The PublicAffairs division of Perseus Books has published a memoir by former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan. The book is titled, What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

It somewhat overshadows an editorial by Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy for four years from mid-2001. Published in the Wall Street Journal, How Bush Sold the War is a highly critical assessment of the White House’s foreign policy positions — and one with which I find myself largely in agreement. But unlike Feith’s well-reasoned and carefully considered judgement, McClellan’s tell-all memoir is getting all the press. After all, a book by a man on the lecture circuit needs selling.

Here’s how I reckon the conversation between McClellan and his publisher went:

Scott McClellan, author: Hey, I want to cash in on a book deal, like all the other losers who’re out of jobs and get ghostwriters tell their inside-track stories. At least I was actually employed by the White House. Unlike, say, Joe Wilson.

Peter Osnos, publisher: Not sure a PR’s story is going to sell well. You lot are not much more sympathetic than lawyers and estate agents, in the eyes of the public, and the media hate your kind. So what do you propose writing about?

McClellan: Bush, and what a great job I did defending him in difficult times.

Osnos: Bye-bye. Nice talking to you. May I recommend Vantage Press? Vanity publishing won’t cost you that much, and most people never even notice.

McClellan: Okay, what would you need?

Osnos: To make money? How about inside-track confessions? Sordid tales of sex and betrayal? Did you know Bush lied about the war? Did you have doubts about White House policy?

McClellan: No, not really. If I had, I would have taken my own advice, as I said about Dick Clarke when he published his memoir, Against All Enemies: “Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let’s look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry’s campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments [that Mr. Clarke made] up on their website.”

Osnos: Best you never bring that paragraph up in public again. We can’t have people questioning our publishing ethics, now can we? Okay, let’s try another angle. Did Bush and Cheney confide in you?

McClellan: No, they didn’t. I just made press statements. Karl Rove actually ran the show.

Osnos: Then here’s an idea: write how the evil twins, Karl Bush and George W. Rove, didn’t confide in you, and told you only what they thought you needed to know to lie to the media.

McClellan: Like what?

Osnos: Take Katrina.

McClellan: Her name was Monica, and that wasn’t Bush, anyway.

Osnos: No, you idiot, the hurricane.

McClellan: Oh yeah. Forgot about that. What about it? I had my hands full defending the White House against charges that they should have violated states rights to send in the cavalry, when the fools in charge of Louisiana didn’t bother to summon federal assistance. Not one reporter would believe that Bush’s powers are actually limited by the constitution.

Osnos: You were the spin doctor, right? Did you set up disaster photo-ops?

McClellan: That’s my job. PRs stage photo-ops.

Osnos: Excellent. Nobody likes staged photo ops. Like spin, or PR, they’re synonymous with insincerity and lies. So just explain matter-of-factly how they were staged, and your book will sell like hotcakes. Nothing of actual substance required.

McClellan: And then?

Osnos: Well, just write how Bush screwed up on this, that or the other, in your extremely well-informed opinion. Without hindsight, book publishers like me would be out of business, and great authors like you would never make the bestseller lists.

McClellan: But my opinion wasn’t well-informed.

Osnos: Who cares? You stood on the podium in the White House briefing room, didn’t you? You have hindsight, don’t you? So you were the only dolt who actually said “yes” to a question on whether Saddam was involved in 9/11. Most people think that was a Freudian slip anyway, because they think a press secretary is supposed to be well-informed of what goes on in the inner circle. People will believe whatever you say now, just because of that White House seal behind you, and the hindsight in front of you. Hindsight will not only make you look well-informed, but it will make you look like you were smarter than them all along.

McClellan: Yeah, I guess. So I write about what I think about Iraq, and the PR job leading up to it — before I was in charge of PR, mind you — that sort of thing?

Osnos: Exactly! Or take the Plame affair. Everyone knows a special investigation failed to turn up anything incriminating at all, except maybe against that Armitage fellow over at State, who wasn’t even being investigated. Bush, Cheney and Rove never did tell you about their role in leaking her identity, did they?

McClellan: Of course not. They knew nothing about it. Well, except that Joe Wilson was a proven liar, and then offered to campaign for John Kerry. Even Kerry washed his hands of him. I advised the White House that if he’s too toxic even for the Democrats, they’d better not comment at all, because that would only give his story credit it didn’t deserve.

Osnos: No, you prat. Want to make money from your book? Just write that the cabal didn’t tell you anything, but they did “collude” to get their stories straight, so they wouldn’t make the mistake that poor fool Libby made. Presumably, this is standard PR advice, but don’t mention that. Just say they met at the time to discuss the Plame case and how Fitzgerald’s investigation might affect the White House. This makes them look like liars, without actually calling them liars, and without implicating you in any way. So you get to dodge lawsuits, and the book will sell millions. Then, when they heed your advice about Joe Wilson once again — not to respond to your book, for fear of looking defensive — everyone will believe they’re guilty as sin. The headline will read: “Bush White House doesn’t deny that Rove and Cheney were in cahoots”. They’re hung by what everyone will think is their own petard — not knowing it’s yours — and you’ll come out smelling like roses.

McClellan: But I have no idea what they actually discussed.

Osnos: Who cares? Write exactly that, in fact. In fact, not taking you into their confidence suggests dishonesty. So why don’t you call it a “culture of deception” or something?

McClellan: But I don’t think calling the White House deliberately dishonest is very smart. Or very honest.

Osnos: So write about “Washington’s culture of deception”. If Barack Obama can say it, why can’t you?

McClellan: Won’t all this look rather dishonourable?

Osnos: Look, Scotty. Mind if I call you Scotty? There are a million people out there who already believe all the adjectives in the world aren’t enough to describe the evil of the Bush cabal. They already believe every word you have yet to write, and more importantly, every word you won’t write. Most won’t even bother to read the book, but will blog about it anyway. Just write them something that doesn’t conflict with their partisan prejudices, and you’ll come out looking like the brave dissenter who did your duty but whose honour now compels him to go public. Who cares that you’re not going public with anything of actual substance? For that matter, who cares about honour? This is Bush we’re talking about, remember?

McClellan: Wow. And I thought I was pretty hot stuff as a spin doctor.

Osnos: No. You gave two-page press releases to journalists who are paid to read them. A mechanical monkey can do that. I’m hot stuff. I have to sell turgid 500-page tomes filled with the partisan drivel of non-entities to a million illiterate nobodies, and get them onto the NYT and Amazon.com bestseller lists to boot. You’re an amateur. That’s why you’re on that side of the desk, and I’m on this side. You have no idea how to spin stories.

McClellan: I see now what you mean by your “innovative and aggressive new model of publishing” that ensures profitability. I’m impressed. Just remember to put in the blurb something like that I was kind of the power behind the throne — one of Bush’s closest aides, or something — and that the White House couldn’t say anything without going through me. I hear what you say. You’re a professional. So am I, so let’s go make some money. I must say, this book-writing business is pretty cool. Used to be you had to actually save for your retirement, and protect your integrity. Now you can just turn around and screw everyone you worked for and make a killing. Here I thought PR was a pretty dishonest but profitable job. It’s clearly got nothing on book publishing.

Osnos: Indeed it doesn’t. Now let’s go find some rare whiskey to toast with. I’m buying.

McClellan: Och aye. A wee dram would numb the pain of prosperity.

Osnos: That it does, Scotty. That it does.

Joseph Stiglitz says the Iraq war is a central cause of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. From which we can conclude that the Iraq war is not a central cause of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The press never tires of describing Stiglitz as a Nobel Prize winner. This is true. He shared a prize in economics in 2001 with George Akerlof and Michael Spence, for work on the asymmetric availability of information in markets. One application, on which Stiglitz in particular focused, involved credit markets, in which lenders know less about the likely repayment of a loan than borrowers.

So one would think he knows something about the credit crunch. And perhaps he does. But if so, he’s not telling. He’s got a war to fight, and a book to flog to the economically illiterate antiwar left. The former economic adviser to US president Bill Clinton teamed up with Linda Bilmes, another Clinton-era economist (not that I’d for a moment suggest partisan bias, you understand), to publish The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Stiglitz’s explanation for the credit crunch? When in doubt, blame Bush. According to him, the Iraq war is a primary cause:

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

“The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system,” he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

He’s partly right: inflationary monetary policy was a central cause of the housing bubble. Low interest rates made money cheaper, which not only boosted investment in fixed assets such as houses, but also led to great offers on home loans at rates that could never last, squeezing those who bought houses they couldn’t really afford.

He’s also right to note that expanding the money supply by keeping interest rates low is a favourite technique of governments to “inflate away” debt. In essence, monetary inflation debases a currency, imposing an invisible tax on income earners that has the effect of reducing public debt: your dollar becomes worth less, and you can buy less with it, but the government’s dollar-denominated debt is also worth less as a result.

But here’s the rub: the US debt has not been inflated away. It may be lower as a percentage of GDP than it was during the height of the Clinton years, but despite the economic growth of the Bush years, it isn’t exactly heading down.

That’s not Stiglitz’s biggest error, however. He attributes this inflation in money supply to the Iraq war. So I got some data from the Federal Reserve, and drew a chart of the monthly federal funds rate since 2000, with the Iraq war period highlighted.

You’ll notice that for most of the duration of the war, the fed rate has risen sharply. It hasn’t been kept low, or been lowered, as Stiglitz’s theory would have it. The cause of the credit crunch predates the Iraq war, and contrary to Stiglitz’s claim, the fed’s policy during the war was to make credit more expensive.

I cannot imagine that a Nobel Prize-winning economist didn’t spot this, so I can only conclude that Stiglitz is simply lying when he attributes the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates to the Iraq war. Must be something he learnt from Bill Clinton.

A year ago, when presenting his paper, “The True Costs of the Iraq War,” he estimated that the war would cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on how much longer troops stay.

Just a year later, he says the war will cost $3 trillion, and that’s a conservative estimate. Then his margin of error, at a conservative estimate, is between 100% and 200%. This seems rather higher than an economist should be comfortable with. Granted, such an estimate does indeed depend on how long the troops stay. Just like the price of an acid trip depends on how much acid you take.

Another way he arrives at this staggering figure is that Stiglitz uses a terrifically broad definition of war costs, including, for example, welfare costs for veterans. This leads to rather interesting conclusions.

One of the greatest discrepancies is that the official figures do not include the long-term healthcare and social benefits for injured servicemen, who are surviving previously fatal attacks because of improved body armour.

So let me get this straight: It’s a bad thing when soldiers don’t die, because then you have to keep paying them? Nice sentiments, Mr Stiglitz. At least we know now why you didn’t win the Peace Prize.

An infamous report was issued in October 2006, just before the US mid-term election that returned Congress to Democratic control. Though the election had been the Republicans’ to lose, by virtue of their disregard for Gingrich Revolution-era promises of small government and spending restraint, the Iraq war played a not inconsiderable part in the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The Lancet, a hitherto respected British scientific journal, published an estimate by Johns Hopkins researchers (PDF) by means of a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, that between the invasion in March 2003 and July 2006, “there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area.”

That is carnage. It exploded arguments that modern wars, though always awful, have become progressively less awful because of better targeting, more accurate munitions, and greater care among Western soldiers to avoid “collateral damage” — the unfairly maligned hold-all phrase used to describe death and injury to civilians and damage to non-military buildings and infrastructure. They understand that collateral damage wastes effort, munitions and lives on inconsequential targets. They understand that collateral damage isn’t exactly the best way to win hearts and minds. They understand that collateral damage makes for bad PR back home, which undermines political support for their efforts. They understand that collateral damage serves nobody and harms everybody, and they have the means to avoid it.

Or so we thought. Until we discovered that around 650 000 people died unnecessarily. This was a much higher death toll than even the most vocal opponents of the war had yet claimed. It was at least 13 times more than the worst estimates of the US military, the Iraqi health ministry, or the independent Iraq Body Count organisation. Not to say that their estimates of 50 000 deaths was good news, but given that some combatants deliberately targeted civilians, it was better than half a million or more. In fact, it wouldn’t compare unfavourably with the death toll during the five years of South Africa’s “peaceful” transition to democracy. In short, tragic though it remains, 50 000 or 100 000 deaths are expected, but 650 000 are not.

The study was met with skepticism in some quarters, and the error margin of 550 000, or over 40% either way, doesn’t inspire confidence. President Bush dismissed the credibility of the report, and his political opponents in turn dismissed his credibility.

Meanwhile, the result was trumpeted across newspapers the world over. The National Journal, which stuck to an arcane debate clouded too often by splits along political lines, rather than substantive arguments about research accuracy and statistical methodology, noted:

CBS News called the report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.” CNN began its report this way: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.” Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Turns out Bush was right, though. Earlier this month, the National Journal published a comprehensive set of conclusions in an article entitled Data Bomb, in which it interrogates every aspect of the study.

Days later, the New Scientists publishes an article entitled “Iraqi war death toll slashed by three quarters”, in which it reports that according to Iraqi health officials, the death toll for March 2003 to June 2006 was in fact between one sixth and one third of those published in The Lancet.

As the American Digest observes, if 600 000 Iraqis had really died, where are all the funerals? Were they held in secret? Were reporters just not interested in the heartfelt drama of corpses swaddled in white, borne by crying men and women?

The Iraq issue may turn out to be the most curious aspect of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Though dramatic mistakes were made, at political level, at intelligence level, and in strategic and tactical decisions on the ground, one gets the impression that most voters now recognise one might expect such missteps in a difficult war. Too many prophecies were made before the fact, rather than after the fact, the way Churchill preferred them, and a political price was paid. It is time, to turn an Angry Left slogan against it, to move on.

The carnage and failures and pessimism appears to have been exaggerated for too long. General David Petraeus is overseeing a strategy that is demonstrably working. Would it surprise anyone to learn that MoveOn.org, the pressure group that slandered him as “General Betray Us” in the New York Times, is funded by the same George Soros who partly funded the Lancet study?

The danger of exaggeration is that people stop believing you. That they recognise you’ll have difficulty making a case on the facts of the matter. The result, in the case of the Iraq-war-as-willful-carnage myth, is that few of the current presidential candidates even mention the war, beyond promising its responsible conduct to a hopeful conclusion. Even some of the Democratic candidates are, implicitly, endorsing the Bush Doctrine now. They know that they can’t objectively call Iraq a disaster, and that it’s no longer politically advisable either. Now, it seems voters, who opposed the war when it was (or sometimes merely appeared to be) going badly, have resolved that competently bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion is a more reasonable political desire than high-tailing it and leaving carnage behind. How far we’ve come, in just one short year.

2007 turned out to be a pretty good year for George W. Bush.

Late last year, voters turfed Republicans out of Congress over either lack of spending restraint or dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq or both, depending who you ask. (Robert Novak: war; Alan Greenspan: spending; Rush Limbaugh: both, and liberals suck; Reason magazine: both, and government sucks.)

This electoral loss, which meant Bush could no longer rely on a compliant Congress to send him only bills he likes, merely reinforced the view that Bush now is a lame duck, unable to govern effectively. (CNN: Is Bush already a lame duck?; Lou Dobbs: Beware the lame duck; The Guardian: ‘Lame duck’ Bush faces struggle to push through new agenda; The Telegraph: Allies desert ‘lame duck president’; Dan Froomkin: How lame a duck?)

A few voices ran against the media herd, but looked like wishful thinkers. (Christian Science Monitor: Bush’s lame-duck advantage.)

But on Friday, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times (apparently independently) noted that Bush hasn’t had a bad 2007 at all. Moore’s item is worth quoting in its entirety:

Bush on the Comeback Trail

Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress’s have sunk into the teens. There’s nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.

This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I’ve made a list of Mr. Bush’s policy victories over the Democrats:

1. S-CHIP — Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2. Alternative Minimum Tax — Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3. Energy bill — What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4. Hate Crimes Legislation — Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5. War funding — Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6. The Budget — Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7. No new taxes — all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.

It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve noted before, US economic and foreign policies matter most to me as a foreigner: whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t keep me up at night.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I said to a friend that perhaps the US needs a presidential term under a Democrat, if only to remind the people in general (and Republican voters in particular) that the Democrats aren’t very good at low taxes, low spending, light-touch environmental regulation and effective foreign policy. Either a John Kerry in 2004, or a Hillary Clinton in 2008, would achieve this goal, and as a result, cement the longer-term rise of the GOP. It now appears that Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco leftist in charge of the ineffectual Democratic Congress, may have achievedachieve this in just two years. Especially if the Democrats nominate Clinton (admittedly, Dennis Kucinich would do too), my money’s on a Republican presidential election win just less than a year from now.

Update: Repaired a grammatic blunder in stating Nancy Pelosi’s term: either she “may have achieved it in just one year”, or she “may achieve it in just two years” — my phrasing was inconsistent, and the former may yet be undone by a sparkling Congressional performance in 2008 (when Martians may land and I may win the lottery).

Laurence, a student of international politics of Commentary South Africa fame, has had an interesting article published by the Mid East Web for Coexistence. It summarises the state of play in Iraq, and notes, with caveats, some reasons for optimism. Not everyone agrees with him, sadly.

Iraq is a disaster, right? Everyone knows that, don’t they? Nobody with half a brain still supports the US-led coalition in its efforts, do they? Odd, then, that the markets disagree.

Markets tap the combined knowledge of their investors. These investors put money on their confidence in predicting the future. Because they have money in the game, it is fair to suppose that they’re more likely to have studied and thought about what they’re buying than you or me. This is why markets are often described as “pricing in” all existing knowledge that may affect the future value of the investments that are being traded.

The predictive power of regular stock and bond markets, though well understood by classical economists such as Friedrich Hayek, has been popularised in recent books such as Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

Using markets as prognostication tools underlies the idea of purpose-designed “prediction markets”. The classic example is the Iowa Electronic Markets, where real-money futures contracts on political and economic events are traded. It has become famous for being more accurate at predicting the outcome of US elections than the exit polls that hitherto have been the best available method short of counting ballots.

Several companies, including Google and HP, use prediction markets to support decision-making.

So, if relying on markets as a predictor of the future is a pretty good idea, then this Bloomberg report is cause for optimism about the future of Iraq:

Holders of Iraqi bonds are giving President George W. Bush a vote of confidence.

The country’s $2.7 billion of 5.8 percent bonds due in 2028 returned 15.2 percent since July… Only Ecuador’s debt gained more, rising 18 percent. Iraq’s securities yield 6.21 percentage points more than Treasuries, the most of any dollar-denominated government debt.

While the war in Iraq has dragged Bush’s approval ratings lower, his policies in Iraq have turned around investor opinion on Iraqi debentures.

Granted, a lot of people, especially outside the US, are heavily invested in the notion that Iraq is a disaster. Their entire worldview is based on the notion that nothing good can possibly come of the foreign policy of Bush the Imperialist Warmonger. Instinctively, they feel what’s good for the US is bad for the world. So if the liberation of Iraq turns out to be a hard-won success, as the markets now appear to predict, don’t expect much more than a grudging silence from the anti-war left. For them, maintaining partisan hypocrisy will prove much less painful than joining the Iraqis in celebrating peace, prosperity and freedom. I’d buy futures on that.

(Hat-tip: Greg Mankiw)

No wonder the issues in the US election campaign are turning towards economic concerns. Not only are there some (economic concerns, that is), but the core Bush-bashing issue of his presidency is starting to look rather limp. MoveOn.org had to turn to vicious slander in its effort to discredit the Congressional testimony of General Petreaus as propaganda for the White House. The media has, in general, been fairly reliably opposed to the Iraq war. Reporters have consistently hedged good news with bad, and are usually skeptical of any news of progress. Some outright suppress it, revelling in predictions of the inglorious defeat of the US-led coalition.

Yet the orthodox view of Iraq as a disaster is under threat. Even the BBC is pointing to statistics that — across the board, it says — show the situation in Iraq is improving:

Is Iraq getting better? The statistics say so, across the board.

Over the past three months, there has been a sharp and sustained drop in all forms of violence. The figures for dead and wounded, military and civilian, have also greatly improved.

All across Baghdad, which has seen the worst of the violence, streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business.

People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes.

Everybody agrees that things are much better.

Except the BBC, of course:

But is the improvement only skin deep? And will it last once the American troops, whose “surge” has clearly made a difference, begin to scale down?

Several quotations in the article do support the view that security, progress and peace in Iraq remain dependent on coalition forces and reconstruction efforts. Which leads to only one conclusion: those calling for a rapid withdrawal (including presidential candidates that do) are willing to give up the gains made, condemn Iraq to rule by partisan or insurgent militias, and sacrifice the peace and prosperity of Iraqis on the altar of political expediency. Perversely, if that happens they’ll get to say, “I told you so,” instead of paying the price for their betrayal. I hope the American people won’t let that happen.

Neoconservatism, since its revival in the popular consciousness after 9/11, is often misunderstood. It defies old-fashioned classification as either idealist or realist, being in many ways both. Most often, it is used as a general, usually derogatory, term to describe the policies of the Bush administration. This association, while in some ways accurate, often is not. Using it as such a simplistic political label is misleading. It disregards the ideology’s classical liberal origin and basis, its history as offshoot from the Democratic party in the United States, and the guiding political and philosophic principles it retains today. Even the term “ideology” itself could use some clarification, being often misunderstood in a similar way: as a rigid, blind dogma, rather than as a set of underlying ideas or philosophical principles on which logical political argument can be based.

In a long but eminently readable article for Commentary magazine, republished in the Wall Street Journal, Joshua Muravchik, who has been closely associated with the neoconservative movement and its central figures, does a remarkably clear and comprehensive job of describing what neoconservatism really is and where it’s at. First he explains its origins and principles. Then he sets the record straight on a number of misconceptions and fallacies. Finally, he analyses its current vitality in the light of both global and American domestic politics. Many commentators — including some neoconservatives themselves — have declared neoconservatism dead, or at least irreparably damaged by the failures and complications of the war in Iraq. Muravchik begs to differ. He concludes that as political ideology, is still the only game in town.

It’s essential reading, in my view. Especially if you want to understand, for example, why neoconservatives think the way they do, or why I’m not afraid to describe myself as one, despite the popular opprobrium with which the label is used, and despite my deep affinity with libertarian economics.

There’s a fascinating article over at The American Thinker, by Ray Robison. He analyses and places in context some events that have barely made headlines, but which suggest significant progress in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the fight against the Jihadists. Though the operations have been kept pretty quiet, the location will be familiar: Tora Bora.

Just one quotation from a long piece:

This cannot be overstated: it is the most crucial development since the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Cutting al Qaeda’s support in Pakistan has been a massive coup, of which our media has no clue of (sic) right now. It is the exact sort of thing that the Democrats and their media accomplices always complain that we are not doing and then completely ignore when we do it.

If what Robison writes is true, this has implications for the war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and on terror in general, as well as for the hunt for Bin Laden himself. The outcome could be momentous.

Who’d have expected a sense of humour at an anti-war protest?

Hat tip: The Thinking Blog

George W Bush’s public speaking skills have improved noticeable during his presidency. Passable is noticeably better than atrocious. But sometimes I’ll bet he rues the confidence he has gained speaking ad lib during press conferences.

Here’s a very funny example, from a press conference yesterday:

The transcript of the relevant section, in which he is speaking about progress in Iraq:

I thought an interesting comment was made, I heard somebody say, you know, “Where’s Mandela?” Well, Mandela’s dead. Because, Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas. You see, he was a brutal tyrant…

The real Nelson Mandela is, as we all know, very much alive and (I trust) well. But the literal-minded anti-Bush crowd is having a field day with this comment, treating it as yet more proof, if any were needed, that Bush is an imbecile. See here, for example, or here.

To those with half a brain, who are able to understand a statement in context (as a spokesperson for the Nelson Mandela Foundation urged listeners to do on Radio 702 earlier today), it seems clear that the question, “Where’s Mandela?” refers not literally to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, a.k.a. Madiba. Rather, it refers to a peacemaker, a unifier, a conciliatory figure in Iraqi politics. Where is Iraq’s Mandela? In this sense, Bush’s response makes perfect sense. It is biased towards an adult audience, perhaps, because it uses advanced literary devices like figurative speech, but it does make sense.

It may still be wrong, of course, and vulnerable to rational argument. I don’t know whether Saddam did indeed kill all Iraq’s unifying figures. But the statement is not stupid. Here’s some free advice for the over-wrought anti-Bush crowd. If you’re going to argue about Iraq policy and disagree with the Bush administration’s prosecution of that war, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, it would help your cause if you didn’t prove your own pettiness and stupidity first.

Yes, there is a connection between Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman who has a book on the market, and sea urchins, who don’t. Some very selective quotation is doing the rounds in the media about Alan Greenspan’s latest book, suggesting that the Iraq war was all about oil. (Here’s a typical version, here’s the outraged hysteria take.)

Greenspan himself refuted such oversimplification, and there’s a good editorial rebuttal here. Among other arguments, it expresses mystification not only that the US never laid claim to any Kuwaiti or Iraqi oil — instead buying it on the open market from the countries in question — but also that the US, despite its supposed oil greed, remains reluctant to exploit its domestic oil reserves, in the name of environmentalism. I largely agree, but would take issue with the last paragraph:

Perhaps those who really think Iraq is about blood for oil can explain just why we would put the lives of young Americans in harm’s way for energy while we safeguard the oil-rich habitats of caribou and sea urchins.

The term “safeguarding” should have read “over-protecting”. There is little evidence that exploiting offshore or Arctic oil reserves would pose a significant danger to either caribou or sea urchins. Environmentalists demand zero cost, and no risk. The environmental cost of exploiting those reserves could be zero — after all, caribou thrive among the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, which is similar to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where environmentalists claim even small-footprint extraction operations would destroy caribou breeding grounds. However, there might indeed be an environmental cost to drilling. We can step lightly, but the only way for humanity to leave no footprints is not to progress at all. Even if there is an environmental cost to be borne, however, there is no evidence at all that the costs cannot be mitigated, and more importantly, that the benefit to US energy security and economic interests would not vastly outweigh them.