Ambit

Class Act

A Denver high school geography teacher landed in hot water recently when a student surreptitiously recorded him letting loose with a partisan tirade, among other things comparing the President to a notorious dictator:

In the 20-minute recording, made on an MP3 player, teacher Jay Bennish described capitalism as a system "at odds with human rights." He also said there were "eerie similarities" between what Bush said during his Jan. 28 State of the Union address and "things that Adolf Hitler used to say."

The United States was "probably the single most violent nation on planet Earth," Bennish also said on the tape.

Plenty has already been written and said about how a high school geography class is hardly the appropriate forum for such a discussion and that, in any case, teachers should try to present controversial topics in a dispassionate, non-partisan fashion.

What I wish to address is Mr. Bennish's deplorable rhetorical skills.  His comments call to mind humorist Dave Barry's classic essay How to Win an Argument - specifically the conclusion where we discover how to deliver the coup de grace, as it were:

* Compare your opponent to Adolf Hitler.

This is your heavy artillery, for when your opponent is obviously right and you are spectacularly wrong. Bring Hitler up subtly. Say: "That sounds suspiciously like something Adolf Hitler might say" or "You certainly do remind me of Adolf Hitler."

Perhaps Mr. Bennish is familiar with this essay but failed to realize it was tongue-in-cheek.  More likely he frequents lefty haunts of the blogosphere, talk radio and Usenet where such insults are commonplace.  Fortunately or unfortunately, according to inclination, one doesn't have to wait long thereabouts, per Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, for discussions to (d)evolve to such a state.

UPDATE: Heh.  Bennish gets off with a reprimand and regrets the Hitler analogy:

At a meeting Thursday, Bennish told Cherry Creek school leaders that he should have used a different dictator when comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler in a geography class.

I'm glad he got off with a reprimand.  While I find his defense to be disingenuous, he's young and deserves a chance to demonstrate he can adhere to his school district's policy which requires that balanced viewpoints be presented in class, even if he prefers political activism to teaching. 

Everyone's biased.  Teachers should aspire to something approximating an objective and impartial journalistic ideal.  Good journalists have opinions about the events they cover, too, but they attempt to 'stick to the facts' and present the alternate perspectives of others.  If anything teachers have a greater duty to play it straight and not to abuse the trust their students and their parents place in them.  Children are impressionable and ill-equipped to judge fact from opinion or detect bias.

America's Complicity In Saddam's Crimes

Now that Saddam has been captured, opponents of the war in Iraq are renewing their efforts to tar America as Saddam's sponsor. Under this view the US was complicit in the worst of Saddam's crimes and the use of his WMD, in particular. In short, the U.S. brought him to power, armed him; gave him his WMD and then looked the other way when he used them.

On the one hand my impulse would be to dismiss these allegations as water under the bridge. But the fact of the matter is that many of the accusations one hears are gross distortions of the historical fact and, thus, slanderous. For example, the anti-war critics frequently refer to the picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein back in 1983 to attest to America's closeness with Saddam. But as you can see in the commentary that accompanies the picture there's no indication that Rumsfeld gave overt or tacit approval for Saddam's use of WMD. On the contrary, contemporary documentation suggest that Rumsfeld delivered a protest to Tariq Aziz on the second of his two visits to Iraq.

But if you like pictures, here's one of France's current head of state in happier days:

As for the rest, here's my understanding:

SADDAM'S RISE TO POWER

Far from being an American stooge, Saddam usurped power from his boss, a bona fide CIA-backed Bathist, in a coup.

SADDAM'S ARSENAL - CONVENTIONAL

Russia and France were the two largest suppliers of Iraq's conventional weapons:

"Last winter, in Baghdad's annual Army Day parade, Hussein displayed some of Iraq's extraordinary arsenal, bought with billions of its oil revenues and with loans from its Arab neighbors. At least half of Iraq's conventional weapons were purchased from its ally, the Soviet Union, but France was also a major source, providing its sophisticated Mirage fighters and deadly Exocet missiles. And there were many others -- China, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Brazil. At one point, in the 1980s, Iraq was the biggest importer of arms in the world."

The Long Road to War
Frontline (PBS)

This is, in large part, how these countries came to be such large creditors of Iraq.

SADDAM'S ARSENAL - WMD (Chem & Bio)

German and Franch companies were the largest suppliers of WMD material:

The World; The Means to Make the Poisons Came From the West
April 13, 2003, Sunday

By GARY MILHOLLIN and KELLY MOTZ (NYT) 664 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 4 , Page 5 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - Means for making any chemical weapons that might be found in Iraq came primarily from Western companies years ago; Germany and France outstripped all others in providing Iraq with specialized chemical-industry equipment that is particularly useful for producing poison gas; map shows origins of sensitive chemicals, equipment and other munitions acquired by Iraq.

SADDAM'S ARSENAL - WMD (Nuclear)

The Russians, French and Italians helped Iraq develop its nuclear capacity:

"The Tuwaitha Site, located about 30 kilometers south of Baghdad, became the Nuclear Research Center when it was chosen in the early 1960s as the location of the Soviet-supplied 2 MWth IRT reactor and its associated facilities. The reactor went critical in early 1968, which marks the beginning of nuclear research in Iraq, albeit limited. The reactor commissioning was followed by an order of magnitude increase in the number of nuclear personnel in Iraq, from a few dozen to a few hundred people"

"The French had agreed to supply a 40 MWth MTR reactor called Tammuz-1 or Osirak, a zero-power reactor called Tammuz-2, a materials testing hot laboratory (named LAMA), workshops, and a radioactive waste treatment station (named RWTS). The Italians supplied a research-scale radiochemistry laboratory capable of handling plutonium and an experimental fuel fabrication laboratory. Figure 6 shows a schematic of the site in about 1981 after these buildings were largely completed."

AMERICAN BACKING FOR SADDAM DURING THE IRAQ-IRAN WAR

The U.S. provided assistance to both Iraq and Iraq during this war (remember Iran-Contra?). The US played each country against the other and tried to ensure that neither got the upper hand. It hoped the war would leave both sides enervated.

AMERICAN COMPLICITY IN WMD ATTACKS ON KURDS

The U.S. opposed Saddam's use of chem WMD:

"As soon as that happened in Halabja, during the war, we took it up with the Iraqis -- a very strong disapproval of chemical weapons. And we got them -- Secretary Schultz got them to move, at that point, and articulate a position that they would forswear future use of chemical weapons. And that's a position that they took with them to Paris at the international conference in January of '89."

Richard Murphy
U.S. State Department's top Middle East diplomat for most of the 1980s.

The Long Road to War
Frontline (PBS)

A Great Day for the Iraqis!

Saddam, himself, was always the real Iraqi WMD - responsible for the deaths of somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 - 2 million Iraqis. The world is well rid of him.

Congrats to the servicemen involved in Saddam's capture. To have taken him alive when he was expected to "martyr" himself through suicide or going down in a blaze of gunfire as his sons did, is an almost unimaginable coup. Saddam's bedraggled visage in captivity will prove a far more powerful and enduring image than even that of his toppled statues.

And congrats to Pres. Bush, PM Blair and the rest of the coalition leadership. The intermediate-term political dividend will likely be small, but it will undoubtably be positive. And in countries where the electorates are as closely divided as in, say, the US or Italy, it could mean the difference between victory or defeat.

It remains to be seen whether Saddam's capture has any lasting effect on the insurgency. It has never been clear what role, if any, he had in coordinating, financing or inspiring Bathist bitter-enders. He appears to have been captured with some documentation indicating he was in touch with elements of the insurgency, though. I'm guessing the biggest benefits will be in the willingness of Iraqi informants to come forward now that they no longer have to fear that Saddam's regime will outlast the foreign interlopers and return to power.

Tipping Point Reached?

I am heartened to see that within the past week two Iraqi bloggers have independently come to the conclusion that the ex-Bathists and foreign Jihadis fighting the coalition forces are losing the battle for the Iraqi peoples' hearts and minds. First, noted Baghdad blogger Salaam Pax:

This is another thing I would like people to pay some respect to. Iraqi Police kick major ass. Much respect. Wherever you go now and open up that subject you will see a lot of sympathy with those brave men and women and a total incomprehension to what this so called resistance is doing. They are killing Iraqis now. They say Jihad against the Infidel Occupier and they go kill those Iraqi police men. The Baghdad Hotel, the Turkish embassy and many more. It is not the Infidel the attackers are killing but Iraqis and this just might be good because the general sentiment now is “what the fuck do the Jihadis think they are doing?”. I wrote or said some time ago that most Iraqis are just sitting on the fence, well the last couple of attacks are tipping the balance against the Jihadis because they are killing all those Iraqis, they are putting bombs in streets and in front of schools, threatening to bomb banks where Iraqis are standing in line waiting to get their new Iraqi Dinars. So as we say here [biha saleh – something good will come out of it] maybe the people who are dying in those attacks are helping us understand that what those saboteurs are doing is just pure evil, telling people they are Muslim Jihadis doesn’t cut it anymore because they are killing civilians indiscriminately.

"Zeyad" from the blog Healing Iraq concurs:

One thing is certain. The attacks are less frequent than say two months ago. The attacks lately have been harming more Iraqis than Americans. Mortar shells in Ba'quba three weeks ago took 12 innocent lives at a grocery market. A bomb planted beside the sidewalk in Adhamiya exploded when a bus stopped next to it killing 7 people. This has made people very bitter and critical whenever they hear about attacks. More and more people are informing against others they know involved with attacks. Large numbers of Arab infiltrators have been arrested. Of course they came from Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

While it's disturbing to think that many Iraqis might otherwise be sympathetic to the insurgents' cause if not for the collateral damage their attacks are inflicting on the civilian population, it is nevertheless encouraging to know that, far from advancing their cause, the insurgents' actions are alienating the very people they purport to be fighting for and whose support or indifference they depend on for cover.

UPDATE: More from Zeyad.

Stiglitz Watch

Joseph Stiglitz, a nobel prize winning economist and former chairman of President Clinton's council of economic advisers, has another opinion piece in the Guardian critical of Bush's handling of the US economy. Here he is blaming the Bush tax cuts for creating the US deficit:

America's burgeoning trade deficit is a result of Bush's unprecedented mismanagement. Tax cuts that the US could ill afford turned a huge fiscal surplus into a massive deficit...

This comes less a month after Stiglitz devoted a whole article critical of Bush's tax cuts in the same forum.

Here's the truth of the matter from Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, writing in his weekly newsletter:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the main reason for the shift from surpluses to deficits is a falloff in tax revenue due to the recession and the corresponding collapse of the stock market. Higher than projected spending accounted for $60 billion of a $333 billion shift towards deficits in the 2002 fiscal year; all but $27 billion of this additional spending was defense-related. Tax cuts added $32 billion to the deficit, as compared to the baseline projections made in January of 2001. The rest was attributable to lower than expected tax revenue.

In other words, to quote James Carville: "It's the economy stupid."

Mr. Stiglitz's impressive credentials suggest he's too sharp to have failed to understand the various factors that have contributed to America's federal budget having swung into deficit. He unfortunately appears to be following in Paul Krugman's footsteps, bending his considerable intellect towards partisan ends and sullying his reputation in the process.

About a year ago Brink Lindsey, a trade lawyer and fellow at the Cato Institute, had this to say about about Mr. Stiglitz's recent book about globalization:

As that excerpt makes clear, I think this is a bad book. A very bad book. A scholar of Stiglitz's standing should be ashamed of himself for having written it. It's slanted, intemperate, and factually and analytically sloppy to the point of mendacity.

The same could be said of Mr. Stiglitz's pontifications in the Guardian.

Speaking of Brink Lindsey, I sure hope he decides to call an end to his blogging hiatus. Maybe some e-mails from fans of his blog could entice him back.

The Danger of Rushing to Return Sovereignty to Iraq

In a great interview by Crescat Sententia, Oxblog's Josh Chafetz makes the case that there's a real danger in rushing to hold elections in Iraq:

Liberal democracy, on the other hand, is stable, because liberal norms of protecting minorities and settling issues through persuasion and open procedures reinforce the strength of the democratic institutions, and the democratic institutions underline the importance of accompanying liberal norms. This is why it's foolish to try and rush elections in Iraq -- unless the groundwork has been properly laid, unless Iraqis have had some time to get accustomed to arguing peacefully about politics, unless they've had time to understand that they can trust a free press in ways that they couldn't trust the Saddam-controlled press, etc., then elections will produce, at best, an unstable democracy.

His comments echo Fareed Zakaria's thesis (made in his book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad) that what really matters is establishing liberal democratic institutions and the rule of law, not merely holding elections and turning over the reigns of power to the winning candidates. Here are some excerpts from a Sept. 16, 2003 opinion piece in the Washington Post written by Mr. Zakaria entitled "Don't Rush to Disaster":

Iraq may not be a failed state, but it is a highly dysfunctional one. It has been through three decades of totalitarian rule, three wars, 13 years of economic sanctions and massive internal repression. Its ministries are organized along Stalinist lines. Its people have been cowed into submission for decades. It will take some time to reform the Iraqi state and heal Iraq's political culture. An immediate transfer of power would retard and perhaps even reverse this process of reform. New political leaders would seek to use the Iraqi state to consolidate their power, not limit its reach. That is what happened in Bosnia. Once elected, ethnic thugs didn't want to build the rule of law; they wanted to use the law to stay in office.

He adds:

Popular sovereignty is a great thing, but a constitutional process is greater still. The French know this. The French Revolution emphasized popular sovereignty with little regard to limitations on state power. The American founding, by contrast, was obsessed with constitution-making. Both countries got to genuine democracy. But in France it took two centuries, five republics, two empires and one dictatorship to get there. Surely we want to do it better in Iraq.

Aside from questioning the wisdom of an immediate transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis there is, in my opinion, good reason to suspect the motives of the French and Kofi Anan for advocating an early pull out. Fareed Zakaria:

It is strange that U.N. officials argue that we must quickly move, in Kofi Annan's phrase, from "the logic of occupation" to that of Iraqi sovereignty. The United Nations has blessed and assisted in the occupation of Bosnia, where it took seven years to transfer power to the locals. It boasts of "the logic of occupation" in Kosovo, which has gone smoothly for the past four years, with no prospect of ending anytime soon. It administered tiny East Timor for two years before handing over power. Does Kofi Annan really think that what took seven years in Bosnia can take one year in Iraq, with six times as many people? It is touching to learn of the French faith in the Governing Council. When the council was set up, the French government (as well as the Germans) refused to endorse it, privately disparaging the group as American puppets. It took a month for the United States to get France to vote in the Security Council simply to welcome the formation of the Governing Council. France's newfound love for the council is simply an attempt to get the United States out as soon as possible.

And a quote from Tom Friedman's now infamous opinion piece "Our War with France":

France wants America to fail in Iraq. France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its "rightful" place as America's equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs.

If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we're sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.

But then France has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern Arab world, which is why its pose as the new protector of Iraqi representative government — after being so content with Saddam's one-man rule — is so patently cynical.

France's position on Iraqi sovereignty, as with its position on the invasion of Iraq, is a tactical one; it's overriding strategic interest is to curb America's influence in the region and the wider world.

MORE: Tom Friedman and a couple of Stanford profs wiegh in on the subject. Also two Francophone Canadians suggest that France's preferrence for an early transfer of sovereignty is borne of its memory of its own occupation during WWII and the circumstances surrounding its recovery.

More Gallup Poll Results from Baghdad

More findings from the Gallup poll I mentioned earlier. Key findings:

The Gallup poll found that 71 percent of the capital city's residents felt U.S. troops should not leave in the next few months. Just 26 percent felt the troops should leave that soon.

AND

Almost six in 10 in the poll, 58 percent, said that U.S. troops in Baghdad have behaved fairly well or very well, with one in 10 saying ``very well.'' Twenty 20 percent said the troops have behaved fairly badly and 9 percent said very badly.

I wonder what Kofi Anan and the French, now advocating for a speedy turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis and withdrawl of occupying troops, have to say to the people of Baghdad. Insofar as the desires of the Iraqi people are known, they don't seem to be particularly anxious for the coalition to withdrawl. [Hat tip: Instapundit]

Pictures from the Revolution

I continue to hear talk that the coalition forces were not welcomed by the Iraqi people when they entered the country. While it's true that the invaders were not universally welcomed in Iraq, there's no question that they were rapturously welcomed by many. Here's a cache of photos I recently came accross that attest to that fact.

Hillary Watch

Despite this blog's brief history, events in the news have already provided me with a couple of opportunities to muse why and whether Hillary Clinton might seek the presidency in 2004. Two articles in the past week have given me cause to revisit the issue again. Eleanor Clift, writing in Newsweek about Hillary, says that:

I don’t believe she’ll run in 2004, and I’m sticking to my story. But she is leaving a crack open in the event President Bush’s presidency collapses on a grander scale than we’ve seen so far, that Howard Dean implodes on his straight talk and that Clark with his quirky certitude turns out to be more Ross Perot than Dwight Eisenhower.

She continues:

Even then, Hillary would run into a buzz saw in New York because of her repeated pledge to serve out her full six years. Prematurely bolting for the presidency would play into the caricature of Hillary as a careerist and opportunist, more focused on her own ambition than what’s good for her constituents.

That's what I thought as well. But in an article in the online version of Business Week Douglas Harbrecht, in making what I consider to be a persuasive case that 2004 is apt to afford Sen. Clinton her best chance of reaching the White House, points out something I had forgotten -- if I ever knew it to begin with -- namely that Bill Clinton himself, in running for the presidency in 1992, broke a campaign pledge he had made to the people of Arkansas:

Successful candidates move when the magic strikes. Just ask Bill Clinton -- he declared flat out that he wouldn't run for President in 1992 if Arkansans reelected him to a fifth term as governor of the Razorback State in 1990. Did that Clinton's fib matter? Not a wit. Bubba saw his opportunity, and he took it.

Clinton understood that the scrapheap of politics is littered with the ambitions of those who thought they could bide their time or wait their turn for a Presidential run. Ted Kennedy hemmed and hawed for years, toying with the hearts of the party faithful, until stumbling into a disastrous slugfest with Jimmy Carter in 1980. His sense of timing couldn't have been worse.

Given all the glowing things that Bill Clinton has had to say about Clark in recent weeks and the fact that some former Clinton staffers who had been sitting on the sidelines have joined the ex-general's campaign, I figured that HRC had signalled that she had given up on 2004. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that should President Bush fall further in the polls in the coming month, all bets are off. If Clark is holding up well in the polls perhaps Hillary would consider being his VP. And should he falter, Hillary could step in as a popular compromise that supporters of both Dean (the fiery insurgent) and Clark (the sober establishment candidate) can rally behind in the general election setting up the proverbial clash of the titans: Bush v. Clinton, Round II. And perhaps Clark would consent to be Hillary's veep. The Clark-as-stalking horse thesis seems more plausible when I recall/learn that breaking a campaign promise not to seek higher office is already in the Clintons' playbook.

The key date to watch is November 21, the filing date for the New Hampshire primary.

French Declinism

Glenn Reynolds points to a good article in the IHT about the growing concern among French thinkers that their country's influence in the EU and the world is in decline. As it happens there's a similar article [subscription required] in the most recent edition of Business Week titled "The Real War is France vs. France" which lends perspective.

First, anti-American screeds continue to enjoy pride of place alongide the emerging declinist genre on France's best-seller lists:

Take alook at the non-fiction best-sellers on display at the giant Fnac Champs-Elysees store. On one side, violent attacks on America, either becuase it's an overbearing colosus -- as political scientist Pascal Boniface argues in his La France contre L'Empire (France against the Empire -- guess which one) -- or because it's a decadent, collapsing giant, as in Emmanuel Todd's Apres l'Empire (After the Empire).

But you'll find that the anti-anti Americans are out in force, too. Bernard-Henry Levy, Andre Glucksmann, and Jean-Francois Revel, among others see anti-Americanism as the default mode among French intellectuals, one that can often slide seamlessly into anti-captialism and anti-Semitism. These critics may not be fans of every US policy, but they reserve their most withering judgements for posturing French public figures.

Second, the BW article contains the results of a poll which suggests that concern about France's decline is not limited to France's intellecutal establishment:

'The only really popular theme [on the book best-seller list] is America,' says a Fnac saleswoman. "That and whether France is declining."

In a way, it's the same theme: power and the lack of it. American diplomatic and military stridency underscore the relative powerlessness of France. Thus the French pine for the days when Charles de Gualle could flamboyantly pull France and its nuclear-tipped missles out of NATO, while at the same time, according to recent polls, some 72% see their nation in decline. 'For the first time in the history of our country, people are wondering whether we are still capable of great things,' says Michael Crepu, head of the monthly Revue des Deux Mondes.

There's more commentary on the "anti-anti-American" French here [also via Instapundit]and here.

A Qualified Endorsement for Ah'nuld

I didn't see the recent California Gubernatorial debate but a Newsweek analyst seemed to think that Tom McClintock won on points; Arnold Schwarzenegger overcame low expectations; Cruz Bustamante looked bad; and Davis may have been the real winner.

I'm opposed to the recall because I don't think it's fair to Davis as he could enjoy higher popular support than any of the other candidates and still get booted out of office. I also think it is apt to inspire copy cat partisan reprisals down the road. That being said, for my money, McClintock looks to be the best qualified candidate to replace Davis. But unless Arnold drops out, which seems unlikely, McClintock doesn't appear to have a chance of beating Bustamante. Because of his name recognition and star appeal Schwarzenegger has a better chance to pick up votes from independents and democrats. Arnie is a rank political opportunist and unqualified to be governor, but then so is Bustamante. Arnold would be far more likely to be a check on the legislature which is dominated by democrats. His victory would also deny the dems another large-state governorship useful for fashioning an electorally-advantaged presidential candidacy. Finally, at the very least, Arnold promises to be highly entertaining.

Hopefully McClintock will drop out of the race if he hasn't pulled even with Arnold as the election draws nearer. I suspect his real ambition was to boost his name recognition for a later run for the governorship or a senate seat anyway.

Even those conservatives who favor the recall should consider voting against it if neither McClintock or Arnold pull out of the race. Gray Davis is prevented by term limits from running again but Bustamante could run as the incumbent for another term.

UPDATE: The Economist thinks [subscription required] that McClintock is probably unelectable because of his stand on abortion. I'm not sure that's true. I'd be an example of someone who supports the availability of abortions who would nonetheless consider voting for McClintock if he had a better chance of winning. I am heartened to learn from the same article that Arnold has tapped Milton Friedman to be an economic adviser. That clinches my endorsement.

Two-thirds of Baghdad Residents Say Saddam's Removal Worth the Hardships

A new Gallup poll of Baghdad residents finds that two-thirds believe that the hardships they have borne in the past five months was a price worth paying to rid themselves of Saddam:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 23 — After five months of foreign military occupation and the ouster of Saddam Hussein, nearly two-thirds of Baghdad residents believe that the removal of the Iraqi dictator has been worth the hardships they have been forced to endure, a new Gallup poll shows. Despite the systemic collapse of government and civic institutions, a wave of looting and violence, and shortages of water and electricity, 67 percent of 1,178 Iraqis told a Gallup survey team that within five years, their lives would be better than before the American and British invasion.

Only 8 percent of those queried said they believed that their lives would be worse off as a result of the military campaign to remove Mr. Hussein and his Baath Party leadership from power.
The survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews from Aug. 28 through Sept. 4 across the ethnically diverse landscape of the battered capital.

The results, which have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, showed that Iraqis in the capital still maintained a great deal of skepticism about the motives of the United States and Britain, and residents said they held France and its president, Jacques Chirac, in higher regard than President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who supported the American military action. [via Drudge]

Keep in mind, these are the results of a survey taken in Baghdad, the heart of the so-called "Sunni Triangle" where support for Saddam's regime is supposedly highest, and Baghdad residents have suffered the greatest hardships during the occupation. Support in other parts of the country for the invasion is higher still.

A recent Zogby poll also found Iraqis optimistic about the future. And a country-wide poll referenced in an August 24 opinion piece by Con Coughlin in the Telegraph found over 70 percent support for Saddam's ouster:

A recent survey of the Iraqis showed that more than 70 per cent supported the removal of Saddam's regime, which probably explains why the different factions and ethnic groups in Iraq have not allowed their age-old rivalries to degenerate into open civil war, as was so confidently predicted by pre-war doom-mongers.

Foreign commentators who still oppose the war must now claim to know better than the Iraqis themselves what's in their [i.e., the Iraqis'] best interest.

The Economist Fisks Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is on the road promoting his new book "The Great Unravelling." Kevin Drum was able to snare an interview with Mr. Krugman for his excellent blog Calpundit. Nice "get", as they say, Kevin.

Paul Krugman on income inequality in the U.S.:

Krugman: If you think that income inequality is one of the things that drives this [i.e., motivates Republicans] – and I do believe it's part of the story – then you have to look at the self-reinforcing process in which growing concentration of wealth at the top feeds into the political power of the people who serve that class's interest. I don't want to sound like a Marxist here, but there's some of that going on. What we thought was an explosion of inequality in the Reagan years was nothing compared to where we are now.

Drum: Purely on an economic basis, what's wrong with income inequality? Does it hurt? And why?

Krugman: Well, I think you can't do it on a pure economic basis, you have to think how it plays through the social system and the political process…

Drum: Suppose it keeps going up. What happens?

Krugman: One thing that happens is you have an adversarial kind of society, you have a society in which people don't share the same lives at all, don't share the same values. Politically, it leads to erosion of the support for public institutions that we need."

As Paul Harvey says: "And now... the rest of the story". As it happens there's a recent Economist article [subscription required] on income inequality in the U.S. just chock full 'o data that puts Mr. Krugman's alarmism into much needed perspective. Here are the "money" grafs, so to speak:

Does America really have an inequality problem? Statistically, the answer is “Yes, but”.

By whatever measure you use, the richest Americans have done very well over the past few decades. According to the Census Bureau, the share of national income going to those in the top fifth of earners rose from 44% in 1973 to 50% in 2000. The share going to the top 1% rose to 15% in 1998, higher than it has ever been since the second world war, according to a recent study of tax returns by two economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

Take wealth rather than income, and America's disparity is even more startling. The wealthiest 1% of all households controls 38% of national wealth, while the bottom 80% of households holds only 17%, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Around 85% of stockmarket wealth is held by a lucky 20%.

If the rich have been doing much better than other Americans in relative terms, the poor have failed to improve their lot as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The wage incomes of the bottom 20% of households have barely grown in real terms since the mid-1970s. As for wealth, the bottom fifth has debts that exceed its assets, making its wealth a negative number. The bottom fifth's percentage of national wealth worsened from -0.3% in 1983 to -0.6% in 1998.

These depressing statistics, though, come with two caveats. First, poorer Americans are better off than they once were. The proportion of Americans in poverty now stands at 12%; in Mr Krugman's supposedly golden 1950s, it reached 22%.

Meanwhile, although real wages appear stagnant, poor people can buy far more with them. The combination of technology and globalisation—the very thing that has depressed some manufacturing wages—has put many more erstwhile luxuries within the grasp of poorer Americans. They now own better-quality cars and washing machines than rich ones did a generation ago; mobile phones and computers are now mass-market items.

Second, America is a remarkably mobile society. As this year's Economic Report of the President points out, 50-80% of the unfortunates in America's bottom quintile push themselves into a higher quintile after 10 years. There are worries about mobility; Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute complains that marriage patterns may now be reinforcing inequalities, since yuppies marry yuppies these days. Yet, in broad terms, the idea that America is a land of opportunity still stands.

Mr. Krugman continues:

Krugman: Take this catastrophe in Alabama just now. It was a dispute about taxes, but what's ultimately at stake is, are they going to do anything to improve that dismal primary education system in Alabama or is it going to get even worse because of the budget crisis? And the answer is, it's going to get even worse.

It's funny, some of the businesses in Alabama were supporting Riley's tax plan because they actually are starting to understand that a decent education level is more important to them than a couple of points off their taxes. But it gets harder to have that sort of enlightened social policy when you have a society that's so radically differentiated.

Think of Latin America. The characteristic thing in Latin America is that they have lousy infrastructure and lousy education systems because they're so polarized on income, and in turn that leads to low development and polarized income. You get this kind of downward spiral. And there's something like that happening here."

Mr. Krugman's argument would be a lot more convincing if the U.S. were not already tops in the world for education spending.

More important than income disparity in the U.S. are the average standard of living and the welfare of the poorest. The economist again:

Seen from an international perspective, America certainly looks an unequal country, but in a way that many of those optimistic Americans might be proud of (see chart). According to the EPI, admittedly using figures from the late 1990s, the gap between the top and bottom tenth of earners in America is wider than that in almost any other rich country. Even so, America's poorest are (in real purchasing-power terms) only a tiny bit worse-off than their peers in Sweden, Finland and Denmark; and they are better-off than those in Britain and Australia.

The relative inequality in America comes from the people at the top doing unusually well. The top 10% of Americans are nearly twice as well off as the top 10% of Nordic households. They are also much further away from the mean.

Back to the interview:

Drum: But despite 20 years of this, starting in the early 80s, there's actually remarkably little class envy among the working class in America.

Krugman: Yeah, and that's partly because people don't know. There's a funny thing that happened when I had that piece on inequality from the Times magazine a year ago. I had no control over the artwork and didn't see it until everyone else saw it, and they had this big picture of what they thought was a mansion. But it wasn't a mansion, it wasn't what the really rich are building now, it was a roughly $3 million house of about 7,000 square feet, and there are a few of those in Princeton just down the road from me. The people doing the Times magazine artwork just don't realize how rich the rich are these days, what the real excesses look like, and I think that's the general thing. I think most people are not well informed, and after all who is going to inform them?

This is the income disparity that's going to be harder and harder for advocates of the social welfare model to ignore. America is going to be able to afford European levels of social spending at much lower levels of taxation and the standard of living enjoyed by Americans in the lowest income quintile will compare favorably with the average standard of living enjoyed in, say, Canada - which has a 25% lower per capita GDP than the U.S. and lags in productivity. How many Americans do you suppose realize that Canadians are, on average, a full one-quarter poorer than themselves, Mr, Krugman?

Bill Clinton Reignites Speculation About a Hillary '04 Presidential Run

Apparently Hillary's previous denials were not as firm as many supposed:

Clinton loyalists were startled yesterday to hear former President Bill Clinton suggest that his wife hasn't made up her mind yet about running for the White House. Asked in Monterey, Calif., on Tuesday about chatter that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) might join the crowded Democratic field, the former President hinted that it remained an open question. "That's really a decision for her to make," he said, according to The Californian newspaper.

She's certainly denied it often enough to be convincing to most:

The former President's statement tantalized Democrats who have heard the senator say repeatedly she will be on the presidential sidelines next year.

Didn't HRC promise she wouldn't run for the presidency during her first term in the senate when she was campaigning for the office she now holds?

In any case, I don't imagine all of this "will she or won't she run" speculation being sown by the Clintons will be much appreciated by the other Democratic candidates for the high office. She's sucking up a lot of their oxygen.

I'm still wondering about this, though.

Productivity & Unemployment

Mickey Kaus wonders how productivity growth and decline can both be bad for the economy:

Gloouis Uchitelle states the full underlying NYT breakdown theory, in which rapidly rising productivity is bad because it means fewer workers are needed to meet a given level of demand. I can see that. But Uchitelle loses me when he switches to arguing that it's also bad if productivity fails to rise rapidly. Up-bad. Down-bad. Capitalism can't win with this guy. Do "most economists" agree? ...

The answer depends upon whether one's looking at the short- or long-run. Here's an explanation from the most recent edition of the Economist [subscription required]:

In the long run, productivity growth is the single most important economic indicator. Faster growth not only boosts living standards, but should also help, eventually, to reduce America's ballooning government budget deficit through higher tax revenues, and make it easier to pay tomorrow's pensions.

But..

If productivity grows by 2.5% annually and the labour force expands by 1%, then the economy can look forward to long-run annual GDP growth of 3.5%. However, if growth is less than this, unemployment will rise. In the long run, faster productivity growth is obviously good for the economy. But in the short run, if it leads to further job losses, there is a risk that worries about jobs could severely dent consumer confidence and spending, a mixed blessing by any measure.

So, short-term unemployment pain, long-term output gain (with its attendant benefits).