The View from Right Field

Vacation

I will be on vacation for a couple of weeks. While I am gone, I leave you this link.

CTA – Ride At Your Own Risk

Last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune reported on the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation into the derailment of a Chicago Transit Authority subway train on July 11, 2006. (Also see here.) According to the article, the investigation found tracks out of alignment, call boxes which did not work, a balky ventilation system (the derailment was underground), inadequate track inspections, incomplete and false safety documentation, and more. Reading the article left one amazed that nothing worse has happened on the CTA recently. The apparent disregard for the safety of the passengers riding the CTA is shocking. Even more shocking, though, is what will likely happen in response to this report: not much, if anything at all.

While the problem is probably worse because this is Illinois (not exactly the home of good, clean government), I would suggest this article be read by anyone who thinks government can solve our problems. In Chicago it can’t even be trusted to run a safe subway.

Taxing the Rich

All of the Democrats running for President claim they will pay for their programs by "taxing the rich". What they don’t realize, or at least won’t acknowledge, is that the rich did not get that way by being stupid. If Congress raises the marginal tax rates on the rich, the rich will just spend even more money figuring out ways to avoid taxes. In sort of a corollary to the Laffer Curve, let me suggest this rule: there is a direct relationship between the level of marginal tax rates and the effort spent trying to avoid paying those taxes; i.e., the higher the marginal tax rates, the more money the rich will spend on avoiding taxes – and the fewer taxes they will probably wind up paying.

As just one example, on September 17, 2007 The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported on how Lehman Brothers, and other Wall Street investment firms, have used complex derivative transactions to enable hedge funds to get the benefits of owning stocks that pay big dividends without actually having to pay taxes on those dividends.

The details of the transactions are not important. The point is the lengths people will go to to avoid paying taxes if the rates are high enough to make it worth their while to do so.

It is sad how much effort goes into not paying taxes. If we had a simple tax system, with relatively low rates, it would not make sense for people to spend so much time and money trying to avoid taxes. If we could get rid of the loopholes and special treatments and regulations so complicated they make quantum mechanics seem simple (and the balk rule understandable), all these tax advisers could work on something that might actually make our country richer and our people better off.

Until then our real national pastime isn’t baseball, it’s tax avoidance. And that is not a good thing, especially when it is not necessary.

"Political Surge"

I wanted to make a couple of comments on Kimberley Strassel’s column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. First, she made an excellent point about on doing what is right (more particularly, supporting what you believe is the right course, even if it seems to be not the best political choice, at the moment).

I also have to wonder, as she does, about Democrats who have pinned their political hopes and future on the United States failing in Iraq. It is one thing to have originally opposed the invasion of Iraq or to now say we should get out because our current presence in Iraq is harming things today, but it demonstrates a lack of responsible thought to say we should get out now because we should not have gone in then. Also, to not be able to say, somehow, that while I do not support what we are doing, I still hope it works, seems to be, in effect, hoping for the defeat of the United States. (If the United States is as evil as some on the far left think, maybe that is what one wants, but I do not think you are going to win an election, in most parts of the United States, on that basis.)

Ms. Strassel is right, and this is unfortunate, that achieving success in Iraq "means giving the generals all the freedom they need to keep doing their job." This is unfortunate because in some ways it seems to cede to the military a question that is properly the responsibility of politicians.

The fact is that there is not just one military answer to a question or one military response to a situation. Generals disagree. There are generals who do good jobs and generals who do not. It is the politicians’ job to pick the good generals and then, but only after choosing the right generals, let them do their job – and while still watching over them.

I am not sure the Bush administration has understood the first part of this point – or at least the members of the Bush administration do not make that distinction in their public statements. It was always: support the troops, give the military what they ask for. But that is not the main point. Ultimately, the President is responsible for what the military does because he is supposed to pick the generals.

Lincoln understood this. He fired general after general until he finally found those who could win the war. In World War I John Pershing was picked out of order to head our forces in France. Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall reached down the seniority lists to give D-Day responsibility to Dwight Eisenhower.

It is unclear whether George Bush and his administration have understood this point. And this has been a mistake because it has taken the Bush administration far too long to get the right generals with the right strategy in place to do the job in Iraq. (It seems like the only time the Bush administration did more than take the next general in line was when they apparently got Eric Shinseki to retire early because he disagreed publicly with Donald Rumsfeld about how many troops we would need in Iraq after the invasion – and Shinseki was right.).

It appears that General Petraeus has the right strategy, but he had it when he was in Iraq the last time he was there. Why did we have to wait an extra year or more to get him into place to implement that strategy for the whole country? (The only possible answer is that he had to come home to re-write the manual on fighting insurgencies, but I doubt that is really the answer.)

Now we are in the position that we may lose in Iraq because the Bush administration did not get the right generals with the right strategy in Iraq on a timely basis. And we are in a position that the Bush administration can only get public support for staying in Iraq by deferring to the military.

For one who supported going into Iraq originally and who still wants to see the United States achieve some reasonable set of objectives in Iraq, this is incredibly frustrating – and depressing – because the Bush administration has made the job so much harder than it needed to be and less likely to actually be accomplished.

Iraq: We Just Want to Succeed

On Monday The New York Times reported the results of an opinion poll on Iraq that it and CBS News conducted just before General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker gave their reports to Congress this week. Here are some of the more interesting results*:

Asked who they trusted the most to resolve the war in Iraq, 5% chose the Bush administration, 21% said Congress, and 68% said the military commanders.

62% said the war was a mistake, and 59% said it was not worth the loss of American lives and other costs.

53% said they did not think that Iraq would ever become a stable democracy. 70% said they did not think the current Iraqi government was doing all it could to bring stability to the country.

64% favored establishing a timetable for a 2008 withdrawal.

Presented with three possible plans, 56% supported reducing troops in Iraq, but leaving some in place to train Iraqi forces, fight terrorists and protect American diplomats, 22% favored a complete withdrawal in the next year, and 20% favored keeping the same number of troops ‘until there is a stable democracy in Iraq.’

Just under half favored a decrease or withdrawal of all troops even if the result was ‘more mass killings’ among Iraq’s ethnic groups, but 30% favored a decrease or withdrawal if Iraq would become a base of operations for terrorists as a result.

On their face, these numbers might seem to be contradictory, but let me suggest an interpretation which reconciles them. First, people are fed up with how things have been going in Iraq. They don’t think the Bush administration has done a good job, and they don’t think the al-Miliki government has either.

However, in spite of all this unhappiness, these numbers do not support the position of those who have been against the war since before we went in and want us to get out now. Rather, what people are saying is that they are upset because we are not winning. The reason 62% say the war was a mistake is because, until recently, our leaders have done a terrible job of fighting it (which is why only 5% trust the Bush administration to resolve the situation in Iraq).

The fact that people are upset about losing, as opposed to being in Iraq, can be seen by the fact only 22% favor a complete withdrawal now. Virtually the same number, 20%, want to stay and win, and 56% are willing to stay to fight terrorists and train Iraqis. Given how badly things have gone until recently, the fact 56% are willing to stay to fight terrorists and train Iraqis and 20% want to stay to win, is amazing.

But this should not be surprising. This matches where Americans were in Vietnam, at least until the very end. In spite of modern myth to the contrary, I would argue that even in 1972, the American people did not want to get out of Vietnam no matter what. They wanted to leave but in the right way. After all, if they had wanted to get out immediately, there was a candidate running for President in 1972 who was willing to do that. But George McGovern got less than 40% of the popular vote and won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

In the same way, what Americans do not like about Iraq is, until recently, we have been losing. When reports appeared in August indicating General Petraeus’s new counter-insurgency strategy was having some success, public opinion started to shift. The "Out Now" people do not care, but middle America does. If middle America can see some success and an expectation we can achieve more, they will support our efforts in Iraq.

The problem the Bush Administration has is nobody believes them (see the poll). But if the military commanders (see the poll) show us we can still achieve a reasonable set of objectives in Iraq, we will support the effort. But this will not be done with fancy speeches and big claims. It can only be done by progress on the ground in Iraq. If the American people see progress, they will support the effort. We just want to win.

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* I have not tried to use quotation marks to show which parts of the article I quoted directly as opposed to those parts that I paraphrased. If this is plagiarism, I apologize.

Accusing Petraeus – # 4

Yesterday I asked who would be the first Democratic candidate for President to disavow Moveon.Org – or at least its ad in yesterday’s New York Times entitled "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?"

Let me apologize to Joe Biden. I did not realize it, but by the time I asked the question, Senator Biden had already rejected the charge against General Petraeus. In "Meet the Press" on Sunday, he said, when asked for his reaction to the ad, "I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth."

On the other hand, according to today’s The Politico, "In a sign of the anti-war movement’s power within the party, neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) nor any of her leadership issued statements taking issue with the ad."

Comparing Vietnam and Iraq – September 2007

Comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam were originally made by those who opposed our involvement in Iraq. More recently, however, supporters of our involvement in Iraq, including President Bush himself, have been making the comparisons.

While many of the comparisons have been overwrought, not all have been. Certainly, the initial failure of our leaders, both civilian and military, to properly understand the situation on the ground and implement the proper strategy and tactics is a fair comparison. So, too, may be a comparison of the success we are beginning to see in Iraq, with General Petraeus using proper anti-insurgency strategy and tactics, and the success which Creighton Abrams achieved in Vietnam.

Other comparisons, and this was President Bush’s point, have been made to what happened after we left Vietnam and what might happen if we leave Iraq too early or in the wrong way.

I agree with President Bush that the consequences for Iraq and, more importantly, for the Iraqi people of an early and hasty withdrawal of American and Coalition forces would probably be horrendous. But there are other consequences we need to consider, too, just as there were consequences of the way we left South Vietnam other than the killing fields, the re-education camps, and the boat people.

Those telling us to get out of Iraq now claim that the strategic consequences of how we left Vietnam were not that great. They say that no dominoes fell (other than Cambodia and Laos). The Soviet Union lost the Cold War and disintegrated within 17 years. We now trade with Vietnam. Etc. Etc.

I beg to differ.

While Vietnam was a war, it was also a battle, a battle in the Cold War. Losing one battle in a war, as we lost in Vietnam, does not mean you automatically lose the whole war. But it can make the next battles harder to win. It also encourages the other side to become more aggressive. That is what happened because of Vietnam.

For example, in the late 1970s, in an effort to split the Western alliance, the Soviet Union deployed medium range SS-20 missiles which targeted Western Europe. When the United States tried to counter this threat by putting cruise and Pershing missiles in West Germany, and elsewhere in Western Europe, a huge debate took place, both in Europe and in the United States. Many people did not want to respond to the Soviets, but fortunately leaders like Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl prevailed and the cruise and Pershing missiles were deployed. Without the loss in Vietnam, would we even have had to install these missiles and run these risks? Who knows?

We have also lost other "battles" that made future battles harder. In 1983, Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon in response to a deadly attack on our forces there. Bill Clinton did the same thing in Somalia ten years later.

I am not saying that it was wrong for Reagan to leave Lebanon or for Bill Clinton to leave Somalia. It may have been appropriate to leave those places, even though doing so made future battles harder, because staying would have been even harder still. Some battles, some places, are such that it makes more sense to withdraw and regroup, to be ready for the next battle, than to stay and continue to fight.

What the Vietnam comparison says for Iraq is this: Leaving Iraq without winning, leaving in a way that will look like a defeat to the rest of the world (and which can be trumpeted as a defeat by our enemies), will make the next battles in the fight against those enemies harder. The question then is whether staying in Iraq until we can achieve a good result and leave without losing, would be harder than the degree by which the next battles will be more difficult because we lost in Iraq.

In this regard, we must remember that the Islamic totalitarians use Vietnam and Lebanon and Somalia as examples of our inability to fight and beat insurgencies. Just fight long enough and the United States will give up. That is what they say. Having those examples in our past has made the battle in Iraq harder. If we now we leave Iraq in a way that can be seen as yet another loss, how much harder will the next battle be?

It may be that succeeding Iraq will be so hard that we should pull out now, even though it will make the next battle more difficult. I do not think so, but others may disagree. What I ask is that those who want to leave Iraq now understand that withdrawing now will make the next battle harder – and commit to being willing to undertake the extra effort to win next time.

Accusing Petraeus – # 3

Moveon.org has made it pretty clear what it thinks of General Petraeus’s integrity – apparently on the theory that if you disagree with me, you must be lying.

Now, here are two more questions.  First, who will be the first Democratic candidate for President to disavow Moveon.Org? 

Second, what is the over/under on the number that will do so?  I'm betting really low. 

Cartoons, Freedom and Flight 93

I did sort of a Flight 93 mini-marathon this weekend. Two years ago I taped "The Flight that Fought Back" from the Discovery Channel and "Flight 93" from A & E. I finally got around to watching both of them this weekend. (I saw "United 93" in a movie theater about 1½ years ago.)

I also read this article by Kathleen Parker about a couple of "Opus" cartoons by Berkley Breathed that a number of newspapers, including The Washington Post, refused to run. Apparently, the papers were afraid Muslims might take offense at the cartoons.

Why do I have this feeling I am glad it was not these newspaper editors who were on United Flight 93?

Accusing Petraeus – # 2

As to the question of "who will be the first major Democrat to say that General Petraeus has thrown away his integrity and said what he knows is not true because he was told to do so by the Bush Administration?", it appears, not surprisingly that Dick Durbin is right there. On Thursday The Washington Times reported that Durbin was calling Petraeus’s report "the Bush report" and saying it could not be trusted.

According to this morning’s Los Angeles Times, "Durbin said he did not want to question Petraeus' integrity: ‘I respect him very much.’" However, Durbin also said that "[b]y carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working." In other words, while Senator Durbin claims he respects General Petraeus, he also says General Petraeus is "manipulating the statistics" to give a misleading report.

Come on, Senator Durbin. You can’t have it both ways. If you say General Petraeus is "manipulating the statistics," you can’t claim you aren’t questioning his integrity.