire to continue the stupid practice.

Most importantly, American foreign policy needs to be fundamentally rethought. A country only needs a military as big as its foreign policy dictates. And when you're spending more on your military on the next 27 countries (26 of whom are your allies), something is desperately wrong. Since 1989, the United States military has been constantly deployed in combat operations and the budget can't take it anymore.

You might have noticed that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world's map has gradually shifted back to what it was before World War I. It might be time for geopolitics to do the same, and for the great powers to resume the practice of "balance of powers" and "spheres of influence" that were established at the Congress of Vienna. American rhetoric about expanding freedom is fantastic but impracticable when the United States is financially ruined beyond repair.

That's what no one seems to get - America's problems are unique because it is in a unique position, one far more intractable than Greece's or Ireland's. First, no one can bail out an economy as large as America's. Second, no one would bail it out if it insists on maintaining large, unfunded entitlements and an assertive foreign policy that requires expensive wars of choice. Either the United States can reform itself or the United States will become Zimbabwe faster than anyone thinks.

I actually think that both political parties understand that. My longtime readers have probably noticed that I rarely actually blame politicians for anything other than coddling ignorant and selfish voters. Eventually the public has to get it. There's been a failure of economic leadership from Washington because that's exactly what the voters have demanded. No politician has said that you don't "pay" for your Social Security when you collect everything you've paid into the system in the first two years after retirement but you stubbornly insist on living for ten. Politicians have steadfastly refused to tell voters that elderly people are usually sick and take forever to die, so Medicare premiums need to go up significantly.

The public doesn't want to hear that, so nobody tells them. Instead, both parties masquerade as the "party of Medicare" or that they "hold Social Security as a sacred trust." Very few Americans are willing to challenge the fundamental premises of their own foreign policy, so much happier are they to hold parades for Jessica Lynch. No political leader s willing to say those things to public because the public would destroy them.

The rich and the poor aren't the problem. The rich largely take care of themselves and the poor generally die too young to cost all that much. The root of the problem is the middle class and the elderly, for whom those entitlements and tax deductions were designed. And they categorically refuse to accept responsibility for anything. It doesn't help that their government hasn't asked them to sacrifice a goddamn thing since World War II, but if they're financially literate enough to manage their households, they should be expected to know how to manage their country. And that applies to foreign policy, as well. The truism is that government should be run like a household, but I can't think of a single household that uses hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weaponry to forcibly install a new lifeguard in a private swimming pool twelve blocks away.

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson did something truly heroic yesterday. They actually told the truth about what this going to take. And if the last 24 hours demonstrates anything, it's that the public and the parties aren't willing to listen. They continue to insist that everyone can keep getting their goodies while refusing to pay for them. Somebody else can sacrifice. Or not.

It's tragic to see this happen to a great country and a magnificent people, but in the end, they're the architects of their own destruction.


Update: I highly recommend reading this (PDF) presentation, which should scare the tits off of you.

Key passage;

The debt burden accumulated over the next ten years will sink us. And a decision will get made... one of two ways. One way is to do it now, proactively, and thoughtfully. The second way is to wait until the Bond Market forces us to do it. We can ask Greece what that's like.

Thanks to Powerline.

Upperdate: Welcome to the merry folks at gamespot. com. I don't want to get all Sally Field about this, but you like me! You really, really like me! Did I just date myself?

Whereupon Things Start Getting Interesting

Idiots across America are celebrating the Republican party's triumph last night and I'll be the first to admit that it was impressive. The GOP managed to do better than I expected, even while nominating psychopaths like Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Carl Paladino. They won despite throwing away perfectly good seats that the Democrats had no business holding.

Well, the Tea Party is holding the keys now. If the biggest victory since 1948 isn't a mandate, I'm not sure what is. And you know what? I couldn't be more thrilled. Now the time for mindless and misleading rhetoric is past and we get to see how these assholes actually govern.

I think John Boehner knows what I'm talking about, although he's going to essentially going to be a handpuppet for lunatics like Michele Bachmann. He's looking down the barrel of an economic shotgun and the prospect of it has him so frightened and humiliated that he broke out in tears during his victory speech.

This is going to be great, friends. We get to see what these people are made of, and I'm sure that it will be exactly what I've saying for over a year: Nothing. You're not going to balance the budget by eliminating a piddling $50 billion in earmarks (a promise that the Republican leadership started walking away from six weeks ago.) Let's break out the popcorn and watch these lying scumbags try to manage the economy.

The first test is coming up fast. In the very near future, Congress is going to have to vote on raising the debt ceiling. If they vote nay, the government runs out of money and shuts down. If you want to throw a national mandate away, there's no faster way to do that than to stop the Social Security checks from going out. However, if they vote yea, their childish supporters in the Tea Party are going to flip the fuck out. The Republicans are trapped by their own rhetorical excess.

Speaker-designate Boehner said last weekend that one of the first things that he plans to do is to restore the half-trillion in Medicare "cuts" that ObamaCare will implement. Let's see how you explain yourself as fiscally responsible when you throw an extra $500 billion on top of the atrocity of the health care reforms because there's no way that they're going to repeal ObamaCare in anything other than the most symbolic ways.

Then there are the Bush tax cuts, an issue on which everyone has been playing politics and no one has been serious. If you look at the numbers, you quickly come to realize that America can't afford to extend any of them. The Democrats want to extend $3 trillion worth of them and the GOP wants to make the whole $3.7 trillion wad permanent. No one has even bothered to look for the trillions of dollars needed to pay for them over the next decade. No one.

The President's Deficit Commission reports next month, and I fully expect the Republicans to completely ignore its recommendations, which will be funny to watch. That's where we get to see what the Republicans are really all about. I expect that the Commission will call for brutal cuts in things like Medicare and defense and very probably call for a national Value Added Tax. If I know how the average Tea Partier thinks - and I do - they'll respond by demanding even more tax cuts. And no Republican is going to cross the Tea Party anymore.

Here's the only thing you need to know about Tea Partiers: they're children. They honestly believe that if they get everything they want, everything will be okay. All that demonstrates is an utter lack of understanding about the power of how mathematics works in the real world.

I've had Tea Partiers commenting here for over a year, telling me that the cuts will be significant. The only problem is that they haven't been able to point to a single promise that their candidates have made to that effect. Some might point to the Ryan Roadmap, but the GOP has had Paul Ryan in hiding for the last three months. Besides, the Ryan Roadmap only addresses Social Security and Medicare reform for folks collecting in twenty years and the problem is looming now.

Then there are their calls for a "constitutional restoration", which are even more hilarious than their economic plans.

You are never going to pass a constitutional amendment creating congressional term limits. But there's another way to do it and the GOP is uniquely positioned to pull it off. As of this morning, the Teapublicans control the governor's mansions and state houses in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alabama, Michigan and Wisconsin. You want term limits? All you have to do is redistrict in such a way as to make congressional districts competitive again. Does anyone think that they're going to do it?

If the Founding Fathers really wanted a Balanced Budget Amendment, I'm pretty sure that they would have included one in Article I of the Constitution. I'm as hardcore as you can get about deficits and I think that I've demonstrated that over and over again. And the Republicans have demonstrated over and over again that they aren't. The last Republican to balance a budget was Dwight Eisenhower and he needed a 91% top marginal tax rate to do it. You cannot be serious about balancing the budget while supporting discretionary wars and massive tax cuts.

As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that you can balance the budget at all as long as Social Security, Medicare and the Pentagon continue to exist as they currently do. The unfunded liabilities over the next four decades, combined with the almost malignant interest on the debt, makes that implausible. And there isn't a single Teapublican who has mentioned that. Not one.

And can we please forget about the line item veto? The Supreme Court has already struck it down once and there's little doubt that they'd do it again. The Constitution is pretty specific about who controls government spending, and it isn't the president.

The Tea Party wanted power and now they have it. Watching their rhetoric wither and die in the harsh light of reality is going to be one of the great joys of my life. I'm only sad that Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell aren't going to be in the Senate to watch it firsthand.

A Question of Seriousness

Just for giggles, compare this with this. Then we can discuss who the real fiscal conservatives are.

Republicans and Canadian Conservatives have been making all the right noises about fiscal conservatism for decades now. The only problem is that it has been just that, noise. The governments of George W. Bush and Stephen Harper both spent far more than their Democratic and Liberal predecessors and had less to show for it. That's not an opinion, it's fact, available for anyone who bothers to care about such things.

Even the previously helpless Liberals under Michael Ignatieff are making proposals to tame Canada's bewildering deficits that are far and away more serious than anything that has come from the Harper government. In just four short years, the Tories magically took the $13 billion surplus that they inherited from Paul Martin and turned it into a $55.6 billion deficit, the largest in Canadian history. Moreover, no one with any sense of how mathematics works is taking Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's deficit reduction strategy seriously, which is good because the plan is fundamentally silly.

The Republican-Tea Party is almost certain to win the House of Representatives in two weeks and make huge gains in the United States Senate, and their going to do it with nothing more than a cartoonish version of "conservative" policy proposals.

If there is a single message unifying Republican candidates this year, it is a call to grab hold of the federal checkbook, slam it closed and begin to slash spending. To bolster their case that action is needed, Republicans are citing major legislation over the four years that Democrats have controlled Congress, notably the financial system bailout, the economic stimulus and the new health care law.

But while polls show that the Republicans’ message is succeeding politically, Republican candidates and party leaders are offering few specifics about how they would tackle the nation’s $13.7 trillion debt, and budget analysts said the party was glossing over the difficulty of carrying out its ideas, especially when sharp spending cuts could impede an already weak economic recovery.

“On the actual campaign trail, you are hearing virtually none of the kind of blatant honesty that we need about what changes would fix this situation,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group in Washington that promotes fiscal restraint.

The parties share blame for the current fiscal situation, but federal budget statistics show that Republican policies over the last decade, and the cost of the two wars, added far more to the deficit than initiatives approved by the Democratic Congress since 2006, giving voters reason to be skeptical of campaign promises.

Not being specific is just smart politics because the GOP is lying in almost breathtaking ways. Because its constituency of old white folks feels even more entitled than the average American, the Teapubilcans have specifically exempted entitlement spending from any cuts. Representative Paul Ryan, whose "Roadmap" is serious - if politically unrealistic - about entitlements, hasn't been heard from in months. And because launching poorly planned and dreadfully executed wars is a central tenant of modern republicanism, serious cuts at the Pentagon are nothing more than a pipe dream.

The cuts that the GOP and Tea Party candidates are proposing - what they're actually saying, as opposed to what their mindless acolytes think that they're saying - aren't even enough to cover the $3.7 trillion cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for another decade, let alone reduce the deficit.

And no, the tax cuts aren't going to expand the economy enough to pay for the tax cuts. How do I know that? The fact that they didn't in their first ten years is a pretty good indication of what the second ten years will bring. Even if there was that much economic growth, it would be swallowed alive by steadily increasing federal deficits. The only real non-political competition between Democrats and Republicans seems to be which can bankrupt the country the fastest.

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana is the only elected official in America who has made serious proposals in deficit reduction and all that he's gotten for his trouble is scumbags like Grover Norquist comparing him to Nazi reenactors.

In my opinion, Norquist is easily the most dangerous man in America and the most destructive force in the Republican party. Before Norquist's unholy rise, the GOP was a somewhat principled party of fiscal conservatism. In the last 35 years, Norquist and his demented Americans for Tax Reform has made them addicted to deficits because that the only thing that continuous pressures for tax cuts has been known to produce. Grover Norquist is about as credible on the subject of macro economics as Hugo Chavez, if not less so.

If the Republican party was halfway serious about anything, they would throw Norquist and his twisted ideology off of the highest bridge they can find. Americans for Tax Reform would be as thoroughly repudiated as the John Birch Society was half a century ago.

Which brings me back to what's happening in London. The budget cuts and tax increases introduced yesterday by the Cameron government are truly staggering in their boldness. They could very well prove to be politically suicidal and they're going to hurt the British economy badly in the short term. But they are necessary.

Yet from the minute his coalition government was sworn in, the American commentariat and its amen choir in the moron blogosphere have lampooned it as whatever the British version of a RINO would be. They don't have any alternative to offer except the repeatedly discredited offerings of supply-side tax cuts and wishful thinking on future economic growth, but that never stopped most of those assholes from criticizing real conservatives before and I doubt that it ever will.

I invite everyone to look at what Cameron did yesterday and compare it to what the Teapublicans and their reality-challenged bloggers are planning. Then ask yourself who is looking more realistically at the long-term survival and prosperity of the economy. Who is doing more to actually reduce the size of government and the welfare state and who is just mouthing platitudes?

Who's doing something and who's just making noise?

"You Know What Would be a Great Idea? Printing Money."

I wasn't one of those folks that flipped the fuck out over the 2008 bank bailouts for the simple reason that no one has ever properly explained to me how you maintain a modern society without a financial system. By September of '08, the banks' indebtedness to one another was so interconnected through AIG, and the lack of liquidity so all-encompassing that you wouldn't have had one or two of the big banks go down (as most Republicans now say that they would have preferred), they all would have collapsed and they would have done so rapidly.

That's the legacy of the deregulation of the late '90s that repealed Glass-Stegall, left derivatives unregulated and led to the securitization of everything. When you create an atmosphere where people can do whatever they want - regardless of how reckless or stupid it may be - they usually will, especially if there's short-term profit involved.

It is my considered opinion that, given the situation that they faced, combined with the fact that they acted counter to their ideological instincts, that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will be remembered by history as Legends of the Fall. President Bush's acceptance of the resulting political damage may be the smartest and bravest thing thing he did in his eight years in office.

Here in Canada, people like me went insane when the Chretien government denied our banks the permission to merge because we thought it would hamper international competition. Well, it turns out that people like me were wrong. Because Canada maintained traditional banking regulation, our institutions stayed healthy as those in the United States and Western Europe veered dangerously close to insolvency.

Consequently, the Canadian econmy is in much better shape than most. There's an informative article about that in last month's issue of Esquire. Our economy is projected to grow at 3% next year, compared to America's 2.3% and Europe's 1.8%. Our dollar is currently at parity with its American counterpart and I expect it surpass it significantly in the coming months, although I'm hardly an expert on these things.

Over the last several months, I've become an admirer of the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson whose book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence, I heartily recommend to everyone. Mr. Samuelson's latest column, dated Monday October 11, deals with the coming austerity that most Western countries are going face.
While Samuelson doesn't come right and say that debt reduction should take priority over economic recovery, he implies it to the point that he doesn't really need to.

Clearly, most European nations waited too long to overhaul their welfare states. (The same is true of the United States.) The added costs of the global recession have now forced them to do the politically unthinkable: chop social spending and raise taxes in trying economic times. They have little choice, but it may be a mission impossible.

On the one hand, huge deficits and debts -- the sum of past deficits -- mean some countries can no longer borrow at reasonable interest rates. Last week, rates were about 10 percent on Greek 10-year government bonds and more than 6 percent on Irish and Portuguese bonds. Even these rates would be higher if these countries hadn't acted to cut long-term budget deficits. By contrast, rates are about 2.3 percent on 10-year German government bonds and 2.4 percent on 10-year U.S. Treasuries.

On the other hand, abrupt tax increases and spending cuts threaten deeper recessions. In Greece, the value-added tax (a national sales tax) was increased four percentage points; the normal retirement age is also being raised. Portugal approved a VAT increase of two percentage points. In Ireland, government workers' salaries were cut an average of 7 percent. In Spain, grants for new children are being abolished. Unemployment rates are already about 11 percent in Portugal, 12 percent in Greece and 14 percent in Ireland.

To some economists, this is folly. Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute foresees a futile downward economic spiral. As recessions worsen, losses in tax revenue and higher jobless spending will offset some projected improvements to budget deficits. So, more tax increases and spending cuts will be needed.

That's a helluva bad choice, but the more adult countries of the world have already made their decision. The English government of David Cameron will soon be presenting an austerity budget far more radical than anything ever envisioned by Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. Most government departments, including national defense, are facing cuts of between 20-30% and taxes are going to rise in painful ways. Cameron is also expected to propose a major decentralization of authority from London to the lower levels of government.

The British plan, if enacted by Parliament, is going to be nothing less than brutal on the English economy in the short term. But so will continued stimulus spending, or merely maintaining the status quo, which will widen already terrifying deficits and nudge London ever closer to the Greek dilemma. However, it is the only rational way to ensure Great Britain's long-term survival as a major economy. Chemotherapy and radiation are almost as bad as cancer, but there are no other realistic ways to treat an aggressively malignant cancer, which the debt crisis is fast becoming.

Granted, Cameron's Conservatives have the cover of their coalition partners, the leftist Liberal Democrats, that will make austerity a far more politically acceptable choice. That consensus doesn't exist in Washington, where the Tea Party Republicans and the Obama administration both want to destroy the U.S economy, only in different ways. Neither is facing reality or even making the feeblest attempts at seriousness. The Tea Party Republicans are pretending this is 1980 and the Democrats are pretending it's 1993.

And the Federal Reserve under Bernanke is about to make things indescribably worse.

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, appeared to remove any lingering doubt Friday that the central bank would take new actions to fortify the torpid recovery and fight low inflation and high unemployment.

The impact of the Fed’s most likely action – resuming vast purchases of government debt to lower long-term interest rates – would ripple far beyond American shores. The new actions could contribute to the weakening of the dollar and complicate a festering currency dispute that threatens to disrupt global trade relations.

For most Americans, additional Fed action will likely mean that already low 30-year mortgage rates will fall even further. The action will not help savers, as yields on certificates of deposit and savings bonds will probably fall. But the Fed hopes that by making credit even cheaper it will encourage businesses and consumers to borrow and spend, a move that could eventually bring relief to jobless workers.

The Fed's "purchasing government debt" is a cute way of saying that it's going to start printing money. That's incredibly inflationary and, once inflation starts, it's extremely hard to contain, as anyone who lived through the 1970s can tell you. Inflation, while it reduces the real cost of the debt by devaluing the dollar, also discourages saving, which precipitates further inflation, to say nothing of the personal debt brought on by unrealistic standards of living. As inflation accelerates, it also drives everyone into higher tax brackets without bringing the government increased revenue in real terms.

And none of that factors in the inflationary pressures that the tax cuts a Republican House majority are almost certain to demand to avoid a government shutdown. President Obama is going to want to spend on further stimulus, the GOP is going to demand spending on tax cuts and Bernanke is going start printing money.

While all of this happens, no one in the government is thinking of cutting spending in any real way. Remember, the current Republican pledge only brings spending down to 2008 levels, which still had large deficits, and they don't even explain how they intend to accomplish that because they're almost certainly lying. If the GOP can't maintain a consistent line in something as insignificant as earmarks, they can't be believed about anything.

Worse, if the inflation fails to spur the economy enough, you wind up with the stagflation of the Carter years combined with the massive deficits of the Reagan, Bush 43 and Obama administrations. As President Reagan's first term teaches us, the only way to stop stagflation is by intentionally inflicting an even worse recession than the one the United States is in now.

No one is laying the political groundwork for any of this by explaining to the voters what the consequences of either massive government debt or runaway inflation are. And they certainly aren't explaining the virtues or dangers of austerity budgeting because both parties and the Tea movement are burying their heads in the sand as deeply as they possibly can.

I'm not sure that the American political system can withstand that. If you think that the rioting in Greece is bad, consider that Greeks don't have very many guns and Americans do. A fiscal and economic Katrina might be visiting the most heavily armed country in the industrialized world.

Folks, we just might be witness the beginning of the self-destruction of the American economy.

They've Got The Whole World In Their Hands

I've been suggesting for a few years now that the War on Terror can be ended in Kashmir. That's a view you don't hear very often because most people aren't as smart as I am, but it's as likely as anything else I've heard proposed, and most often, more so. More importantly, the history tends to bear it out.

It should be noted that there were no terror training camps in Afghanistan prior to 1989. The Pashtun mujaheddin that the United States, Saudi Arabia and China supported were armed and trained in the tribal provinces of Pakistan during the anti-Soviet jihad.

That's sort of important because that's exactly where they're fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan from today. Moreover, a good number of them are exactly the same people that we armed and trained all those years ago. In intelligence circles, this is known as "blowback." Another example of blowback is the diversion of US mujaheddin funding to the Pakistani nuclear program. Some accounts have as much as 50% of the Afghan aid going into the Islamic Bomb.

Once the Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan and the civil war began, the remaining Arab fighters began establishing training camps in the south and east of the country under the sponsorship of Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence.

There were two motives for doing this. First, Afghanistan is strategically important to Islamabad, particularly the military, and the Pakistanis wanted to continue their influence there, hoping that a faction that they controlled would prevail in the coming battle for Kabul. The camps would be used to train Pakistan's preferred factions, although the Arabs would be the primary face of them.

Secondly, the ISI hoped that the lessons that the learned in the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad could be applied in the Indian occupied half of Kashmir. Fighters would be trained in Afghanistan and then smuggled past the Line of Control in Kashmir to support the independence movement there. It isn't a coincidence that Kashmir exploded into violence in 1989, the year that the Soviets began demobilizing from Afghanistan. Afghan-trained terrorists arrived in Kashmir in large numbers in 1992.

The terror camps had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, which had only been formed that year. Osama bin Laden had already returned to Saudi Arabia, later moving to Sudan and not returning to Afghanistan until mid-1996. Bin Laden and his band of Arabs had nothing to do with the Afghan civil war. Bin Laden was forced out of Sudan under pressure from the Clinton administration, which might have created another incidence of blowback in the form of 9/11. It's impossible to imagine the Sudanese, who want nothing more than better relations with the U.S, tolerating something like that being planned and executed from its territory.

The camps, indeed, the entire superstructure of terror in Afghanistan is a Pakistani creation and remains largely - although not entirely - under the influence of the ISI.

Pakistan supports terrorism because it is seen as a strategic asset against the militarily superior India. The fact that those assets are being used against American and NATO forces is seen by the ISI as unfortunate but the cost of doing business. Pakistan is not going to diplomatically persuaded to stop supporting terrorism, nor is there any prospect of a military attack accomplishing that goal. I've been discussing the consequences of invading Pakistan at Jay Currie's place, so I'll refer you there.

However, Pakistan would end its support of terror if their reasons for that support were resolved. The first step on that path would be to resolve the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan. Once that's settled, everything else is relatively simple.

Kashmir has been a cauldron of wrong for as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but hasn't received half the attention, despite a much higher body count and the potential for even more disastrous consequences. Kashmir is far more likely to be the flashpoint of a nuclear exchange than is Iran or North Korea. And it could be easily avoided.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 47, adopted on 21 April 1948, called for a national plebiscite on Kashmir's status. The people could decide to join India, join Pakistan, or achieve independence. India has refused to hold the referendum, knowing that it would lose highly strategic, if overwhelmingly Muslim populated, territory.

Although the violence has declined somewhat since 1994, there are still approximately 2,500 violent incidents in Kashmir every year. The Indian security paramilitaries (as opposed to the Army) have been credibly accused of gross war crimes, although every side in the conflict is guilty of atrocities to one extent or another.

In the last couple of weeks, separatist protests have begun anew in Indian Kashmir and Jammu. Surprisingly, the New Dehli is responding by easing security measures in the territory and openly talking about modifying its hated Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which protects those security forces accused of crimes from prosecution.

India's relaxation of security in the face of renewed protests might be a response to Pakistani President Zadari's declaration that Kashmiri separatists are "terrorists." Or it might not. Right now it's impossible to say with any certainty.

But this might create the ideal circumstances for a deal between India and Pakistan on Kashmir, preferably allowing the plebiscite called for under Resolution 47. That would almost certainly create an independent Kashmir.

If that happens, Pakistan would have far fewer reasons to support terrorism and several more reasons to oppose them. Islamabad's not altogether paranoid fears of an American "tilt" toward New Delhi would suddenly mean considerably less than they currently do. More important, without Pakistani support, the odds of the Afghan government being able to handle the Taliban without large numbers of NATO troops increases dramatically.

Wouldn't that be nice? I sure hope that someone in Washington is having the same idea.

The New Normal?

So the U.S jobs numbers for August were released last week, and they should scare the tits off of all of you. 23 months after the Wall Street economic crisis, American unemployment is still at 9.6%. That's the twelfth consecutive month that it's been over 9.5%, which can't be good.

A lot of observers have compared this recession to Reagan recession of 1982-83. Those observers are wrong, and possibly terribly so.

The Reagan recession was unique in that it was deliberate. By the time he was inaugurated, inflation had been playing havoc with the American economy for nearly fifteen years, with both unemployment and inflation in double digits. The economy was growing, but nowhere near the level it should have been. This was known as stagflation.

Jimmy Carter's appointee to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volker, decided that the only way to break to break stagflation was with a deep, long and brutal recession. President Reagan understood this as well, and promised to support Volker and shoulder the political blame from Congress and the American people. Having been so assured, Volker raised interest rates to about 22% and the economy crashed hard.

However, there were significant differences between then and now. It could very well be true, as Republican partisans and the Cult of Reagan argue, that the 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cuts were stimulative to the economy, and helped bring the country out of the recession when they fully took hold in late '83 and early '84. On the other hand, it shouldn't be forgotten that Reagan had raised taxes - specifically the payroll tax, which most consumers immediately feel - in 1983.

Taxes are significantly lower now than they were during Ronald Reagan's first term. Indeed, since the recession began in the fall of 2007, President Bush issued over $100 billion in "tax refunds" and President Obama passed $300 billion in tax cuts as part of his stimulus plan. None had any effect, other than to add to the deficit.

Then there's the matter of the deficit and the debt. Reagan had the most gargantuan deficits in American history up until that time, but even they are dwarfed by the Bush-Obama levels of debt.

Some commentators have compared these deficits to the ones incurred by World War Two, and they're wrong about that, too. The war debt was mostly brought about by the U.S government borrowing from U.S banks, which isn't the case now. Paying off that debt was made considerably easier by the fact that the major industrial economies of Europe and Asia were destroyed by the war. The United States was uniquely positioned historically to service not just it's own economy, but the markets of most of the world as well.

For the last 20 years or so, the Americans have been outsourcing most of their industrial capacity to the developing world, on the premise that the financial services and Internet technology sectors could drive the economy, which they can - in good economic times.

Previous recoveries have happened by stimulating consumer demand, which in turn stimulates the industrial sector. But there really isn't an industrial sector anymore, and consumers, seemingly having learned a lesson from the financial panic, are saving and paying down personal debt. Even if people weren't saving, increased consumer demand would only widen the trade deficit with China and move even more money and jobs overseas.

This might very well be "the new normal." The 2008-09 stimulus isn't working, and further spending or tax cuts will only broaden the deficits and debt, which I believe are a prime factor behind the economy's collapse (as opposed to the financial sector's, which has recovered nicely) in the first place.

The problem is ultimately the debt. Unfortunately, you can't take care of that with spending cuts and tax increases without further wounding the economy in the near term, and there's no political appetite for that. The Democrats want to spend money in stimulus programs and the Republicans want to give it away with tax cuts, neither of which the international bond markets will take as a sign of American seriousness. And neither - or a combination of both - is likely to work. This is the new normal.

The United States government has been spending more than it has taken in since John Kennedy was sworn in. The American people have been doing that since Reagan was president. That debt has taken away the flexibility for Kensyianism or supply-side theories to be practiced.

Under George W. Bush, the U.S dollar lost nearly half it's value in just five years and the stock market lost half of it's value in a day. And I think that this is just the beginning of a steep and rapid decline. Americans have traditionally thought that their exceptionalism made them immune from the laws of economics and history, but they forgot that the British thought that a century ago, as well.

What you're going to see in the next few years is Republicans and Democrats arguing over how to actually make things worse. And if I'm right, the American people will soon be longing for the days of 9.6% unemployment.

Welcome to the new normal, America. It might not last very long.