For the uninitiated, Kenneth Pollack has been very critical of the war in Iraq. His latest article in the Times is a decent article. However, for a man such as Kenneth Pollack to have written it is a paramount achievement to the hard work and determination of not only our soldiers, but the Iraqis who no doubt want to see their country return to a state of quasi-peace and comfort. The authors note that the situation is still grave, which is not an overstatement, but it would be an understatement to say that the situation in Iraq isn’t looking better.
Want more evidence? The death toll is at the lowest in 8 months. While it would be easy to dismiss this and say “it should be zero”, it must be noted that a lower death toll in soldiers is a great barometer for how we’ll we’re doing in not only keeping the peace, but in protecting our men and women in uniform when the Iraqis won’t conform to peace.
What both these articles also have in common is a ineffectiveness of legislature and leadership. Peace can be achieved through military perseverance, but a lasting peace will require the government to really step up and work to pass laws that make everyone safe. This is also take time…we haven’t had an effective Congress in something like 12 years. Ha.
But is everything about guns and bombs? No way jose. The national soccer team has managed to pull off a Cinderella story of their own, winning The Asia Cup with a spectacular defense-powered victory over Saudi Arabia. I think I’ll leave the final words to Sabbah Hameed.
Sabbah Hameed, a 47-year-old teacher, said he had been watching soccer since he was 10 and he was not going to miss the rare chance of celebrating despite the danger.
“My wife threatened to take the kids and leave home if I go celebrating outside with my friends,” Hameed told Reuters.
“I told her to leave home now because I am going to go outside,” he said.
That’s right, Hammeed. Fight the power.
laurel says
the other side of the casualty coin is, of course, the Iraqi death count. And July has been one for the deadliest for Iraqis this year. Things are looking up how?
joets says
rather than leaving all the dirty work for us.
david says
then doesn’t it mean we can leave? What’s your proposal for a withdrawal?
joets says
I would tell the joint chiefs to draw up a withdrawal plan that has a set date within 2 years of the date of completion of the plan. I would give a speech to the Iraqi people telling them they have two years to show the world that they are capable of holding themselves to a level of civility higher than apes yelling at blinking lights, and at the end of this period we will withdraw, leaving them with nominal forces (embassy, maybe some MPs to continue training forces if needed) but nothing significant.
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If, after this time, they want to have a civil war, kill each other over essentially nothing and destabilize the region, they can go right ahead. Why? Because I will have invested a ridiculous amount of money in the auto industry to develop hydrogen cars or other alternatives. I don’t like subsidies, but I think its a national defense thing.
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As far as I’m concerned, the second we come up with an oil-free car, we can pull out of every middle eastern country and send them on a bullet train back to the 6th century.
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But in all honesty, I think our withdrawal relies as much on our own ability to divorce ourselves from middle eastern commodities as much as their willingness to be peaceful. Call my approach overly simplistic, but it’s practical and realistic.
laurel says
Joe, what do you think of this idea? According to this Dep’t of Energy image on the wiki page for US energy use, 56.2% of the energy we generate is lost. Wasted. So my question is, is the focus on shifting to new auto fuels the best way to reduce our consumption and related problems? Perhaps if we worked on problems of efficient transmission, certain other problems would take care of themselves?
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I don’t have the answer, just curious as to whether someone else has considered alleviating our energy/foreign policy problems from the perspective of stopping up the holes in the leaky bucket.
joets says
I don’t know if it’s a leaky bucket or if it’s unavoidable energy losses. Aren’t some of the people here sciency? What’s their take?
stomv says
and I’d bet I speak for nearly all scientists when I say: if you’re looking for science to solve the problem of energy, you’ll fail.
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That’s not to say that advances in renewable energy production and transmission, advances in battery and electric motor technology, or materials advances won’t help — they will.
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But here’s the reality: there just won’t be enough clean energy available fast enough to satisfy the current demands of tUS, Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and India over the next 20 years. Supply can’t solve the problem.
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We’ve got to cut back on demand, and that’s done not with science but with public policy. Consumers in tUS and Europe aren’t sensitive enough to the price of energy nor long-term thinking enough to make the change with just science and economics. I’d bet I could go to your house and find you $50/month in energy savings for a $500 investment. An economist would point out that this is impossible — you’re obviously rational, and therefore there’d be no reason for you to waste money for no gain… but you, and all other Americans [to some extent or other] do it.
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This is where public policy comes in. Raising efficiency standards must be done with public policy. Fuel efficiency standards, electrical use standards, building standards. While we’re at it, we need public policy to transform our culture from one of autos to one of mass transit — this means both (a) dramatically expanding and improving our mass transit infrastructure both inner city, city-to-suburb, and intracity, and it also means (b) changing our zoning standards to ones where mixed use commercial/residential neighborhoods are encouraged, where high density housing is encouraged, and where sprawl and 2500+ square foot homes and over-sized vehicles are seen for the selfish waste that they are.
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Spending more money as consumers won’t get us out of this problem — in fact, only by spending less money as consumers and more money with good public policy [both science research and public transit & efficiency initiatives, plus higher taxes on energy usage] will we solve the problem… and we’d be a whole lot farther along if we’d taken all that money spent on Iraq and instead spent it on clean domestic energy programs, on both the supply and demand side.
P.S. You asked about hydrogen: it’s a scam. It’s not really necessary. Hydrogen is a fuel, not a fuel source. Think of it as electricity or gasoline, not as a power plant or an oil rig. To use hydrogen, we’ve got to gather it — and that requires energy. Where’s that energy coming from? Politimagicians who wave hydrogen in front of your eyes are taking you for a spin, since they never explain just where the energy to collect the hydrogen will come from. It’d be no different than me proudly proclaiming that we’ll replace gasoline with lots of hamsters running wheels in each persons car.
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P.P.S. It’s not just a leaky bucket — it’s an oversized bucket. All systems will have losses, and there are some gains in efficiency that science will get us. The real problem though is that we’re using energy to push around 5000 pounds of materials in an effort to transport 200 pounds of flesh is always going to be inefficient. Using energy to heat and cool 2500+ sq feet when flesh is only occupying 500 sq feet [or as little as 0!] is always going to be inefficient. Using oil to create plastic so that we can pour water in it and then using more oil to transport it to a store so people can use even more oil to collect it for drinking water when there’s already a much more energy efficient system to bring drinking water straight to your home, school, or business [hint: pipes is pipes!]. So it goes.
laurel says
i’m not sure i agree totally on ‘pipes is pipes’. your points are all valid as far as i can see. however, there is promise in improving the transmission efficiency with better conductors. i’m not ready to ditch energy research just yet.
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on the issue of demand, i’ll just add that another way to approach that problem is to look seriously at population. this is rarely a popular subject, but it is important to understand that many of the improvements we each make in personal usage are nullified by the addition of ever increasing numbers of people. until population is under control in energetically opulent countries like ours, the value of my switching to fluorescent bulbs, say, is grossly offset by the recruitment to the population of several more bulb users by the time I die. i fear that addressing one factor without addressing the other is ultimately fruitless.
joets says
be prepared to look at a number of options that will bother your good senses. There is very little to do to curb population growth without either cutting immigration or “womb control”.
laurel says
check them out – they’re benign approaches/solutions to the problem.
david says
Your positions are slowly but surely becoming more reasonable. If you spend much more time around BMG, you’re going to wind up a Democrat. đŸ˜‰
bob-neer says
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Just for the record, however, those who want to go back to the time of the caliphate, if anyone in the Middle East really wants exactly that, are aiming for the 7th-8th century. After all, Mohammad himself only died in 632: the 7th century.
mr-lynne says
… those Iraqi civilians are stepping up and into the paths of bullets to keep our american casualties down.
centralmassdad says
At this point, I think the reality is the opposite: Americans have been stepping in front of bullets for four years– and riding over IEDs– to keep Iraqi casualties down. There will be an inverse relationship, which will continue when US casualty rats equal zero, on account of withdrawal. At that point, Iraqi casulaties will increase dramatically, as they are engaged in a civil war.
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Advocating withdrawal is precisely the same thing as advocating that more Iraqis bear the violent brunt of their own civil war–that is, more dead Iraqis, fewer dead Americans, so I think this bit of sanctimony is misplaced.
mr-lynne says
… in response to the assertion that the Iraqis are stepping up to the plate. I was just pointing out that whatever is going on with the Iraqi military, the civilian casualty count is still unacceptably high. So whatever is happening, it isn’t the Iraqi military paying the price so much as the population as a whole.
raj says
At that point, Iraqi casulaties will increase dramatically, as they are engaged in a civil war.
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…Lebanon, another country made up by Europeans (Lebanon was formed out of the French Mandate from the old Ottoman Empire following WWI) has been engaged in a civil war–off and on–since 1975. Remember the bombing of the US Marines’ barrack in 1982, after the US stupidly involved itself?
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The Iraq civil war will continue whether or not the US military is there for another 30 years.
kbusch says
So you’re telling us that if Iraqi casualties decreased you’d take that as a bad sign?
centralmassdad says
that if American casualties increased you would take it as a good sign?
kbusch says
In my opinion casualties of any kind are a bad sign. They signify injury and death.
joets says
dismissing all the good news and focusing on the bad is an awfully unpragmatic (word?) way to look at things.
kbusch says
The optimists in this occupation have consistently been wrong on every level.
kbusch says
This, it turns out, is baldly untrue as amply documented here and elsewhere. They are war supporters.
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These guys are the same serial optimists, who are always proven wrong, that keep us in this counterproductive occupation. Why are they right today when they’ve been wrong so often before? Time for new experts — who are actually expert.
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The Bush Administration would have us believe that the problem in Iraq is akin to a war and has a military solution. Defeat the bad guys, get them to surrender, pack up, go home.
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But that’s not the problem at all. The main problem is that the Sunnis in Iraq see no advantage to cooperating with the current Iraqi regime. They’ve lost power. They’ve lost access to oil revenue. Some Sunni provinces are being dictated to by Shia. No amount of “defeating bad guys” is going to magically make that problem go away. In fact, things like destroying Falluja or firing all Baathists have had the opposite effect. They’ve inflamed the internal violence.
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What were the goals of the surge? They were to provide the Iraqi government with “political space” to make the hard choices that need to be done.
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Success or failure? Failure: There’s no evidence that the Iraqi government wants to do the hard things that need to be done no matter how much “space” our troops give them. In fact, given their leisurely approach to these problems and their diligent vacation plans, one can assume that the U.S. military presence enables their rejectionism.
centralmassdad says
You are displaying your progressivism here.
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He is a war supporter, inasmuch as he supported the decision to invade in 2003. He has been anti-war, in that he has argued that everything after March of 2003 has been bungled.
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This is a distinction without a difference only among the progressive set.
kbusch says
The article has two authors: O’Hanlan and Pollack. Pollack made a trip to Iraq mid 2003 and came back full of happy news about the great successes there. Both Pollack and O’Hanlan supported the “surge”. I belive O’Hanlan is even more of a hawk than Pollack.
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On the lack of difference in the distinction:
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I should also add that the serial optimists will say in January that everything has been bungled thus far but the new strategy shows every sign of success and we should give it a chance. Then, in June, they throw up their hands again and say that everything has been bungled thus far but the new strategy shows every sign of success and we should give it a chance. Then the January following…
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Being a critic of bungling has barred no one from being an enabler of this disaster.
raj says
Many of the points I was going to make have already been made in comments above. A few observations
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As far as I’m concerned, the second we come up with an oil-free car…
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We had a gasoline-free car in the 1960s. You probably weren’t born then, but the car was powered by a turbine engine that could run on alcohol. A number of prototypes were wandering the US midwest–I know, because I saw one. One of the cars powered by the turbine engine almost won (or maybe it did win) the Indie 500. The Indie 500 folk banned the use of the engine; why? because it did not have the VROOM! VROOM! that the Indie 500’s customers wanted. It was silent, not figuratively, but literally. But it was an amazing engine.
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Regarding stomv @ Wed Aug 01, 2007 at 00:48:04 AM EDT
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I’m sciency, too, although my profession has been as a lawyer. You might be interested in some articles in the August 2007 issue of Scientific American that bear very much on your comment. Hydrogen is a non-starter. It requires more energy–and more CO_2 production–than is warranted for its production, whether by catalysis or by electrolysis, and that energy is provided by oil. And that, notwithstanding the fact that there is no infrastructure to deliver the hydrogen.
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On the subject matter of JoeTS’s post, it would be nice if he would give us the statistics on the number of American sorties into enemy territory, and where they were. It is obvious that Mr. TS is merely interested in American deaths, not those of Iraqis, but if American strategy changed so as to minimize American deaths, that would suggest that the statistics now cannot realistically be compared with the earlier statistics.
joets says
raj says
…if the number of American soldier sorties (it’s only soldiers who are being counted, not American mercenaries) was fewer over the last few months than previously, the number of opportunities for them to be shot and killed would also be lower.
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That should be obvious. Comparing one statistic from one time period, with a similar statistic from a different time period, without taking into account other variables, is fraudulent. Comparing statistics, by filtering out effects from other variables, is what mathematicians would call “regression analysis.”
gary says
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You can only be talking about the turbo car of the famous 1967 race. Parnelli Jones almost won the race, but for a mechanical problem late in the race.
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His car used a helicopter GAS driven turbo engine and in contrast to the other open wheeled Indy cars, Parnelli’s car actually used more gas and less alcohol than its competitors.
raj says
…but we were told that the turbine engines in the prototypes would run on pretty much anything that would combust.
gary says
…the Petromax. Gas, kerosine, diesel, alcohol…
will says
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JoeTS, you are way off in the corn fields, man. I don’t know what will fix Iraq, but soccer games and cheery blog posts aren’t it.
joets says
Don’t you dare underestimate the amount of influence soccer has on Eurasia. They need more events like winning the Asia cup to bring themselves together and help them realize that Iraqis have more in common with each other than not.
johnk says
From the AP
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joets says
laurel says
when the captain of the soccer team talks politics? hmmm…
joets says
That’s what I was implying.
johnk says
Would wet his pants if anything remotely close happened to him. Please don’t compare a cry baby multimillionaire to a player in a war torn country.
joets says
doesn’t make him a crybaby.
johnk says
Lost me….
will says
You are way off base.
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Soccer is meaningless compared to armed gangs, crime, violence, fear, and anarchy on a daily basis.
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If you think differently, ask yourself how many world cup wins it would take before you would want to spend your summer vacation in Iraq.
johnk says
You seem to be thoughtful and honest in your posts, so I’m not sure that you know Pollack’s background. Think Progress has some detail about “the war critic” and how many times he thought we were winning.
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The AP reports (emphasis mine):
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Take a look at the details on Iraq casualties, I don’t think a trend can be determined by anyone. Also take a look at the numbers in the summer months and compare.
johnk says
One problem, Pollack is now backpedaling…
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From George Packer from Pollack:
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O’Hanlon’s backpedaling too…
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Good grief!