Thomas Friedman has a mixed reputation in the blogoverse. But today he writes a column that explains exactly what I’ve been looking for from President Bush; go read it and understand why we’re fighting, and what I’m talking about when I talk about ‘selling’ the war.

“We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One. They don’t believe their own propaganda. They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq … a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.“

Continued…

“You’d think from listening to America’s European and Arab critics that we’d upset some bucolic native culture and natural harmony in Iraq, as if the Baath Party were some colorful local tribe out of National Geographic. Alas, our opponents in Iraq, and their fellow travelers, know otherwise. They know they represent various forms of clan and gang rule, and various forms of religious and secular totalitarianism … from Talibanism to Baathism. And they know that they need external enemies to thrive and justify imposing their demented visions.

In short, America’s opponents know just what’s at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America’s ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere.

…

So, the terrorists get it. Iraqi liberals get it. The Bush team talks as if it gets it, but it doesn’t act like it. The Bush team tells us, rightly, that this nation-building project is the equivalent of Germany in 1945, and yet, so far, it has approached the postwar in Iraq as if it’s Grenada in 1982.

We may fail, but not because we have attracted terrorists who understand what’s at stake in Iraq. We may fail because of the utter incompetence with which the Pentagon leadership has handled the postwar. (We don’t even have enough translators there, let alone M.P.’s, and the media network we’ve set up there to talk to Iraqis is so bad we’d be better off buying ads on Al Jazeera.) We may fail because the Bush team thinks it can fight The Big One in the Middle East … while cutting taxes at home, shrinking the U.S. Army, changing the tax code to encourage Americans to buy gas-guzzling cars that make us more dependent on Mideast oil and by gratuitously alienating allies.

We may fail because to win The Big One, we need an American public, and allies, ready to pay any price and bear any burden, but we have a president unable or unwilling to summon either.” (emphasis added)

That’s what I’m looking for from Bush; to take this war as seriously as I do and as seriously as our enemies do, and to make it clear to the American people – as FDR did, and Churchill did – that this war will take blood, toil, sweat, and tears. And that we will prevail, because we have no choice.

Because we really don’t.

UPDATES:

· Porphy comments.

· Cameron over at BeetsWerkin gently hammers Needlenose on selective editing in his Friedman quotes…

· Atrios leads us to Swopa, and the Needlenose blog, who disagrees with Friedman:

Pardon me for suggesting that Friedman doesn’t believe his own propaganda, either, but just a couple of months ago he was telling a quite different story:

The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.

In other words, as I happened to discuss in a post last Thursday, the war’s goal wasn’t to project American ideas into the Middle East — it was to project American power there. Which, not surprisingly, is a development that Iraq’s neighbors (who will be next on the “hit list”) and anti-Western fanatics throughout the region want very much to derail.

I’m in the attic plumbing this afternoon (after a morning of installing brakes), so a longer response is due. Let me leave you with a medium-length one:

It’s absolutely the case that our task in the Middle East is to break the ‘various forms of religious and secular totalitarianism‘, and that we’re in Iraq because we had to start somewhere, and they were the ‘low-hanging fruit.’ My own words from mid-March:

…I believe the answer is to end the state support of terrorism and the state campaigns of hatred aimed at the U.S. I think that Iraq simply has drawn the lucky straw. They are weak, not liked, bluntly in violation of international law, and as our friends the French say, about to get hung pour l’ecourager les autres…to encourage the others.

Does that make it any clearer?

Phil Carter (who I really have to buy a cup of coffee one of these days – he’s local) has a typically-for-him great post on Ashcroft and the politics of the Patriot Act and its successors. He has a great point on the cost of lost legitimacy:

The net result of this distrust was seen very clearly in the debates over TIA and the Pentagon’s planned terrorism futures market. Americans — and their legislative representatives — didn’t care how these programs actually worked. They didn’t care that academics on the left and right supported such ideas in the abstract. Despite TIA’s fate, we still need computerized tools to look for “non-obvious relationships”. And a closed-access futures market for experts could have been a great way to quantify collective expert opinion. Nonetheless, the American public answered these programs with a resounding “Enough already!”

Go read the whole thing.

Michael McNeal has a great compilation post on the health consequences of Depleted Uranium (DU) – often used in U.S. military projectiles (via Volokh). Hint: there don’t appear to be any.

(changed title)

Brad DeLong’s website is one of my regular visits and has been for about as long as I’ve been reading blogs. He’s a damn smart liberal economist (yes, Dorothy, they do exist) and knows one of my old professors from there, Steve Cohen, pretty well to boot.

So when I read this, I put it aside for a bit to see if it made any more sense.

Just came back to it, and it doesn’t. This raises three possibilities:

# I’m not salvageable when it comes to economics and shouldn’t read or discuss it any more;
# Brad wasn’t paying attention and phoned this post in;
# There’s something subtle I didn’t understand that someone may be able to explain to me.In the hopes that it’s #3, let me wade in. Brad says, in response to Dan Gilmour’s post on ‘outsourcing our future‘:

First of all, the number of jobs in the United States is not set by what happens on the sea lanes–on what exports and imports the container ships carry from port to port. The number of jobs is set in the Eccles Building, by the Federal Reserve, which tries to hit the sweet spot: high enough demand to produce effective full employment, without so much demand that vacancies become so abundant as to lead inflation to run away. Sometimes the Federal Reserve does a good job and is lucky, and we have full employment with price stability. Other times the Federal Reserve is unskillful or unlucky, and we have accelerating inflation or high unemployment. It is certainly true that what happens in international trade affects employment in America. But the Federal Reserve can and does offset and neutralize impacts of trade that push employment away from where the Federal Reserve thinks the sweet spot of full employment is.

To which my response is sha-WHAT?? Last time I checked, we weren’t an autarky. The world economy is, as I visualize it (and yes, I do spend all too much time visualizing trade flows when I ought to be thinking about, say, Uma Thurman…) a complicated network, with a linked series of subnetworks each of which has some measure of control over itself – but that is firmly bound within the larger. If the Fed can unilaterally set monetary policy and interest rates, with no regard to world markets, there are a whole lot of people working on international currency trading floors who have been faking it for a long time.

I simply can’t imagine any condition under which this is correct; my plea here is for someone to either confirm my impression or correct me, if possible.

He then goes on to discuss international trade:

So what, then, is the impact on the American economy when Singapore educates its people to become competent network developers, or India educates its people to become competent help-center technicians? It’s not that jobs leak away. Remember: trade balances. Indians want rupees, not dollars: they will only sell us as much as we can pay for in rupees, and the only way we get rupees is by selling things to Indians. Either way (if the Federal Reserve does its job) Americans’ demand for imports made in other countries is recycled into foreign demand that employs Americans in industries that export goods, export services, make producers equipment, or build structures. This is a consequence of Say’s law–an economic principle which is usually true, sometimes false, but which it is the Federal Reserve’s business to make as true as possible as much of the time as possible. This means that nightmare scenarios–3.3 million high-tech jobs moving overseas–are beyond the bounds of short-run probability. The current account plus the capital account must balance: if the work that used to be done here by 3.3 million people is to be done there, that means that our export industries here must employ an extra 3.3 million people as well.

I can’t think of the appropriate Snoop Dogg response except to say one simple word here: “eurodollar”.

As I recall, they’ve found a couple hundreds of millions in U.S. cash in Iraq recently…what was Saddam doing with that, if what he really wanted was dinars?

This is a kind of important issue, because in my mind, the ‘global averaging’ taking place in the economy and the consequences on jobs is one of the most pressing issues that faces us today; lots of the other issues fall out from causes rooted in this one.

I’m not advocating a return to Smoot-Hawley; in fact I’m not far enough through this issue to begin to know which path makes sense, except that any path we take must somehow deal with the issue, rather than ignore it.

And DeLong’s post somehow seems to ignore it.

So help and clarification from all quarters welcome.

Is it me, or is this editorial in the NY Times surprisingly strong:

Palestinian leaders have been promoting the illusion that Islamic radical groups will ultimately transform themselves into peaceful political parties. That fantasy was shattered on Tuesday along with 20 innocent lives when a Hamas terrorist blew up a Jerusalem bus. The bombing occurred at the very moment the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, was meeting with Islamic radicals in Gaza. If anything positive is to come from this latest atrocity, it will be a conclusive realization by Mr. Abbas that organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have no genuine interest in cease-fire agreements or two-state solutions and must be forcibly put out of the terrorism business. Only then will the American-sponsored road map for peace have a chance of delivering Palestinian statehood.

…

Hamas described Tuesday’s bombing as retaliation for the Israeli Army’s killing of one of its militants in June. Hamas is a self-appointed gang of thugs with no right to kill anyone, Israeli or Palestinian. That is how it must be treated by Mr. Abbas and his security chief, Muhammad Dahlan.

Hmmmm. I feel the earth shifting ever so slightly under my feet.

We launched the Big Project Monday and amazingly little happened; it just kinda worked. Amazing and nice when that happens!! So while I’ve been sitting at my desk as a part of the Tiger Team, and doing nothing, I’ve been catching up on my blog reading.

And I notice a nice thread that I want to use to tie back to a point I made earlier about what Bush hasn’t done well.

The basic thread was “Why was FDR considered such a great President?” Over at Volokh, David Bernstein opens:

Something I’ve always wondered about, too. Why is Hoover infamous for presiding over four years of Depression, not terribly uncommon in American history, while Roosevelt is much-beloved for presiding over an unprecedented two more presidential terms of Depression, while much of the rest of the world economy was recovering [edit: at a faster pace]?

Matthew Yglesias replies:

When David put it that way, I got pretty interested in the question, too. After all, everyone knows Roosevelt was popular, and that his popularity has been lasting. He even managed to show up on the conservative list of Greatest Figures of the Twentieth Century (though he made the list of the worst as well). So, shall we inquire?

The short answer, as it turns out, is that Bernstein has his history wrong. Take a glance over at the chart below, if you will. Turns out that while the economy didn’t re-obtain its pre-Hoover size until the war was under way, economic growth resumed almost immediately after FDR took office, and continued apace (at least looking at the annual figures, quarterlies may have more hiccups) pretty consistently throughout his time in office.

David replies with references to other economists who challenge the causes of economic growth during FDR’s presidency, and who suggest that a number of his fiscal and monetary policies actively contributed to the Depression.

I’ll suggest two things to these guys:

First, you’re overlooking one of the core reasons why FDR is so beloved – because he won the freaking war. FDR was not only a Depression president, he was also the WWII president.

Second, and strongest of all, you’re overlooking FDR’s great ability to sell the public on his strategy and policies. Great leaders create faith and hope. In truth, those are probably more important than the exact policies they establish (although those obviously have significant impacts) because faith and hope are what drive people to make positive, future-oriented decisions, and to stick it out through the tough times.

From what I’ve read (and obviously it’s not everything, nor is it as good as having actually been there) FDR managed to do a hella good job of selling both his policies and the war.

People were left feeling like there was a corner that we might turn, and that it was worth it to keep going to get there.

So now we move to another issue: Did he always tell the truth??

Pretty obviously not. He ‘sold’ his policies, as most leaders do, with some measure of misdirection and puffery.

You can see where I’m going with this.

Yglesias says:

Wunderkinder Scott has an instructive response to an argument I made here regarding Bush’s deceptive rhetoric in the build-up to war:

Politicians strive to “ensure that the public is well-informed”? Please! I’m not going to argue that I was shocked when President Clinton challenged the definition of “is”. I mean, that’s “pushing the limits” of honesty about as far as possible. It’s also politics. When you’re making a case, you use all the relevant facts at your disposal, and you paint them in the best way to the public. This goes whether you’re excerpting economic studies for a tax plan, or making the case for war.

…

The case of Bush and the war, however, is quite different. For one thing, unlike the Paula Jones trial it concerned a public policy debate. For another thing, unlike a debate about economic policy it concerned information to which the president had special access. When we debate tax policy we expect our politicians to be nothing more than sources of argument concerning which policy to adopt. When we debate going to war, however, we rely on the President of the United States to accurately portray the intelligence he has received, for the White House is our only source for this information. The public simply cannot deliberate on how to respond to American intelligence if we are being deliberately misled about the contents of that intelligence.

I’m certainly prepared to cut Bush more slack than he is on this; where he sees misrepresentation, I see puffery and misdirection. I think Matthew is acting naive – and I know he actually isn’t – in suggesting somehow that the American history of debates about war (any war) is an unbroken record of contemplative public debates based on pure fact. Or that any other debate about war in any other nation is handled that way.

But I do think, as I’ve said over and over and over again that Bush is vulnerable (which in turn makes the war effort vulnerable) because he’s done a bad job of selling his policies and overall strategy to the public.

Is this in part because of a ‘disloyal media’, and does Bush thereby get a pass?? Yglesias has the best reply of all (in a post about Joe Conason’s new book):

I worry that folks on the left are growing far too concerned with “the right-wing propaganda machine” as a source of our woes. Certainly, sans propaganda machine the GOP wouldn’t be doing nearly as well as it does, but at the end of the day complaining that your political opponents have a propaganda machine is like complaining that the jockey you’re riding against has a horse … that’s just the way the game is played. Moreover, it’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools and I’d much rather see liberals working on perfecting our own strokes than on worrying about what the other guy’s doing.

(emphasis added)

(fixed embarassingly omitted links)

From the N.Y. Times:

A suicide bomber attacked a crowded bus in Jerusalem today, killing at least 18 people and wounding scores more, Israeli officials said. Two Palestinian militant groups hastened to take responsibility for the attack, which threatened to imperil the fragile Middle East peace plan.

“The suicide bomber blew up in the center of the bus,” Jerusalem’s police chief, Mickey Levy, told Israel Radio, according to Reuters. “We are talking about a big bomb, and there is a large number of casualties, including dead.”

There were conflicting estimates of casualties. The police said at least 18 people had been killed, while the head of the Israeli emergency medical service told reporters earlier that 20 people had died and 105 people had been wounded.

My first thoughts, as always, are for those killed and wounded and for their families.

After taking a deep breath, my second one is that we’re not done seeing this, or anywhere close to it. But for the first time, I can begin to see a path through the problem.Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the alphabet soup of their competitors in terror don’t work for free.

My phrase for this (borrowed from ‘The Right Stuff’) has always been “no bucks, no booms.” While the hatred may be indigenous, the resources behind these attacks are foreign.

They have been, up to now, the poorly-paid proxies of the Arab governments (as well as, back in the day, the Soviets) in their war against Israel.

And as I’ve noted, one strong reason to support the invasion is to dry up the resources – cash, materiel, and support – that the Arab states are giving these proxy armies. Iraq certainly is limited in what it can pay; as soon as Saddam runs through the cash hoard he is doubtless carrying around with him, he’s out of business. I have to hope that the other funding states – Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya – are thinking seriously about the wisdom of financing this kind of a war.

At least on a limited basis, Instapundit links to a Post column:

BARRING a last-minute miracle, the pan-Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party, one of Jordan’s oldest political organizations, is expected to file for bankruptcy within the next few weeks.

I’d love to know what the books look like for Hamas and Islamic Jihad these days…I’d have to believe that the days of making an easy living in terror are behind us.

UPDATE: Nitin of Hawken Blog comments, with links to some Oxblog posts.

As noted below, Jeff over at Caerdroia has a good post on the logic of distributed systems and redundant networks, and how we can apply some of that thinking to combating terrorist attacks. I’ll take his idea, that:

bq. “the government needs to encourage the population to arm itself with handguns and long arms; to offer training in spotting bombs, recognizing vulnerabilities, emergency medical care, planning in advance for contingencies and the like; and to give us the information we need to understand and react to threats”

…and differ in two places: [1] I’m reluctant to ‘encourage’ people to arm themselves without some measure of training (as opposed to ‘not interfering’), and [2] I think that the giving of information needs to be a two-way street. I think that the government needs to come up with some good communications channels that can go from citizen upward, as well as from local agency upward, since the local sheriff or firefighter is likely to be the first on the scene in the event of any kind of threat or attack.

Over the last few days, I’ve had some experience on how that shouldn’t be done. Let me tell you a story.I have a long commute from Thousand Oaks to the South Bay; one of the perks is that I get to ride my motorcycle through the Santa Monica Mountains, which have some of the most beautiful (and entertaining) roads in the nation.

About a week ago, I was commuting home up one of the canyon roads, and started closing on a car. Looking up, I saw that it was a big white car. As I got closer, I noticed that it was a Crown Victoria (a model of Ford favored by law enforcement). I slowed my progress, looked more closely and realized that it had a civilian license plate, as opposed to the ‘exempt’ plates police cars and other local agency public cars have. I looked, and decided that it probably wasn’t a police car, and so was safe to (illegally) pass, and moved up still closer. And saw that it had a cage (barrier in between the front and back seats), spotlights, and an antenna. Definitely not a civilian, but what? I have a fair amount of experience with law enforcement; two of my dearest friends are a working LEO and a retired one. UC cars don’t have cages, and typically aren’t Crown Vics. Command cars have exempt plates, and some agency markings on them. I puzzled for a moment, then decided not to pass and fell back and followed the car until it turned up into a driveway. I rode away going “huh?” and forgot about it.

Until the following Tuesday, when I drove in to work, and happened to catch the tail end of a news story about someone at large who had been imitating a police officer, and who drove – a white Crown Vic. A bell went off in my memory, and I wondered what to do. I’d decided to call one of my LEO friends and ask, when I pulled up next to a LA Sheriff patrol car. I beeped, rolled my window down, and asked for a moment of his time.

Note: when you do something like this, obey their instructions, and before he gets out of the car, roll your window down and make sure both forearms are on the sill…why make the officer nervous?

I told him what I’d seen and heard, asked him what to do, and he replied that frankly, he had no idea, but he’d pass my contact info on to the detectives when he went off shift. I gave him my card, and drove off.

No one called, and I put it out of my mind, until Saturday, when the L.A. Times ran a story:

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is investigating reports that a group of about six men masquerading as law enforcement agents … and calling themselves “the posse” … has been falsely arresting and robbing motorists in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

OK, now I’ve got to do something, I called my LEO friend at home, and told her what I’d seen, asking if maybe it was something she knew about…LEO vehicles with civilian plates. She berated me for not getting the plate, and said that yes, I should call it in to the San Bernardino Sheriff ASAP, particularly as I’d seen it drive up a driveway and could probably find it again.

So I called. No one could take a message on a Saturday, and I didn’t have the name of a detective to ask to be sent to his or her voicemail.

This morning, I called again. I was told that I couldn’t be transferred to the Detective Bureau, they didn’t take calls. After protesting that I was calling in response to a story in the Times about a crime they were investigating, I was transferred to the Public Affairs Division, whose mission is to serve:

as a departmental emissary by fostering relationships between the organization and the communities. Division staff works closely with media sources, citizen groups, labor units, residents, schools, and the faith community to facilitate the flow of information between the Sheriff’s Department and the citizens we serve.

In other words, I left a message about an active investigation with the guy who I’d ask to come speak to my son’s second-grade class.

Now, based on my knowledge of cops, they take the crime of ‘imitating an officer’ damn seriously, as they should. I have no reason to believe that the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department feel any differently.

But it’s pretty obvious that they don’t have a clue…and here I’ll bet they aren’t alone…on how to take information from the public that’s not of the 911 call variety.

I have no idea whether the car I saw was legitimate, or might have been associated with the investigation they have underway. But I can tell you for sure…and I have two sworn police officers who I’ve discussed it with who agree with me…that it’s information that the investigating officers ought to have.

And until we can build structures that make that kind of communication easy, useful, and pervasive, the kind of distributed defense that Jeff discusses, and Instapundit pushes aren’t going to be able to leverage on the existing safety and security infrastructures. Instead, we’ll get centralized bureaucratic systems that will shut out the information they aren’t interested in hearing.

And when that doesn’t work, they’ll get more and more intrusive and sadly, they won’t work any better.

As for my mystery car, I’m having lunch with my LEO friend tomorrow, and she’ll call San Bernardino when she goes back to the office; when she calls, they’ll listen.

(cleaned up grammar)

Over at Armed Liberal, I’ve got some comments up about the budget issues.

Two points:

California isn’t alone…go Google “state budget crisis 2003”, in the first three pages, you’ll see references to California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

and

I’m thinking about a budget and tax strategy (I don’t know enough detail, except in a very few areas, to actually propose tactics), and I’ll propose two basic goals:

1. Budget Integration. We need to look at State, county, and city budgets in some integrated way, to deal with the – transfers – between the levels which tend to mask spending and growth in a number of areas.

2) Tax stability. California is mandated to carry a balanced budget. We need to relook at our tax programs to attempt to get a more stable revenue stream for the state. This implies that we shift from personal income to corporate income, sales, and property taxes. This is pretty obviously nontrivial is so many ways…but I’ll suggest one point in each of these three areas that could make a difference.

The overall issue of the ‘structural fiscal crisis’ is a major one, and may be worth some thought itself.

From today’s L.A. Times:

A member of the Biotic Baking Brigade, a loose network of San Francisco pie-throwing politicos, said Wednesday that he did not believe that anyone from the group was responsible for the pastry flung in the face of Ralph Nader on Tuesday.

The brigade tends to target rich oppressors of working men and women and “wouldn’t get involved in progressive politics infighting. It’s not our bag,” said the operative, who goes by the moniker Agent a la Mode.

The group has pied San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, former Chevron Chief Executive Ken Derr and others.

“I do want to stress that anyone with a pie and a vision of a better world can deliver just desserts,” said Agent a la Mode. “But in the espirit de pie of the Biotic Baking Brigade, [Nader] is not a worthy target. He’s not deserving of a pie…This is one of the first times in recent history that I’ve actually cringed and said, ‘Oh my God.'”

Nader was pied – though some media reports said the dessert looked more like a cake – as he endorsed Green Party candidate for governor in the recall campaign. Camejo quickly blamed Democrats, who had lashed out at Nader for drawing liberal votes away from Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race. But a California Democratic Party spokesman suggested that it was internecine Green Party pie-fare.

OK, when do these guys start training Hamas in how to protest?