Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

If You’re Looking …..

For some good, original reporting on Iraq that isn’t the same old, tired, regurgitated AP junk, I’ll recommend Bill Roggio. Yeah, I know everyone knows all about Bill, the embedded blogger, but so what. I’ve never really read him before.

Today I was about fed up with the junk I get from the AP …….. you know, so and so many killed today, Iraqi government dysfunctional, some senator some BS about the war, the ISG report, blah blah. It’s the same tired stories, over and over, with no real insight into how the troops are doing, what being on the ground is like and whether things outside Sadr City are going well, or not.

So, I checked out Bill’s site, turns out he is in Fallujah these days. Here’s a small sample of what he’s doing and writing, from a post about his journey to Fallujah.

Camp Stryker:

While waiting to catch the flight to the Green Zone, I spoke to two Army captains, one who works in Civil Affairs, the other with the Military Transition Teams. Both explained how the situation could look very different based on your job, but that the Iraqi police and Army were making real progress. They said the Iraqis’ skills ranged from poor to excellent, but they always saw improvement.

I also overheard an Army specialist sitting behind me curse the media (and I mean curse), saying they didn’t know what they were talking about when it came to Iraq. I talked to him, and explained I’m considered a reporter, and that I won’t argue with his points. I made him uncomfortable. Had he known I was ‘the press’ I think he would have kept it to himself.

Now, isn’t that more interesting than the junk that the AP, Reuters and the rest are passing off as reporting on Iraq?

footnote: By the way, don’t assume this means that I am “for” or “against” the Iraq War, that I advocate withdrawal or “staying the course” or anything else. It’s just a pitch to you to get a different perspective on Iraq, one well worth checking out. I may, or may not, post my own thoughts on Iraq at some point, we’ll see.

Stuck in Iraq Longer Than WWII?

A friend sent me this via e-mail:

U.S. Involved in Iraq Longer Than WWII

U.S. involved in Iraq war 3 years, 8-plus months – longer than it was in World War II

Only the Vietnam War (eight years, five months), the Revolutionary War (six years, nine months), and the Civil War (four years), have engaged America longer.

Fighting in Afghanistan, which may or may not be a full-fledged war depending on who is keeping track, has gone on for five years, one month. It continues as the ousted Taliban resurges and the central government is challenged.

Bush says he still is undecided whether to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq or add to the 140,000 there now.

Well, this is CBS, so you know they’re reporting it to make it sound as bad as possible. But is this truly accurate?

Yes, we’ve been in Iraq longer than than the time between Dec 7, 1941 and August 14, 1945. But if you’re measuring the time we’ve been there against the date we get a signed surrender from the insurgents, you’re going to keep waiting. But we didn’t exactly leave Japan and Germany in 1945. We were still “involved” there for much longer.

The time it took to defeat the Iraqi military, of course, was much shorter than the time it took to defeat the Japanese or German forces. In fact, we quickly destroyed Iraq’s command and control structure, and shortly thereafter felled their government. If you want to compare, perhaps we should compare the situation we’re in now with the reconstruction of Germany (which ended in 1949) and Japan (ended in 1952). Against that comparison, we’ve still got years left before we’re involved in Iraq for longer than WWII. But then again, that doesn’t paint nearly as bad of a picture, so I think we know why CBS chose to highlight this.

Of course, the situations aren’t completely analogous. I think the violent insurgency and sectarian warfare we’re facing is a lot more serious than we saw in either Germany or Japan. But, then again, the wars were considerably different as well. World War II was a long, hard-fought war, where there was considerable collateral damage. It wasn’t called collateral damage at the time, it was called “bombing the crap out of the enemy’s cities to break their will”. After four years of constant war, Europe was tired. In Iraq, we lopped off the head but the body remained. Now it’s flailing around lashing out at anything it can.

I have no problem with people who can come up with reasoned criticism of the war or the handling of the occupation. I think some of our policies have been muddled, our government has done little to justify what they’re doing and what they hope to accomplish, and the best answer we get is usually “stay the course”. It’s unacceptable whenever government refuses to justify their actions to the people.

But it’s also unfair for the media to be disingenuous with the facts. It took six years for the Allies (with four of those years including America’s participation) to achieve a military victory over Germany and Japan. It took a few months to achieve a military victory in Iraq. Trying to defeat an insurgency and police sectarian violence is not analogous to Iwo Jima and the Battle of the Bulge. To act is if they are is to play the American people for fools. One would think a respected news organization like CBS should be above such a thing, but recent history has shown otherwise.

North American Union?

Over at JasonPye.com, one of their more conservative (i.e. less libertarian) bloggers, Larry Stanley, is railing against immigration, highlighting this quote by Tom Tancredo (R-CO) (emphasis added by Larry, which I will continue here):

“People have to understand what we’re talking about here. The president of the United States is an internationalist. He is going to do what he can to create a place where the idea of America is just that – it’s an idea. It’s not an actual place defined by borders. I mean this is where this guy is really going.”

America is a place defined by borders, but it is much more than that. A year and a half ago, I argued specifically that America is an ideal, and that this nation is an approximation of that ideal:

I love America, but I don’t consider myself a “nationalist”. America, to me, is not simply a nation. America doesn’t start or end at our borders. America is an idea.

“The American Dream” is more than three little words. It is the idea that if you put your mind to something, the only thing that will cause your success or failure is the strength of your idea and your work. The government, ‘the man’, isn’t going to keep you down. The American Dream is an expression of the triumph of human potential. It is, in three little words, the idea that you can be all that you desire and more.

When you read the words of many of the idealists who founded our nation, they didn’t believe our birthright of liberty came as a result of being born in America, they believed these rights to be inherent in all of humanity. They were determined to set up a nation based upon those rights, and thus America was born. But the rights came first, and the nation came later.

The worry of these folks is that we will one day be a de facto North American Union, where most of the barriers between the US and Mexico will be as easily-traversable as France to Germany. It is a call for little more than protectionism, to deny those who aren’t already here from the chance to join in the American ideal. They are afraid that if we respect the rights of new entrants to our nation, it will somehow diminish their rights. But that’s not how it works.

William Allen White said it best: “Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you give it to others.” These folks are asking that other people, stuck in horrible third-world countries where the rule of law and property rights are not even fathomable, much less respected, just accept it. Their position is that because these people were not born here in the United States, they are not deserving of the blessings of liberty. It may be easy to tell someone in a nation where tyranny is enforced by jackbooted thugs with automatic weapons that it is their responsibility to win their freedom. But it downright cruel to turn them away when they escape those nations to live the dream of freedom here.

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American Economy As A Family

Over at Control Congress, there’s a post about How Bad Trade Deals are Destroying the Middle Class. It was a call for greater protectionism, because the authors believe that we are not negotiating trade deals that are free. Perhaps the authorities could do with some more training in negotiation if people are feeling so disenfranchised.

These days comparable numbers are imports are 16.22% of GDP and exports are 10.46% of GDP. Per se, there is nothing wrong with trade growing as a percent of GDP. However, the brutal reality is that our nation can no longer pay its bills. Imports of goods are almost double exports of goods. We enjoy a small (and shrinking) surplus on services and are now in deficit for payments (profits received from overseas US investments versus profit earned by foreign investment in the US). This is why American families look into their own type of investments to see how they can individually help themselves. Firstly they may look into stocks for beginners, aka – aksjer for nybegynnere, and take it from there, this can help towards retirement, living wills, etc.

If you could only pay half of your bills, your debts would be soaring. Guess what? So are the debts of the United States. Of course, the national debt is growing and more than 50% owned by foreigners. However, the debts of ordinary Americans are rising as well and a growing percentage are owned by foreigners as well. With growing debt across the nation comes a growing need for solutions such as Consolidation Loans to help people come out of these financial dilemmas.

The trade debate is usually depicted in terms of “cramped, narrow minded, locally oriented protectionists” versus “visionary, open minded, free trading globalists”. This caricature is largely correct. However, that doesn’t mean the protectionists are wrong. With America going broke, they are at least on the right side of the issue..

Now, I’m reflexively against protectionism. I could point to just about every post at the Eidelblog, as Perry is very strong on this subject, but a very recent post at Coyote Blog makes the point even better. Even without the trade deals being ideal, we’re likely to be getting the better end of the deal than the Chinese people.

But I decided to go a different route. I drew an analogy in the comments section over there, and I thought it was a pretty good one:

Is America going broke, or is the US Government going broke?

Think of it like a household. You’ve got two working parents who own a small business, paying their bills, getting increases to their income every year, etc. Overall, they’re doing fine. Then you’ve got a spoiled brat of a child, who wants to spend, spend, and spend some more, but the parents have put on an allowance.

The US Government is the spoiled child. That’s not a problem so far.

The problem is when you give the spoiled child a credit card. Now the child can get themselves into trouble and require the parents to bail them out. And if the child spends too much, it can overwhelm the parent’s ability to pay the bill. At the very least, it forces the parents to put off capital expenditures that could grow their small business (and thus their income). They want to go to the bank to get a loan for their business, but the bank won’t lend to them (it’s got it’s money lent out through its credit card branch, and their child’s debt make them a bad risk). They now have to start looking at Credit Cards for No Credit because those cards will be the only way they can borrow any money.

The parents are the US economy. The child is the government. The credit card is public debt, and China is the bank/credit card company.

The problem has nothing to do with trade. The problem has to do with a government that is spending more money than it’s taking in, and is getting so far in debt that the people giving it an allowance (the taxpayers) are in danger of being overwhelmed paying off its debt.

A trade deficit isn’t a bad thing, if China were spending its money investing in US equities/etc, that could be fueling economic growth. Instead they’re investing their money in T-bills, fueling government spending that is little more than a sink-hole, affecting economic growth little (if at all). Then, when the bill comes due, the government will have to take money out of the economy (further damaging economic growth) to finance their burden.

If we had a trade deficit with China, and they were using their excess dollars to invest in American business, we’d be in good shape. We can use that investment to make more jobs here than what we outsource to “over there”. Unfortunately, we’ve got a spoiled child spending our money, giving us back nothing useful for it, and sucking up the money we need to build our economy.

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