Category: News and politics

Thank you all for your comments. Four of them cry out to be
shared. The first is from Kelly Young, a long time friend here in DC, who is a
lawyer. The second is from Steve Paliwoda, who was an ATO fraternity brother at
UC Berkeley in the mid 60s and now lives in Alaska. The third and four—which
landed in my in-tray next to each other and both have things to say about the
Mormon Church are respectively from Diana Paskett, my cousin and the most
loving person on the planet, and Steve Lang, my English/Russian interpreter in
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova in 1992 – 96. Steve was such a good
interpreter that when translating my frequently given Monetary Policy 101
lecture, he sometimes translated statements before I made them. He later became
the personal interpreter of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch who
built up Lukos Oil before being imprisoned (where he remains today) for gaining
Putin’s disfavor by becoming somewhat political. Putin’s friends have managed
to steal Khodorkovsky’s companies as the government bankrupted it with phony
tax claims. Steve remained in that position even after Khodorkovsky was put in
jail, but has now moved to Canada after the Russian government banned him from
entering Russia.

*****************

Warren,

Yep.  You hit the nail on the head:  the
fundamental problem here is the unnecessary involvement of government in
running universities, which necessitates political resolution rather than
private, market-based, and diverse solution-making.

Another problem, which you didn’t touch directly, is that
Hastings, like nearly all universities, levels a head tax in the form of a
“student activity” fee on all enrollees and uses.  It then uses monies to
fund such recognized groups, which it naturally has to define.  Hence, a
First Amendment problem akin.

Consistent with your argument, private institutions ought to
be free to decide whether to organize themselves by imposing such fees and
using them however they please.  The market will decide which systems work
and which don’t.  But there is a strong argument that even private
organization – especially one as large and diverse as a university — ought not
to do such a thing, as Berkshire Hathaway approximates in allowing each
shareholder to decide how the company spends his share-based portion of the
company’s allocation of charitable contributions.  Of course, as Friedman
argued years ago, corporations ought not even try to make truly charitable
gifts but simply return profits to shareholders to let them spend, save, or
give away as they see fit.  Unless the organization has a comparative
advantage in making such decisions or can reduce transactions by doing so, the
economic – but not political – argument is quite strong:  focus on your
mission, whether profit maximization, education, or national defense – and
avoid taxing, spending, and other actions that don’t advance THAT mission.

I made this very argument in the late 1980s when I was an
undergrad at UVA.  I wrote a bi-weekly column for one of the newspapers
and called for repeal of the student activity fee as an inefficient and often
unfair “tax.”  As you might suspect, I was roundly…ignored.

Thanks for making and sharing your points.

Kelly

******************

Warren:

Public universities represent our Government, and
our Government says there can’t be discrimination; therefore, all groups
associated with public universities must adhere to the values of the
university, which in turn must adhere to the values of the Government. 
It makes no sense whatever for a public university to provide on-campus
meeting facilities for (1) A local wing of the American Nazi
Party — which advocates, among other things, discrimination
against Jews, or (2) A local section of the Ku Klux
Klan — which advocates, among other things, white supremacy,
or (3) A meeting of NAMBA — the North American Man-Boy
Association — which advocates pederasty.

It is an easy trap for parochial organizations to fall into,
that they claim they have the "right" to bar from membership all
non-believers (and gays — even if they are believers).  Today,
such groups are dealing with questions that are not yet fully resolved by
the law.  For example, the law, as well as general public
opinion, are pretty clear and unified regarding such issues as
racial discrimination, poll taxes, women suffrage, child labor, vigilante
justice, state secession, and slavery.  However, we have yet to clarify
and come to terms with such issues as sexual discrimination, abortion,
terrorism security, and illegal immigration.  And before too
long, we will have to deal with such issues
as diminishing available funding for social security, medicare and
national defense.

While the above "laggard" issues are being
resolved in the courts, the law must be obeyed.  This means that parochial
groups that discriminate cannot, and should not, have the use of public
facilities, or receive public funding or backing. 

Steve Paliwoda     

******************

Warren,

I so completely AGREE with you, it is late so I shouldn’t comment
further, however I will briefly say that as my Christian Church, the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, AKA the Mormons, will one day, if we
have not already, come head to head on this very issue.  The several BYU
campuses, many campus organizations, our Temples which even our membership must
meet very specific requirements to attend are all at risk.  Many of our
students depend on federal financing – grants etc., we are told which holidays
we MUST celebrate, and HOW we must celebrate them etc. I am not well
versed on the subject, but I hear people who are – discussing the issues
with great concern.  I am afraid we are sleeping through the loss of most
of our freedoms.

Have a good night,

Diana

******************

Hi Warren,

Hope this finds you well.  Thought I’d toss in my two
cents’ worth on this one for a change.  But before I do, some sad news
from Kyrgyzstan.  I don’t know if you recall one of the housekeepers on
the foreigners-only floor of the old Dostuk hotel.  Her name was Olga, and
she was tall and statuesque and looked like a cross between Geena Davis and
Whitney Houston.  She was the only non-Kyrgyz among the housekeepers.
 Anyway, I know Dave Lindsey would remember her (I am ashamed to admit
that I still haven’t written to him as I’ve been intending for several years),
as would Isaac Svartsman.  Anyway, Olga had one son, whom she was raising
alone, his father having been a Cuban exchange student who had long ago
returned to Castro’s paradise, and she absolutely worshipped the kid.  He
was around 21-22 years old this year.  I’ve been in touch with Olga all
these years, and last week I called her to find out if she was okay because of
the recent disturbances there, as I had called during the previous ones, since
she lives only a few blocks from the central square and, being so obviously
non-Kyrgyz, would be a natural target for any racist violence.  She was in
tears within seconds, saying that the disturbances are nothing compared to the
fact that in December, her son was one of the passengers in a car being driven
by a kid his age, very fast, and it lost control on a bridge, rolled over
several times, and smashed into a concrete wall, killing everybody instantly.
 I can’t imagine what her life must be like now, after having invested so
much of her life energy into her son.  I then did a bit of internet
research on the accident, and learned that it was a new BMW, registered to a
humble 23 year old clerk in the city court (the chairman of which is Marat
Sultanov), who had loaned it to his buddies for their joy ride to oblivion, and
that he had been fined a whopping 300 som for having given them the keys
without having first drawn up the necessary documents for the transfer with the
road police, so he was in a way responsible for the accident, see…  In
the former Soviet states, you have to draw up the equivalent of a power of
attorney to allow someone else to drive your car without you.  By the way,
have you got a valid email address for Isaac?  I found some old aol or
hotmail address for him and wrote him about the accident but he didn’t respond,
so I suspect it’s an address he doesn’t use any more.

Okay, let’s talk about clashing values…

When I was a student at Cal State Long Beach, I remember
there being all sorts of special-interest clubs registered on campus, with the
right to hold meetings on campus property, post notices about events on campus
property, and hold these events on campus property, provided they followed all
the rules.

These organizations included all sorts of narrow groups that
one would think discriminated:  there were definitely Christian
"fellowships" and probably a Catholic society, GLBT
"alliances", young Democrat and Republican groups and probably
various socialist-leaning ones as well, a black student "association"
and comparable groups for latinos and the several varieties of orientals who
had big representation in the student body, etc.

I remember once attending some event and being given one of
those "HELLO" stickers to write my name and affiliation on, and I
wrote that I was with the Lesbian Buddhist Student Association, and ended up
getting some very angry looks from another attendee who, I suspect, was
probably a lesbian Buddhist student and was not amused.

But actually, my choice of fake affiliation illustrates an
important point that made all these groups legal:  membership was
technically open to everybody.  You didn’t have to be lesbian or Buddhist
to belong to my LBSA.  You didn’t need to be black to belong to the BSA or
pro-gun/anti-abortion to belong to the Republicans, or a Christian to belong to
the Christian "fellowship".  The question is, why would you WANT
to join a group of people you didn’t have anything in common with?
  But there were pragmatic answers to this question:  I know for
a fact that there were, for example, white guys who happened to be into
oriental girls who purposely joined the Asian Student Association or the like
just to get to meet lots of slant-eyed chicks.

The Mormons were different.  They like to be in control
of their own organizations, not beholden to the rules of an overseeing secular
institution.  They had a building off campus for all of their
extracurricular activities, where young Mormons could hang out in the safety of
their own kind and do all kinds of safe things together.  But even they
were open to outsiders!  I was actually a card-carrying member of the LDS
"institute" just off the CSULB campus and took Book of Mormon courses
there, and used their computer and printer, and their parking lot (which ended
up being cheaper than using the school lot).  And nobody kept me from
joining.

As an aside, in Utah, the Mormons have an
"Academy" building adjacent to every public school, where Mormon kids
go for an hour before or after secular schooling for some religious
instruction.  In Poland, there’s a priest teaching Catechism in most
public schools, but of course in the US that would be a no-no, so the Mormons
just build their own parallel schools right next to the public schools.

And, as another aside, one of the reasons the Boy Scouts are
as despicably reactionary an organization as they are is precisely because
they’ve been taken over (I mean this quite literally, at least in the US) by
the Mormons!  Every Mormon boy is a Boy Scout, the church sinks massive money
into the organization, and in return holds the majority of the executive and
board seats at the top of the BSA pyramid, where it sets the agenda for the
organization.  Mormon girls, however, do not join that dangerously rad-fem
lezbo-commie organization known as the Girl Scouts, because GSA categorically
told the nearly-dead old white men who run the LDS in Salt Lake City they could
go to hell when they came to the organization with an offer to richly fund it
in return for being given control.  And the Mormons are so misogynistic
that they wouldn’t let their docile and obedient matrons do the job in their
name – no, it had to be the MEN.

Okay, let’s get ourselves out of Utah already.  The
best way to diffuse a potentially dangerous campus organization is to flood its
membership with dissenters.  How dangerous would the Christian Legal
Society be if a whole bunch of leftist (sorry, like you, I find leftists to be
quite dangerous too, albeit less so than Christians) gay-tolerant agnostics
surreptitiously joined it, ultimately creating a large and vocal minority, if
not an outright majority, in the organization?  The only criterion for a
student organization (besides not engaging in criminal activity) ought to be a
firm insistence on open membership.

Such organizations are, indeed, discriminatory by their very
nature, and, as you correctly point out, that’s all fine out in the world of
private societies, as long as they don’t violate the rights of other people
outside their organizations.  But a public university campus would be a
far poorer place without its special-interest societies. Essentially,
prohibiting all these groups would create something no better than Jim Jones
University or Oral Roberts University or whatever Pat Robertson’s university is
called.  These schools also tightly control what kind of organizations are
allowed on campus, and permit only ones the administration deems to be
politically correct.  There’s no difference between that and a public
university only allowing pantheistic rainbow-coalition groups to exist on
campus!

Another aside:  How come White Student Associations
come under such fire at universities whenever somebody tries to form one?
 Why is it wrong for white students to associate AS SUCH?  Why is
"black pride" (or "gay pride", or whatever) okay, but
"white pride" is instantly labelled fascist/racist?  Why is it
okay to be proud of anything except being white (and male), and if you DO
express your pride in one of these two things you are, once again, a racist or
a sexist and very dangerous and probably another Timothy McVeigh?  And
even if these white groups DO believe whites are superior to others, how does
this differ from, oh, I don’t know… Black Muslims, or Muslims in general (who
are something entirely different from Black Muslims, who actually believe Allah
walked the earth seventy years ago), or CHRISTIANS (of all flavors!), who
believe they’ve got a monopoly on the truth and everybody else is destined to
roast in hell for eternity, and are not ashamed to let you know this?

Returning to the Boy Scouts for a moment, I find the
organization’s homophobia amusing, given that a) there is ample circumstantial
evidence to strongly suggest that its founder, Baden-Powell, was a repressed
homosexual himself (every Victorian was sexually repressed, regardless of
orientation…), and b) its real fear and concern ought to be the pedophelia
that I’m sure has always quietly existed in its ranks.  And if you really
don’t want testosterone-fuelled teenage boys to "turn gay" (I’m using
terminology the Boy Scouts leadership might use, which, naturally, does not
reflect my own views in the least), then it’s probably not a very good idea to
toss them together into close collective quarters running around naked together
and sharing tents together and what-not…

Back to the Christians…  You write that one of the
problems these days in distinguishing between private organizations (who can
deny membership to anyone they please) and public ones these days is the fact
that that evil big government has crept into more and more areas that used to
be the exclusive domain of the private sector through the evil of
"funding" (socialism creeping in through the back door?).
 Indeed.  While those super-fundamentalist universities in the south
(and Brigham Young in Utah) don’t take a dime of government money precisely
because they want to retain the right to bar negroes and homosexuals and
(gasp!) liberals, you’ve got plenty of mainstream schools (Georgetown,
American, etc.) that come from distinctly religious traditions but have long
ago sold out to the almighty dollar and become as secular as any public
university.

Which isn’t nearly as bad as the opposite trend, which we’ve
seen develop during the glorious reign of W.:  the government actually
seeking out and encouraging the formation of "faith-based"
organizations to give federal money to (but only approved faiths – I don’t
think they gave a dime to, say, Sikh or Shinto organizations).  When the
state actually starts giving money to organizations that are discriminatory by
definition (remember, any Christian organization, by definition, believes I am
inferior, whether they act on it or not, although, of course, there is a
fundamental difference between "prejudice", a belief, and "discrimination",
a behavior that acts upon this belief), it loses a lot of its moral right to
prohibit discriminatory organizations from asking for and expecting to get
money from the state, which brings us right back to the Christian Legal
Society.

And finally, a thought on school vouchers.  An idea any
true libertarian ought to champion, except, of course, that we then open up
another pandora’s box – who will determine which schools qualify?  Why,
the state of course.  This is already an acute issue in the US and
elsewhere in the modern world, when fundamentalist religious schools (of any
religion) fight to get accreditation.  Under a voucher system, they’d be
fighting for the accreditation in order to qualify to get state money, and here
we go again…

The knowledge that there are actually schools in Amerika
today that are teaching children creationism instead of science, and these
kids’ education is recognized as perfectly valid by the relevant government
agencies, simply scares me to death.  A former girlfriend of mine, who
always was into Jesus, has really gone off the deep end in her old age.
 She and her husband, both born-again musicians, have actually
home-schooled their five kids, and this is apparently a very big trend amongst
the fundamentalist crowd.  There’s a whole industry of teaching aids for
bible-based home-schooling.  One of this particular couple’s money-making
projects is making CDs of bible verses set to catchy music (think Sesame Street
or Electric Company songs, but with bible verses instead), as performed by
their kids.  These disks are then sold through the above-mentioned
teaching aids industry to help Christian kids learn their mantras, in between
learning about how Ezekiel begat Bathsheba and how first there was light and
then the sun and the moon were created a couple of days later.

Once again, I’m seriously scared when I contemplate that
there’s a whole generation of kids being home-schooled or Christian-schooled
today in an entirely different value system from the shared one you and I were
raised in a continent and a decade apart.  What will happen when this army
of reborn zombies has graduated from Christian colleges and begins to
infiltrate American society in ways that make today’s already alarming
infiltration by Christians seem like chicken feed?  And what will happen
when they clash with upwardly mobile young Muslim professionals, who will have
their own equally strong, but irreconcileably contrary views on who has a
monopoly on the truth?  I don’t want to be there when it happens!  And
it WILL happen…

And on that apocalyptic note, I bid you good night!

Steve

The Supreme Court is about to hear a case brought by the
Christian Legal Society (CLS) against the Hastings Law School in San Francisco,
a public university. The law school refused to register CLS as a recognized
student organization because it discriminated against non-Christians and gays.
The CLS claims that this violates its freedom of association with others of
similar beliefs. Hastings says that CLS is free to believe what it wants but
cannot have university (state tax payer) funds and use of university facilities
if they violate the university’s anti-discrimination policies. Needless to say,
if this issue had a simple and easy resolution, it would have been resolved
long before reaching the Supreme Court.

As a country we have limited the areas of such conflicts by
limiting the scope of government involvement in our lives and associations.
Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist groups are free to form and limit their
membership to the like minded. Their right to do so is protected by the U.S.
Constitution and by the cultural respect for privacy and the rights of others
that is an enduring feature of our country. This right is unchallenged when
exercised in the purely private sphere. But as government involves itself in
more and more areas of our daily lives, such conflicts have multiplied and must
be resolved at the state rather than the private level where individuals are
free to have different answers to important moral and philosophical questions.

To me, it is foolish for a university to prohibit clubs that
will only admit members who share the purpose and beliefs of the clubs’
founders. On the other hand, I find it objectionable for the state to prevent a
university from setting whatever policy it wants for clubs or for the students
it wishes to admit and teach. However, such thinking is more clearly applicable
to private universities, which are in fact private associations like the
clubs/groups in question. Public universities are funded in part from general taxpayers’
money. As such, they must not favor the religious or social views of some
taxpayers against those of others. Here is where the conflict of values—freedom
of religious belief and assembly, and non-discriminatory use of the taxpayers’
money—arise.

The well known case of the Boy Scouts banning membership to
gays comes to mind. While I would refuse to join an organization with such
Neanderthal attitudes and find the image of some homophobic scout master
quaking at the thought of a potential encounter with a homosexual scout
pathetically amusing, I think the Boy Scouts should be free to define
membership qualifications anyway they like. The problem, of course, comes when
they want to use public facilities and public funds. And the real problem is
that it is increasingly difficult to find any activity that does not involve
public/taxpayer funds in some way or other. Jonathan Turley provides an
excellent discussion of this conflict and of this latest Supreme Court case in
Sunday’s Washington Post.[1]

The Court will hopefully find a pragmatic balance between
these two social and constitutionally protected values. But we should also not
give up on trying to limit the scope and reach of the government into our every
day lives. The argument made by Milton Friedman and others long ago that a
social interest in education does not justify the state building and operating
schools is as valid for universities as for grammar schools. He championed
tuition vouchers—i.e. public financing of education privately produced and
delivered—that students could use at any school they chose that would accept
them. It is hard to believe that the money government spends to subsidize
university educations in public universities produces better results than if
the same financial assistance were given in the form of vouchers (and research
grants) to be used at private universities of the customers’ (students’)
choice. The problem of conflicting values would not go away—could vouchers be
used at Jewish, Christian, Muslim schools—but it should make it easier to
fashion pragmatic solutions that broaden or protect the freedom of religion and
association of one person without violating such rights for others. It would
also surely improve the quality of education per dollar spent.

Anyone interested in the debate over whether torture is a useful interrogation tool for fighting terrorists should watch this presentation earlier today at the New American Foundation: http://www.newamerica.net/events/2010/effective_interrogation_techniques
 

As usual friends sent some interesting comments on my note
on torture. Here are two of them with a further comment from me.

*********************

Dear Warren,

As always, I enjoy your deliberations.

It would please me no end to agree fully with you — not so
much to be in agreement with you (that’s only a bonus) but to have a firm
conclusion about a difficult and unseemly issue.

These are among my difficulties:

It doesn’t work argument: As best I can tell, a wide variety
of torture has been used, probably every year, for thousands of years. All
kinds and manner of men. Has it been used by so many and so different people,
only because they are ignorant that it doesn’t work and because they "feel
good" torturing people? That seems most unlikely. Is there any comparable
practice, that spans most cultures and civilizations over centuries, that
continues to be done despite "never working"?

Might one think that torture is a specialized case to
terrorism. The use of violence, not for its own sake, but to change the
political/psychological dynamics. One would hardly argue that "terrorism
never works" repugnant though it is.

The military: the military has another reason for avoiding
torture — the belief that their military personnel are more likely to be
tortured if they are believed to torture. This seems true in some
circumstances, but not others (depending who the opponent is), but it seems
important for them to make this part of their creed. The FBI and the military
seem pretty vocal, but the CIA seems not to share their aversion.

The Geneva Accords: It’s my understanding that it applies
primarily or exclusively to standard "wars" with disciplined military
under state control.

I am very troubled by the lost of standing the U.S. has
suffered over the past decade or more. The lack of disciplinary action after
Abu Ghraib is particularly damaging and disgusting. But I wonder, of the nearly
200 countries, which of them would not have been tempted to waterboarding three
people had that country suffered something comparable to 9/11 and had very
likely suspects in hand? That is, I suspect almost all the governments would
have done something comparable if they were in comparable circumstances. That’s
a version of the argument above that most everyone thinks it works, but also an
argument that there is a certain disingenuosness going on here.

One might, of course, argue that even if it does work, and
even if most everyone else does do it, the U.S. should not — that the U.S. is
more moral than all other countries and should conduct itself as truly
"exceptional" — even if it means risking more terrorist attacks than
would otherwise be the case. An appealing argument but considerably less
persuasive.

All this from someone who was very against the Iraq invasion
— and continues to think it arguably the biggest blunder the US has made in at
least half a century — and that the biggest costs may well be in the future.
The the Patriot Act was a terrible piece of legislation. That Yoo’s argument
for a "unitary" executive a very shoddy and self-serving concoction.

That said, I think we are still at sea, as a nation, on how
to react to the challenge of terrorism. It is distinct from simple criminality
and traditional war. Does the phenomenon need distinct institutions and
structures to accommodate it into a constitutional and rule of law framework?
Bush II worked on this but failed to engage the rest of the country which is
desperately necessary for an enduring consensus to be formed. It looks as if
the challenge of terrorism, or at least the Islamic version, may fade before we
wrestle with the larger issues. Releasing terrorists, (like sex molesters,
criminally insane and other such) seems mistaken yet holding them indefinitely
violates something very fundamental, to cite but one example. Judicial
oversight, with legislative guidance, is needed together with speed and secrecy
in many cases. Etc.

As always, my best,

Bob [Robert Schadler, former Director of the Office of
International Visitors and Chief of Staff to the Director of former U.S.
Information Agency in the Reagan Administration]

*********************

My reply:

Dear Bob,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. As you note, both
morality and effectiveness matter. As you imply, torture seems to works some
times or it wouldn’t have such a long history. The statements last year by Adm.
Dennis Blair (Ret), the Director of National Intelligence, are
interesting in this regard. His comments were in relation to the controversy
over the use of torture by the Bush W administration.

“High value information came from interrogations in which
those methods [“enhanced interrogation”] were used and provided a deeper
understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country…."

"The information gained from these techniques was
valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same
information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is
these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have
done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are
not essential to our national security," Blair concluded[1] 

Best wishes,

Warren

*****************

Warren, A good and unfortunately still a timely message that
bears repeating for future generations.  I personally thought we as a
country had finally learned, back in my law school days in justice torn
Mississippi, that if we don’t adhere to the rule of law we can not expect
anyone else to do so.  Now we’re in the very sad situation of having other
countries in both the developed and developing world use our illegal and
counterproductive behavior in the torture arena as an excuse to engage in even
worse behavior  — all in the name of fighting terrorism and promoting
"national security." While it is one thing for us to have lost our
moral and legal standing in the world, which is something we will hopefully
eventually overcome, it is another to think about all of the additional people
now being imprisoned and "legally" tortured around the world under US
legal cover.  I would say thank you for nothing Messenger Yoo; I sincerely
hope that one day you will see the light and that you will find a way to ask
all of the detainees who have and will suffer under your own
"tortured" legal machinations for forgiveness.

Hope to see you soon!

Keith [Henderson, anticorruption consultant]

 The New America Foundation and Slate sponsored a fascinating seminar this morning on “Manhunt: From Saddam to bin Laden; What Social Networks Mean for Modern
Warfare.”  The presenters included Colonel Jim Hickey,
Commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, U.S. Army that caught Saddam; “Matthew Alexander” (a pseudonym),
the Air Force interrogator of the captive who lead to the location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq); and Scott Helfstein, PhD, Associate, Combating Terrorism Center, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences, United States Military Academy.

All of them stressed the importance of intelligence and of knowledge of the population in
which the military is operating for the success of counterterrorism/insurgency operations. Thus historical and cultural knowledge and relevant language skills are essential for understanding the population and gaining its trust and cooperation, and thus obtaining useful intelligence. Along with being the best equipped with military hardware, America’s military is one of the best trained. Significant delegation of authority to well-trained field commanders permits flexible reactions to conditions on the ground. I have always been highly impressed by the intelligence and quality of the American military officers I have met and this seminar underscored how critical the human capacity of our military is to its success.

The skills and knowledge needed in the field cannot be trained into or found in one person—a super soldier. Thus collaboration and information sharing among a number of people with different skills is essential. More resources should be devoted to
recruiting and training interpreters, for example. The interagency turf fighting and personality clashes between the Departments of Defense and State in Iraq, for example, undermined our effectiveness there.

Most fascinating for me were the comments by Mr. “Alexander,” whose interrogation of an
al-Zarqawi associate led to Mr. al-Zarqawi’s elimination as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He expressed frustration that some political demagogues (my words not his) continue to call for “enhanced interrogation” techniques (torture) despite the generally held conclusion by the military (reflected in its field manual on interrogation) and interrogators like himself that such techniques are not effective in obtaining useful information not to mention in violation of the Geneva Conventions to which the U.S. is formally committed. He declared the call for the use of enhanced interrogation methods an insult to the skills of trained interrogators. “Imagine,” he said, “that American solders were told to use poison gases in their attack on the enemy. The suggestion that they could only succeed by violating international standards of warfare would be an insult to their skills.

By the way, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation of John Yoo, the drafter of the Justice Department’s memo claiming to justify some forms of torture (sleep deprivation, water boarding, etc) found that he was guilty of “professional
misconduct” with regard to his advise on this matter (which could lead to his disbarment).
Earlier this week, that judgment was softened by the Justice Department’s David Margolis to “poor judgment.” I leave to legal scholars to debate the most appropriate characterization of the legal quality of Mr. Yoo’s conduct of his duties. The sad fact is that his ignorance of the substantive (as opposed to legal and moral) aspects of the subject he was advising on, so called “enhanced interrogation,” has done great harm to the United States. We are seen by much of the rest of the world and by many American’s as violating our treaty commitments and our standards of morality and we have in those limited cases
where such techniques were actually used, diminished our capacity to obtain useful information from interrogation.

 

An important element of U.S. strategy to stabilize Afghanistan and contain and preempt the Taliban is the empowerment of village militia in their own defense. I wrote about the virtue of this approach in November in http://tinyurl.com/ybmbfv3 in the context of a broader discussion of our strategic mistake in imposing an overly centralized government on Afghanistan in their new constitution we helped prepare. See http://tinyurl.com/yhq9ctx and http://tinyurl.com/yk8temx.
Today’s Washington Post publishes an important and balanced discussion of value and risks of this policy: http://tinyurl.com/ydl73mr

Correctly assessing the enemy’s motives is essential to
combating him effectively. If radical Muslim fundamentalists hate American
freedom, etc., they are at war with us in our homeland and we would be in a
very different situation requiring a very different strategy than I think we
are actually in. The suicide bomber who killed seven American CIA agents in
Afghanistan December 30 adds further evidence that such claims are false. A
U.S. drone attack in Pakistan killed the important terrorist leader Baitullah
Mehsud in August. “In a chilling videotape released posthumously Saturday by
the Pakistani Taliban and broadcast on regional TV channels, bomber Humam
Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 32, called on Muslim holy warriors worldwide to
avenge Mehsud’s death by attacking U.S. targets. ‘We will never forget the
blood of our emir Baitullah Mehsud," Balawi said on the tape, using the
title that means leader of the Muslim faithful. "We will always demand
revenge for him inside America and outside.’"[1]
 What the bomber hates is America’s
intrusion into his part of the world and its attacks on his brothers, not the
American way of life.

War is always the enemy of liberty, even when trying to
defend it. Our constitution and common sense gives our president essentially
unlimited powers to defend the nation in times of war. Liberty has been
preserved by limiting the wars we fight and keeping them short. These days we
invoke the imagery of war (the war on drugs, crime, terror, etc.) far too often
and too easily for those of us who love liberty and the checks and balances on
government power that are a critical tool for persevering liberty. As Vice
President, Dick Cheney relentlessly pressed for more and more Presidential
power to fight terrorists in the mistaken belief that that was the only way to
win the war against al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorists. Even today he persists in
this dangerous, fundamentally un-American view. His fellow traveler in the Bush
Justice Department, John Yoo (the bad guy would wrote the opinions justifying torture
and other expansions of Presidential power) makes the case for the Imperial
Presidency explicit in his latest book “Crisis and Command.”[2]
This bears on the issues of trying terrorists in regular or military courts,
the use of warrantless wiretaps and similar powers.

Anyone who thinks that I am expressing isolationist views
has totally misunderstood me. My professional career at the IMF has been
devoted to sharing the cumulated wisdom of the developed world with regard to
monetary policy with the central banks of other less developed countries. This
includes explicit “nation building” in places like newly independent (from the
USSR) countries like, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova, and post conflict
countries like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Serbia. I
strongly believe that it is in America’s self interest and the interest of
every other peace loving country in the world to contribute to the building of
more law abiding, successful, and prosperous countries freely trading with one another.
I believe in this kind of “nation building.” I do not think this better world
can be promoted at the end of a gun or as part of an empire of the old or the
new American type neocons seem to want. President Bush was right to say that
Democracy is ultimately the best way to govern peaceful prosperous countries
that respect the just rights of individuals and their neighbors, and that
promoting democracy is thus in America’s interest. But his neocon friends are
wrong to think that viable democracy, as we understand that term, can be
promoted at the point of a gun. Many internal conditions are required before
democracy is likely to improve governance. The Imperial Presidency and the new
American Empire advocated by the Dick Cheney’s of the world are a bigger threat
to our liberties and well being than al-Qaeda.

 

With the benefit of hindsight after eight years of war in
Afghanistan and almost seven years of war in Iraq, hundreds of billions of
dollars gone up in smoke (per year), and the loss of thousands of American and
many more non American lives, many of us have doubted that it was in America’s interest
to undertake these wars. No one can seriously argue that they made us stronger
and/or more secure. As a result, American troops are now stationed in several
more countries, the primary reason for terrorist attacks against America (the
idea that they attack us because they resent our freedom and decadence is
laughable on the face of it).[1]
The two or more trillion dollars we have paid for these two wars could have
been spent to strengthen investment in American infrastructure and productive
capacity, which is ultimately the basis of our military and political strength
in the world. Afghanistan’s complex regional and tribal make up was poorly
understood and our plans to rebuild a more centralized government in
Afghanistan were ill conceived, facing us with high probability of failing to establish
an environment that serves any ones interests very well. And Al Qaeda can and
has easily moved elsewhere and we don’t have enough young men and women to send
to die in too many more places. But it is easier to look back and see our
mistakes, than to evaluate similar situations in advance. Enter Yemen.

Al Qaeda is once again operating in Yemen (remember the bombing
of the U.S.S. Cole October 12, 2000?). What should we do about it? Looking
ahead we see the dangers to us of Al Qaeda operating recruiting and training
areas in Yemen more clearly than we see the dangers of further stretching our
military into a country whose government is deeply hated by at least half of
the country creating an incentive to attack us (the foreign invader) that does
not now exist. We need to try hard to evaluate the costs and benefits of our
future involvement in Yemen with equal attention to both types of risks.

The Republic of Yemen occupies the Southern end of the
Arabian Peninsula. Somalia, the land of pirates and another potential haven for
Al Qaeda, is a short distance way to the South  across the Gulf of Aden. Its
size and population (0.20 million square miles and 23 million people) are
similar to those of Afghanistan (0.25 million square miles and 30 million
people). Its largely Arabic population is overwhelmingly Muslim almost equally
divided between Sunni and Shi’a. However, its Sunni and Shi’a population are
very unevenly distributed with most Sunnis in the South and most Shi’as in the
North. South Yemen, which only gained its independence from Britain in 1967,
was only united with North Yemen, which gained its independence from the
Ottoman Empire in 1918, in 1990.

Enhanced U.S. involvement in Yemen to eliminate or contain
Al Qaeda might take the form of intelligence gathering with or without the participation
of the Yemen government, military cooperation with and support to the Yemen
government (equipment, training, etc), or a military invasion ala Afghanistan
and Iraq. In evaluating the costs and benefits of these options, we don’t need
to wait to be surprised that the Yemen government is very unpopular with a
large segment of the population and that we would be taking its side against an
existing insurgency. We already know that. There has already been one civil war
between the north and south (1994). “Southerners contend that the government
has denied them their share of oil revenue, and has dismissed many southerners
from military and government jobs. A wave of protests has roiled the south,
prompting a government crackdown. Many members of the Southern Movement, a
loosely knit coalition, now demand secession. ‘We no longer want our rights
from the government. We want a separate north and south,’ said Ahmed Kassim, a
secessionist leader….”[2]
 “Al-Qaeda militants… are shielded
by tribal alliances and codes in religiously conservative communities that do
not tolerate outside interference, even from the government.”[3]
In short, in Yemen we would face many of the same sorts of problems we are now
facing in Afghanistan. Thus the cost of any significant involvement, especially
direct military involvement, in Yemen would be very high.

Limiting our Yemen activities to enhanced intelligence gathering,
whether covert or overt, would greatly reduce the costs and risk of our
activities. Occasional drone attacks on carefully vetted al-Qaeda personnel and
facilities in Yemen (though a few mistake are inevitable) would be no less
effective toward the objective of eliminating or containing al-Qaeda than the
full military invasion and continued operations in Afghanistan have been there.
Addressing the issues causing the insurgency, or “nation building” more
broadly, is a desirable long run strategy but is not promoted by the presence
of foreign military (ours or anyone else’s). An invasion would increase the
cost enormously with no clear increase in benefits. “‘If there is direct
intervention by the United States, it will strengthen al-Qaeda,’ warned Rashad
al-Alimi, Yemen’s deputy prime minister for security and defense. ‘We cannot
accept any foreign troops on Yemeni territory.’”[4]
There is substantial evidence that the presence of foreign troops on their home
soil is the most significant motivation for almost all suicide bomber attacks.[5]
We should not introduce that reason for Yemeni insurgents to attack the United
States, which is not now the source of their discontent.

But what about al-Qaeda? Shouldn’t we go after them in Yemen
(Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc) with everything we’ve got? If we do, they
will just move somewhere else. . We bare the cost with no benefit. We will
better defend ourselves from al-Qaeda and the small number of other fanatical terrorist
who wish to punish the U.S. (rather than their own domestic enemies): by
improving our intelligence and its use to detect and deter terrorist plots,
strengthening our borders, and reducing our irritating and costly interference
in the lives of others.

Kat Woolford, my BearingPoint (now Deloitte) colleague in Baghdad, just informed me that our British IT colleague Peter Moore has been released by his captors. Peter was kidnapped from the Finance Ministry in Baghdad in May 2007 along with his four PSDs (Personal Security Detail). The bodies of the four PSDs had been recovered earlier. This is a welcomed bit of good news. Happy New Year to you all.

The size of government tends to grow naturally if not checked. There are many reasons for keeping the government lean and mean (a distant memory, but still a good standard)—personal liberty, personal responsibility and the moral qualities it fosters, economic dynamism, progress and efficiency, and the list goes on. Government bureaucrats, however public spirited and well meaning, are simply not driven by the spirit that animates the private competitive entrepreneur and those he or she manages. Both the
public sector and the private sector respond to the incentives they face. One of the government’s more effective tools for “regulating” the private sector is to fashion laws and regulations that create incentives for private sector behavior that serves the long run public interest. That is what Adam Smith’s invisible hand of self interest and competition do quite well on their own most of the time but there can be gaps (externalities) the government can sometimes fill.

It is difficult to get the incentives right in the public sector. Political leaders may have the public interest at heart but getting reelected must come first and their constituency may have special interests other than the national interest. Bureaucrats rarely advance their careers by standing up or standing out. When government interference with and involvement in economic activity exceed the essentials, it often starts us down a slippery
slop of catering to special interests that is increasingly hard to resist. Three recent examples, illustrate this point.

In the area of financial sector supervision, some have charged that the government has not regulated bank and financial sector behavior tightly enough thus contributing to, if not causing, the financial sector crisis of last year and the recession of last year into this one. While “appropriate” supervision is desirable, America’s financial supervisors (just for banks this included the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, FDIC, Office of Thrift Supervision, and fifty state supervisors) suffer a number of weaknesses typical of government.

Banking supervisors did not foreseeing the housing and financial crisis any better than anyone else (how could they!!). “In May 2006, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, Wachovia, signed a deal to buy Golden West, one of the largest mortgage lenders in California….  The next month the board [of Governors of the Federal Reserve] unanimously approved the deal. The Fed wrote in its approval that it had “carefully considered” the warnings about Golden West and concluded that Wachovia had sufficient capital to absorb losses and effective systems for assessing and managing risks…. Two years after Wachovia closed its
deal for Golden West, regulators told the company it could no longer survive on its own. A hasty sale to Wells Fargo was arranged with the help of billions of dollars in federal tax breaks.”[1] The Federal Reserve and other banking supervisors did not lack adequate
supervisory authority in this instance. The problem was that they did not use the authority they had satisfactorily. New powers (though a few may be useful) would not over come these weaknesses.

Regulators rightly work closely with those they regulate, but are too easily captured by the perspective and interests of the regulated. In the extreme, regulars can fail to use regulatory tools and measure available or even mandated. The FDIC is required by law to intervene when a banks capital falls to less than 2 percent of its risk weighted assets. The fact that the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund is in danger of running out is proof that it has
failed to fulfill this mandate. [2]

A quit different example comes from the area of military procurement. Obviously we need a strong military and get a much better deal for the taxpayer by developing and buying military systems and hardware from the private sector. But consider how difficult it is for the government to judge objectively what is needed and who can prove it best.  I already commented on Lockheed Martin’s attempt to keep the unwanted and unneeded F-22 in the military budget http://tinyurl.com/yfvzdv5. The Defense Department finally won on this one with the passage of the defense appropriation bill Dec 20^th without the F-22. The battle for the new U.S. Air Force tanker plane contract rages on (again) between Boeing’s and Northrop Grumman’s offerings. It is a brave Congressman who considers the
national interest over the jobs impact in his congressional district. Boeing, for example, once produced almost all of its airplanes and their parts in the Seattle Washington area. The move of its headquarters to Chicago and the scattering of its manufacturing and assemble plants to as many locations around the country as possible was certainly not motivated by economic efficiency.

These obvious challenges to efficient government have now hit a new low. “Insurance giant Mutual of Omaha will see less of a hit from a $10 billion-a-year industry-wide tax on health insurance providers, under the terms of a deal worked out between Senate Democratic leaders and Sen. Ben Nelson (D., Neb.).[3] This was part of the price Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid arranged for us taxpayers to pay in order to buy Senator Nelson’s vote for the Healthcare bill now almost sure to pass the Senate (Nelson was the 60^th vote needed to block a filibuster). “Reid was buying the votes of senators whose understanding of the duties of representation does not rise above looting the nation for local benefits.”[4] Richard Cohn, who supports the bill, noted that “The bill has turned out to be a mosh pit of selfishness.”[5]  “Reid didn’t even attempt to offer a reason why Medicaid in Nebraska should be treated differently from, say, Medicaid across the Missouri River in Iowa. The majority leader bought a vote with someone else’s money….  Why doesn’t every Democratic senator demand the same treatment for his or her
state? Eventually, they will.”[6] “As news of the agreements proliferated, Republican senators went to the floor to protest. “This will not stand the test of the Constitution, I hope, because the deals that have been made to get votes from specific states’ senators
cannot be considered equal protection under the law,” argued Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Tex.).  Her Texas colleague, Sen. John Cornyn, took issue with White House strategist David Axelrod‘s claim that such deals are “the way it will always be.”[7]

The problem is hardly limited to health care “reform.” Despite promises not to interfere with the business decisions of GM after the government took over its ownership, Congress could not restrain itself from forcing GM to keep open some of the dealerships GM wanted to close. “One United Bank in Massachusetts got aid after Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) inserted language into the bailout bill that effectively directed Treasury to give the
bank special consideration.”[8] “Reid said when asked about the fairness of it all. ‘So this legislation is no different than the defense bill we just spent $600 billion on.’ That would be the bill with more than 1,700 pet-project earmarks. ‘It’s no different than
other pieces of legislation,’ Reid continued.”[9]

Sadly he is right. Obama the candidate promised to end earmarks. Under Obama
the President they have gotten worse. There is only one way to roll back and
keep such abuses in check, which threaten to bleed us to death from a thousand
little cuts, and that is to keep the government lean and mean—keep it out of as
much of the economy and our private lives as possible. And eternal vigilance.