The worst laid plans

The best laid plans of mice and men,
go oft awry,
And leave us nought but grief and pain,
for promised joy.

......Robert Burns

Of course when were talking about Iraq we are talking about the worst laid plans or lack of a plan at all so it's not too surprising that it has gone very awry and left us with much pain and grief. Leon Hadar tells us about Risk of 'Blowbacks' in Iraq.
It all started in Afghanistan:

In the spy business, "blowback" is a term used to describe unintended negative consequences of actions taken by intelligence agencies to advance national interests. The phrase was allegedly coined by spooks at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to an agent, an operative or an operation that turned on its creator.

Indeed, given prior US support of the Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan during the Cold War and purportedly also of Osama bin Laden, it could be argued that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack was the most prominent contemporary example of blowback, since some contend that this US backing actually helped build Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as a geopolitical force.

Officials in the administrations that provided US assistance to the Islamic guerillas fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan justified their policies by arguing that they helped force the Soviets out of that country and played a crucial role in the process that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually to the end of the Cold War.

And now it's Iraq:

....only few analysts had foreseen that the anti-communist jihadists that were allied with the Americans during the Cold War would turn on their promoters and form the most violent anti-American force in the world today. Is it possible that 10 years from now as Americans would recall the US military in Iraq, the ousting of Saddam Hussein from power, and the first multiparty elections in that country in 50 years, they would be once again pondering the negative outcomes of the another US policy that was supposed to rid Iraq of an evil dictator, to establish a democracy in Mesopotamia that would serve as a shining model to the entire Middle East, and in the process advance US national interests and promote its values of liberty and freedom?

Enter the Shiites:

For the Shiites, who were repressed by the ruling Arab Sunni minority since the creation of Iraq by the British, the fall of Saddam and their electoral victory marks their assertion to power as an ethnic and religious group that has been marginalised and despised not only by Saddam and his Baath party, but also by other Arab-Sunni and pro-American regimes in the region.

From that perspective, American policy has helped make Iraq safe, not for liberal democracy and individual rights, but for religious and ethnic identity – strengthening the Shiites and the Kurds while radicalising the Sunnis.

Moreover, even the most moderate elements in the Shiite leadership, reflecting the prevailing views in their community, are bound to adopt policies that would formalise their religion's influence on public and private life, weakening protection for the rights of women and minorities.

Similarly, the empowerment of Iraq's Shiite majority would encourage the spread of Iranian influence in Iraq and the region. It is a development that would energise Shiite groups in the Persian Gulf and the Levant most of whom, not unlike the Hizbollah in Lebanon, espouse a religious and political agenda that is antithetical to US values and interests.

So once again US policy makers have failed to take into account the "realities" of the Islamic movement. This time rather than creating a Democratic haven in the middle east we have created an Islamic theocracy that will be pro Iranian and anti American. The early results of the election in Iraq would seem to be the first indications of this "blowback".

Edit
Over at The Left Coaster pessimist has a related post. It's long but worth a read.

Sully finds some inconsistencies

Andrew Sullivan found some contradictory statements from the right.

"At least 12,000 American troops and probably more should leave at once, to send a stronger signal about our intentions and to ease the pervasive sense of occupation." (Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), January 27, 2005).

"America's willful defeatists — led by Senator Ted Kennedy, who chose to declare our cause all but lost just days before this historic vote — look particularly puny in light of the millions who turned out to vote because they believe in the new Iraq." (National Review Online, January 31, 2005.)

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says that with the election in Iraq over he believes 15,000 U.S. troops can be withdrawn, reducing the American military force to 135,000." (Associated Press, February 4, 2005).

So, I guess that makes Paul Wolfowitz one of "America's willful defeatists".

you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft,........

.......provided you also feed them arsenic.
As we might anticipate, Paul Krugman does the best job of explaining Bush's plan to "save" Social Security. I will start with his final paragraph:

Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.

So, what is the plan? Krugman explains that "the plan" amounts to the government loaning you money at 3 percent. If your government selected "safe" portfolio does better than 3 percent you will be better off, if not you lose. It's like going to the horse races and letting someone you don't know chose which horses you should bet on. Here is how it works:

"In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system. Now, the way that election is structured, the person comes out ahead if their personal account exceeds a 3 percent rate of return" - after inflation - "which is the rate of return that the trust fund bonds receive. So, basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent rate of return."

Translation: If you put part of your payroll taxes into a personal account, your future benefits will be reduced by an amount equivalent to the amount you would have had to repay if you had borrowed the money at a real interest rate of 3 percent.
[....]
The only way to get ahead would be to invest in risky assets like stocks, and hope for higher yields. But if the investment went wrong and you earned less than 3 percent after inflation, your benefit cuts would leave you poorer than if you had never opened that private account.

So people are expected to take a loan from the government and use it to buy stocks, and if that turns out to have been a mistake - well, too bad.

So that great financial advisor George W. Bush is telling you to do exactly what investment advisors would tell you not to do.

Experts usually tell people to plan for their retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. They disapprove strongly of speculation on margin: borrowing to buy stocks. Yet Mr. Bush wants tens of millions of Americans to do exactly that.

OK, but it's going to "fix" Social Security you say. Well not exactly.

Here's the senior official again: "In a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of Social Security." The government would have to borrow huge sums up front to create the personal accounts - $4.5 trillion in the first two decades - but it would supposedly make up for all that borrowing with offsetting cuts in account holders' benefits many decades later.

Color me skeptical: will retirees with private accounts that performed badly really be forced to repay their loans in full? Even if they are, private accounts will at best have a "net neutral effect" - that is, they will do nothing to improve Social Security's finances. Mr. Bush says the system faces a crisis; what does he propose to do about it?

His "plan" will do nothing and in fact will only make it worse. That can only mean there are going to be some future benefit cuts he kind of left out of the speech. Remember WMD? Remember Saddam's ties to al Queda? That's where the title of the post comes in.

...his plan will also involve major benefit cuts over and above those associated with private accounts. And it's true that you can improve Social Security's finances with privatization, as long as you also slash benefits - just as you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic. (Thanks, M. Voltaire.)

I don't know about you but I wouldn't want George W. Bush as my investment advisor and I wouldn't take any of his friends to the horse races.

Lies about Iraq, The List

Via our conservative friends at LewRockwell.com comes this from Eliot Weinberger, What I Heard about Iraq. He has a list of what Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and the CIA were saying about Iraq before 9-11. A few hours after the 9-11 attack Rumsfeld said:

On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’

He then lists the litany of lies following 9-11. Nothing new but all the lies in one place. Give it a look.

Cross posted at Middle Earth Journal.

A Modest Proposal

I would like to make a suggestion that I feel would be apropos regardless of who is in the White House.

Let's rename the State of the Union address to something that's a little more truth-in-advertising:

Ladies and gentlemen, you didn't just learn about the State of the Union last night ... you had a first-row seat for the 2005 Presidential Commercial (Extended Edition)™.

Other bloggers — both here and elsewhere — have made far more astute analysis of Dubya's blabbering prattle than I could, especially since I find myself repulsed every time I hear the man speak and usually can't force myself to watch him espouse American neocon fascism.

I was encouraged, though, to see (well, rather, read) the Democrats' response, as it seemed to begin to do some rudimentary framing, instead of going the nay-saying course:

It's time that America's government lived up to the same values as America's families. It's time we invested in America's future and made sure our people have the skills to compete and thrive in a 21st century economy. That's what Democrats believe, and that's where we stand, and that's what we'll fight for.

And later on:

Good, new jobs, world-class education, affordable health care -- these things matter.

Reid went on to do a KILLER bit of framing:

Too many of the president's economic policies have left Americans and American companies struggling. And after we worked so hard to eliminate the deficit, his policies have added trillions to the debt -- in effect, a "birth tax" of $36,000 on every child that is born.

"Birth tax." The Democrats have to just RAM that sucker down the American people's throats. That's a GREAT piece of framing.

Science!

OK, it's not so political, but in this world where people forget that the theory of evolution actually means that there's facts to back it up, it's nice to see something all science-like and fact-y.

Scientists Find Missing Matter has all the science talk I could want. I thrilled to their talk of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory! I giggled at the thought that "baryon" is a real word! And when they talk about "dark matter", they're not implying that it's anything that has to be solved with any kind of freedom march.

Yes, the big words like "extrapolation" are a soothing balm to my soul.

A Sotus Take

Go check out Shakespeare's Sister's take on the SOTUS and the lame Democratic response. Here is a tickler:

How can a speech riddled with references to freedom and equality contain a call for a federal marriage amendment denying rights to a sizable portion of the American public? Or a demand to make tax cuts favoring the wealthiest permanent? Or a recommitment to funding faith-based initiatives over those which, in a country where freedom to practice or not practice religion as one sees fit, do good works in the name of humanity instead of God? Unmitigated horseshit.

Go check out the rest.

Repealing the New Deal

As most realize the goal of Bush's Social Security "reform" is to destroy it. Harold Meyerson points out in the Washington Post today we won't hear that tonight, we will only hear more of the nonsense that it's going broke.

Tonight the president of the United States will come before Congress and call for the repeal of the New Deal.

Not frontally, of course. Indeed, George W. Bush has taken to invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt as a fellow experimenter-in-arms. That's true as far as it goes, but the goal of Bush's experiment is to negate Roosevelt's.

And this attack is nothing new and infact is as old as Social Security itself.

The roots of Bush's speech tonight go back almost as far as the New Deal itself. Social Security was enacted in 1935, and in 1936 Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon questioned its solvency.

Since Landon (who carried two states against Roosevelt's 46), right-wing attacks on Social Security have proceeded along two lines: those that doubted its solvency and those that disparaged its ideology.

Bush is on the wrong side of the ideological argument against Social Security and he knows it. He will once again try to convince the people of the US that it is bankrupt.

And so we will hear tonight that Social Security may be doing fine today, but it will be a toothless geezer of a program by the time today's young people hit 65. There will be so many retirees living so long that only by redirecting young people's money out of the program and into the market will we preserve the solvency of the old.

All this is nonsense, of course. According to the system's actuaries, if we do nothing at all, the system will remain in the black, paying out full benefits, straight through 2042. Beyond then, its liabilities will amount to just a fraction of 1 percent of the national income. The program, like all programs, could use some modest fixes over time, and by such measures as raising revenue through a hike on the employer's payroll tax (by eliminating the cap on taxable employee income), it can be fixed.

But Bush is not seeking to strengthen a strong system; he's seeking to dismantle it. The private (or "personal," in poll-tested Bushese) accounts we'll hear so much about tonight provide the pretext for slashing benefits to future retirees by as much as 40 percent. As with that village in Vietnam, it's become necessary to destroy Social Security in order to save it.

Keep in mind what you hear from Bush tonight on Social Security is a lie. He can't sell his plan to destroy it based on ideology so he will lie about it's solvency. I think we have learned by now that the "morale values" of George W. Bush don't include telling the truth.

Tonight, we'll hear that a great system is in trouble. It is, but only because the people who run the government wish it ill.

Educational Segment Deux

The rest of the World.

I apologize for the inherent bias in posting the link to USA first, and then a world map version. However, that is the order in which I found them.

Unfortunately, this test doesn't work quite the same way, and it's a bit tougher.

Linkapalooza

My brain is just not set on "insightful analysis" these last two days. (Guy in the Peanut Gallery calls out, "Was it ever?" Ba dum dum.) Anyway, these are a couple of links I had been meaning to write more about, but I don't think it's going to happen, so I'll just post them up here for your interest and edification. Enjoy ...

From the L.A. Times, via Kos: "Some senior Democratic operatives say unease about a Dean chairmanship is widespread among congressional leaders and many governors. But almost none of those grumbling privately have expressed their concerns publicly -- in part, some believe, because they fear crossing the ardent grass-roots, Internet-activist community still backing Dean." As Kos points out, nice that they're finally fearing people, not special interests. I'm cautiously optimistic about Dean's chances on the 12th.

On the opposite side, this numbskull's enough to make you want to become a neocon. In it, he calls the WTC victims "little Eichmanns," and refers to the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that killed three thousand Americans. You can read his full essay here if you have the stomach.

Two startlingly racist moments in Johnny Carson's Tonight Show legacy were captured on film here. (Do I think he was racist? No, not really. But the sketches display remarkably poor taste, especially jarring given Carson's usually impeccable sensibilities.)

"Manna," a rather interesting science fiction short story/economic forecast (that does speak heavily to economic policy, so it's not really out in left field for this blog).

Angelina Jolie, with regards to celebrities advocating for charities: "Celebrities have a responsibility to know absolutely what they're talking about, and to be in it for the long run." Beautiful and not afraid to be politically incorrect: a wonderful double whammy.

New York Times, "Men Are Becoming the Ad Target of the Gender Sneer": "The 'man as a dope' imagery has gathered momentum over the last decade, and critics say that it has spiraled out of control. It is nearly impossible, they say, to watch commercials or read ads without seeing helpless, hapless men. In the campaigns, which the critics consider misandry (the opposite of misogyny), men act like buffoons, ogling cars and women; are likened to dogs, especially in beer and pizza ads; and bungle every possible household task."

Are you an urban dweller? Wonder what you'd do if the subway caught fire? Read this guy's firsthand account.

Roger Ebert condemns neocon movie critics (e.g., Michael Medved) who spoil the plot to further political agendas in their reviews — specifically in regards to "Million Dollar Baby." Warning: the essay contains a large plot spoiler for the movie, although Ebert (appropriately enough, given the subject of the article) warns you off if you've not seen it.

And, finally, a grammatical tidbit, just 'cause I feel like it: e.g. = exempli gratia = for example = useful if you're giving one example of something, when there's many available = "many vegetables (e.g., peas, carrots) taste gooky." i.e. = id est = in other words = think "synonym" = "the most corrupt President in our nation's history (i.e., George W. Bush) stays away from pretzels nowadays."

Social Security And Fuzzy Math

I think that most of us now by now that the intention of Bush's Social Security "reform" is to slay what they see as an evil dragon from the New Deal not save it. Paul Krugman checks their math today and finds it has some major flaws. He shows that if the economic assumptions they make for their estimated returns in stocks are true then Social Security will not go broke.

They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don't need to worry about Social Security's future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.

Alternatively, privatizers can unhappily admit that future stock returns will be much lower than they have been claiming. But without those high returns, the arithmetic of their schemes collapses.

It really is that stark: any growth projection that would permit the stock returns the privatizers need to make their schemes work would put Social Security solidly in the black.

And I suspect that at least some privatizers know that. Mr. Baker has devised a test he calls "no economist left behind": he challenges economists to make a projection of economic growth, dividends and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years. Not one economist who supports privatization has been willing to take the test.

So like everything else that we hear from this administration the numbers on the return from "private" accounts and the date the Social Security System becomes insolvent are just bogus numbers with no basis in fact. Once again, kind of like the mythical WMD's.

Educational segment

How well do you know where to place your states?

I was off by an average of 13 miles, because I got Oklahoma off by 91 miles and missed Missippi's shoreline.

HAL uses Google

What made the HAL 9000 computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey so smart? Maybe it was Google.
Google's search for meaning

Computers can learn the meaning of words simply by plugging into Google. The finding could bring forward the day that true artificial intelligence is developed.

Trying to get a computer to work out what words mean - distinguish between "rider" and "horse" say, and work out how they relate to each other - is a long-standing problem in artificial intelligence research.

One of the difficulties has been working out how to represent knowledge in ways that allow computers to use it. But suddenly that is not a problem any more, thanks to the massive body of text that is available, ready indexed, on search engines like Google (which has more than 8 billion pages indexed).

The meaning of a word can usually be gleaned from the words used around it. Take the word "rider". Its meaning can be deduced from the fact that it is often found close to words like "horse" and "saddle". Rival attempts to deduce meaning by relating hundreds of thousands of words to each other require the creation of vast, elaborate databases that are taking an enormous amount of work to construct.

I wonder if Yahoo search works too.

The Iraqi Elections....My 2 bits worth

Bull Moosetells us we should have a "Rational Exuberance" over yesterdays Iraqi elections. I don't have enough information yet. I've learned over the past four years that I can't rely on any information I receive from the Bush administration or the US media, it's all propaganda. As James Wolcott reported yesterday FOX news let this slip out the day before the election.

Yesterday on one of the Fox financial shows, James Rogers, author of Investment Biker, commodities guru, and neighbor-down-the-block (an utterly irrelevant detail I thought I'd toss in to make this blog sound more "personal"), was asked by host Neil Cavuto whether the elections in Iraq would be successful. Rogers said, "They'll be successful because the media will say they're successful," adding impishly, "Fox News probably already has the results."

Juan Cole tells us

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country.

Jazz thinks that they voted for food.

The initial turnout number was given as 72 percent and latter reduced to 60 percent but these were both numbers just picked out of the air. Of course the ever compliant American Pravda immediately reported them as if they were fact. Kind of like WMD's I guess.
Am I cynical because I want Bush to fail? No, I'm cynical because of my experiences with the Bush administration and the media over the last four years. I'm sorry Moose, it's a little early for me to be rationally exuberant, I remain rationally cynical.

The Morale Values of the Bush Administration........

.....Guantánamo edition.
Maureen Dowd has the shocking story of torture at Guantánamo Bay using sex. I'm not going to copy and paste the detail here, just go to the link. The idea that this administration has any concept of "morale values" should be totally put to rest by details in this report. She references this AP interview with Erik R. Saar who confirmed the accuracy of a draft manuscript written by a former Army sergeant. That report is classified but has been leaked to AP. This should be must reading for all of the Radical Christian Wingnuts who voted for George W. Bush and his administration on "Morale Values". Listen wingers, I guarantee that Jesus doesn't want anything to do with you if these are your "morale values" too. Go check out the above links for the shocking details and be warned, they are shocking.