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The Camp David Agreements, far from being a Jimmy Carter accomplishment, succeeded in spite of him. He was spinning his wheels trying to impose a comprehensive settlement of all Mid-East problems. Arthur Herman has the story.
… Interestingly, the man who ultimately prevented this Carter-led calamity from unfolding was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sadat decided that Egypt needed to start from scratch in its relationship with Israel. Sadat found natural allies in Nixon and Mr. Kissinger after throwing out his Soviet patrons in 1972. With American support, he came to a disengagement agreement with Israel in 1973, and again in 1975. The culmination of this process was Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, where he discussed a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, and forestalled Mr. Carter’s plan for a Geneva peace conference.
It was this trip — not Camp David — that marked the true seismic shift in Middle East relations since Israel’s founding. It came as an unwelcome surprise to the Carter foreign policy team, who still wanted their grandiose Geneva conference. In fact, for the better part of 1977, as Israel and Egypt negotiated, the White House persisted in acting as if nothing had happened. Even after Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Mr. Carter announced that “a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.”
But by the autumn of 1978, the rest of Mr. Carter’s foreign policy had crumbled. He had pushed through an unpopular giveaway of the Panama Canal, allowed the Sandinistas to take power in Nicaragua as proxies of Cuba, and stood by while chaos grew in the Shah’s Iran. Desperate for some kind of foreign policy success in order to bolster his chances for re-election in 1980, Mr. Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David. …
Forget the economics, David Warren wants to understand the psychology of stimulus.
There is no good reason to listen to economists just now. This is no fault of the economists themselves, some of whom I have found to be very sensible fellows. (I wasted several years of my life in economic journalism, learning just how sensible.) But the discipline of economics, which is partly a science, and partly an art, and partly pure bluster like other human enterprises, is founded and can only be founded on the notion that human beings behave rationally (on the analogy of lab rats).
Sometimes they do, as David Brooks, a token “conservative” columnist in the New York Times, was arguing on Thursday, using biological jargon from our contemporary phrenologists, or “cognitive scientists” as they call themselves.
When the human animal is placed in a game with fairly predictable rewards and punishments, only the stupidest consistently reach for the punishments.
But when the rules of the game are suddenly changed, or rather, withdrawn and replaced by chaos, decision-making is transferred to that region of the brain our phrenologists call the “amygdala.” It is where they think emotions originate. We have what is politely called “non-linear” thinking.
I might disagree with Mr. Brooks about how the chaos is being created. He seems to think the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress are acting on economic models and analyses that are rational in themselves, but cannot anticipate human behaviour. I think they are acting in a state of growing panic, in which they cite whichever “expert” spoke to them last, to justify lining the pockets of their cronies with whatever money they can find. But the result, on either view, is the same. ..
$8 Billion for high speed rail between Disneyland and Las Vegas!? Bill Kristol tells us how that happened.
One of many highlights of the stimulus bill the Democrats just rammed through Congress is $8 billion for high-speed rail. What makes this appropriation special is that there was no money for high-speed rail in the original House legislation. The Senate bill had $2 billion. The legislation coming out of conference “compromised” on $8 billion.
How did this happen? Well, some of that $8 billion, as the Washington Post reported Friday, seems intended for “a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.” Reid of course played a major role in putting together the final bill.
That’s the kind of policymaking the new Obama administration has embraced in its signature legislative proposal: a congressional process as unseemly as ever; an emergency bill that barely addresses the emergency; a “stimulus” bill short on stimulus (is that magnetic-levitation rail line “shovel-ready”?).
What accounts for this debacle? You could start with a lack of presidential leadership. Who would have thought the missing player in the first month of the administration would be Barack Obama? He let his signature economic legislation, the stimulus, be shaped by congressional Democrats. …
Mark Steyn Corner posts.
Re Cambridge University’s de-imperialized “Empire Ball“, many many readers write to insist I point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups”‘ litany of evil - “the British Empire’s association with slavery”.
The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Thanks to William Wilberforce and the brave men of the Royal Navy, an institution that hitherto had been regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky was expunged from most of the globe. …
Volokh post on corrupt Eastern PA judges that will turn your stomach.
Before The Bill, the latest disaster from our government was ethanol. Even the NY Times got the message.
… “The ethanol industry is on its back despite the billions of dollars they have gotten in taxpayer assistance, and a guaranteed market,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy analyst at Rice University.
The government’s Energy Information Administration recently projected that the industry would fall short of the targets for expanded use of ethanol and other biofuels that Congress set in a 2007 energy law. “It’s possible we may have to look at the targets again,” said Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
VeraSun Energy, one of the nation’s largest ethanol producers, has suspended production at 12 of its 16 plants and is planning to sell production facilities. In recent days Renew Energy, Cascade Grain Products and Northeast Biofuels have filed for bankruptcy protection. Pacific Ethanol said it would suspend operations at its Madera, Calif. plant.
Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group, estimated that of the country’s 150 ethanol companies and 180 plants, 10 or more companies have shut down 24 plants over the last three months. That has idled about 2 billion gallons out of 12.5 billion gallons of annual production capacity. Mr. Dinneen estimated that a dozen more companies were in distress. …
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