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David Brooks says finally Bush got something right in Iraq.
Let’s go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-2007. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.
Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.
Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.
The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.
When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.
In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call. …
Bret Stephens says the cure for Zimbabwe is for the Brits to apply the Bush Doctrine.
Here’s a prediction: Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize’s few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe’s goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people’s well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a “violent, illegitimate sham.”
Here’s another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai’s Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe’s politics as Aung San Suu Kyi’s has had on Burma’s. Effectively, zero. …
John Tierney looks at cartels in diamonds and in oil, and asks if they will go on forever.
As Lab readers were debating Malthusianism and oil reserves, I noticed a couple of interesting items about diamonds, one of the most expensive and restricted resources on Earth.
The diamond cartel has survived more than a century, making it what Edward Jay Epstein calls “the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce.” The DeBeers cartel has kept prices of diamonds artificially high by limiting supply (and by creating demand through marketing like its 1947 slogan, “A diamond is forever.”)
Lately, though, the cartel has been under strain. “Cartel-free” diamonds are being mined and sold in Canada, where huge reserves have been discovered. (For an engrossing account of the epic quest to find diamonds near the Arctic Circle, see Kevin Krajick’s “Barren Lands.”) And now, as Ulrich Boser explains in Smithsonian, there’s a whole new threat: “virtual diamond mines” that are creating diamonds in laboratories that even the expert eye of a jeweler can’t distinguish from one found in the ground. …
Speaking of the oil Cartel, Barron’s cover story this week wonders if oil has peaked.
Oil’s sharp move up — prices have doubled in the past year — caught the world by surprise, including almost everyone involved in the petroleum market, from major exporting nations to big energy companies to the global analyst community. The rally has emboldened oil bulls, who argue the world is bumping up against oil-supply constraints, and that demand will rise inexorably, despite sharply higher prices, as the four billion to five billion people in emerging economies like China and India get a taste of the energy-intensive good life, replete with the cars, air conditioners, refrigerators and computers that Americans and Western Europeans have long enjoyed. Statistics support their view that demand growth is in its infancy in the developing world: U.S. per-capita oil consumption is 25 barrels annually, while Japan uses 14 barrels per person. China’s 1.3 billion people consume just two barrels each per year, however, and India’s 1.1 billion use less than a barrel a year.
In the next decade, oil indeed may hit $200 a barrel. But prices could fall to $100 a barrel by the end of this year if Saudi Arabia makes good on its pledge to increase production; global demand eases; the Federal Reserve begins lifting short-term interest rates; the dollar rallies, and investors stop pouring money into the oil market. China raised prices on retail gasoline and diesel fuel by 18% Thursday, in a move that is expected to curb demand.
It’s tough to know how much of the surge in crude-oil prices — up 40% just this year — reflects fundamental supply and demand, and how much is due to other factors, including the dollar, commodity speculation and interest from institutional investors. Like some others, we suspect the run-up was fueled by more than economics. …
Pickerhead was thoroughly annoyed with William Manchester when, in 1992, instead of the next volume of his Churchill biography, we got instead A World Lit Only By Fire. Then Manchester was forgiven when the book was read. Cafe Hayek has an excerpt that is good for getting our lives in perspective.
The late William Manchester’s 1992 book A World Lit Only By Fire provides a well-paced and vivid look at life in late-medieval and renaissance Europe. For example, consider his description of the homes and some common experiences of peasants (pp. 52-54):
Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard. The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling. Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot. According to Erasmus, who examined such huts, “almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer…remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome.”
The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin. Everyone slept there, regardless of age or gender — grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs — and if a couple chose to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement. In summer they could even watch…..
If this familial situation seems primitive, it should be borne in mind that these were prosperous peasants. …
Volokh Conspiracy tells a disturbing story from the University of Chicago.
The University of Chicago has decided to establish an economics research institute named after the late Milton Friedman. Normally, a university’s decision to name an institute after it’s most famous and successful professor would be a completely uncontroversial nonstory. However, over 100 University of Chicago professors have signed a letter protesting the decision. Essentially, they object to naming a research institute after Friedman because he was a libertarian rather than a liberal or leftist – even though Friedman’s academic distinction is such that he clearly deserves the honor. It is inconceivable that you could find 100 academics at Chicago or any other major university who would sign a letter opposing the creation of an institute named after a liberal academic whose intellectual achievement’s were as great as Friedman’s. …
Thomas Sowell wonders why we should imitate Europeans.
… Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.
If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies’ patents and profits, then we should do the same.
Some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.
Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the United States has been doing better than Europe for a very long time. …
Samizdata says there might be a tax revolt in Massachusetts.