View 271 August 18 - 24, 2003 (original) (raw)
Friday, August 22, 2oo3
I have two problems with updating this page. One is the physical arrangement, and that's my fault. I don't have to be working on a kitchen counter with the keyboard too high, and in fact the COMPAQ Tablet PC keyboard and screen are good enough for most work, and the FrontPage editor is all right.
The other is the Crusoe Chip in the Tablet PC, and that's mostly an exercise in learning patience. Things DO work. But they take a long time and the progress reporting in Outlook is AWFUL, and when you are at the end of a thin pipe and there's a spam attack things can take an hour that you expect to be only a few minutes. I also found out how to use mail2web to delete a bunch of stuff before I have to suck it down this pipe. That makes it a lot easier. It's still an exercise in patience, but I am learning: even though Outlook is a pig and the Crusoe chip is slow and when Outlook is hauling stuff in it eats all the cycles, if you have faith and pay no attention to the progress messages, eventually it gets all your mail and sends what you wrote.
So have a book to read while you wait...
I see Israel has ended the Road Map. Now I am not fixing blame and don't shoot the messenger: but the Road Map is dead with the latest Israeli attacks on Palestinian political leaders. When you kill the people you are negotiating with, soon enough there will be no one willing to step forward and say they are in charge, and if you can't find anyone to talk to it is hard to make peace.
Which leaves the US in a dilemma since we put some American prestige into trying to settle the Israel problem. The difficulty is this: with Israel's more or less democracy, there are veto groups who have diametrically opposed goals. Some of those in Sharon's party won't be happy until the Palestinians are deported to Jordan and Syria, all of them, and all of the old Holy Land is Jewish. Some of those won't include pre-West Bank Arabs who are citizens of Israel in the deportations, but some will, and I don't know how much power those latter have; but there are enough in the faction that wants and Arab-free Holy Land to insist on massive retaliations -- Israel not only killed the Hamas leader but the Army demolished a number of Arab middle class businesses as a demonstration of what kind of reprisals they can take -- and the reprisals are pretty certain to open the terror attacks again. More, by casting middle class into poverty they send educated people into despair, and probably furnish a new generation of suicide bombers.
On the other side there are Israeli factions powerful enough to have a veto who will simply not stand for deportation of all the Palestinians. This leaves any government of Israel in a precarious position.
On the Palestinian side politics are not democratic, so it's harder to describe the political factions, but I know enough Christian Arabs to have some appreciation of their view, which is roughly "Because the Jews were treated horribly in Germany and elsewhere doesn't give them the right to come over here and take our land and keep us from having a country of our own." There was a time when Israel could have made real allies of the Christian Arabs and thus driven a wedge into the racial solidarity of the Arab world, but they worked hard at rejecting that possibility, treating the Christians as potential enemies rather than potential friends. Most Christian Arabs, at least those I know, now would reject alliance with Jews against Moslems even though this wasn't true 25 years ago.
As far as I can see, there are Palestinian factions that won't be happy until Isreal is pushed into the sea, even though the vast majority of Arabs Christian and Muslim would be satisfied with a state of their own and defined boundaries. The extremists won't make peace, and the moderates are more afraid of them than they are of the Israelis. Unfortunately, Israel's attempts to reverse this fear preference loses Israel all hope of attracting moderates, and loses support for Israel in the Western world.
John McCarthy, who knows the situation at least as well as I do, thinks the only hope is for Israel to hang on, try for less but hold on, and hope things change over time. I agree that's probably the only thing that can work, if anything can. I once thought that a stable border defensible would moderate the attacks, but the settlers have made such a border impossible: you can't build a fence that includes most of the settlements and defines a defensible border, and the fence itself will generate more suicide bombers who are deprived of hope.
I expect Israel will hang on, with more and more severe actions, as the Palestinians get increasingly desperate; and I the end game doesn't look to be in sight.
On Iraq: we need more soldiers with more skills and we don't have them other than reservists, and the reservists don't want to go and have political friends. Sending in a volunteer army is one thing. Getting the volunteers to re-enlist is another. Extending their enlistments without asking them is yet one more. And sending in Reservists who thought they were to be part of defense of the realm is political dynamite.
Winning wars is glamorous. Occupation duty with a trooper a day fed to a meat grinder is less so. As things stand, Bush won't win re-election and the incoming President will bring the army home. Of course if it's Gephart he will also double the budget and spend so much on domestic stuff, and raise taxes so high, that a foreign war may be the only way to bail him out of trouble. The old axiom was that the Republicans are the party of Depression, the Democrats are the party of War, and the Republicans are the tax collectors for Democrat spending schemes: the Democrats buy votes with public money and the Republicans come in to clean up the economic mess and pay for it, whereupon the Democrats reap the benefits.
Bush needs 4 million bbl/day of oil out of Iraq, and fast, and he may not get it. He also needs to cut back on the casualties. A trooper a day isn't all that many -- Marines in Iraq are probably safer than on the highways around Camp Pendleton and a black infantryman is definitely safer in Iraq than a lad his age would be in Central LA -- but we don't think that way in the US. And the troops are muttering about not re-enlisting, and enlistments were way up but that trend seems to be slowing and may have halted.
Pacification of Iraq will take client states. It may be the UN can be talked into providing some. But that's dangerous too since the UN and its bureaucrats are terribly expensive, and their record of nation building is very poor.
Welcome to the world of empire on the cheap, empire backed into with good republican intentions.
How long until we have Elagabulus?
I have said this elsewhere and often but it bears saying again. Efficiency is the enemy of reliability.
Optimizing for efficiency always discounts the effects of infrequent events and improbable events. Unfortunately some events are really uncertain: assassinations, terrorist attacks on the power grid, that sort of thing. You can't factor those events into the market because you don't have any estimate of their probability.
Multiple redundancies are the only defense against improbable events. Those are redundant and cannot be done by the market because the only way to make money from preparing for an improbable event is to "gouge" and "exploit" when the disaster happens, and any company that tries that will be out of business and its investment lost.
Preparing for disaster is a matter of insurance, and that means as wide a base as possible for contributions. Which mean everyone, usually, which means the public purse. Of course the incentive then is to prepare for everything and build enormous bureaucracies that themselves cause disasters. So it goes.
When it comes to energy the regulated public utility model isn't wonderful, but if you don't build in imbecilities like the old Federal preference for "public owned utilities" over "Private (but still regulated) utilities" it can work pretty well. Better than the patchwork system with periodic interference to punish "gouging" that we seem to have now. Or so I am inclined to believe. I am willing to listen to arguments.
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I have no way to test the authenticity of this:
Subject: Inside the resistance?
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/15/1060936052309.html