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This week’s Newsweek magazine has this cover story; Victory at Last – The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq. Kathryn Lopez starts off a few Corner posts on the subject. We’ll end with Peter Wehner.
… In 2006, the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami wrote a powerful and stylistically beautiful book, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. That gift, Ajami said, was the idea of consensual government. It is a gift we gave the Iraqis at the cost of many American lives and much treasure. It is a gift they appear to have received.
“Iraq seemed the most forbidding place for a campaign of reform, the hardest soil,” Ajami wrote during the darkest days of the war. “Yet every now and then, that country offered glimpses of hope that Iraqis may yet pull off a decent political world that works. There were days its sectarianism seemed like an affliction that would never go away. Then there were hints that the multiplicity of its communities could yet support a politics, and a culture, of pluralism.”
The Iraqis were not as enchanted with tyranny or indifferent to democracy as some critics of the war insisted.
What America has done for Iraq, which had been brutalized for so long, may not be the noblest act in our history. But it ranks quite high. The Iraq war was, in fact, a war of liberation. And the liberation appears to be working. Nothing is guaranteed; “Everything in Iraq is hard,” Ambassador Crocker once said. But regardless of where one stood on the war and the surge, what we see unfolding in Iraq today is something to be grateful for, and to take pride in.
In the NY Times, Efraim Karsh discusses the lack of cohesion amongst the Islamic states and the implications for US foreign policy.
…So, if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations, what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?
For one, it should give us more impetus to take a harder line with Iran. Just as the Muslim governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament, so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions, or even a military strike.
Beyond the customary lip service about Western imperialism and “Crusaderism,” most other Muslim countries would be quietly relieved to see the extremist regime checked. It’s worth noting that the two dominant Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been at the forefront of recent international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. …
In the WSJ, Bret Stephens writes about how Milton Friedman, and free market ideas, helped Chile to become South America’s most prosperous nation.
…In 1973, the year the proto-Chavista government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile was an economic shambles. Inflation topped out at an annual rate of 1000%, foreign-currency reserves were totally depleted, and per capita GDP was roughly that of Peru and well below Argentina’s.
What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman’s academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile’s “Chicago Boys” had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.
…Pinochet … In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.
…By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet’s democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America’s richest people. They have the continent’s lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.
Chile also has some of the world’s strictest building codes. That makes sense for a country that straddles two massive tectonic plates. But having codes is one thing, enforcing them is another. The quality and consistency of enforcement is typically correlated to the wealth of nations. …
Bill Kristol says that Republicans did not stop Obama. Here’s who did:
(1) President Obama himself. As one wag commented, Obama turned out to be quite an effective community organizer. But the community he organized was a majority of the American people in opposition to his agenda of big-government liberalism.
(2) Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Republicans, facing overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, should thank their lucky stars to have squared off against an ideologically blinkered speaker of the House and a short-tempered, incompetent majority leader of the Senate.
(3) Conservative and independent grassroots activists. It’s this simple: No Tea Parties, no defeat of Obamacare. It wasn’t just the practical and political effect of the demonstrations across the nation. It was the example of people not being intimidated by elite opinion, the example of their willingness to fight what was supposed to be an inevitable new era of liberal big government, and the enterprise that self-generating and self-organizing activists showed in resisting the Obama agenda. …
Robert Samuelson says that politicians on both sides of the aisle have delusions about the budget. We disagree with part of Samuelson’s assessment regarding tax cuts, as the Reagan tax cuts fueled economic growth after the disastrous Carter years. However, Republicans have done little in recent decades to restrain government growth or reduce spending, which has contributed to the current economic crisis and increased the national debt.
…On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.
Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t. Just recently, the Democratic Congress passed a new version of the “pay-go” budget rule. Under pay-as-you-go rules, if Congress cuts taxes or increases spending beyond present policies, it must find offsets by raising taxes or cutting spending elsewhere. This seems a prudent discipline, and Obama bragged about being “responsible.” What he didn’t say is that this new pay-go contains huge exceptions. These include the renewal of most of the Bush tax cuts, revisions of the alternative minimum tax, higher Medicare reimbursements for doctors and overhaul of the estate tax. Over the next decade, these exceptions could be worth about $2.5 trillion, says Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. …
David Harsanyi examines the conflict of interest in the government investigating Toyota while owning GM.
…The other majority shareholder in GM (also on your dime) is the United Auto Workers union. As Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner recently uncovered, 59 Democrats serving on the two congressional panels involved in the investigation of the non-unionized Toyota had received re-election campaign contributions from UAW.
Then there is the administration. Less than a year ago, Ford — a private, non-government good ol’ American corporation — issued the largest single recall in its long history. A total of 4.5 million vehicles were recalled after it was learned that faulty switches were fire hazards.
At the time, the Obama administration’s overmatched Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood gently prodded customers “to pay attention.” When news of Toyota’s problems began to emerge, before we even knew what it was all about, LaHood told Americans to “stop driving” them. (He later claimed to have misspoke.) …
…There is, however, an unsettling conflict of interest. Whatever happened with these cars, the subsequent investigation creates suspicion about the motives of those involved. And just another of countless reasons that Washington should stay out of the car business.
In the NY Times, Ross Douthat sees presidential material in Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
…Since then, though, he’s become America’s best governor. In a just world, Daniels’s record would make him the Tea Party movement’s favorite politician. During the fat years of the mid-2000s, while most governors went on spending sprees, he was trimming Indiana’s payroll, slowing the state government’s growth, and turning a $800 million deficit into a consistent surplus. Now that times are hard, his fiscal rigor is paying off: the state’s projected budget shortfall for 2011, as a percentage of the budget, is the third-lowest in the country.
But Daniels hasn’t just been a Dr. No on policy. His “Healthy Indiana” plan, which offers catastrophic coverage to low-income residents, aspires to eventually cover 130,000 people, about a third of the state’s long-term uninsured. He’s pushed targeted investments in kindergarten programs, the police force and the child welfare office. And he’s been a pragmatic free-marketeer, rather than a strict ideologue. His controversial decision to lease the Indiana toll road reaped $3.8 billion for the state. But when an attempt to outsource welfare enrollment went awry, Daniels yanked the system back into the public sector.
…And unlike both CPAC-goers and his party’s leadership, Daniels was blunt about the challenges of deficit reduction. “There’s been some very healthy hell-raising going on in the country,” he said of the Tea Parties. “But to my knowledge, nobody’s gotten up in front of those rallies and explained what’s going to have to happen.” His ideal approach to the deficit would look like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, all spending restraint and no new taxes. But one way or another, deficit reduction “has to be done” — even if “you have to take the second- or third-best method.” …
Nancy Pelosi’s hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has an article from Sally Pipes on the dismal state of the Canadian healthcare system.
…Danny Williams, the premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, traveled to the United States earlier this month to undergo heart valve surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. With his trip, Williams joined a long list of Canadians who have decided that they prefer American medicine to their own country’s government-run health system when their lives are on the line. …
…Lawmakers should take Williams’ case to heart. Canada’s experience shows that government health care leads to waiting lists, rationing and lower quality of care. …
…Canadian patients also face wait times for medical procedures. Nearly 700,000 Canadians are on a waiting list for surgery or other treatments.
A Canadian patient has to wait roughly four months for the average surgical or other therapeutic treatment. Wait times were similar a decade ago – even though the government has substantially increased health care spending since then. …
This is an editorial from the Chicago Tribune that was posted in Pickings last August. Chicago aldermen had been trying to prevent a Wal-Mart from opening on the south side of Chicago. This is background for the next story.
…When that Chicago store opened in 2006, it was flooded with applicants for 450 jobs. But the aldermen want to dodge a vote to allow another Wal-Mart — the first on the South Side — because they’re petrified over the influence of organized labor on local elections.
Organized labor doesn’t like Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart doesn’t have union jobs. It just has jobs (with an average hourly wage of $12.05 in Chicago).
The aldermen, of course, already have jobs. They get paid $110,556 a year and they figure that as long as they keep the labor unions off their backs, they’ll keep making $110,556 a year. Who says the City Council doesn’t generate jobs? If you’re one of the 50 aldermen, your unemployment rate is 0 percent.
But the unemployment rate for the rest of Chicago is above 10 percent. …
Chicago Business.com tells us about a coalition of South-side ministers prepared to fight the Chicago government to get Wal-Marts built in Chicago. This is not your president’s community organizing. It’s much better.
…The alliance of just over 200 ministers, representing more than 100,000 congregants, will first demand that Mayor Richard M. Daley grant administrative approval to begin construction of a Wal-Mart at the Chatham Market shopping center, saving that project from falling into foreclosure. The group also will pressure aldermen to approve that store and others in retail-starved neighborhoods such as Englewood and Pullman.
If, as appears likely, more Wal-Marts don’t get the green light this year, the ministers say they’ll mount a campaign against aldermen who oppose the big retailer’s expansion. Taking a page from union groups that have held Wal-Mart back, the ministers say they will support candidates in favor of the store with political advertising and urge their congregants to vote against dissenters.
“The pressure must be applied, starting with the mayor,” says the Rev. Larry Roberts of Trinity All Nations Ministries on the South Side. “The procrastination is just bringing more damage to the city and the communities.”
…The pastors are betting that community sentiment in favor of Wal-Mart has grown immensely as store closings and job losses have piled up, leaving Wal-Mart the only viable hope in many poor neighborhoods