It [the Iran-Iraq war] didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind. ~Benjamin Netanyahu

Via Alex Massie

As Massie says, this makes no sense. First of all, British losses in WWI, like those of all belligerents in WWI, were much higher both proportionally and in absolute terms than Iran’s losses in the war with Iraq, and WWI was far more futile and was, for the British, almost entirely a war of choice. The Iranians were resisting aggression against their country. People will endure remarkable hardship, at least once, to expel an invader from their country. Like France after Verdun, the horrific experience might be great enough to force a nation into a purely defensive posture, but even post-WWI France, which is a better comparison with post-1988 Iran, did not sink into pacifism.

Indeed, the occupation of the Rhineland, security guarantees to central European states and the building of the Maginot Line all point not to pacifism, but to an assumption that another war might come and France should be prepared for it. The Maginot Line came out of the experience of Verdun, which was that the defensive position held the overwhelming advantage in modern warfare; the problem with the Maginot Line was not that it was defensive and therefore somehow “weak” or pacifistic, but plainly enough that it did not guard the entire border.* Another small problem with Netanyahu’s remark is that it seems to show no awareness that Britain did not lapse into pacifism after WWI; British forces kept fighting the Bolsheviks and were busy suppressing colonial uprisings well after Armistice Day. There were practical, fiscal and political limits to the size of the military after the vast expense of WWI, so demobilization halted or reduced a lot of these operations, but it wasn’t for lack of will that Britain pulled out of Anatolia or gave up on the White cause in Russia.

The real gem of Netanyahu’s interview was this:

He continued: “You see a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” I asked Netanyahu if he believed Iran would risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.

Massie comments:

Secondly, why does Netanyahu decline to “get into” a discussion on whether Iran would “risk its own nuclear annihilation at the hands of Israel or America”? Might it be because the obvious answer is that they would not? Otherwise why not just say “yes they would be prepared to risk that”?

Netanyahu might have to acknowledge that all the supposed glorification of “self-immolation” is just bluster and empty rhetoric. Let’s be very clear on this point: the only argument in favor of a preventive war against Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities is that traditional deterrence will not work with the Iranian government, because the “mad mullahs” are supposedly willing to suffer annihilation in exchange for destroying Israel. Not to be too blunt about it, but has it ever occurred to the people who make this argument that they may be making Israel’s fate far more important to Tehran than it actually is? I’m not sure what would offend some people more: the idea that Iran wants to destroy Israel at all costs, or the idea that it doesn’t place enough importance on the fate of Israel to do very much about it. Is Tehran willing to back proxies on Israel’s flanks that can launch rockets on Israeli cities? Yes. Does it follow that this garden-variety proxy warfare and power projection means that the government in question is so dedicated to harming Israel that it would invite nuclear apocalypse? Obviously, it doesn’t, and if I were an advocate of a strategy that takes this ludicrous idea for granted I would try to avoid talking about it in public, too.

* Regarding the Maginot Line, this short description may help the woefully ignorant out there:

Like the Séré de Rivières forts constructed along the line of the rivers Meuse and Moselle after the 1870–71 war, the Maginot Line was designed to keep the Germans out. Constructed between 1930 and 1940, it was the brainchild of the French Minister of War (1929–31), André Maginot. Spanning the entire length of the French–German border – plus a section of the French-Belgian border – it comprised a complete system of defence in depth. There were advance posts equipped with anti-tank weapons and machine guns. There were fortified police stations close to the frontier. But the main line consisted of a continuous chain of underground strongpoints linked by anti-tank obstacles and equipped with state-of-the-art machinery. It was of course hugely expensive and, when put to the test in 1940, proved to be worse than useless: the Germans simply violated Belgian neutrality and drove round the other end of the Line.

Obviously, defensive fortifications that fail to guard the entire border can be outflanked, which is the flaw mentioned in the original post. The Germans’ launch of their offensive through the Ardennes was an acknowledgment that the Maginot Line would have been very difficult and costly to breach, if it would have been possible at all. The Maginot Line was a classic case of preparing to fight the last war, but it had nothing to do with pacifism.

We have covered this question before during the strikes on Gaza, the war in Lebanon, and the war against Yugoslavia, but somehow it never seems to sink in with some people. As Massie correctly argues, the failure to understand that other nations do not respond well to bombing and terror is a failure of imagination and empathy, but I think it is more and far worse than that. Certainly, it helps that supporters of air wars and collective punishment do not try to see things from the perspective of a foreign population. It helps a great deal that they seem to have not an ounce of respect for the sentiments and feelings of loyalty and pride those people have regarding their own countries.

However, after the second or third or tenth failed campaign to spark a political backlash against a given regime by means of aerial bombardment and collective punishment, some learning would have to take place, wouldn’t it? Perhaps I have too much confidence in the intelligence of the supporters of these methods, but I do find it hard to believe that someone can still honestly and seriously put forward an argument that these methods are likely to yield the intended political result. It is hard not to conclude after a while that interventionists of this kind do not have a misguided desire to help other nations living under authoritarian or sectarian rulers and just happen to advocate using counterproductive means, but are content simply to use this as an excuse and a cover for their genuine interest to inflict humiliation and destruction on these nations in pursuit of projecting power and crushing resistance to the governments that they favor.

When it came to Gaza, this was much more straightforward and clear, because there was not much incentive for supporters of the operation to pretend that Palestinian attitudes mattered to them. There were undoubtedly some supporters who were interested in the operation’s effect on Palestinian attitudes, but for the most part the analysis stopped at “this is what you get for supporting Hamas, so there!” Supporters of the operation could more or less shrug off civilian deaths in Gaza as both unavoidable and supposedly deserved (the “they brought it on themselves” excuse). If collective punishment did not have the effect of discrediting Hamas with the population, it was neither here nor there, because it was simply the inflicting of punishment and not any grand strategy of undermining Hamas that mattered. Again, there were supporters of the operation to whom this description did not apply, but I think it very fairly describes the most vocal and zealous supporters. No one could have observed the counterproductive effects of bombing Yugoslavia (causing Serbs to rally to a leader most of them had come to loathe) or starving and bombing Iraq (empowering Hussein and weakening all opposition) and concluded that these practices succeeded in bringing down the regimes in question. At some point, don’t we have to say that people who make such manifestly ridiculous arguments are using them as nothing more than window-dressing and do not really mean what they’re saying? Lack of imagination and lack of empathy are part of the problem, but can they really account for the blindness to reality on display?

As Massie says:

The problem with Abrams and co is not simply that they treat every problem as though it were the same, but that they seem to have no imagination. That is, Abrams clearly cannot imagine how an Iranian might be both opposed to the regime and proud that Iran had a nuclear capability. Yet it is not difficult to imagine how such feelings might exist. Equally, Abrams’ lack of empathy makes it impossible for him to imagine how an Iranian might hear the “good messaging” about “why we ae not against the people of Iran” and see these messengers dropping bombs on Iranian territory and conclude that perhaps the Americans do indeed have something against the Iranian people. This is elementary.

It is elementary, and even Abrams et al. cannot be so dense as to be unable to grasp the concept. Something more than being unimaginative and indifferent is at work.

When it comes to Iran, it is more difficult to portray the Iranian government as both deeply unpopular and entirely unrepresentative if state and people are conflated together too easily. Different parts of the rationale for toppling the regime come into conflict with each other. For that reason, there is more of a need to resort to the fiction that the Iranian people will turn on their government if foreign governments launch unprovoked strikes on their country. The disastrous assumption that all Iraqis would welcome their invaders or attackers would make most Americans wary of trying something similar again, so the fiction is useful in reassuring some Americans that it will be different next time.

The advocates for attacking Iran have a small problem: people generally do not turn on their government when foreigners attack, and those who actually welcome the invaders or try to overthrow their government in response tend to be regarded as collaborators with the enemy and traitors and treated accordingly. Not only has the mass rejection of a government attacked by another state scarcely ever happened in modern history, but it makes no sense psychologically or politically. It may be the case that governments that launch or enter into wars and fail are subsequently thrown out of power, but when a nation is on the receiving end of an attack the population typically stands by the government during the attack and at most scapegoats individual commanders, politicians or rulers for failure afterwards. I can think of one example when a nation has turned on the leadership of the regime in wartime, which was Russia in February 1917, and this was done in part, so the revolutionaries hoped, to be better able to fight the Germans. Even that happened only after two and a half years of one of the bloodiest wars of all time in which Russia suffered enormous, lopsided losses. No one of any importance, thank goodness, is proposing to launch a military campaign against Iran that is even remotely similar, and it is worth remembering that the Iraqis did inflict major losses on the Iranians during their war at a time when the regime was actually much weaker than it is today, and the regime did not fall then. The net effect of the experience of their war with Iraq was to solidify support for the new regime.

As I said earlier this year, one need only think for half a minute about what our response would be and what our responses have been to what we regarded as purely unprovoked attacks, and it is fairly easy to understand what the response of another nation would be under similar circumstances. Did 9/11 cause the vast majority of Americans to ask, “How did our government get us into this mess?” Obviously not. It did cause most people to ask, “Why do they hate us?” to which the official and popular answer has been, “Because they are irrational maniacs bent on destroying our way of life.” Even to the extent that it was permitted to discuss the possible role our policies had in generating hostility and resentment against us, the conclusion in mainstream circles has always been that those policies were basically sound and necessary. Of course, the public tends to accept official answers during an emergency and in the years following it, even when these answers come in the form of propaganda that insults their intelligence, and in an emergency solidarity with the government tends to push everything else to the side. So even in the unlikely event that a majority of Iranians saw the Iranian nuclear program as the intolerable danger to international peace that Washington says it is, rather than the legitimate national pursuit most Iranians actually see it as being, launching strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would ensure that whatever dissenters there are would be radicalized and pushed into the arms of their leaders, whose oversimplified, perhaps largely false, description of the motives of the attackers would become the widely-accepted one.

It should go without saying that a more nationalistic public, especially one that has been raised with the knowledge of modern unprovoked invasions of their country (as Iranians have been), will be even more likely to rally to the government in a time of crisis, because they will not see an attack on their military and scientific installations as an attack focused solely on the government or a specific policy of that government. Instead, they will see it as an attempt to thwart their national ambition and to humiliate them in the eyes of the world, and nationalists tend not to react well to either one.

Ross mentions this profile of Russian President Medvedev as an interesting source of background, and I agree that it is a useful primer on Medvedev if you are not familiar with his career prior to his elevation by Putin and election, but I am instinctively wary of efforts to interpret the actions of foreign governments or to speculate about their future actions based on the biographies of their temporary heads of state. Even if the impulse to distinguish Medvedev from Putin helps to make reconciliation with Russia more palatable in the short term, it inevitably sets up American observers for disappointment if it makes them overly confident that Russian policy is somehow going to change significantly with respect to Russian resistance to NATO expansion, ballistic missile defense or the launching of “pre-emptive” and humanitarian wars against their satellites and clients. Just as there are limits and constraints imposed by our political class and foreign policy establishment on how far Obama can go in accommodating Russia, whoever happens to be the head of state in Moscow will face similar limitations on his side.

One of the reasons I continually, perhaps boringly, insist that the Kagan-esque description of Russia and China as “autocracies” is completely wrong is that it creates a false impression that any particular head of state wields the kind of arbitrary and absolute power that an autocrat would actually possess. According to much of our political class, Putin was perceived to be a Bad Tsar, but that leaves open the possibility of a Good Tsar, when there are actually no more tsars. Otherwise, this autocracy framing is premised on the even more ridiculous notion that if only Russia were more democratic (which would actually make it more nationalistic in its policies) Russian policy would be less “anti-Western” or whatever term our political class feels obliged to put on Moscow’s pursuit of limited national interests.

Modern Russian Presidents may like to model themselves after Byzantine emperors, but that does not mean that they have the constitutional role of the autokrator. If we take this autocracy idea seriously, we are going to come to the wrong conclusions. As a general rule, we routinely misread and misunderstand what other governments are trying to do because we tend to personalize discussion of what these governments do. Even now that Putin is no longer actually President, there is some need in certain circles to insist that he is the one really in charge, because the personalized interpretation of a neo-Soviet regime or “unpredictable” so-called revisionist power does not work nearly as well when its head of state is a lawyer with some modest reform impulses. Medvedev can’t really be in charge, and can’t even be the major partner in a sort of dyarchical executive, because he cannot be made into a villain as easily as an ex-KGB officer.

Medvedev’s reform impulses shouldn’t be ignored, but they shouldn’t be exaggerated, either. Likewise, Medvedev is a Russian nationalist, and his view of Russian security interests and foreign policy is not significantly different from that of Putin. His career in Gazprom reinforces the certainty that his policies will be shaped to a significant degree by the needs of the Russian energy sector, as you would expect in a petro-state. As we saw in the war in Georgia, Medvedev is no less willing to defend Russia’s role in the separatist enclaves in Georgia, and he has shown no significantly greater tolerance for dissent. Indeed, in reaction to the worsening economic crisis, authoritarian measures have become stronger inside Russia in an attempt to quell or minimize dissent and upheaval. We would be less surprised, and less inclined to invent ridiculous narratives about Russian “backsliding” if none of us floated a theory every few years that some new leader is going to change Russian policy in major ways. One of the problems with such theories is that they seem to be driven to some degree by a desire to see foreign leaders who sign off on U.S. foreign policy moves that their predecessors found intolerable, as if opposition to these moves was the idiosyncratic or arbitrary reaction of a particular person rather than an expression of state interests as understood by a broad consensus inside the other government.

Of course, the siloviki, the military, Gazprom and the oligarchs are fundamentally no less important to the current system than they were when Putin was President (the oligarchs and Gazprom are poorer, but not necessarily less important in shaping policy for all that), and their interests continue to define the contours of Russian policy because they make up the overwhelming bulk of the power structure. Even modern regimes that might be more reasonably described as autocracies–the Saudi monarchy, for example–have interest groups at home they must satisfy, and in Russia and China there are institutions and political forces that the head of state has to accommodate, not vice versa. The more we acknowledge that Russian policy is dictated by Russian perception of their national interests, rather than by the preferences of a particular leader, the better chance we have of recognizing where our interests are shared and where we can accommodate their objections.

Update: Now posted at The New Atlanticist.

Not that I want to encourage a lot of television-watching (it is Lent, after all), but I have to say a few words about the new NBC series Kings. As a longtime Ian McShane fan from his days as the roguish antiques dealer Lovejoy, I was very pleased to see him in the lead of this new series, and he has not disappointed in his new role. When I discovered that the show was an attempt to make a modern adaptation of the story of Saul and David from the First Book of Samuel, I was even more intrigued and was determined to give it a chance. I did this even though I assumed that, being a network television series, it would downplay if not actually eliminate all references to God, prophecy and anointed kingship, and in this assumption I have been completely wrong from the first minutes of the pilot. The first three episodes have treated the original Biblical story respectfully, if not slavishly, and they have given the political theology of I Samuel and the role of “Rev. Samuels” as central a place in the story as one might expect to see. Obviously, the show is being marketed as a political drama/soap opera a la Rome with the religious component obscured almost entirely in the advertising (apparently because, as they say in the first scene, “it’s not popular to speak of God”), and additional plot twists added on occasion. Like Rome, it has impressive sets and casting, and a similarly large budget, and it has so far brought in high quality directorial talent. Naturally, pitted against The Simpsons and even more mindless reality TV fare, Kings has been doing very badly in the ratings. NBC is infamous for its mishandling of quality programming, so there is every reason to fear that the network will do its best to undermine the show until it is cancelled. However, this is a show that is intelligent, reasonably attentive to the Biblical narrative and serious when speaking of matters of faith and sacrifice, and if there is any show on network or cable that can claim anything similar I have yet to hear of it. It’s worth a look.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a great admirer of T.S. Eliot, who has to be considered one of the best, if not the best, poet writing in the English language in the 20th century. His writings on culture and Christianity have been important in my thinking about these matters, his inclusion in Kirk’s The Conservative Mind had an important role as well, and I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that his oft-quoted remark about there being no such thing as lost causes has had more influence on how I think than just about any other single aphorism. So I was a little surprised to read the report (via Alan Jacobs) that Eliot had, as an editor at Faber & Faber, rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm in 1944.

It was not that he rejected the novel that surprised me or concerned me so much as the reasons he reportedly gave. As Jacobs notes, the reasons are entirely political and seem to be dictated to an embarrassing degree by the British and American alliance with the Soviet Union. Personally, I have never been overwhelmed by the quality of Animal Farm, having first read it when I was in elementary school and perhaps not able to appreciate it fully thereafter, but if one had to turn it down I would think that describing it as an “anti-Russian novel” informed by a “Trotskyite” political view would be one of the last things one would ever say about it. It is not an anti-Russian novel, or to be precise one could only call it that if you accepted that being Russian and being a Soviet communist were necessarily the same thing, which is an idea that Solzhenitsyn would later ridicule with great vehemence. If I recall correctly, Russians have nothing to do with the story, and indeed I would hazard a guess that setting an anti-communist or more specifically anti-Soviet communist story in an entirely un-Soviet setting was intended to distinguish between the destructive ideology being critiqued and any particular nation. It is Trotskyite mainly in the sense that anyone on the left writing against Stalin’s butchery and evil would probably have been denounced as a Trotskyite by the Soviets.

Would Animal Farm have offended the Soviets? I assume that it would have to have been offensive to them and was offensive, but why should a publishing house in the West care about that? What a telling and sad statement about the power of wartime political correctness that even a mind such as Eliot’s, which obviously had zero sympathy for the system being attacked in the novel, could reach the conclusion that he was not convinced that “this is the thing that needs saying at the moment.” When would have been appropriate? When the Allies were no longer at war with Eastasia and were once again opposed to Eurasia? Ahem. Presumably, as in most historical films today, what was needed was a reliable, easily vilified Nazi pig dictatorship in which the chickens and cows were subjected as ‘racial’ inferiors.

John points to Alex Massie’s post on growing dissatisfaction with European economic policy on some parts of the American left:

The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time – and not so long ago neither – Democrats thought it was important fro friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.

As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!

What is also worth noting is not only the repetition of the tropes of imperial entitlement and unreasonable expectation of lockstep obedience, but the same accusatory rhetoric that Europeans are not sharing the load. If Europeans (particularly the “old” ones!) were free-riding, dictator-loving weaklings (or whatever) in 2002, they are now supposed to be free-riding, self-destructive neo-Hooverites if they are not on board with dubious Washington remedies. The assumption is always that we propose, and the Europeans dispose, and there can be no backtalk. This was a crazy attitude before the war, when we should have listened to the French and Germans when they warned us that no good would come from invading Iraq, and it is a crazy attitude now when we could probably stand to learn from the German wariness of taking on massive new amounts of debt and spurring wealth-destroying inflation.

One of the great ironies in all this is that it is the fiscal straitjacket of the EU itself that compels leading European states to be less reckless in their deficit spending, and it is the same Union structures that Washington has been only too glad to encourage. This is also the same Union whose expansion Washington has been more interested in than some of its current members. The Turks might take note that their banking system appears to be much less adversely affected by the crisis, and this might not have necessarily been the case had their government had its way in gaining entry into the Union and Turkey participated in the free-wheeling financial bonanza that ate Iceland. While badly underrated during boom times, retaining relatively more national sovereignty can have its advantages.

There is a related misunderstanding that continental economies are somehow not as badly affected by the recession and the financial crisis, which some may want to cite as proof that continental models are preferable to the “Anglo-Saxon” one and others use as an excuse to demand that Europe put up much more than they can possibly afford in new spending. That is, even if European governments were inclined to pursue Washington’s route of stimulus spending, many countries have banks that are just as overleveraged as ours and some that are even more so, which constrains the resouces these states can devote above and beyond their existing welfare outlays. While economic integration will tend to lead to similar political responses over time, there is a lot to be said for sovereign states tailoring their policies according to conditions in their countries and not simply reproducing the responses that may be more appropriate elsewhere. Part of me suspects that some of the administration’s supporters would like to see European governments get on board with additional spending to provide cover and create the impression of a near-universal consensus on how to respond to the recession, so that even if they are wrong in their proposals they can, like the previous administration about WMDs in Iraq, declare haughtily, “Hey, everybody thought this was true!”

No one chanting “Yes we can” was pushing for a change that would stick America’s middle-class taxpayers with additional trillions of new debt in order to fill up the coffers of some of the biggest and richest swindlers on Wall Street.

Where’s the change, in short, between Bush’s TARP-1 and Obama’s TARP-2? ~Ralph Reiland

Obviously, I agree that there are certain obvious points of continuity between the administrations on matters of foreign and financial policy, since I have been saying something of the kind about Obama’s policy views for more than a year. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone make some stupid claim about Obama’s plans to slash the defense budget, sell out Israel or introduce socialism, I could pay for a considerable part of the omnibus budget bill. However, these points of continuity were obvious before the election, so I do get a little tired of pundits who write entire columns saying nothing more interesting than, “That’s not change–that’s more of the same!” as if this has never been discovered until now. On the day after the election, I wrote a summary of my assessment of Obama in a piece for Culture11:

If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

In fairness to Obama, he has never hidden his preference for accommodation and consensus, and those who understand Obama’s political career the best have already discovered this defining characteristic.

This was a distillation of arguments I had made for the entire campaign. Just about everything Obama has done since his inauguration bears this out. One of the more odd memes that has cropped up recently is the sudden recognition by a broad swathe of the media that Paul Krugman is an Obama critic–really, I hadn’t noticed! Krugman railed against Obama as a centrist (which, from Krugman’s perspective, is a mostly accurate description) since the early stages of the primaries, Krugman denounced the bailout plan the first time and has resumed denouncing it in its new incarnation, and yet for the Reilands of the world it is as if Obama’s relative centrism and establishmentarian instincts come as a revelation only recently imparted.

When I pointed out in one of my columns the absurdity and non-credibility of McCain’s attack on the “spread the wealth” phrase in light of his support for the bailout, I am fairly sure that there were not a lot of others on the right who perceived the sheer hypocrisy of it all. They had their lines down cold: Obama was the evil redistributionist, and McCain was resisting the onset of socialism, and that was all they needed to know, because the Plumber had told them so. The possibility that both were acquiescing in a bad policy designed to satisfy the interests of certain large financial institutions at the expense of the public seems to have been lost on quite a few people in the mainstream press. Of course, on this question not only did Obama not make a significant break with the Bush administration, but he and McCain were indistinguishable.

For that matter, based on surveys of public attitudes before the election, there was a significant minority of approximately 30% across all ideological and partisan affiliations that supported the creation of the TARP. So clearly there were quite a few Obama voters who were not bothered by his embrace of the bailout and his vote for the EESA, and perhaps there were more than a few “responsible” center-left “pragmatists” and Wall Street Democrats who saw Obama’s pro-bailout stance as a reason to vote for him. These are the people who welcomed the appointment of Geithner as brilliant. These people were pretty thoroughly wrong, but there were plenty of them–the sort who sneer at populists, whether left or right, and put their trust in technocrats.

There were also quite a few progressives who hated the bailout, but who nonetheless voted for Obama, so whatever they may have expected in the way of “change” they must have understood that rejecting the TARP was not going to be part of it. It is unlikely that these people would have supported McCain had he done the politically and substantively smart thing by opposing the bailout, but then McCain has almost never done the substantively smart thing so we were never going to find out. For that matter, there was significant support on the right for bailing out those whom Reiland dubs swindlers, and there were very few rising national Republican leaders who actively opposed the measure; no one in the Congressional leadership did so. The House backbenchers and a handful of GOP Senators who opposed the TARP were regularly demonized by “responsible” Republican pundits as know-nothings, nihilists and nitwits. Six months later, their opposition, like that of progressives in the House and Senate, appears even more correct than it did at the time.

Where was Reiland’s criticism of this plan at the time, or did he just happen to rediscover his outrage now that it is Obama who presides over and supports the awful policies that Bush, McCain and the GOP leadership all embraced just as readily?

The Bush-Obama approach to the crisis in the financial sector is to monetize existing debt and accumulate massive new debt that will likely also require monetization. The monetization threatens inflation, high interest rates, and depreciation of the U.S. dollar and loss of its reserve currency role. The accumulation of new public debt implies larger annual interest payments that could make future deficit reduction problematic. Clearly, the Obama administration needs to broaden its perception of the predicament to which financial deregulation and offshoring have brought the U.S. economy. ~Paul Craig Roberts

Naturally, then, our crack team of experts is busily combating non-existent deflation as most pundits warn against the menace of protectionism.

Via Clive Davis, a tutorial courtesy of The Onion:

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

If we focused on what is vital for our safety and independence, we could spend a lot less money. But if there is no limit to what we have to do to police and remake the world, there is also no limit to what we can spend. ~Steve Chapman

This is one of the key things to understand about the Long War: its very amorphous, unlimited and endless nature makes for an outstanding justification for ongoing and ever-increasing spending, which then creates more and more interests that have a stake in keeping the flow of funding constant. For one thing, a war of “no exits and no deadlines,” and one that theoretically encompasses the entire planet in one way or another, is a perfect justification for a set of government programs that can never be defunded. If our national security strategy were primarily concerned with national defense, rather than with power projection and hegemony, our objectives would be relatively few, limited and achievable, but that would create some ceiling on spending. The very open-ended and global nature of the Long War means that no “defense” budget is ever really large enough, because no budget no matter how large could be equal to the unlimited nature of the project. This may help explain why the Long War’s most ardent supporters are not embarrassed to claim that Pentagon budget increases are cuts. When measured against the absurd demands their war of “no exits and no deadlines” makes on the nation, mere 9% annual increases in outlays probably barely register.