Stromata Blog

Good News and Bad

“Real life”, in the form of a long, long chapter on 403(b), 457(b) and 457(f) plans for a forthcoming book (if you don’t recognize the numbers, you aren’t interested), having absorbed 110 percent of my free time, there hasn’t been much blogging here lately. Eventually that will change. In the meantime, a couple of items about the current state of the War on Terror struck me as worth repeating.

First, the sounds of silence from Iraq:

Two weeks ago, at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Al Qaeda declared that it would escalate attacks and specifically target leaders who were cooperating with Iraqi security forces. (This strategy, in and of itself, is a sign that Al Qaeda fears the growing strength of Sunni tribal cooperation). But instead of escalating attacks, the U.S. military reports that violence across Iraq during Ramadan dropped by 40% compared to last year. In addition, mass-casualty producing, spectacular attacks – long a hallmark of Al Qaeda – have occurred with far less frequency.

This is not to say they cannot still deliver such attacks, but the new U.S. strategy has crippled them. Don’t just take my word for it, listen to the latest Al Qaeda “martyr,” Abu Osama al-Tunisi. In a handwritten note found at the site of his death, the Al Qaeda in Iraq #2 wrote, “I have been surrounded…for two and a half months because the road has been closed by the Apostate, and there is no other way.” He added, “We are so desperate for your help.” The words of this high-ranking Al Qaeda member speak volumes, and underscore the now undeniable counter-narrative happening in Iraq.

Rather than deny the undeniable, our news media simply don’t report it. I wonder how much attention will be given tomorrow morning to the September death toll. The Coalition lost 42 soldiers to hostile action during the month (according to icasualties). In the past three years, only four months have had equal or lower figures.

On the other hand, the media’s silence about Lebanon masks a less happy state of affairs:

There are only 50,000 Lebanese soldiers (including the Lebanese Army, Navy, and Air Force), and as is the case with any nation’s combined military forces, only a marginal percentage of Lebanon’s soldiers actually carry rifles and kick down doors. And the country has virtually no air force – no serviceable fixed-wing aircraft, no attack helicopters.

Worse, Lebanon is crawling with Syrian and Iranian-supported — and Al Qaeda-affiliated — terrorists. Most are operating covertly. Many are actually in the streets, controlling sectors (where the legitimate army and police do not enter) and they are armed.

As I mentioned a few days ago, a Hezbollah militia camp has been set up between the Lebanese Parliament and the Serail. And more than 50 pro-Cedar Revolution parliamentarians (there are 68 pro-Cedar members of parliament, a majority of the country's total 127 MPs), struggling to elect a president, are holed up in the Hotel Intercontinental Phoenicia in Beirut's Ain El-Mreysseh district less than one mile from the HezB tent city. This doesn’t include those parliamentarians elsewhere under very heavy security.

The MPs know they are under threat of death. Their cell-phone calls are being monitored and the signals tracked. It’s believed MP Antoine Ghanem, who was killed less than two weeks ago (I’ve actually seen what's left of his blown-up car) was tracked by his cell-phone signal.

In Lebanon, at least, the alarmists who claim that cell phones are dangerous to one’s health are right.

Low Intensity Victory

Three sets of numbers tell much about the direction and scale of the Iraqi campaign.

First, Michael Goldfarb compares both the quantity and trend of our casualties and the enemy’s. On the enemy side, as reported by USA Today (which for some reason antiseptically refers to men who are trying to kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians as “militants” – remember those “Nazi militants” in WWII?):

More than 19,000 militants have been killed in fighting with coalition forces since the insurgency began more than four years ago, according to military statistics released for the first time.

The statistics show that 4,882 militants were killed in clashes with coalition forces this year, a 25% increase over all of last year. . . .

The cited figures start with June 2003 and thus don’t include enemy KIA’s during the invasion. Aside from the permanently disabled hostiles, Coalition forces hold about 25,000 enemy prisoners. Our POW tally is four.

During the same period, the Coalition forces have suffered 3,195 combat deaths. (There were also 143 before June 2003. Deaths from accidents and other non-hostile causes have totaled 763.) Thus the killed/captured ratio is over 13 to one in our favor.

The natural expectation was that the “surge”, which increased both the number of our soldiers in the field and the aggressiveness of their activities, would lead to a higher toll. In the fourth quarter of 2006, when our troop strength was about 100,000 and patrolling tended to be restrained, the monthly average KIA was 89. By June 2007, our force was 60 percent larger, and the body count followed this trajectory:

June: 99
July: 74
August: 60
September (so far): 39
Monthly average: 68

Sixty percent more soldiers and 25 percent fewer casualties – accomplished not by hunkering down but by going after an enemy that certainly resembles a punch drunk fighter hanging on the ropes and hoping for salvation from his (or a Democratic Congress’s) corner. Reinforcing that impression is the sudden, sharp decline in Iraqi Security Forces losses: 197 in June, 232 in July, 76 in August, 86 so far in September. The mufsidun can still spread random terror against civilians, but their capacity to deal with armed opponents appears to be dwindling rapidly.

The enemy could, of course, revive, as has happened before. Iranian intervention, which the political climate in Washington won’t allow us to counter vigorously, is a serious worry. Nonetheless, Senator Reid’s declaration of defeat a few months back looks more preposterous by the day.

Second, a left-wing MSNBC interviewer recently caught a Republican Congresswoman off guard by asking her to name the last serviceman from her district killed in Iraq and crowing when she didn’t know the answer. It turns out that his own answer was wrong, which was rather amusing, but there is a nontrivial point here. While Rep. Blackburn hadn’t kept track of local fatalities, she could have. Since June 2003, a period of 51 months, U.S. deaths from hostile action have totaled 2,994, an average of just under seven per Congressional district. While the numbers vary a bit, remembering five to ten names isn’t beyond the mental capacities of any Republican member of Congress.

Looking at the butcher’s bill more broadly, a moderately diligent Representative could have visited every constituent who was wounded severely enough to require medical evacuation from Iraq. That’s an average of under 20 per district, i. e., one every two and a half months.

I cite these figures not to excoriate uncaring Congresscritters but to highlight the low intensity of this conflict, at least so far as our side is concerned. During World War I, World War II, Korea or Vietnam, could any member of Congress have been embarrassed not to know his district’s individual honor roll by heart?

Finally, The Monkey Tennis Center has plucked a nugget from a routine New York Times assault on Blackwater, the firm that provides a large proportion of the private security guards in Iraq. MTC observes that, according to numbers cited by the Times, guards who escort convoys of American civilians – obviously a prime target for terrorist attack – hardly ever fire their weapons.

DynCorp’s “shoot rate” [“all cases in which weapons are fired, including those meant as warning shots”] was around one mission in a hundred in 2005, and around one mission in 150 in 2006. Blackwater’s shoot rate was about twice as high, so if we average the shoot rate for DynCorp over the two years (one incident per 125 missions) then double it and round down for good measure, that gives Blackwater a shoot rate of one incident per 60 missions.

I don’t know about you, but I find those figures – both for Blackwater and DynCorp – staggering, even allowing for the fact that there must be other incidents where convoys come under attack, but keep going without returning fire.

Blackwater has a reputation for hiring macho, soldier-of-fortune types. They must be getting real bored in mid-surge Mesopotamia.

Facilis Descensus Averno

A friend who agrees with the paleoconservatives on a number of issues (e. g., trade and immigration) sends me word on the trajectory of the anti-war Right:

Turning on your country in time of war is not just a slippery slope to the leftist hell, but free fall carrying an anvil. I took part in the John Randolph Club meeting yesterday, a project of the Rockford Institute. The Rockford crowd is Buchananite, but the line between “isolationist” and “treasonous” was never thinner. The resolution was “The US should immediately withdraw its military forces from Iraq.” The first speaker in favor was Kirkpatrick Sale, who made the usual Marxist “anti-imperialism” speech, denouncing the Pentagon-industrial cabal that has run the American Empire since 1941 (an interesting date to choose, without mentioning Pearl Harbor). He blamed the US for a half century of world-wide slaughter, rapine and disease. He then said that a US loss in Iraq just might be enough to bring down the empire. He got applause! Not everybody, but that anybody in a room of supposed “traditional conservatives” would do anything but boo this scumbag out of the room was very disturbing.

The old-time, pre-WWII isolationists thought that the U.S. was too good and pure to entangle itself with the affairs of a decadent Old World. The contemporary breed thinks we’re so wicked that the Old World needs to be protected against us.

Update (9/25/07): Chris Check, executive vice president of the Rockford Institute, sent me an e-mail, posted here with his permission, into which I have interpolated my own comments:

Thanks for the mention of our event. I’m sorry your correspondent did not clarify that the resolution was put up for debate and ably opposed by Srdja Trifkovic, Cort Kirkwood, and William Hawkins, the first two especially receiving abundant applause for their contributions.

I thought that it was obvious that what I posted described a debate and that not everyone in the audience howled with the moonbats. What dismayed my correspondent – rightly, I think – was that an appreciable proportion of soi disant “real conservatives” cheered a socialist, Luddite anti-American.

To take a non-quite-perfect parallel (Mr. Sale is an advocate of mass murder only in the indirect sense that an unintended consequence of his rejection of technological civilization would be the greatest die-off in human history), was it reassuring or appalling that only a quarter to a third of “President” Ahmadinejad’s audience at Columbia applauded him?

Your own remarks about the differences between America pre-Second World War and America today are more accurate than you perhaps are willing to consider. By all sorts of social measure, I am sure, you would agree that America has taken something a moral plummet. Why not then also in matters of foreign policy?

If Mr. Check believes that isolationism was a bad thing in the past, when America was in his view morally superior to its present self, but is the right course today, he is at least consistent. For myself, I won’t try to evaluate whether George W. Bush’s foreign policy is morally better or worse than James Monroe’s, Woodrow Wilson’s or FDR’s. I do think, for reasons that needn’t be detailed here, that allegations of the Sales sort – that our role in the world is wicked and imperialistic – are too absurd for rational belief.

By the way, do you know this line from G.K. Chesterton: (From Orthodoxy, I think): “A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.”

GKC tossed off aphorisms the way a Clinton tosses off campaign promises, and not all of them hit the mark. The problem with this particular analogy is that warning of an upcoming cliff doesn’t increase the likelihood of going over it, whereas domestic division in wartime makes victory more difficult. In the case of Iraq, the only way that our country can be defeated is if we unilaterally decide to give up. People who favor defeat need to weigh carefully whether we would really be better off for having lost a war to a terrorist gang whose declared aim is to destroy our civilization.

John Edwards Is Too Right-Wing for Me

Tonight several of the Democratic Presidential candidates (Clinton, Edwards, Richardson, but not Obama) appeared at a panderfest debate sponsored by the AARP. As it was almost completely unpublicized, Jim Geraghty calls it “the hidden Democratic debate” but assures us that “absolutely nothing that you haven’t heard before” was said.

Not quite. He records this line from the lovely and talented John Edwards: “We oughtta have a law that every CEO’s pension, golden parachute, and everything else will be treated the exact same way as the lowest-paid worker’s pension.”

Well, Senator Edwards pals around with rich people, so it isn’t surprising that he is pushing their selfish interests. If the law treated every CEO’s nonqualified deferred compensation “the exact same way as the lowest-paid worker’s pension”:

• The CEO’s benefits would be insured by the PBGC.

• Benefits would have to be funded by his employer in a trust beyond the reach of the employer’s bankruptcy creditors and in accordance with the recently tightened minimum funding standards.

• Benefits would also be protected from the CEO’s own creditors.

• Benefits would be taxed only when actually received, without regard for the doctrine of constructive receipt.

• Benefits would become fully vested after no more than six years of service.

• Section 409A, which subjects nonqualified plans to a set of hyper-technical, trap-laden rules, whose violation is punished by a 20 percent penalty tax, would be repealed.

Except for the last, I don’t think much of any of those ideas. It appears, then, that I’m to the left of the left-most top-tier Democratic hopeful (well, if one stretches the meaning of “top-tier” – Gallup currently has him 36 points behind the Tin Lady). Who would have thought it?

Welcome Back, Rathergate!

“Rathergate” drew much attention before the 2004 election; it may, contrary to its perpetrators’ manifest intentions, have pushed President Bush over the top. Indeed, it was a story that, one would think, deserved to be not just news, but history, one of those scandals that is zealously probed until the truth is wrenched from reluctant guardians.

After all, a major television network had used forged documents in an attempt to sway the outcome of a Presidential election. Wouldn’t the most minimally curious journalists or historians like to know more about that act of infamy than the superficies of headlines? Precisely who at CBS allowed the forgeries in? Were they active conspirators or merely dupes? If dupes, who did the duping, and how did they succeed? Was there anything to the early rumors that political party operatives were involved?

The affair remains mysterious. According to what we know (or think we know), the mainspring of the fraud was an anti-Bush crank with a long record of making wild charges. His account of how he came by the supposedly incriminating documents shifted, the various versions having little in common but their lack of credibility. That the so-called “Killian memos” were fakes wasn’t hard to see. One didn’t need to know anything about 1960s’ typewriters or notice that the font, tabs and line breaks exactly duplicated the default settings of Microsoft Word. It was enough to look at genuine records of Lt. Bush’s service, which CBS had in its possession, all of them very obviously produced by utterly different instruments. And, for the benefit of the utterly unseeing, experts hired by CBS raised strong doubts about the memos’ authenticity.

If I may quote what I said in perplexity a couple of years ago:

[A]ccepting at face value documents without a verifiable provenance that come from the hand of a known partisan zealot is not typical journalistic behavior. Biased the MSM may be, but it isn’t a ship of fools. While I’ll grant that Mary Mapes is, on the evidence of the posted chapter of her forthcoming book, a fool and a half, 60 Minutes II had a staff that was certainly capable of detecting a fake on the “Killian” level of amateurishness. Moreover, the staff started the vetting process the right way, by sending the memos to independent experts for review.

As is well known now, the examiners’ first reactions were mostly negative. Yet the network shunted them aside and went ahead with the story, cherry picking testimony from the one whose conclusions were favorable to a limited extent on a narrow issue. (He couldn’t prove that the purported signatures on the memos were forged, though he also stated that signatures cannot be authenticated from a photocopy, which is all that he was given to work with.)

No matter how much those in charge of 60 Minutes II loathed George W. Bush or how eager they were to scoop the competition, it is impossible to believe that they proceeded without greater assurance that they were relying on genuine documents. The “Killian memos” were not secondary support for a report based primarily on other evidence; they were the Big News, the breakthrough that lent credibility to an interview with a former Texas House Speaker, who contradicted past public statements about whether he had used political influence on young George Bush’s behalf, and lesser anti-Bush tidbits. Almost everyone, including ardent Bush defenders, took it for granted at the outset that the memos had checked out; any debate would center on what they proved or didn’t prove about Lt. Bush’s conduct.

That they were instead frauds – and inept frauds at that – was flabbergasting. CBS’s credulity remains flabbergasting and unexplained to this day. The Thornburgh report [CBS’s very limited internal inquiry] did not address this mystery. Yet the answer remains important, if only to make the historical record complete.

But none of the elite media cared enough to investigate. National secrets the New York Times can penetrate; CBS News’ remain secure.

Now Dan Rather, of all people, gives us a fleeting opportunity to unearth the hidden facts. I don’t hold out high hopes that his lawsuit against CBS et al. will turn up a great deal. Discovery and cross-examination can be powerful truth detectors, but at least one side has to have a desire to bring the truth to light. That would not, I suspect, be in the self-interest of either plaintiff or defendant. Yet good may come out of this mire. Maybe the case will incite the curiosity of a would-be Woodward or three. If so, Mr. Rather will at long last have performed a useful public service.

Quote of the Day

Pollster Scott Rasmussen:

We just did a poll last night that showed 58 percent of voters saying everything that has been going on with the campaign so far has been generally annoying and a waste of time.

Count me with the majority, though it is informative, in an obnoxious way, to watch the Democratic candidates unanimously bow and scrape to the Angry Left. Thus Hillary Rodham Clinton delivers a tirade at General Petraeus parroting the MoveOn line, and the big “Sister Souljah” moment from John Edwards’ wife amounts to suggesting that MoveOn should have substituted more genteel language for “Betray Us”.

Around New Year’s Day, I’ll start to think about the Republican contenders. I urge everyone else who has a life to wait, too.

Failing to Understand

With all due respect to Mitt Romney, most governors of Massachusetts vanish from the public square as soon as they leave office. I hope that doesn’t happen to Governor Romney’s successor, Deval Patrick. He deserves to go down in history as the man who called the 9/11 attacks “a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other”.

In a rarified sense, I suppose that’s true. Any atrocity reflects, at some level, a deficiency of understanding and love. Yet one somehow suspects that Governor Patrick would hesitate to use the same words about lynchings in the Jim Crow South. “Failure of understanding” is proportionate to disagreements over same-sex marriage, not to carefully planned acts of mass murder.

Still, let’s think a moment about “understanding”. It’s probably true that our enemies don’t understand us. On the other hand, they’re making it easy for us to understand them.

The other day, an exhibit on the Koran opened in Iran. An excellent opportunity to understand the significance of Islam’s holy book for the powers that be in Tehran. Shown below is a photo (via Yahoo News). Reuters – not an outfit inclined to exaggerate anti-American gestures – captioned it thus:

Iranian visitors walk on the U.S. and Israel national flags as they walk past pictures of the Palestinian suicide bombers, during a visit of the International Koran exhibition at Imam Khomeini grand mosque in central Tehran.

What would you “understand” if a Christian sect’s Bible exhibition gave an honored place to photographs of terrorists?

One might also wish to peruse recent statements by Iran’s president, including his promise to put nuclear technology “at the service of those who are determined to confront the bullying powers and aggressors”. But maybe Mr. Ahmadinejad was simply offering to build nuclear power plants in the Gaza Strip to help Hamas cope with an energy shortage.

The Mullarchy operates on the assumption that it can furnish weapons to our enemies, as it does not in Iraq, and issue not-too-veiled threats to arm the mufsidun with nukes, without any fear of retaliation. In other words, it counts on liberals like the governor of Massachusetts, so avid for “understanding”, not to understand.

Further reading: Thomas Joscelyn, “Iran’s Proxy War Against America”

A Sphinx But Not a Moonbat

Not having read, or even seen a copy of, Alan Greenspan’s about-to-be-published memoirs, I don’t know the context of the sentence that so excited Matt Drudge and the Times of London (and an atypically unperceptive Little Green Footballs, too): “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Those words will doubtless be seized on by moonbats of all stripes, from the Paulitarians to the Krazy Kos Kidz, as “proof” that the “petroleum elite” conspired to invade Iraq, steal its oil and sell the plunder for outrageous profits.

That reaction shows why Mr. Greenspan is “saddened”. The Angry Left has set up a snare for timid politicians. With one side of its mouth it shrieks that the Iraqi campaign isn’t in the national interest. Then, when anyone responds that what happens in the world’s largest energy-producing region is too a matter of American concern, the other side of its mouth sneers that war supporters want to trade “blood for oil”. The same trick was deployed during the Vietnam War: Whoever pointed to America’s concrete interests in Southeast Asia was accused of imperialism; whoever invoked idealism, of waging a war in a region where our interests were nil.

Mr. Greenspan’s point – easier to divine that his oracular pronouncements on monetary policy – is that rich anti-Western tyrants are a greater danger than impoverished ones. Robert Mugabe is as hostile to us as Saddam Hussein was, but he can’t fund suicide bombers or bribe Western politicians, much less finance weapons programs. It was oil that made Saddam dangerous, so in that sense “the Iraq war is largely about oil”. If its eventual outcome is a peaceful Iraq under a lawful and reasonably competent government, oil will help bring prosperity. If the mufsidun prevail, as every Democratic Presidential candidate is willing to see happen, oil will pay for attacks on our friends and ourselves.

Addendum: A New York Times preview says, perhaps accurately,

Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.”

Here I think we see Greenspan the Sphinx again. Bill Clinton never expended a syllable in behalf of policies to promote long-term economic growth. But, after his initial round of tax hikes, he was the most ineffectual President since Gerald Ford. His “consistent, disciplined focus” consisted of doing nothing, which was, in all likelihood, exactly what his Fed chairman wanted to be done.

Update (9/17/07): My interpretation of the Sphinx is vindicated. The Washington Post reports:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. . . .

He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, “I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.” Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, “Well, unfortunately, we can’t talk about oil.” Asked if he had made his point to Cheney specifically, Greenspan said yes, then added, “I talked to everybody about that.”

Greenspan said he had backed Hussein’s ouster, either through war or covert action. “I wasn’t arguing for war per se,” he said. But “to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B” – an alternative to war. . . .

Greenspan said that at the time of the invasion, he believed, like Bush, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction “because Saddam was acting so guiltily trying to protect something.” While he was “reasonably sure he did not have an atomic weapon,” he added, “my view was that if we do nothing, eventually he would gain control of a weapon.”

His main support for Hussein’s ouster, though, was economically motivated. “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands,” Greenspan said, “our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war. And the second gulf war is an extension of the first. My view is that Saddam, looking over his 30-year history, very clearly was giving evidence of moving towards controlling the Straits of Hormuz, where there are 17, 18, 19 million barrels a day” passing through.

Greenspan said disruption of even 3 to 4 million barrels a day could translate into oil prices as high as $120 a barrel -- far above even the recent highs of $80 set last week -- and the loss of anything more would mean “chaos” to the global economy.

Given that, “I’m saying taking Saddam out was essential,” he said. But he added that he was not implying that the war was an oil grab.

“No, no, no,” he said. Getting rid of Hussein achieved the purpose of “making certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work, frankly, until we find other [energy supplies], which ultimately we will.”

Quote of the Day

Mark Steyn in a post captioned, “The Loyal Genetically Predisposed Criminally Insane Opposition”:

What I find slightly unnerving is the curious determination of the contemporary left to attribute political differences to some other factor – to genetic predisposition, to mental illness (“homophobia”, “Islamophobia” et al) or, when all else fails, criminality (it’s not enough for Bush to have a different view on the merits of toppling Saddam, he also has to have “lied” and committed crimes worthy of impeachment in the pursuit of said policy).

I don’t know where this is headed, but it can’t be conducive to civil politics in a constitutional democracy.

No doubt conservatives occasionally speak just as harshly about the Left, but there’s surely a striking difference in quantity and quality. Leaving aside the insufferable Ann Coulter, how often does one see a right-wing parallel to liberals’ incessant accusations of bad faith or worse against people with whom they disagree on matters of policy? For that matter, how often does any liberal assert that conservatives are merely mistaken rather than knowingly dishonest?

As the Left more and more assimilates the idea that it faces not ordinary opposition but a perfidious conspiracy (à la Mearsheimer & Walt (U.S. foreign policy is secretly controlled by a Jewish-neocon cabal*) or Jonathan Chait’s The Big Con (supply siders know that their nostrums are wrong but pursue them out of sheer greed)), the more likely it is to conclude that argument is futile and that force is needed to thwart the malefactors. One of my consolations over the 2006 election results is that, by giving the Left hopes of peaceful victory, they may have postponed our next civil war by a decade or two.

* Proof-of-the-pudding footnote: The review to which I’ve linked, written by a liberal who excoriates M&W’s conspiracy theorizing, can’t avoid declaring that the Bush Administration “manipulated” intelligence to “mislead” the country into going to war with Iraq and that the sinister mastermind was Vice President Cheney, “a card-carrying member of the petroleum industry elite”.

The Joys of Monopoly Medicine

From Britain, whose “single payer” (i. e., government monopoly) health care system is much admired by American liberals, comes this story:

A smoker is facing years of pain after an NHS hospital refused to set his broken ankle unless he gives up cigarettes.

John Nuttall, 57, needs the operation to fix the ankle he broke in three places two years ago and which was not healed by a plaster cast.

Doctors at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro have refused to operate to rebuild the ankle because they say Mr Nuttall's heavy smoking would reduce the chance of a full recovery.

They have told him to give up smoking before they operate but the retired builder has been unable to break his habit.

Mr Nuttall says he is in constant pain from the grating of the broken bones against each other and has been prescribed daily doses of morphine. . . .

A spokesman for the hospital trust said: “Smoking has a very big influence on the outcome of this type of surgery and the healing process would be hindered significantly.”

I don’t know how much influence nicotine has over the healing of ankles, but I do know that, in America at least, many operations are performed that have less than a perfect chance of a perfect outcome. Patients are allowed to evaluate risks and rewards for themselves. Not in the single-payer utopia.

The Tin Lady Looks Backward

During a campaign stop earlier this week, Senator Clinton declared,

The day I’m elected, I’m going to be asking distinguished Americans – including my husband – of both parties, to start traveling around the world, and not just talking to governments and leaders, but talking directly to people and telling them that America is back.

Most commentary has centered on the implied promise (or that not le mot juste?) that a second President Clinton would employ the first one in an official capacity. Since Mr. Clinton has never shown much interest in exerting sustained effort – next to him Warren G. Harding was a whirling dervish – that prospect doesn’t concern me. More interesting is what the statement says about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision for America’s foreign policy. It is nostalgically backward looking, invoking a era of harmony and innocence that never existed in fact and cannot be brought into being by gushing ambassadors of good will “talking directly to the people”.

As her invocation of her husband pretty clearly indicates, she looks back to his Administration as her model. Why she picks it, aside from family pride, is obvious. During those eight years, the world looked peaceful to most Americans. We fought short wars with few casualties, and terrorism was a remote threat that could easily be seen as the unfortunate product of random mental illness. The disturbed, supposedly “right wing” loser Timothy McVeigh was the paradigm. Only assiduous news junkies and a handful of experts on Moslem heresies knew anything about Osama bin-Laden.

Returning to those days would be pleasant, but we can no more do it than the Bourbon monarchs could return to the era of deferential peasants, complaisant bourgeoises, loyalist priests and subservient nobles. Worse yet, acting as if the world hasn’t changed, reviving the policies and mindsets that gave rise to our current tumults, would be as foolish as Louis XVIII’s and Charles X’s determination to forget nothing and learn nothing.

Is there any way to reconcile “America is back” with the challenges that we face today?

Bill Clinton’s America paid no serious attention to our self-proclaimed enemies. When al-Qa’eda issued a formal declaration of war and attacked the Khobar Towers and the U.S.S. Cole, our response was insouciant. Osama bin-Laden was placed on a level with a Mafia capo, and the Justice Department was at least as interested in making sure that the FBI and CIA didn’t share information improperly as in bringing the “criminal” to justice.

President Clinton doesn’t bear the full blame for that negligence. Almost everybody ignored Islamic extremism back then. But now we know that the mufsidun weren’t mere blatherers. Their explicit goal is to dominate the Middle East and, from that base, wage war against the rest of the world until all knees bend to Allah and the seventh century world of their fantasies is restored. That drive for world conquest can’t be countered by the old Clinton Administration’s legalisms or its unwillingness to employ military force in any circumstances that might lead to American soldiers’ deaths or its exaggerated respect for “European” opinion (that is, the opinions of the left-wing, resolutely anti-American European intelligentsia). It’s conceivable that the Tin Lady grasps the differences between 1993 and 2009, would act resolutely against Islamofascism once in office and is (as the Krazy Kossack Kidz suspect) lulling the Left with agreeable words, but I’d rather not stake my country on the hope that she is a liar rather than a fool.

Blame the GOP!

A friend who hangs around D.C. sent me this aperçu on the oddball state of Democratic propaganda:

I was on Capitol Hill yesterday and passed the office of Florida Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Many members now have posters outside their offices proclaiming some pet cause or another. Hers was, “The Democratic budget does not raise a penny in new taxes. It was a Republican Congress that mandated that tax cuts expire in 2010.”

Ah, yes, I remember how the Dems fought fiercely against sunsetting the Bush tax cuts and have agitated ever since for making them permanent.

If tax increases were really as popular as every donkey party Presidential contender seems to believe, you’d expect a bit more forthrightness among their backers. When was the last time any politician tried to blame the other party for forcing him to reduce taxes?

Un Plus Grand Étonnement

Already knowing how the Worldcon site selection context for 2009 would come out and being preoccupied with great-nieces and -nephews, I didn’t bother to Blackberry around for the official results. Then I picked up a friend’s e-mail with the cryptic subject line, “Does This Mean I Have to Learn French?” The text was a link to the très incroyable news that Montreal had prevailed over the heavily favored Kansas City bid.

The vote count, when I tracked it down later, was – Sacre bleu! Not only did Montreal win, but by a runaway 507 to 342. For perspective, consider that, four years ago, Los Angeles in 2006 beat essentially the same K.C. bid by about a third of that margin with far more ballots cast.

Moreover, this was the first Worldcon race I can recall in which the at-con vote was strikingly different from the mail-in ballots. The votes cast at the convention have sometimes been decisive, but never has there been anything like –

Mail-in: Montreal 227, Kansas City 221, None of the Above 12, Write-ins 8, No Preference 13
At-con: Montreal 280, Kansas City 120, None of the Above 8, Write-ins 7, No Preference 6

Breaking it down more finely, here are the day-by-day counts:

Thursday: Montreal 25, Kansas City 12
Friday: Montreal 130, Kansas City 61
Saturday: Montreal 125, Kansas City 47

The parties must have been decisive. There is one famous historical instance of a Canadian bid’s pulling off an unexpected victory thanks to the quality of its at-con revelries, but the chef whom Winnipeg in ’94 imported from its HQ hotel, magnifique as he was, didn’t generate a landslide, only a by-the-nose lead for what had been only a mild underdog.

I’ll be curious to learn more about what happened in Nippon. For the moment, the only explanation that comes to mind is that the mild slackening in K.C.’s bidding effort over the past year, combined with an unlucky SMOFCon, topped by some coup of Québeçois partying, had a disproportionate impact on what was doubtless a predominantly “smoffish” electorate.

This is, of course, the second Worldcon site selection upset in a row. A consequence is that the old Central Zone is all but certain to go at least nine years (from Toronto in 2003 till the prospective Chicago bid in 2012) without hosting a World Science Fiction Convention. One can, however, imagine a not utterly implausible alternate history with Central Zone Worldcons three years in a row (Columbus in 2007, Chicago in 2008, Kansas City in 2009). Maybe a more or less regular procession from East to West to Center, with the occasional excursion outside North America, as envisioned by the zone regime, was unnecessary, but the prediction that the no-zone scheme would lead to erratic lurches has been borne out, for good or ill.

We’ll also have a good test over the next pair of conventions of the theory that a two-year lead time is ample for putting on a contemporary era Worldcon. Neither Denver nor Montreal has a huge local cadre of con runners, and neither bidcomm put together more than a skeleton organization in advance of the balloting. When the change from picking the site three years in advance was debated, some of us worried that lopping off a year would make it difficult for sites outside of locales like Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago to assemble concomms. The optimists pooh-poohed us and convinced the Business Meeting. If they were wrong, I’ll be very unhappy about saying “I told you so.”

Hugos Come, Hugos Go

Since I’m vacationing at my mother’s, and Mother thinks that a dial-up connection is all the Internet anybody needs, I got my Hugo results early Saturday morning via Blackberry. As usual, the vox populi diverged greatly from my own, nowhere so widely as in the Best Movie Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category. None of this year’s nominees was, IMHO, of Hugo quality, but Pan’s Labyrinth wasn’t even worthy of a first year student project: tedious, ugly, incoherent – were I the Hugo dictator (“Hugo Chávez”, one might call me), anyone who ranked it above 10th place on the ballot would not be allowed to vote in this category ever again, or, alternatively, would be sentenced to watch it repeatedly until his aesthetic sense writhed in agony.

About the other winners, I have no complaints, even if they weren’t my own first choices.

Best Novel: Rainbows End is an enjoyable read, but it has the feel of having been constructed rather than imagined. One part terrorist conspiracy, because that’s in the news; one part Alzheimer’s recovery, because that’s been a big theme for the past few years’ Hugo nominees; one part massive multi-player role playing game, because lots of fans play them, or at least wish they had time to; one part book digitization, because it’s a big controversy among techno types. Stir, and blend to taste. I preferred Glasshouse, which presents the problem of how to break into, and then out of, a panopticon-like prison, and Eifelheim, in which the intellectual sophistication of the Middle Ages gets due respect (the serious side, one might say, of what The High Crusade treated lightly).

Best Novella: I expected “A Billion Eves” to win on the strength of its concept. I thought, though, that, like so many of Robert Reed’s other stories, the concept was superficially thought through. My pick was Paul Melko’s “The Walls of the Universe”, a romp through parallel worlds.

Best Novelette: “The Djinn’s Wife” continues Ian McDonald’s tales of a near future, politically fragmented, cyber-sophisticated India, and I have nothing negative to say about it, though Michael F. Flynn’s “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” impressed me more. I suppose that the lack of a resolution to its mystery – a rip in reality in the middle of Puget Sound – disappointed some readers. The gravamen of the story was, however, how people react to the inexplicable, not to explain it.

Best Short Story: “Impossible Dreams” is sweet and poignant, and it must also have gathered a big movie buff vote. I went back and forth between it and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” before giving the nod to the Gaiman piece.

Best Related Book: I didn’t read the Tiptree biography, because I apprehend that much of it is about the subject’s mental illnesses, culminating in murder and suicide. For that sort of thing, were it to my taste, I’d pick up People in the grocery store. If others want to read and vote for it, that’s fine with me – no sanctions from the Hugo dictator here. I just regret that two less flashy projects, the Hugo GoH speech collection and Joe Major’s study of Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles, were left among the also rans.

I’ll pass over the rest of the ballot, except to note that John Scalzi’s (or his acolytes’) campaign to depose David Langford didn’t quite succeed. But it came within one vote of winning, so this is, so far as I can recall, the very first time that my very own vote has decided a Hugo (or probably any other) election. My thanks to Mr. Scalzi. As for what the outcome means, perhaps those of us who have an interest in fan writing should take to heart this lesson: It looks like the field has become so insular that a rather ordinary blog written by a well-known figure can outpoll first-rate fan writers of the traditional kind. It won’t break my heart if Best Fan Writer warps de facto into Most Popular Pro Weblog, but, before that happens, maybe an effort ought to be launched to make the works of Messrs. Hertz, Garcia, Silver et al. better known within the wider precincts of fandom.

Hypocrites Against Hypocrisy

If Larry Craig’s restroom adventures undermine arguments against same-sex marriage or demonstrate that the Republican Party is ineradicably corrupt, shouldn’t we be on the lookout elsewhere for the dread disease of “high-pock-ris-see”, as Ned Rutledge sibilates it in his big number in 1776?

What does it mean, for instance, when ardent supporters of campaign finance reform benefit from the proven illegalities of Americans Coming Together and suspected ones of Norman Hsu? Aren’t they hypocrites in a much stronger sense than soon-to-be-ex-Senator Craig? He may be (and probably is) an intellectual believer in heterosexual monogamy who succumbed to lust, a force that has been known to lead men to do foolish things. The decision to fund a Democratic support group with $100 million of illegal campaign contributions (three-quarters of all the money it collected) was made by coldly rational calculators. Moreover, a large proportion of that sum came not from individuals like George Soros, giving their own more or less hard-earned cash, but from labor unions converting their members’ dues into involuntary political donations. The Service Employees International Union was ACT’s biggest source of funds. (Just coincidentally, as I’ve noted before, Congressional Democrats cut the budget of the government agency that reviews union financial disclosures.)

But Politics-and-Poker evidently has a rule that the Hypocrisy Card can be passed only to the right, never to the left. If liberal politicians send their children to private schools and fight vigorously against efforts to give poor families the same opportunity, or if the watchdogs of racial sensitivity heap racist abuse on black Republicans, or if left-wing Democrats vote to slash the defense budget while inserting pork barrel projects into it, or if the builders of high walls between church and state have no qualms about government support of Islam, or if soi disant “First Amendment absolutists” call for suppressing political speech, or if environmental scolds call for sacrifices by ordinary citizens from the gangways of their private jets – all that is a big “so, what?” to the bien pensants.

If hypocrisy is ever treated as a symmetrical offense, and retains its status as Worst of Political Sins, the Left will suffer grievously. Luckily for them, that isn’t likely to happen.