The New York Times is making a big deal on their website about a leaked memo written by Colonel Timothy Reese, a U.S. military adviser in Baghdad. In the memo, Reese argues that we should accelerate our withdrawal from Iraq:
As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose. Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission. Perhaps it is one of those infamous paradoxes of counterinsurgency that while the ISF is not good in any objective sense, it is good enough for Iraq in 2009. Despite this foreboding disclaimer about an unstable future for Iraq, the United States has achieved our objectives in Iraq. Prime Minister (PM) Maliki hailed June 30th as a “great victory,” implying the victory was over the US. Leaving aside his childish chest pounding, he was more right than he knew. We too ought to declare victory and bring our combat forces home.
This is in some ways reminiscent of the advice I used to hear from some officers when visiting Baghdad prior to 2008. Although this was not the majority sentiment by any stretch, some iconoclasts in uniform would claim that the task was hopeless, that the Iraqis could never be good partners, and that therefore we should pull out. In other words, they thought we should pull out because we couldn’t win. Now Colonel Reese suggests we should pull out because we’ve already won and can’t achieve anything more. His rationale — the allegedly hopeless state of Iraqi political and military culture — is identical to that once cited by those who wanted to pull out even when the war was still raging against us.
Iraq is certainly a lot more peaceful than it was a few years ago, and the Iraqi Security Forces are certainly a lot more capable. But they still depend on the U.S. for vital services like logistics, fire support, and intelligence, and they won’t be able to run things entirely on their own for years to come. General Odierno just mentioned what has been obvious for a long time: Iraq won’t be ready to defend its own airspace by 2012, when all U.S. troops are supposed to be gone.
Pulling out U.S. troops now would risk major setbacks to the progress the Iraqi Security Forces have been making. Just as important, it would endanger the Iraqi political process. Various factions that are suspicious of one another have been able to hash out their differences in the political arena because of the implicit guarantee provided by the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops. Take out those troops and there is much greater risk that deep-seated divides, such as those between Kurds and Arabs or between Sunnis and Shiites, will once again flare into violence.
In essence, U.S. troops provide an insurance policy that Iraq will continue in the right direction. Colonel Reese may be right that Iraq is strong enough to stand on its own. But given the sacrifices that so many American personnel — including Colonel Reese — have made to get Iraq to this point, why would we want to take a chance on a premature pullout? Most of our troops will be gone by this time next year anyway. Even that withdrawal carries some risks, but pulling out now would be unacceptably dangerous.
Way to talk down America, wingnuts. Well, prepare to be disappointed. Futures are pointing to a higher market opening (caveat: sentiment could shift based on jobs data), and the market rallied late in the day yesterday after this auction. So clearly the market thinks Jennifer’s Rubin’s concerns are a non-issue. Isn’t the market supposed to be smarter about these things?
Still, expect Rubin to take any chance to embrace doom and gloom. She is irrationally partisan. She was for the bailouts when they were led by Republicans — for deficit spending, when it was done by the Republican party. And she would happily see America fail, indeed needs it to, to see her party get back into power. You can read the breathless excitement whenever she perceives some cloud on our horizon. Fortunately for all of us, she has yet to to make a correct call.
Worth reading-Henninger in the WSJ:
Democrats Bid Business Adieu
Bart, what you wrote in psychological terms is called projection.
Bart, there’s a massive difference between rooting against America and worrying about it. We conservatives aren’t rooting against this country when we express concerns like those here of Rubin’s. But we are worried that the consequences of Obama’s policies will be what she describes. Look, when liberals opposed the Iraq War back in ’03, were they rooting against America? I don’t think so. They were just worried about America, and in my opinion, they turned out to be right about that, as I think that war was a mistake.
And I wouldn’t get too focused on one morning’s worth of futures. You think Obama’s policies are brilliant because the market is up over the past two and a half weeks? What did you think of his policies before then, while the market was crashing between Inauguaration Day and early March?
Since when is a left-winger concerned about market futures?
Please check this out relating to our “CORE” economic problem,CURRENCY.
Is the Floating Dollar Sunk?
By RANDALL W. FORSYTH
——”But you’d have to be into your sixth decade to have been of voting age when the dollar was anything but a free-floating currency without a defined value. That would exclude our youthful president and his Treasury secretary.
For the first time in adulthood of anybody who doesn’t qualify for AARP, however, there is a suggestion of reform of the current, dollar-centric system. It may not go anywhere anytime soon, but it would be foolish to ignore it.
President Richard Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold at a rate of $35 an ounce on Aug. 15, 1971, and by March 1973, all major currencies were free to float. Under the Bretton Woods regime, currencies were pegged to the dollar, which in turn was fixed in terms of gold. For the last 36 years, the dollar’s value has been set by the currency markets.
In theory, floating exchange rates were supposed to allow economies to reduce trade deficits by letting the currency adjust. A weaker exchange rate would drive up the cost of imports and make exports more competitive, thus reducing deficits. Under fixed exchange rates, the economy would have to be constricted to eliminate imbalances, reducing imports and lowering prices to make exports more competitive. That’s a more painful process than the seemingly benign adjustment of the exchange rate to bring things into balance.
That’s what the textbooks said anyway. The reality has been more complicated.”
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB123793604883731531.html
This is precisely what I’ve been talking about;analysis relating to the problem of “Fiat” currency are starting to proliferate in the Economic Media.
Just as I’m contemplating the dismally poor track record of a certain blogger pundit, what should I stumble upon in the New York Times? An explanation, based on years if academic study. In short, ideologues are really bad at their jobs.
“[Professor] Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.
“This was the distinction that mattered most among the forecasters, not whether they had expertise. Over all, the foxes did significantly better, both in areas they knew well and in areas they didn’t.
“Other studies have confirmed the general sense that expertise is overrated. In one experiment, clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses. In another, a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent.
“The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. We trumpet our successes and ignore failures — or else attempt to explain that the failure doesn’t count because the situation changed or that we were basically right but the timing was off.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opinion/26Kristof.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
Bart,
The going explanation for the minor bump this morning is that the economic news, while awful, is not as awful as many on Wall Street had expected. That should cause us to frolic naked in the streets, eh?
If you bash JR every day then, every once in a while, you will be as right as a stopped clock.
A country funds its government spending with taxes, with borrowing, or by printing the money. If not enough people will buy the debt, the government will print the money to fund its spending. (Zimbabwe is an example.) In our case, we do that via the Federal Reserve in a manner that most people do not understand. Because of the Federal Reserve, we will never get to the point where the government cannot sell its debt. Watch the price of gold. If people really start worrying about the government resorting to money creation to fund the debt, you will see it in the price of gold.
#9, “Because of the Federal Reserve, we will never get to the point where the government cannot sell its debt. Watch the price of gold. If people really start worrying about the government resorting to money creation to fund the debt, you will see it in the price of gold.”
Somewhat true but more complicated. Governments have the ability to manipulate the price of Gold for political ends,for example, Switzerland sold 450 Tons of Gold to India a few years ago to cool off the Gold market,and it was temporarily sucessful.
We need to be asking how much Gold does the US have. We haven’t had a legal accounting in years. That just doesn’t make sense. Gold is the last “ASSET” of our Government,maybe we already sold it all???????
The Zhou-Triffin Doubloon (ZTD) is worth discussing. IF the ZTD were controlled properly it could serve as a steadier store of value, with less risk of devaluation.
Remember Gold forces us to balance the books and behave.
A credible ZTD would have many of the advantages of the now-defunct gold standard. It would be strictly limited in supply and ready acceptability everywhere. Indeed, it could be even better than Gold in the sense that actual Gold is too cumbersome for a modern economy and too scarce to serve as a measure for international trade
Paper gold looks like one of the best ideas to come out of the financial crisis:it’s certainly an improvement over the current concept of Fiat paper trading for more Fiat paper. However,any paper currency can be ruined,even paper gold.
#4, you give the liberals too much credit. Many liberals WERE actively rooting against America in the Iraq War. Remember Harry Reid’s, “The war is lost”?