Many years ago Aunt Mary A angrily told me that her eye operation had cost $3,000 and only took a couple of hours. I shocked her a bit, and made her laugh, by telling her that the next time she needed a similar operation I would read up on it and then do the operation for her for a lot less money.
Another time I was talking with Frank A at a reunion and he mentioned indignantly that a friend's mother was taking a heart medicine that cost (I think) $300 a month. What really burned him, he said, was that the same company sells the same medicine for dogs for only a few dollars a month.
Always willing to fuel a good argument, I pointed out to Frank that his friend had an easy solution. If the dog medicine was truly the exact same thing as the human medicine he could save a lot of money by buying the dog medicine and giving that to his mother instead of the human medicine.
In both cases I was being facetious; but there is a great truth in these incidents that relates to the current debate about health care. One of the things the health care "reform" boosters are arguing, and have argued for a long time, is that pharmaceutical companies often make minor changes to existing drugs and then charge a lot more for the new formulations, which are often only slightly better than the old drugs. This is viewed as somehow exploitative, even though everyone agrees that pharmaceutical companies spend huge amounts of money on research and development precisely in order to refine old drugs and develop new ones.
If it's true that a new drug is only a little bit better than an older drug that is now a generic and available for much less cost, why shouldn't people who can't afford to or don't want to pay the price asked for the new drug simply be satisfied with the older drug?
In every other area of life that's the way things are. I would very much like to drive a nice new Cadillac or Lexus every year; but I drive a Ford until it pretty much craps out because I don't want to pay for a Cadillac or a Lexus, and it would certainly cramp my budget to buy a new car every year. I would like to eat nothing but tenderloin and lobster prepared by great chefs in fine restaurants; but I eat chicken and tilapia prepared at home because I don't want to pay restaurant prices for tenderloin and lobster.
Someone who relies soley on much cheaper generic drugs is, at worst, trusting his life to the very best drugs that existed in the world as of about seven or eight years ago. It's true that doing that means taking a slight but significant risk with your life; but then most people take much more substantial risks with their lives by driving cheaper cars that don't have the super sophisticated safety systems that are installed in the most expensive cars.
Why is health care viewed so much differently than the other necessities of life? Why do people beat up on pharmaceutical companies when it's the pharmaceutical companies that have provided both the generic drugs and the slightly better newer drugs?
Here's an article by Tevi Troy that appeared in the June issue of Commentary Magazine that goes into other aspects of the health care, and specifically the pharmaceutical cost, debate:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-end-of-medical-miracles--15162?search=1
Here are some quotes from it for those too lazy to click the link:
"Americans have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the life-sciences industry—the term for the sector of the economy that produces pharmaceuticals, biologics (like vaccines), and medical devices. These days, the mere mention of a pharmaceutical manufacturer seems to elicit gut-level hostility. Journalists, operating from a bias against industry that goes as far back as the work of Upton Sinclair in the early years of the 20th century, treat companies from AstraZeneca to Wyeth as rapacious factories billowing forth nothing but profit. At the same time, Americans are adamant about the need for access to the newest cures and therapies and expect new cures and therapies to emerge for their every ailment—all of which result from work done primarily by these very same companies whose profits make possible the research that allows for such breakthroughs."
"Liberals and conservatives appear to agree on the need to unleash the possibilities in medical discovery for the benefit of all. But it cannot be ordered up at will. It takes approximately ten years and $1 billion to get a new product approved for use in the United States. Furthermore, only one in every 10,000 newly discovered molecules will lead to a medication that will be viewed favorably by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Only three out of every ten new medications earn back their research-and-development costs. The approval success rates are low, and may even be getting lower—30.2 percent for biotech drugs and 21.5 percent for small-molecule pharmaceuticals."
"It is the very nature of scientific discovery that makes this process so cumbersome. New developments do not appear as straight-line extrapolations. A dollar in research does not lead inexorably to a return of $1.50. Researchers will spend years in a specific area to no avail, while other areas will benefit from a happy concatenation of discoveries in a short period. It is impossible to tell which area will be fruitless; so many factors figure into the equation, including dumb luck. Alexander Fleming did not mean to leave his lab in such disarray that he would discover that an extract from moldy bread killed bacteria, yet that is how it happened. Conversely, if effort and resources were all it took, then we would have an HIV/AIDS vaccine by now; as it stands, the solution to that problem continues to elude the grasp of some of the most talented and heavily funded researchers."
"Scientific discoveries are neither inevitable nor predictable. What is more, they are affected, especially in our time, by forces outside the laboratory—in particular, the actions of politicians and government bureaucracies. The past quarter-century has offered several meaningful object lessons in this regard. For example, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration undertook a number of actions, both general and specific, that had a positive effect on the pace of discovery. On the general front, low taxes and a preference for free trade helped generate a positive economic climate for private investment, including in the rapidly growing health-care sector. More specifically, the Reagan administration engaged in new technology transfer policies to promote joint ventures, encouraged and passed the Orphan Drug Act to encourage work on products with relatively small markets, and accelerated approval and use of certain data from clinical trials in order to hasten the approval of new products. All of these initiatives helped foster discovery."
"That which the government gives, it can also take away. As the 1990s began, a set of ideas began to gain traction about health care and its affordability (it seems hard to believe, but the first election in which health care was a major issue was a Pennsylvania Senate race only eighteen years ago, in 1991). Americans began to fear that their health-care benefits were at risk; policymakers and intellectuals on both sides of the ideological divide began to fear that the health-care system was either too expensive or not comprehensive enough; and the conduct of private businesses in a field that now ate up nearly 14 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product came under intense public scrutiny."
"A leading critic of Big Pharma, Greg Critser, wrote in his 2007 Generation Rx that President Clinton picked up on a public discomfort with drug prices and “began hinting at price controls” during his first term in office. These hints had a real impact. As former FDA official Scott Gottlieb has written, “Shortly after President Bill Clinton unveiled his proposal for nationalizing the health-insurance market in the 1990s (with similar limits on access to medical care as in the [current] Obama plan), biotech venture capital fell by more than a third in a single year, and the value of biotech stocks fell 40 percent. It took three years for the ‘Biocentury’ stock index to recover. Not surprisingly, many companies went out of business.”"
"The conduct of the businesses that had been responsible for almost every medical innovation from which Americans and the world had benefited for decades became intensely controversial in the 1990s. An odd inversion came into play. Since the work they did was life-saving or life-enhancing, it was not deemed by a certain liberal mindset to be of special value, worth the expense. Rather, medical treatment came to be considered a human right to which universal access was required without regard to cost. Because people needed these goods so much, it was unscrupulous or greedy to involve the profit principle in them. What mattered most was equity. Consumers of health care should not have to be subject to market forces."
"And not only that. Since pharmaceuticals and biologics are powerful things that can do great harm if they are misused or misapplied, the companies that made them found themselves under assault for injuries they might have caused. It was little considered that the drugs had been approved for use by a federal agency that imposed the world’s most rigorous standards, and was often criticized for holding up promising treatments (especially for AIDS). Juries were convinced that companies had behaved with reckless disregard for the health of consumers, and hit them with enormous punitive damages claims."
"The late 1990s also coincided with an unpredictable slowdown in the pace of medical discovery, following a fertile period in which new antihistamines, antidepressants, and gastric-acid reducers all came to market and improved the quality of life of millions in inestimable ways. A lull in innovation then set in, and that in turn gave opponents of the pharmaceutical industry a new target of opportunity. An oft-cited 1999 study by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) claimed that the newest and costliest products were only offering “modest improvements on earlier therapies at considerably greater expense.”"
"The NIHCM study opened fresh lines of attack. The first came from the managed-care industry, which used it as a means of arguing that drugs had simply grown too expensive. Managed care is extremely price-sensitive, and its business model is built on cutting costs; executives of the industry were well represented on the board of the institute that put out the report. They were, in effect, fighting with the pharmaceutical companies over who should get more of the consumer’s health-care dollars."
"The second came in response to the approval by the FDA in 1997 of direct consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The marketing explosion that followed it gave people the sense that these companies were not doing life-saving work but were rather engaged in the sale of relative trivialities, like Viagra and Rogaine, on which they had advertising dollars to burn that would be better spent on lowering the cost of drugs. And the third element of this mix was the rise of the Internet, which gave Americans a level of price transparency that they had not had before regarding cost differentials between drugs sold in the U.S. versus Canada and other Western countries."
"These three factors precipitated a full-bore campaign by public interest groups that bore remarkable fruit over the next several years. By February 2004, Time magazine was publishing a cover story on pharmaceutical pricing, noting that “the clamor for cheap Canadian imports is becoming a big issue.” Marcia Angell, a fierce critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2004 that, “In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry.”"
"Harvard’s Robert Blendon released a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in 2005 in which 70 percent of Americans reported feeling that “drug companies put profits ahead of people” and 59 percent saying that “prescription drugs increase overall medical costs because they are so expensive.” Overall, noted the foundation’s president, Drew Altman, “Rightly or wrongly, drug companies are now the number one villain in the public’s eye when it comes to rising health-care costs.” "
Showing posts with label Commentary Magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary Magazine. Show all posts
Monday, August 17, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Heavens to murgatroyds - I'm very, very mildly famous
Commentary Magazine's Contentions Blog chose one of my comments as their Post of the Day.
"A large part of MoveOn’s success was rooted in the fact that it was well launched and organized long before the start and most especially the bogging down of the Iraq war provided it with its most effective issue. The Tea Party movement is most interesting because it seems well launched and ready to grow long before the ‘chickens’ inherent in Obama’s statist policies can reasonably be expected to ‘come home to roost.’
There is simply no way to pay for Obama’s initiatives with taxes only on those earning over $250,000 or even $150,000 and there is no way the economy can resume rapid long term growth anytime soon given the much larger share of output that Obama’s plans will consume. The anger at passing on the tax and slower growth burden on to the children and grandchildren will pale next to the anger that will arise once people see taxes and slower growth impact on their own household finances."
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/gjermani/64111
"A large part of MoveOn’s success was rooted in the fact that it was well launched and organized long before the start and most especially the bogging down of the Iraq war provided it with its most effective issue. The Tea Party movement is most interesting because it seems well launched and ready to grow long before the ‘chickens’ inherent in Obama’s statist policies can reasonably be expected to ‘come home to roost.’
There is simply no way to pay for Obama’s initiatives with taxes only on those earning over $250,000 or even $150,000 and there is no way the economy can resume rapid long term growth anytime soon given the much larger share of output that Obama’s plans will consume. The anger at passing on the tax and slower growth burden on to the children and grandchildren will pale next to the anger that will arise once people see taxes and slower growth impact on their own household finances."
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/gjermani/64111
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Our Brave New World and a change in my understanding of mark to market accounting
When I went to the AOL site this morning to get my email I found a new feature that's like the home price estimator at zillow.com. Having nothing better to do, because corporate recruiters are still among the unneeded and undervalued if not toxic assets of this economy, I clicked on it.
No surprise in the valuation. Our home is now estimated at $330,000, down about 30% from the $470,000 that zillow was estimating it at the very peak of the real estate boom valuations in July of 2007. What was really interesting is that AOL Real Estate has a much better satellite or aerial photo of our home and lot than the one I last saw on zillow a few months ago, and I can almost precisely date that photo.
That photo, a very clear one, shows the redbuds and the crabapples in bloom and my garden as a rectangle. It also shows the big hybrid poplar nearest the house, a tree we had removed in 2006, still in place. Finally, it shows the white plastic recliner out on the lawn in the sun. So it has to have been taken in the late Spring, about mid May, of 2005, almost surely on a Saturday or Sunday since I was working pretty intensively on the weekdays during that period. We all still thought real estate values would rise forever and the biggest business problem at my contract employer was the difficulty of continuing to hire enough new people to expand fast enough to ensure that the other commercial mortgage companies would never catch up in our specialized market niche.
First off, what a brave new technological world we live in. A couple of clicks and I'm looking at an image of our house and lot from above, an image clear enough so I would probably be able make a good guess at the tee shirt I was wearing if I had been in the recliner when it was taken. I think that image is from a stitched together pastiche of aerial photos rather than from a satellite photo. The implication is that the entire country, if not the world, is now imaged at a resolution of about a foot and searchable. Somewhere, some biology graduate student who knows that polar bears do not shit in the woods is counting the brown blobs on the snow and writing a paper on how many craps a polar bear took last week and how far apart they are. Somewhere else, someone with different interests is occasionally stumbling across a picture of a California or Florida swimming pool owner who thought he or she could take a dip in the nude in total privacy.
But enough of that line of thought. I have serious quibbles with the rather simplistic calculation assumptions that zillow and now AOL make about home values. Our home, for instance, appears to be valued almost soley on the basis of its square footage and bedroom and bathroom count. The system they both use assigns little or no value to the land that our home sits on, a much larger and infinitely more private lot than those of the houses presented as comparables. This is only natural because it's no doubt impossible, at least now, to put a value on purely esthetic factors, But the AOL valuation also misses the potential for subdivision of our five acre home lot.
Which brings me to my other point. The other day I asserted that the value of something is simply what someone is willing to pay for the thing. On Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog yesterday I came across a comment that made me recognize a slight wrinkle that I hadn't considered which is perfectly demonstrated by my reaction to AOL's valuation of our house. We, the owners, have a better understanding of both intangible and tangible factors that go into the value of our house. We know that the privacy has great value to us, if not to others in the general marketplace; and we also know that the lot is subdividable.
So there is no way we would trade our house and its lot for one of the comparable houses worth $370,000. As the commenter on Contentions correctly pointed out, accounting for value has to take into consideration the price at which the owner of an asset would be willing to sell it as well as the price at which some other party would be willing to buy it. And for thinly traded assets that bid versus asked spread can be pretty wide. For our home, for instance, the bid versus asked spread is more than the current bid price, at least as simplistically arrived at by zillow and AOL. We might sell if someone showed up tomorrow with a check for double the valuation on AOL; but I'm not sure. Even putting aside the pretty tangible value of subdivision we might not sell. Linda and I both like the pond and the privacy a lot.
So we're back to this question of mark to market accounting. The banks unwilling to sell those so called toxic assets at current bid prices presumably understand those assets somewhat better than the potential buyers do. Hence, the toxic assets are worth more than the bid price as I asserted the other day; but how much more? The mere fact that my best answer to that question is "Who knows?" says that this question of mark to market accounting is more complex than I asserted the other day.
Do bankers know the value of the assets in their vaults? Do bears shit in the woods? Do Californians and Floridians swim in the nude?
Not always.
And - in somewhat related news, here's a 3 minute speech by a member of the European Union parliament that's fantastic. We should offer this guy citizenship and elect him to our congress. It would be refreshing to have one politician down in Washington who makes sense.
"You cannot borrow yourself out of debt."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
No surprise in the valuation. Our home is now estimated at $330,000, down about 30% from the $470,000 that zillow was estimating it at the very peak of the real estate boom valuations in July of 2007. What was really interesting is that AOL Real Estate has a much better satellite or aerial photo of our home and lot than the one I last saw on zillow a few months ago, and I can almost precisely date that photo.
That photo, a very clear one, shows the redbuds and the crabapples in bloom and my garden as a rectangle. It also shows the big hybrid poplar nearest the house, a tree we had removed in 2006, still in place. Finally, it shows the white plastic recliner out on the lawn in the sun. So it has to have been taken in the late Spring, about mid May, of 2005, almost surely on a Saturday or Sunday since I was working pretty intensively on the weekdays during that period. We all still thought real estate values would rise forever and the biggest business problem at my contract employer was the difficulty of continuing to hire enough new people to expand fast enough to ensure that the other commercial mortgage companies would never catch up in our specialized market niche.
First off, what a brave new technological world we live in. A couple of clicks and I'm looking at an image of our house and lot from above, an image clear enough so I would probably be able make a good guess at the tee shirt I was wearing if I had been in the recliner when it was taken. I think that image is from a stitched together pastiche of aerial photos rather than from a satellite photo. The implication is that the entire country, if not the world, is now imaged at a resolution of about a foot and searchable. Somewhere, some biology graduate student who knows that polar bears do not shit in the woods is counting the brown blobs on the snow and writing a paper on how many craps a polar bear took last week and how far apart they are. Somewhere else, someone with different interests is occasionally stumbling across a picture of a California or Florida swimming pool owner who thought he or she could take a dip in the nude in total privacy.
But enough of that line of thought. I have serious quibbles with the rather simplistic calculation assumptions that zillow and now AOL make about home values. Our home, for instance, appears to be valued almost soley on the basis of its square footage and bedroom and bathroom count. The system they both use assigns little or no value to the land that our home sits on, a much larger and infinitely more private lot than those of the houses presented as comparables. This is only natural because it's no doubt impossible, at least now, to put a value on purely esthetic factors, But the AOL valuation also misses the potential for subdivision of our five acre home lot.
Which brings me to my other point. The other day I asserted that the value of something is simply what someone is willing to pay for the thing. On Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog yesterday I came across a comment that made me recognize a slight wrinkle that I hadn't considered which is perfectly demonstrated by my reaction to AOL's valuation of our house. We, the owners, have a better understanding of both intangible and tangible factors that go into the value of our house. We know that the privacy has great value to us, if not to others in the general marketplace; and we also know that the lot is subdividable.
So there is no way we would trade our house and its lot for one of the comparable houses worth $370,000. As the commenter on Contentions correctly pointed out, accounting for value has to take into consideration the price at which the owner of an asset would be willing to sell it as well as the price at which some other party would be willing to buy it. And for thinly traded assets that bid versus asked spread can be pretty wide. For our home, for instance, the bid versus asked spread is more than the current bid price, at least as simplistically arrived at by zillow and AOL. We might sell if someone showed up tomorrow with a check for double the valuation on AOL; but I'm not sure. Even putting aside the pretty tangible value of subdivision we might not sell. Linda and I both like the pond and the privacy a lot.
So we're back to this question of mark to market accounting. The banks unwilling to sell those so called toxic assets at current bid prices presumably understand those assets somewhat better than the potential buyers do. Hence, the toxic assets are worth more than the bid price as I asserted the other day; but how much more? The mere fact that my best answer to that question is "Who knows?" says that this question of mark to market accounting is more complex than I asserted the other day.
Do bankers know the value of the assets in their vaults? Do bears shit in the woods? Do Californians and Floridians swim in the nude?
Not always.
And - in somewhat related news, here's a 3 minute speech by a member of the European Union parliament that's fantastic. We should offer this guy citizenship and elect him to our congress. It would be refreshing to have one politician down in Washington who makes sense.
"You cannot borrow yourself out of debt."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
Thursday, October 23, 2008
And now for a little political incorrectness
Commenter Diane at Commentary Magazine's blog just did the best job I've seen of capturing the reason behind a phenomenon that outrages me - namely the blithe way the news media has attacked Sarah Palin in a way it would never attack a member of any other racial or ethnic group.
Here's a thought to enrage you Barack Obama fans. Sarah Palin is more qualified than Barrack Obama to be President of the United States, at least by demonstrated experience. Barry is better educated, and he's probably smarter; but Sarah has at least done something that looks like governing for a few years. Going by actual experience governing, Barry is a smooth mouth, a talking head. He's all hat and no cattle. He's an empty suit. Even he puts forward nothing but his running of his own campaign as his main executive qualification to run the country. And if you believe he runs his own campaign in detail, or even on an executive level, you must also believe that Kermit the Frog has a third arm and hand tucked up his own back passage to make him move.
But enough of me - here is Diane, the commenter who so aptly captured the reason so many so called elite folks feel free to trash Sarah Palin while they act like Barack Obama is the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt - who was a not too bright governor like Palin when he was elected president, by the way.
Diane Says: October 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 PM
I’d like to get something off my chest re: the hypocrisy of the Left’s attacks of Sarah Palin. I contend that it is a stunning piece of overt reverse racism.
We’re told she isn’t smart enough. Doesn’t have the right college degree. Imagine for a moment if Sarah Palin were a Native American. Everything else about her is the same — hunting, snowmobiling, religious, self-made freshman governor. Would we be hearing the liberal establishment deriding her non-Ivy education, her funny accent, her folksy word-choices? Her family’s size or her children’s morals? Her parenting skills? No, we wouldn’t. Because as a Native American, she would be the long-suffering victim of oppression. Her having risen above it would be a tale of triumph. Her hunting and religious views (let’s say she was an animist who prayed to ancient spirits in a sweat lodge) would be accorded the dignity of a fine and noble cultural heritage.
Cast her in any other ehtnic minority — Hispanic, black –– and the test yields the same results.
We don’t scoff at Thurgood Marshall attending Howard University law school. It was a miracle, we are told, given the advanced state of white oppression, that he attended law school at all. Look at Bolivian president Evo Morales, the high-school drop out, former bricklayer, baker and llama sherpherd whose peculiar Catholic faith included making alcohol and coca offerings to the earth goddess, Pachamama. But because he is a full-blooded indigenous Amerind, none of this disqualifies him in any way from political leadership.
This amounts to a form of political affirmative action. White politicians who aren’t elites are subject to vicious stereotyping and condescension. Non-whites who aren’t elite get a pass, indeed a pat on the back for not kowtowing to “the man.” And minorities who are elites — like Obama — get the double-advantage of full acceptance by elites and massive affirmative-action bonus points for their so-called disadvantaged origins.
Me again - Diane's comment was in response to a post by Abe Greenwald about Christopher Hitchen's blind spot re religion. An interesting post and comment thread if you're into such things.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/greenwald/39671
Here's a thought to enrage you Barack Obama fans. Sarah Palin is more qualified than Barrack Obama to be President of the United States, at least by demonstrated experience. Barry is better educated, and he's probably smarter; but Sarah has at least done something that looks like governing for a few years. Going by actual experience governing, Barry is a smooth mouth, a talking head. He's all hat and no cattle. He's an empty suit. Even he puts forward nothing but his running of his own campaign as his main executive qualification to run the country. And if you believe he runs his own campaign in detail, or even on an executive level, you must also believe that Kermit the Frog has a third arm and hand tucked up his own back passage to make him move.
But enough of me - here is Diane, the commenter who so aptly captured the reason so many so called elite folks feel free to trash Sarah Palin while they act like Barack Obama is the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt - who was a not too bright governor like Palin when he was elected president, by the way.
Diane Says: October 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 PM
I’d like to get something off my chest re: the hypocrisy of the Left’s attacks of Sarah Palin. I contend that it is a stunning piece of overt reverse racism.
We’re told she isn’t smart enough. Doesn’t have the right college degree. Imagine for a moment if Sarah Palin were a Native American. Everything else about her is the same — hunting, snowmobiling, religious, self-made freshman governor. Would we be hearing the liberal establishment deriding her non-Ivy education, her funny accent, her folksy word-choices? Her family’s size or her children’s morals? Her parenting skills? No, we wouldn’t. Because as a Native American, she would be the long-suffering victim of oppression. Her having risen above it would be a tale of triumph. Her hunting and religious views (let’s say she was an animist who prayed to ancient spirits in a sweat lodge) would be accorded the dignity of a fine and noble cultural heritage.
Cast her in any other ehtnic minority — Hispanic, black –– and the test yields the same results.
We don’t scoff at Thurgood Marshall attending Howard University law school. It was a miracle, we are told, given the advanced state of white oppression, that he attended law school at all. Look at Bolivian president Evo Morales, the high-school drop out, former bricklayer, baker and llama sherpherd whose peculiar Catholic faith included making alcohol and coca offerings to the earth goddess, Pachamama. But because he is a full-blooded indigenous Amerind, none of this disqualifies him in any way from political leadership.
This amounts to a form of political affirmative action. White politicians who aren’t elites are subject to vicious stereotyping and condescension. Non-whites who aren’t elite get a pass, indeed a pat on the back for not kowtowing to “the man.” And minorities who are elites — like Obama — get the double-advantage of full acceptance by elites and massive affirmative-action bonus points for their so-called disadvantaged origins.
Me again - Diane's comment was in response to a post by Abe Greenwald about Christopher Hitchen's blind spot re religion. An interesting post and comment thread if you're into such things.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/greenwald/39671
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Obama will say Ouch! when he reads this
Over at Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog a poster took on the issue of why Barack Obama continues to trade punches with Sarah Palin even though his real opponent is John McCain.
I'm betting the writer is a graduate of a top notch college which has a Womyn's Studies Department. Alternatively, this is such a pitch perfect example of it's genre that the writer may even be Camille Paglia posting under a pseudonym.
"Joe NS Says: September 6th, 2008 at 2:50 PM
The Democratic campaign is not in a meltdown. The proper image, I believe, is that of a long metal chain the links of which are one by one sliding off the edge of a bench. One can see what is happening, very slowly at first and then accelerating, with horror or glee depending on party affiliation; but it’s very definitely underway.
It is nearly impossible to credit it, but the Palin pick has caught the Democrats so flat-footed that they have clearly decided the only counterpunch they have is to argue that Sarah Palin cannot be a mother and a vice-president at the same time. That is a flat-out incredible position for a Democrat to take. It is unvarnished surrealism. And I fear it might even work. The truth, however, is that they really have no other option at this point. Largely because of the psychology of BO himself, I believe.
In any sensible assessment of his current predicament, Obama MUST IGNORE Sarah Palin. To have the Democratic presidential nominee fencing on almost a daily basis with the Republicans nominee for vice-president is only a little short of insane. Palin was wrong on one matter: the longer the jousting between them continues, the more voters will notice that the proper level of comparison of Obama and Palin is not between Obama as community organizer and Palin as mayor, but between Obama as community organizer and Palin as a member of the Wasilla, Alaska, PTA. Obama should put Sarah Palin out of his head. So why can’t he?
It’s simple: She’s sexier than he is.
One of the things that has always seemed to me creepiest about the 2008 presidential campaign has been its erotic - I would even say homoerotic - atmospherics. Sheer celebrity, of course, tends to push things that way, to be sure; but with Obama something else has been going on, something that is often referred to as “narcissism” or “self-absorption” or, more honestly, as “seductiveness.” Though others may take offense, I think it was always more the self-fascination one sees in a young girl posing in front of a mirror. Edwards displayed the syndrome as well, but once he left the race, Obama had the enchantress slot all to himself. McCain? Hillary?? I don’t think so.
Now here is Sarah Palin, who directly threatens the male narcissist’s amour propre because she seems to be reorienting the eroticism in the campaign toward its “traditional” locus in ordinay life: toward the female. Sarah Palin is amazingly erotic. But even more amazing: It’s perhaps the least important thing about her? Like a belle who meets an unforeseen competitor for the title of most alluring, Obama has reacted badly and, let’s be honest, a little bit cattily.
In sum, hell hath no fury . . . ."
I'm betting the writer is a graduate of a top notch college which has a Womyn's Studies Department. Alternatively, this is such a pitch perfect example of it's genre that the writer may even be Camille Paglia posting under a pseudonym.
"Joe NS Says: September 6th, 2008 at 2:50 PM
The Democratic campaign is not in a meltdown. The proper image, I believe, is that of a long metal chain the links of which are one by one sliding off the edge of a bench. One can see what is happening, very slowly at first and then accelerating, with horror or glee depending on party affiliation; but it’s very definitely underway.
It is nearly impossible to credit it, but the Palin pick has caught the Democrats so flat-footed that they have clearly decided the only counterpunch they have is to argue that Sarah Palin cannot be a mother and a vice-president at the same time. That is a flat-out incredible position for a Democrat to take. It is unvarnished surrealism. And I fear it might even work. The truth, however, is that they really have no other option at this point. Largely because of the psychology of BO himself, I believe.
In any sensible assessment of his current predicament, Obama MUST IGNORE Sarah Palin. To have the Democratic presidential nominee fencing on almost a daily basis with the Republicans nominee for vice-president is only a little short of insane. Palin was wrong on one matter: the longer the jousting between them continues, the more voters will notice that the proper level of comparison of Obama and Palin is not between Obama as community organizer and Palin as mayor, but between Obama as community organizer and Palin as a member of the Wasilla, Alaska, PTA. Obama should put Sarah Palin out of his head. So why can’t he?
It’s simple: She’s sexier than he is.
One of the things that has always seemed to me creepiest about the 2008 presidential campaign has been its erotic - I would even say homoerotic - atmospherics. Sheer celebrity, of course, tends to push things that way, to be sure; but with Obama something else has been going on, something that is often referred to as “narcissism” or “self-absorption” or, more honestly, as “seductiveness.” Though others may take offense, I think it was always more the self-fascination one sees in a young girl posing in front of a mirror. Edwards displayed the syndrome as well, but once he left the race, Obama had the enchantress slot all to himself. McCain? Hillary?? I don’t think so.
Now here is Sarah Palin, who directly threatens the male narcissist’s amour propre because she seems to be reorienting the eroticism in the campaign toward its “traditional” locus in ordinay life: toward the female. Sarah Palin is amazingly erotic. But even more amazing: It’s perhaps the least important thing about her? Like a belle who meets an unforeseen competitor for the title of most alluring, Obama has reacted badly and, let’s be honest, a little bit cattily.
In sum, hell hath no fury . . . ."
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Once more into the breech
There is probably no more literate and thoughtful geopolitics site on the web than Commentary Magazine's "Contentions" blog but that doesn't mean that folks there don't sometimes see other world issues through lenses colored by their positions on other issues so I found myself in a back and forth with a couple of very well informed fellows. I've removed comments by other parties that didn't bear on the thread.
Russia, Georgia, and IranNoah Pollak - 08.12.2008 - 11:42 AM
The response of the West to Russia’s invasion has been to dress up in tough rhetoric a helpless message: What can we do? And there isn’t much the free world can do. The most aggressive proposals consist only of arming the Georgian army and throwing military and diplomatic support behind other nations which live in Russia’s crosshairs. One important reality narrows options and prevents serious consideration of a First Gulf War-style response: the fact that Russia is a nuclear power.
This is a lesson surely not lost on the Iranian regime, which like Russia has territorial designs on its neighbors, wishes to play an outsized role in its region, and views an American-allied democracy on its borders (Iraq) with about as much benevolence as Putin views such nations on his borders. Those who confidently predict a “containable and deterrable” nuclear Iran should consider the suddenly not-so-deterrable nuclear Russia and ask themselves whether such confidence is warranted.
10 Responses to “Russia, Georgia, and Iran”
2J.E. Dyer Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:03 PM
Perfect, Noah. The problem with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was always that it was NOT containable. We never succeeded in containing it, unless you credit the 53+-year armistice in Korea to the “contained” column.
Those who think it would be better to “contain” Iran than disarm Iran misread the history of containment (or don’t even know it).
The “contained” don’t have to directly confront the US, NATO, or anyone else with strategic nukes, to steadily push back our line of “containment.” Their method will be the one perfected by the Soviets: attack nations on the periphery — by subterfuge if possible, rather than outright military invasion — and calculate that, again and again, we will consider ourselves out of position, or not obligated, to respond.
Consider that during the years of the USSR’s existence, there was only one occasion when the US or any other Western power literally reversed, with force, a Soviet-client Marxist coup or incursion in a third party nation. Where did we do this? Grenada. From 1917 to 1989: Grenada.
Containment ain’t all that.
3Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Noah Pollak - I wholeheartedly agree that a nuclear Iran is a seriously bad prospect, but this is a seriously overstretched analogy.
J.E. Dyer - You missed Afghanistan as an example of where a Soviet incursion was reversed.
And both of you missed Vietnam, where a non-nuclear state took over a neighbor despite our massive effort over a very long period.
4Noah Pollak Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:31 PM
Sully, The point of the analogy was to show that when a state with large regional ambitions is also a nuclear power, the ability of its rivals to deter its aggression is significantly reduced. The Soviet incursion into Afghanistan was indeed reversed, but only after years of bloodshed; more importantly, the vital point here which bolsters my argument, and J.E.’s argument, is that the Soviets felt sufficiently undeterred that they launched the incursion in the first place. With nukes, the Iranians will no doubt feel the same way toward, say, Bahrain. Which is exactly my point. No?
5Forbes Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:37 PM
Shorter version: Under a policy of deterrence and containment, a nuclear power is neither sufficiently deterred, nor contained, to prevent acts of aggression.
6J.E. Dyer Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:44 PM
Sully — nope, didn’t miss either of them. We failed to contain the Soviet client in Vietnam. Period. We lost the whole country to the Soviet client (Hanoi) and the Soviet orbit. Within six months of the fall of Saigon, the Soviet Navy and Air Force were using the old bases in South Vietnam to patrol the South China Sea.
In Afghanistan we supported the rebel tribes, whose persistence and ungovernability eventually induced a Soviet Union that was pulling in its horns on all fronts to withdraw from there also. It’s arguable how to call this one, but I don’t include it with Grenada for several reasons, such as the ten years the Soviet Army occupied Afghanistan, and the sea change that had already been induced by Reagan’s policies in the Soviet posture: agreeing to the INF treaty; not responding when Poland effectively declared her political independence, and Czechoslovakia hers, or when Austria opened her border to the East Germans; remaining passive and impotent as Iraq and Iran duelled in the Persian Gulf, and the US performed the role of enforcer for the safety of international shipping there.
A strong case can be made that we got the Soviets out of Afghanistan — which, after all, IS in Russia’s back yard, and matters to her security as Mexico does to ours — not through a “containment” policy, but by the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, through the package of pressures applied by Reagan. That’s why I don’t include it as a victory for “containment.” The very definition of containment means that you don’t defeat or transform the opposing power itself, you merely pen it in behind a containing perimeter.
And the truth is, that never worked. Only forcing the Soviet Union to disintegrate stopped her career of expansion.
7Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:46 PM
Noah, Again, no argument that Iran will feel more free with nukes, but they already feel pretty darn free to mess around in Iraq without them and they feel pretty darn free to intimidate about the Straits of Hormuz without them. And I suspect that Russia, with its massive conventional forces, would feel pretty darn free to mess with Georgia without them as it did in breaking its assurances about eastern Europe after WW2 without them given the logistics and such of anybody else making an issue of it.
Everything isn’t comparable to Iran just as everything isn’t comparable to Munich.
8Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 1:01 PM
J.E. Dyer, Good points. And with this “And the truth is, that never worked. Only forcing the Soviet Union to disintegrate stopped her career of expansion” I totally agree.
The problem in Iran is the regime and it will remain a problem as long as it exists.
Re Vietnam - I was over there in a destroyer helping to guard the minesweeper which were pretending to sweep the probably self-deactivated mines in Haiphong harbor. And I was over there a couple of years before that in a different ship to observe the kind of shouldering and electronic harassment we delivered to the Soviet intelligence trawler that periodically visited Yankee Station. I actually had the conn of an aircraft carrier during one such exercise which caused them to leave the area in a hurry and stay away for a while. “What’s the bearing of the trawler? “207 degrees.” “Make your speed 30 knots and make your course 207 degrees.” And then a bit later when he was about 5,000 yards away - “Come right one degree.”
We lost South Vietnam because of self-deterrence rather than deterrence by the Soviets.
9Dellis Says: August 12th, 2008 at 1:05 PM
Another analogy to this situation is our allied Gulf states within range of Iranian nuclear missiles. They have seen how little the U.S. will do to protect its ally Georgia in the face of an invasion by a nuclear armed adversery. Why would Saudi Arabia & friends not conclude that they need nuclear weapons too, since the U.S. nuclear shield is nowhere near 100% credible? Do we really want every nation in the world armed with nuclear weapons? How soon until one of these made its hands into terrorists, or until a minor row between states escalated to nuclear war? This is surely America’s national interest at stake, no matter how narrowly you define what America’s interests really are.
10Seth Halpern Says: August 12th, 2008 at 1:07 PM
I hope nobody here is implying that we could invade, regime-change and “reform” Russia even if we had nukes and they didn’t. Maybe the first two things, certainly not the third. If our objective is to unhitch the Slavs from their Slav mentality, way better to rely on natural demographics until Russia shrinks out of its self-imposed harness and explores alternative arrangements. But by then we may need them against the Chinese anyway.
11J.E. Dyer Says: August 12th, 2008 at 2:18 PM
Sully — You say, “We lost South Vietnam because of self-deterrence rather than deterrence by the Soviets.”
Truer words were never spoken — but the pretext for our self-deterrence started with the USSR being a nuclear power, all the way back in 1954 when Ike decided not to assist the French at Dien Bien Phu. What people still don’t understand is that we NEVER intended to “win” in Vietnam: to defeat Hanoi and ensure that Vietnam was not subsumed in the Soviet orbit.
A whole cottage industry emerged in the early 1960s to define how to fight “limited wars” in the nuclear age. The basic premise was that no interest was worth a nuclear war to protect, and that we somehow had to figure out how to wage a satisfactory security policy without the “destabilizing” idea of actually changing whatever the current situation was.
So the Soviets could retain whatever they managed to present to us as an existing situation. This was a horrible, bloody travesty in Vietnam, where we lost 58,000 lives in our bid to avoid actually defeating Hanoi.
Your description of shouldering the intelligence collection trawlers (I remember those guys well from the 1980s) is quintessential Robert S. McNamara, Mr. Limited War/Limited Objectives himself. Achieving an actual military effect against North Vietnam would, in his view, have been provocative, destabilizing, and might bring us into direct conflict with the USSR or China. He actually thought it was a good idea, instead, to administer a series of tactical pinpricks to Hanoi and her sponsors, and call that a show of resolve.
This practice got us the Tonkin Gulf incident. It got us a lot of aviators shot down over North Vietnam. What it did NOT get us was any political impression on North Vietnam, other than that we weren’t serious, and would go away eventually if Hanoi could just hang on.
Hanoi was right, and McNamara was wrong. The Soviets were right: we would fold, in a struggle on the periphery, because they were nuclear. They never even had to issue a threat.
15Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 4:16 PM
J.E. Dyer,Again excellent points, but I’m not as sure as you that the nuclear issue was as defining as you state. Particularly I think it mixes up with the disadvantage a morally self limited democratic leader has when up against a bloody minded dictatorial one who cares not a whit (or appears not to) for the safety of his own population let alone that of his adversary.
For one example Eisenhower settled for a draw in Korea against a conventional armed China after Truman fired a bloody minded McArthur in part for suggesting stuff like a nuclear windbreak along the Yalu which would certainly have won the war albeit a bit messily. For another the same Kennedy who brought in McNamara and his system analyst idiots clumsily and riskily backed down the Soviets over the missiles in Cuba when the issue was closer to home.
The good guy necessarily cedes a huge advantage in caring about the population oppressed by the bad guy. Nuclear weapons magnify that advantage but they don’t create it.
Given Iran’s use of children as mine sweepers during the Iraq war I don’t want them to have nuclear weapons but they are a big problem regardless unless we plan to build up a sufficient force to invade and conquer them, which I seriously doubt.
16lester Says: August 12th, 2008 at 5:07 PM
or we could accept things aren’t perfect in the world and be thankfull we have more freedom that the people in iran and russia and china and use that freedom to out innovate them, make better movies, steal all their best and brightest, and beat them in the olympics every 4 years.
eventually they will give in when they see there is no hope in planned economies, something we’ve known since 1917 (google “economic calculation problem” )
17M. Simon Says: August 12th, 2008 at 5:35 PM
So the Soviets could retain whatever they managed to present to us as an existing situation. This was a horrible, bloody travesty in Vietnam, where we lost 58,000 lives in our bid to avoid actually defeating Hanoi.
Uh, guys. We didn’t lose in Vietnam. Congress gave it away. Go back and read your history again.
As to Georgia. Russia stopped after 5 days. The 1,000+ American trainers are still there. Why would they stop if they were winning? It is not their way. Let us wait until the dust settles and see what the real results are.
18Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 5:53 PM
Blimey - now I find myself in rough agreement with a lester post!
I’m retiring from this discussion.
Russia, Georgia, and IranNoah Pollak - 08.12.2008 - 11:42 AM
The response of the West to Russia’s invasion has been to dress up in tough rhetoric a helpless message: What can we do? And there isn’t much the free world can do. The most aggressive proposals consist only of arming the Georgian army and throwing military and diplomatic support behind other nations which live in Russia’s crosshairs. One important reality narrows options and prevents serious consideration of a First Gulf War-style response: the fact that Russia is a nuclear power.
This is a lesson surely not lost on the Iranian regime, which like Russia has territorial designs on its neighbors, wishes to play an outsized role in its region, and views an American-allied democracy on its borders (Iraq) with about as much benevolence as Putin views such nations on his borders. Those who confidently predict a “containable and deterrable” nuclear Iran should consider the suddenly not-so-deterrable nuclear Russia and ask themselves whether such confidence is warranted.
10 Responses to “Russia, Georgia, and Iran”
2J.E. Dyer Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:03 PM
Perfect, Noah. The problem with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was always that it was NOT containable. We never succeeded in containing it, unless you credit the 53+-year armistice in Korea to the “contained” column.
Those who think it would be better to “contain” Iran than disarm Iran misread the history of containment (or don’t even know it).
The “contained” don’t have to directly confront the US, NATO, or anyone else with strategic nukes, to steadily push back our line of “containment.” Their method will be the one perfected by the Soviets: attack nations on the periphery — by subterfuge if possible, rather than outright military invasion — and calculate that, again and again, we will consider ourselves out of position, or not obligated, to respond.
Consider that during the years of the USSR’s existence, there was only one occasion when the US or any other Western power literally reversed, with force, a Soviet-client Marxist coup or incursion in a third party nation. Where did we do this? Grenada. From 1917 to 1989: Grenada.
Containment ain’t all that.
3Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Noah Pollak - I wholeheartedly agree that a nuclear Iran is a seriously bad prospect, but this is a seriously overstretched analogy.
J.E. Dyer - You missed Afghanistan as an example of where a Soviet incursion was reversed.
And both of you missed Vietnam, where a non-nuclear state took over a neighbor despite our massive effort over a very long period.
4Noah Pollak Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:31 PM
Sully, The point of the analogy was to show that when a state with large regional ambitions is also a nuclear power, the ability of its rivals to deter its aggression is significantly reduced. The Soviet incursion into Afghanistan was indeed reversed, but only after years of bloodshed; more importantly, the vital point here which bolsters my argument, and J.E.’s argument, is that the Soviets felt sufficiently undeterred that they launched the incursion in the first place. With nukes, the Iranians will no doubt feel the same way toward, say, Bahrain. Which is exactly my point. No?
5Forbes Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:37 PM
Shorter version: Under a policy of deterrence and containment, a nuclear power is neither sufficiently deterred, nor contained, to prevent acts of aggression.
6J.E. Dyer Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:44 PM
Sully — nope, didn’t miss either of them. We failed to contain the Soviet client in Vietnam. Period. We lost the whole country to the Soviet client (Hanoi) and the Soviet orbit. Within six months of the fall of Saigon, the Soviet Navy and Air Force were using the old bases in South Vietnam to patrol the South China Sea.
In Afghanistan we supported the rebel tribes, whose persistence and ungovernability eventually induced a Soviet Union that was pulling in its horns on all fronts to withdraw from there also. It’s arguable how to call this one, but I don’t include it with Grenada for several reasons, such as the ten years the Soviet Army occupied Afghanistan, and the sea change that had already been induced by Reagan’s policies in the Soviet posture: agreeing to the INF treaty; not responding when Poland effectively declared her political independence, and Czechoslovakia hers, or when Austria opened her border to the East Germans; remaining passive and impotent as Iraq and Iran duelled in the Persian Gulf, and the US performed the role of enforcer for the safety of international shipping there.
A strong case can be made that we got the Soviets out of Afghanistan — which, after all, IS in Russia’s back yard, and matters to her security as Mexico does to ours — not through a “containment” policy, but by the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, through the package of pressures applied by Reagan. That’s why I don’t include it as a victory for “containment.” The very definition of containment means that you don’t defeat or transform the opposing power itself, you merely pen it in behind a containing perimeter.
And the truth is, that never worked. Only forcing the Soviet Union to disintegrate stopped her career of expansion.
7Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 12:46 PM
Noah, Again, no argument that Iran will feel more free with nukes, but they already feel pretty darn free to mess around in Iraq without them and they feel pretty darn free to intimidate about the Straits of Hormuz without them. And I suspect that Russia, with its massive conventional forces, would feel pretty darn free to mess with Georgia without them as it did in breaking its assurances about eastern Europe after WW2 without them given the logistics and such of anybody else making an issue of it.
Everything isn’t comparable to Iran just as everything isn’t comparable to Munich.
8Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 1:01 PM
J.E. Dyer, Good points. And with this “And the truth is, that never worked. Only forcing the Soviet Union to disintegrate stopped her career of expansion” I totally agree.
The problem in Iran is the regime and it will remain a problem as long as it exists.
Re Vietnam - I was over there in a destroyer helping to guard the minesweeper which were pretending to sweep the probably self-deactivated mines in Haiphong harbor. And I was over there a couple of years before that in a different ship to observe the kind of shouldering and electronic harassment we delivered to the Soviet intelligence trawler that periodically visited Yankee Station. I actually had the conn of an aircraft carrier during one such exercise which caused them to leave the area in a hurry and stay away for a while. “What’s the bearing of the trawler? “207 degrees.” “Make your speed 30 knots and make your course 207 degrees.” And then a bit later when he was about 5,000 yards away - “Come right one degree.”
We lost South Vietnam because of self-deterrence rather than deterrence by the Soviets.
9Dellis Says: August 12th, 2008 at 1:05 PM
Another analogy to this situation is our allied Gulf states within range of Iranian nuclear missiles. They have seen how little the U.S. will do to protect its ally Georgia in the face of an invasion by a nuclear armed adversery. Why would Saudi Arabia & friends not conclude that they need nuclear weapons too, since the U.S. nuclear shield is nowhere near 100% credible? Do we really want every nation in the world armed with nuclear weapons? How soon until one of these made its hands into terrorists, or until a minor row between states escalated to nuclear war? This is surely America’s national interest at stake, no matter how narrowly you define what America’s interests really are.
10Seth Halpern Says: August 12th, 2008 at 1:07 PM
I hope nobody here is implying that we could invade, regime-change and “reform” Russia even if we had nukes and they didn’t. Maybe the first two things, certainly not the third. If our objective is to unhitch the Slavs from their Slav mentality, way better to rely on natural demographics until Russia shrinks out of its self-imposed harness and explores alternative arrangements. But by then we may need them against the Chinese anyway.
11J.E. Dyer Says: August 12th, 2008 at 2:18 PM
Sully — You say, “We lost South Vietnam because of self-deterrence rather than deterrence by the Soviets.”
Truer words were never spoken — but the pretext for our self-deterrence started with the USSR being a nuclear power, all the way back in 1954 when Ike decided not to assist the French at Dien Bien Phu. What people still don’t understand is that we NEVER intended to “win” in Vietnam: to defeat Hanoi and ensure that Vietnam was not subsumed in the Soviet orbit.
A whole cottage industry emerged in the early 1960s to define how to fight “limited wars” in the nuclear age. The basic premise was that no interest was worth a nuclear war to protect, and that we somehow had to figure out how to wage a satisfactory security policy without the “destabilizing” idea of actually changing whatever the current situation was.
So the Soviets could retain whatever they managed to present to us as an existing situation. This was a horrible, bloody travesty in Vietnam, where we lost 58,000 lives in our bid to avoid actually defeating Hanoi.
Your description of shouldering the intelligence collection trawlers (I remember those guys well from the 1980s) is quintessential Robert S. McNamara, Mr. Limited War/Limited Objectives himself. Achieving an actual military effect against North Vietnam would, in his view, have been provocative, destabilizing, and might bring us into direct conflict with the USSR or China. He actually thought it was a good idea, instead, to administer a series of tactical pinpricks to Hanoi and her sponsors, and call that a show of resolve.
This practice got us the Tonkin Gulf incident. It got us a lot of aviators shot down over North Vietnam. What it did NOT get us was any political impression on North Vietnam, other than that we weren’t serious, and would go away eventually if Hanoi could just hang on.
Hanoi was right, and McNamara was wrong. The Soviets were right: we would fold, in a struggle on the periphery, because they were nuclear. They never even had to issue a threat.
15Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 4:16 PM
J.E. Dyer,Again excellent points, but I’m not as sure as you that the nuclear issue was as defining as you state. Particularly I think it mixes up with the disadvantage a morally self limited democratic leader has when up against a bloody minded dictatorial one who cares not a whit (or appears not to) for the safety of his own population let alone that of his adversary.
For one example Eisenhower settled for a draw in Korea against a conventional armed China after Truman fired a bloody minded McArthur in part for suggesting stuff like a nuclear windbreak along the Yalu which would certainly have won the war albeit a bit messily. For another the same Kennedy who brought in McNamara and his system analyst idiots clumsily and riskily backed down the Soviets over the missiles in Cuba when the issue was closer to home.
The good guy necessarily cedes a huge advantage in caring about the population oppressed by the bad guy. Nuclear weapons magnify that advantage but they don’t create it.
Given Iran’s use of children as mine sweepers during the Iraq war I don’t want them to have nuclear weapons but they are a big problem regardless unless we plan to build up a sufficient force to invade and conquer them, which I seriously doubt.
16lester Says: August 12th, 2008 at 5:07 PM
or we could accept things aren’t perfect in the world and be thankfull we have more freedom that the people in iran and russia and china and use that freedom to out innovate them, make better movies, steal all their best and brightest, and beat them in the olympics every 4 years.
eventually they will give in when they see there is no hope in planned economies, something we’ve known since 1917 (google “economic calculation problem” )
17M. Simon Says: August 12th, 2008 at 5:35 PM
So the Soviets could retain whatever they managed to present to us as an existing situation. This was a horrible, bloody travesty in Vietnam, where we lost 58,000 lives in our bid to avoid actually defeating Hanoi.
Uh, guys. We didn’t lose in Vietnam. Congress gave it away. Go back and read your history again.
As to Georgia. Russia stopped after 5 days. The 1,000+ American trainers are still there. Why would they stop if they were winning? It is not their way. Let us wait until the dust settles and see what the real results are.
18Sully Says: August 12th, 2008 at 5:53 PM
Blimey - now I find myself in rough agreement with a lester post!
I’m retiring from this discussion.
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