Yesterday's New York Times Magazine carried David Leonhardt's interview of President Obama on the economy and, I am glad to say, in at least one respect (if not also others) it was very heartening. I refer specifically to the fact the POTUS clearly gets the analytical problems involved in the health care cost acceleration, especially the problem of spending on terminal care.  He exaggerated the estimated percentage this might come to -- as much as 80%, he said -- but that's not important. What's important is that he takes the subject seriously enough to have learned something about it.  And, of course, his understanding thus tracks perfectly with my own, as discussed in an earlier post on this blog. You could look it up. 

I was amused too by Obama's remarks about his economic advisers -- the ones in government service and a few not.  He mentioned by name Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Paul Volcker, Peter Orszag, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Joe Steiglitz and Christine Romer. He noted that Summers is now sounding more like Reich sounded inside the Clinton Administration ten years ago--i.e., more structural and radical in terms of analysis.  What he did not mention is that all of these advisors except, I think, Romer, are Jewish. Is Obama trying to get the economy moving or to make a minyan?

Of course there is an explanation for this.  It's not (just) funny. It's in my new book: Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Get Praised, Blamed and Used to Explain Nearly Everything.  Out in September. Buy it please, because I don't make a dime from this blog.

More, on Bulgaria and Savoie Libre, later.

Three weeks is a a long time to take off for a blogger, and so I apologize--to myself as well as to anyone else accustomed to reading this space. But I needed a vacation.  My wife and I went to France, Switzerland (briefly) and Bulgaria. There was work of a sort interspersed in the trip, but mainly it was a vacation, our first in almost three years. While in France we were not only in Paris but also Haute Savoie.  Or what in English used to be called Savoy. Savoy was an independent polity for longer than the United States has been organized territorially, from around 1516 to 1860. But unless you know a little European history, this will come as news to most Americans. One sees signs here and there while driving around the mountains (these are the French Alps, of course) that read "Savoie libre."  The white-on-red Savoy cross is everywhere, too. Ah, European regionalism raising its head under the high blue sky of the European Union umbrella. A phenomenon with a future--noting Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland and many other examples? I think so. 

But that has nothing to do with Barack Obama. So let me only say that I will write more about my trip later, particularly about my first time in Bulgaria. For now, however, just a short comment about the President. 

Last thing I heard the President say was that he "can't just push a button and have the banks do what he wants them to do", or "flip a switch" and make Congress obey his desires. Of course, the President-as-pedagogue explains to the American people, there are counterpoised centers of power in the United States. The President is not a king or a dictator.  All of this is true, certainly, but that is not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make coalesces around a question: It is wise to say things that are true, just because they are true?

Short answer: no.  I do not see how it helps the President or his program to admit his weaknesses. I do not see either why it helps the President get what he wants, as opposed to keeping his popularity ratings high, to go on the Jay Leno Show and otherwise indulge in forms of postmodern populism.  The American people are nervous right now, and have every right to be. There is a sharp deficit in anonymous trust in our institutions--not just the financial ones, all of them (except maybe the U.S. Army). The American people, if they can be distracted from their bread-and-circus entertainments, do not need a pal; they need a leader. They do not need commiseration from the Oval Office; they need confidence-building. They do not need a rock star, but a rock.

President Obama really has his hands full. He's in not a classical double-bind, but a triple bind. He wants to change the country, invest in human capital and social trust, but he cannot afford to do those things (assuming he knows how, which I don't assume except maybe in the energy area) until the economy rights itself. He doesn't know when that will happen or really know how to make it happen faster, but the way he has chosen to try will make his desire to invest that much harder a goal to reach. He knows that once (if?) the economy starts to rebound, he needs to throw on the spending brakes lest we end up with devastating inflation, and he seems honestly to be a sincere fiscal conservative. But he'll never get a grip on spending with this Congress in his face; they simply won't let him. He can't even roll Senator Conrad on farm subsidies, for heaven's sake. And thanks to the Congress, too, his underlying goal that he sees as a the key to making American democracy work again--to change the K Street transactional culture--recedes in the face of the other sides of the bind. 

In the end, of course, being stuck in this bind--economic straits, the investment limits they impose, and the impossibility of structural reform as a result of his being beholden to the Congress to deal with the first two parts of the bind--will ultimately hurt his popularity, and here timing, as usual, is everything.  He needs to avoid the Democrats getting pasted in the 2010 midterm elections if he is to rack up enough of a second-term victory to get real leverage over the Congress. He also needs to try again at bipartisanship, even though it is distasteful to him for good reason. But if he acts weak, even and especially if he is weak, he won't get the GOP help he could use.

He is still smiling; he is still popular; he is charmed in Europe and elsewhere. But he is not being effective yet in turning the great wheels of the ship of state. He doesn't have a lot of troops, a lot of "his" guys (think, by comparison, for example, how many chits Lyndon Johnson could call in by the time he got to the White House). He is dependent on others, and their interests are not the same as his. In this light to call attention publicly to what he can't do is not very wise.  He needs to cut that stuff out.

President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Ataturk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted it is ever since 1924. This at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, at the same time that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush Administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any President who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims have now heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts”, as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting, it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off of whitehouse.gov, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bonafied clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have done better as a speechwriter for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh so many missed opportunities in that speech--so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) that apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people have been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

Since my last post--and yes, I know, it's been a while--I've been for the first time to Las Vegas, Nevada. I went with my wife, just for a weekend. The occasion was a history teachers' conference on the nuclear age, held at the Desert Research Institute, which houses the Museum of Nuclear Testing. Yes, there really is such a thing, and it's where it is, of course, because the testing site for lots of U.S. tests was in the nearby Nevada desert. Pretty good conference: Jeremy Bernstein, a eminent senior scientist who personally witnessed the 1946 test, was there and told some great stories. He told us Leibling's Gambler's Prayer, for example: "Oh Lord, let me at least break even....because I really need the money." Ambassadors Avis Bohlen and Jim Goodby were there, also Hans Mark, former Secretary of the Air Force and an MIT physics PhD, and several other not-too-shabby presenters. And, of course me. But that's not what I want to talk about. 

Las Vegas is just weird, and since most of Nevada's two million people live there, Nevada is weird. We're told that these days Las Vegas is a normal town, and that less than half its economic activity depends on The Strip of hotel-casinos and associated activities. Well, maybe, but it doesn't matter: If hadn't been for the gambling and the booze and the whores in the first place, none of the rest of that stuff would ever have developed. The whole place is built on what amounts to once-removed theft. It's not outright theft, but it's a systematic taking advantage of people who, for one reason or another, think that probability and statistics apply to everyone on the planet except them. 

In every other American town I've ever been in, and I've seen a few, the freebie newspaper kiosk things are full of real estate brochures, restaurant coupons and stuff like that.  In Las Vegas, they're full of dial-up naked women. There are hordes of Mexicans on the street, lined up in gaggles of six, eight, twelve -- some of them older women -- handing out little cards, just slightly smaller than a baseball card, with pictures of mostly naked women on them, and the members of the advertising gaggle are all wearing the same orange t-shirts emblazoned with black letters reading "Girls, in 20 minutes" and some other gibberish and a phone number.  And yet this is a city of family entertainment, you bet; and absolutely there are huge number of people there with their little kids, infants, toddlers, elementary school kids, junior high school kids.  Are these people out of their minds?!

And you never saw such gaudy, ugly footwear in your life. I always wondered what kind of woman would buy high heels that looked like they've been dunked in birthday cake glitter. Now I know.

There are some elegant things to see and experience, it is true.  I liked the Bellagio best, all of it, but especially the fountain water ballet, and that especially at night. We took in a  Cirque de Soliel show, which was magnificent. But my basic inner feeling was one that drove me to a long, hot shower as soon as I could avail myself of one, just to wash off all the inner filth I felt from being there. 

We did not gamble. Not one penny. No reason to.  I did not understand some of the card games, and I've been playing poker since I was eight years old. Long enough ago to have since learned that playing against the house is not my idea of a fair fight. As for the machines, there not slot machines anymore like the old ones my parents took me to out route 301 in the old days around Waldorf, Maryland.  No arm to pull down; no obvious randomizer at work. The new machines are not electro-mechanical but digital. They can be programmed to a zillion sequences, and while they will pay a win now and then, it has nothing to do with the player, or with counting the odds seeing how the machine patterns out. You cannot reason that there even is a randomizer at work, except by inference that if there weren't, the credibility of the whole thing would suffer and people wouldn't come so much. But it just did not seem right to me, did not feel right, and I didn't play. It's not even the money I cared about; it's the extremely unpleasant feeling of being had.  I'd rather lose $1,000 at a fair game than 30 cents at a fixed one. 

The city was crowded; shows were sold out; if there's a recession in this country, you can't readily tell it from walking around Las Vegas. The local news show had a story while we were there talking about how many more girls -- I think they mean young women -- are going in for stripping and more besides. The experts opined that the common explanation for this--hard times so they need the money--seems right, but probably isn't. They said it just provides a pretext for women who are looking to do this anyway. Well, I don't know. No way for me to know. All I know is, if I had a ten year-old, I wouldn't take him, and especially her, there. 

Oh, and what about President Obama? Well, there's been the Geithner bank plan playing out and getting hammered by experts left and right. 

There's been the revelation of the new Afpak strategy, and attacks on it. 

There's been the vaunted return of U.S.-Russian strategic arms control, a useful activity in its own right, but something easy to do only when one doesn't really need it. 

And a NATO and G-20 Summit is going on right now. It won't end so well, but it won't matter so much either.  It's an initiation ritual. The sides will get serious later. 

There's been the revisitation of the lunatic North Korean regime with its missile test, and the Secretary of Defense pronouncing in public how we were not going to knock it down on the launch pad, and how the Pyongyang crowd seems uninterested in diplomacy--not, in my view, the sorts of things it is wise to say out loud. 

Our Secretary of State actually told the truth, out loud, about Mexican drug-gang warfare actually being our fault, in this case I think a wise thing to say out loud. But then there was that handing of some letters from Ambassador Holbrooke to an Iranian, and the the State Department had the audacity to say it was a chance, unanticipated encounter. Folks, you don't prepare diplomatic correspondence in the hopes of a chance encounter. Lies are fine if they serve a purpose in this sort of game. But when they are transparently false, obviously false, it is embarrassing even to try to lie.  Maybe the State Department should hire some unemployed types from Wall Street.  They're experts.

A lot has happened lately, in fact.....but it'll have to wait for comment later. Too much other work to do. 

Just a short note for today, again on Afghanistan.

Since I wrote last on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, I have read at least half a dozen pieces arguing against the minimalist approach--the idea that the Administration is doing more and promising less in order to bring capabilities into lines with a pessimistic assessment of achievable outcomes. The arguments insist that a real counterinsurgeny strategy can win the war. We are warned, at the same time, that victory will cost plenty and take many years, but indeed we can win. They plead for money, time and patience from the American people. I'm an American people, and here's how that sounds to me.

Well OK, Senators Lieberman and McCain, Max Boot, and the other nine people I've heard this from lately, let me ask you this.  Suppose I grant the thesis that we can in fact win: But what are the opportunity costs of spending resources, lives and time in Afghanistan against wherever else they may be needed?  Tilt as you will against real decreases in defense spending, they are here and they will stay for a while whether we like it or not. Are you sure Afghanistan is where we should be spending so much?  

Another question: Suppose we win -- how secure will victory be?  It's a nasty neighborhood, and Afghanistan has never been a normal conventional state. Another question: What will winning in Afghanistan mean for Pakistan, arguably a more important stake -- a much more populous country, with nuclear weapons. How do you win in Afghanistan without doing things that risk destabilizing Pakistan further?  If you don't have an answer to this one, you need to go back to start, do not pass go and do not collect anything expect history books and aspirin. 

In short, a lot of commentators seem to me to be looking very shortsightedly at this problem despite claiming they are looking out 10, 12 years.  They are looking out, but they are doing so as through a tunnel: no sense of what's outside, or what the other side of the journey really looks like. I'm skeptical we can ever win in Afghanistan as I define "win", but even if we can I am even more skeptical that the result will be stable enough to justify the costs. The vision in my mind is the kid on the seashore who spends the whole afternoon building the most amazing sand castle ever, besting his own expectation and wowing the spectators. Cool; great; wonderful; amazing. Hey, but then the tide rolls in.

Maybe I'm wrong, but at least I am starting my analysis with all the factors on the table. Those who say we can win, it seems to me, are not.

Today's news registers in a major and a minor key and a still more minor key, maybe a minor 7th.  The major key concerns the Geithner bank rescue plan. That's the one that has garnered all the big headlines and attracted the star journalists.  The minor key concerns the EPA "finding", so to speak, that it has the authority to use the Clean Air Act to enforce "global warming" policy. Hardly anyone will even read this news. The minor 7th concerns the President's remarks on energy. 

I am no financial expert, so I am not in a position to judge what Geithner has rolled out.  A lot of experts say it won't work, despite Wall Street's enthusiastic response to its details. That just makes me think, however, that in fact it won't work. We have an essay coming up in the magazine, one of our toolboxes, arguing for Limited Purpose Banking. When I first read it and sort of understood it, it struck me as a very radical, but still quite logical and sensible a proposal. None of the criticisms to the Geithner approach, so far anyway, for all the alternative approaches they propose, come close to Limited Purpose Banking. But the reason I'm prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the LPB approach is that, unlike almost all the alternatives I've heard of, it proposes changing the incentive structure of banks and bankers. Right now, banks gamble with other people's money, but bankers do well from commissions and bonuses whether their gambles pay off or not. Their gambles, moreover, are all more or less variations on a single theme: arrange things so you borrow short and safe but lend long and risky.  That way you'll make enough from high-yield loans to more than cover your obligations, even if a fair number of your loans come a cropper. But when too many loans come a cropper, the whole edifice fails, and the losers are other people, not oneself. That being the case, there's not much incentive against irrational behavior, particularly when other bankers are mainly doing the same thing. This just means that individually rational behaviors don't necessarily add up to collectively rational behavior. But every social science PhD already knows that.

Anyway, LPB would change what banks do.  It would prevent them from gambling with other people's money. It would limit them to intermediating between depositors and borrowers, between those who offer investments and those who purchase them. It would earn a fee for its service, and its own money the bank could invest.  But not other people's money. That changes the incentive structure. It has always seemed to me -- but what do I know? -- that if we keep giving banks money, from TARP reservoirs or from some public-private scheme like Geithner's, but we don't change what bankers can do and how they think, then eventually we'll end up with another crisis.  It's true, sure, that we haven't had a whole lot of banking crises since the FDIC was created, and the S&L crisis was not exactly the same thing. But the system we have ensures that when we do have a crisis it's a real doozy. 

Maybe the practical thing is to reliquify the system as it is, and stabilize it--and then change it radically so this can't happen again. But that'll never happen, because it takes a crisis to get real change in this country -- always has. Solve the crisis, or the sense of it, and the motivating force for real reform will evaporate overnight.

I am tempted, while I am on this subject, to refer back to a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week in which Senator Chris Dodd mused that, well, maybe we should not get ourselves into a "too big to fail" situation in the first place. Dodd is no philosopher. But better he and his colleagues wake up later than not at all. Gigantism in American society is the problem, and at many levels. It's nothing new, however; go back to W.J. Byran, TR, Woodrow Wilson, and all the Populists, Progressives, Bull Moosers, Mugwumps and the rest, and you see it all fresh and clean a century ago. Go back and read William Allen White.  Kirkpatrick Sale and his 1970 book Human Scale had nothing on WAW. The problem here, from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1888 forward, is that if you let corporate scale get very large, you will have to also let countervailing forces in society--unions but especially government--get very large to balance against potential abuses. This is what J.K. Galbraith understood in the 1950s -- that grand scale qualitatively changes the dynamics of "invisible hand" competition in a market economy.  This is what C. Wright Mills understood (though he got a lot wrong, too) when he wrote about The Power Elite. This is what Murray Bookchin and dozens of other intellectual anarchists (as opposed to the old-fashioned bomb-throwing type) have been trying to tell us for 50 years. If you depersonalize economic relations--all kinds, production, owner-worker interactions, marketing, banking, you name it--you hollow out the stickiness of ethical considerations in keeping everyone honest.  To return to the point, most bankers will not gamble with just any other people's money, just other people they don't know. So if we let banks and investment houses and insurance companies get as big as Lehman Brothers and Citibank and Bank of America and AIG, then we enable a too-big-to-fail problem to form,  we have only ourselves to blame for it. It would be one thing if there were real and widely shared economies of scale from such gigantism, but there are not. Instead there are usually diseconomies related to large transaction costs, as can be seen clearly in the whole medical insurance racket. 

Now for the minor key news, which could end up being a lot more important than the major. If EPA uses the Clean Air Act to regulate hydrocarbon emissions, the U.S. economy may never recover. Carol Browner and the rest of the new crowd at EPA are true-believing pantheists, as best I can tell. They approach "global warming" as though it were a surrogate religion, and as such their catechism has become impervious to actual facts. They don't care about the economic and political costs of "saving the world", as they see it. Because they are, after all, "saving the world."

OK, so let me say it, flat out--say what has almost become unspeakable in many polite quarters these days: I don't believe that global warming is mostly anthropogenic, and I don't think it's a crisis. I also don't believe that acute weather events are driven by warming trends, though I am open-minded about what the science has to say here, once we have enough of it to reach a reasonable conclusion. 

Speaking of facts, most of the global warming pantheists who claim facts are on their side wouldn't know how to evaluate genuine scientific evidence if their lives depended on it. It is true that global temperature rise and energy use increases track upward together generally from around 1850 to the present, but they do not track exactly. For example, according to data no one disputes, from 1850 to 1880 energy consumption increased little but temperatures increased a lot. Between 1880 and 1910 the data show that energy use doubled, but temperatures actually declined!  Again, if you measure from 1935 to 1965, fossil fuel consumption doubled, but global temperatures remained essentially flat. 

This means either that there is no lock-step relationship between energy use and temperature increases; that the measurement techniques have been wrong; and/or that something else is driving temperature patterns. One of those things may be the rotation and wobble of the earth and how it affects ocean currents and weather. We have had global warming before. We had it, for example, in and around the 6th-7th century CE, and again in the 14th-15th century. Scandinavian types were able to grow grapes in Greenland, after all, long before the Industrial Revolution. (We also had great plagues in temperate zones during those warming trends, so the CDC is right to be concerned about tracking diseases and pests.)

Add to that the fact--yes, the fact--that we rarely if ever measure actual particulates in the atmosphere, but only extrapolate what's going on up there from measuring emissions down here, and any reasonable, scientifically literate person would pause before rushing to alarmist conclusions. And as many observers have pointed out, to behave as though a long-term trend is a crisis is to cripple rationality in public policy. For what it would cost to stop and reverse global warming, we could do lots of other praiseworthy things. But the religious attitude typically taken toward the problem makes the idea that propositions ought to be examined on the merits a form of heresy.

I am all for reducing emissions, for a smaller societal carbon footprint, and I am all for cleaner energy. I am for these things because it is, in the end, more efficient and healthy. I am for them too, as in President Obama's energy plan also rolled out in more detail in today's news, because this is indeed a major source of new productive jobs. We have underinvested by orders of magnitude in energy R&D in the past thirty years--the fault of Congress and the K-Street lobby mafia, once again. (It's everywhere rotting out public policy.)  I am not for these things because I fear global warming. And I hate to think that only an irrational, scientifically specious fear is powerful enough to get us to do what we should want to do anyway.  It's enough to drive a person crazy.

Final comment for now, about what the President had to say yesterday about energy policy. He spoke, as so many have, about energy independence, about not being dependent on foreign oil. This isn't completely stupid, but it mainly is. 

We chose, as a nation, to become more dependent on international commerce in oil because it was a whole lot cheaper to import than to use domestic sources. We did it, starting in the Eisenhower Administration, for economic advantage: the cheaper our energy inputs, the more efficient our economy all else equal. We do this in general, as do other countries. It's called comparative advantage; that's why there is international trade, and international trade is in the main good. So why do so many people think oil is an exception?

These days there are really two reasons. The first, which is valid, is that the money we pay to buy foreign oil (which is no longer as cheap on a regular basis as it was before) helps nasty regimes and sometimes trickles down to nasty terrorists. This is true, but if we don't buy Saudi oil, say, someone else will. So we don't eliminate the problem by not being dependent on foreign oil; we only loose ourselves from moral responsibility for it. 

The other is that we can't depend on the supply; it might get embargoed for political reasons or interdicted. This is pretty much nonsense nowadays. The vertically integrated nature of the industry makes embargoes very hard to pull off. The Arab embargo of 1974 failed, in point of fact. As for interdiction, that was a worry we planned for during the Cold War; it is not a serious worry anymore. (I have detailed all this in a Harvard Middle East Paper recently, which can be found, if you look around long enough, at MESH.org.) Middle Eastern and other oil producers have to sell their oil; they want to sell it at least as much as we and others want to buy it, or it becomes worthless to them in fact. We should not rue our "dependence"on foreign oil really any more than we should rue our dependence on imports of kiwi fruit, yak hides or copper ore.  We should not rush to pay a lot more for domestic sources of energy over foreign any more than we should want to pay a lot more for domestic sources over foreign of anything else.

Ah, but here is the rub. As I said, oil isn't so cheap anymore--at least it hasn't been fairly recently and, after economic recovery, could go quite high again and pretty much stay high. So if we can figure out how to produce domestic energy that is lots cheaper than oil, whether foreign or domestic, we'll be in pretty fine shape, which is why all kinds of efforts, public and private, should be devoted to and incentivized toward that end. 

Can we do this?  Yes, I am sure we can, and I am sure we can do it a lot faster than many people think. Some guy in Japan last month unveiled a car that runs on water.  That's right, plain old water. It has a hydrogen-gas producing mechanism that has to run on something else, so I don't know the devices' thermodynamic balance sheet, but whatever it is, it promises to be non-carbon and possibly pretty damned cheap compared to $200/barrel sweet crude. And that's just one thing, out of dozens we can put to use. We can do this.  What's stopping us, or slowing us down?  Just the K-Street-Congressional circus, as usual.  

So, taking all this into consideration, will the President please stop talking nonsense about our dependence on foreign oil? It's just the wrong way to think about these things. We should not be thinking about oil at all. We should be thinking about calories, or about energy packets, if you like. We should be asking how much does it cost us to produce (and clean up after) enough energy to do some arbitrary amount of work, defined scientifically, not casually: How many calories to push a ten-kilo weight two meters, say. We should work to develop and use the cheapest net source (net meaning after clean-up and taking into account all externalities) we can devise. If that turns out still to be imported oil, fine.  Except that it won't.  If that turns out to be food to feed a human or an animal who then pushes that ten-kilo weight two meters, fine. That also used to be the case, a long time ago; but it won't be in the future. 

Science really is useful, folks. It really does help us to see clearly and to solve problems. It can't make critical value judgments, but it is still the best bet on the block for a problem like energy. So can we please stop nattering about climate crises and energy dependencies that are either figments of addled imaginations or entirely besides the point? No, we probably can't.....

Let's talk just a little about Afghanistan (because I am speechless about the trillion dollar headlines......). The papers say the Obama Administrations wants to dramatically expand the size of the Afghan Army and police, and is prepared to pay a huge amount of money to do it. Everyone from General Barno to Senator Levin are on board with the idea, as are many other analysts whose opinions I have come to respect. So why does the idea make me nervous?

Well, first, I confess that I have to agree that the alternatives to a larger force are not appealing. We can't or at any rate should not do it ourselves, even in coalition with other outsiders. Afghans don't like outsiders in their midst telling them what to do. And it's not a good idea to just let the Taliban 2.0 take over, although it does not necessarily follow that a Taliban 2.0 government would do the same stupid and terrible things the Taliban 1.0 government did--i.e., provide welcome and save haven for al-Qaeda. 

Still. And the "still" comes down to three things. First, and most important, I am not soothed by General Barno's assurances that the army will remain loyal to civilian authority. That depends on whether the civilian authority remains worthy of their loyalty. I have a lot less animosity toward Hamid Karzai than the Obama Administration seems to have.  As I have said before, I don't think they appreciate sufficiently the cultural relativity of corruption. Karzai, or whomever tries to run the country from Kabul, has to be tough, flexible and lucky to make a go of it. He can't act like a Philadelphia lawyer or a boy scout and expect to get anywhere. So the key is whether the government can persuade the army that any cruelty, double-dealing and corruption it deploys it deploys on behalf of the national interest rather than its own pocketbooks. It's not what it does that matters as such; it's the perception of on whose behalf it is done. If Kabul becomes selfish and narrow, we'll end up with a military government there. Karzai will end up either dead or back in India, most likely.  

That, of course, is not the end of the world as far as I am concerned. But it will look like a colossal U.S. policy failure if it happens.  It will look especially heinous because the Obama Administration has dropped the 4th "D" from its vocabulary--the "democracy" D. So a lot of people, no doubt, will conclude that these Democratic Machiavellian realists actually plotted all along that there be a military coup and a military dictatorship in Kabul. It won't be true, but so what?

Second, it is very important how this larger army and police force are recruited and balanced.  If the Pashtun tribal leaders see either one as a front, basically, for the Tajiks or for de-tribalized Pashtuns in league with foreigners, a larger army will just set the stage for the next iteration of civil war.  That would be much worse than a military government in Kabul. In other words, not all larger armies and police forces are created equal.

Third, on a rather different level, I find it sort of amazing that the New York Times can report, and here is how today's article starts, "President Obama and his advisers have decided to significantly expand Afghanistan's security forces. . . ."  Like what, like Afghanistan is Ohio or something?  Like it is normal for one sovereign government to decide how large the security forces of another nominally sovereign government should be?  We fall into this language without even being aware of how weird it is.  We should listen to how we talk sometimes; we might learn a thing or two. 

Obviously, the reason for the seamless obliviousness in the way we talk about these things is that the Afghans themselves cannot afford to build up their own army and police themselves. Still, there appears to be no mention in the article of what the elected Afghan government thinks about this idea. Did we ask them? We're not told.  How can we boast about the Afghan election and Afghanistan's new budding democracy, and then go and make critical decisions about that country's future as if the presidential palace and the parliament were about as relevant to the policy discussion as a day-care center?  If you don't find this attention-arresting, well, what do you find attention-arresting?