I’ve been meaning to post more on the situation on Iraq, but the complexity of the issues, and the rapid alternation of good, bad and ambiguous news makes things difficult. I’ve decided the best way to deal with things is to start with the big picture, and work down. At this stage, I don’t see any reason to change the prediction I made last November that the most plausible stable outcome in Iraq is, in fact if not in name, a two-state solution, with an Islamist Shiite majority government for Iraq as a whole, and the Kurds maintaining effective autonomy in the areas they already control. The recently-announced constitution contains various measures that are supposed to constrain this, but it’s already clear that they will be ineffectual. The Shiite leaders, most notably Sistani, have already stated that a document drawn up by an unelected council can’t constrain a democratically elected government. In any case, as long as they don’t challenge the regional autonomy of the Kurds, the Shiites will have all the votes they need to make the changes they want, particularly an enhancement of the role of Islam and the removal of requirements for power-sharing at the national level.

A second problem, pointed out by Alan at Southerly Buster is the attempt in Article 59 to maintain US military control until a permanent constitution is ratified, and a government elected pursuant to that constitution. This is the same kind of thinking that brought us the proposed regional caucuses. Faced with an elected government demanding the repudiation of this article, what are the Americans going to do? The article will fail in its intended purpose, but may cause a lot of trouble in the meantime. I predicted such an attempt, and its failure when I looked at the situation some months ago , and I see no reason to change this view now.

Despite these difficulties, and the still-real risk that the situation will collapse into civil war once it becomes clear that the historically-dominant Sunnis have been demoted to, at best, a subaltern role, I think the odds are in favour of a reasonably stable outcome.

Does this mean the war was justified? To answer this question, we need to ask two others: Compared to what? and Justified for whom?
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Howard’s sudden announcement of a proposal that the Commonwealth should take over the hospital system may be the result of desperation for a “Big Idea”, as some say. Still, since I have long advocated this idea myself (see the AFR article below), I’m happy to endorse it. The mixture of state and commonwealth funding for health is a recipe for cost-shifting and administrative duplication. If the Commonwealth took over health completely, and somehow managed to hand the GST properly to the states, it would also largely resolve the problem of vertical fiscal imbalance.

While we’ re in the business of tidying up spheres of responsibilities, I’d suggest getting the states out of the university and TAFE sectors (although they get almost no state funding, most universities operate under state acts of Parliament) and the Commonwealth out of school funding.

Update: It appears that I overstated the definiteness of this proposal. Here’s a semi-denial from Howard. In the current quasi-campaign environment, it’s increasingly hard to tell what’s policy and what’s not.
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I thought I’d said my last word on voting systems, but it’s a topic that’s hard to exhaust. The comments thread to Brian’s latest post raised the notion of Approval voting in which you cast a vote for all candidates of whom you approve, the candidate with the largest number of votes being elected. I suggested that “the appeal of approval voting is mainly to people who can see the inadequacies of plurality (first past the post) but are worried about the supposed complexity of preferential” and the site linked above, with its frequent references to simplicity, supports this view.

I now want to make a stronger point. Approval voting is, for nearly all purposes, dominated by the “optional preferential” system, in which voters can list in order all the candidates whom they wish to give any support, leaving the remaining candidates unranked. In effect, optional preferential is an approval voting version of the preferential system, with the desirable property that voters don’t have to give any support to candidates they dislike. Given the data from on optional preferential ballot, it would always be possible to implement approval voting by disregarding the rankings given by voters, but its hard to see when this could ever be desirable.
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Brad de Long picks up my post on opportunities and outcomes in which I argued that the achievement of meaningful equality of opportunity in a society with highly unequal outcomes would require extensive government intervention to prevent the development of inherited inequality, and says that I’m falling into Irving Kristol’s trap, which he describes, accurately enough, as

an ideological police action designed to erase the distinction between Arthur Okun and Mao Zedong, and delegitimize the American left.

I agree that many people, particularly critics of social democracy like Kristol ,use the outcome/opportunity distinction in a dishonest way. This is particularly true in the American context, since anyone honestly concerned with the issue would have to begin with the observation that the United States performs just as badly on equality of opportunity (as measured by things like social mobility) as it does on equality of outcome (see the book by Goodin et al, reviewed here for one of many demonstrations of this). So if Kristol were genuinely concerned about equality of opportunity he’d be calling for at least as much intervention as the liberals and progressives he’s criticising.

On the other hand, there is a genuine debate within the social democratic/socialist movement[1] which I was addressing. On the basis of fairly limited knowledge, I identified Blair and Brown as proponents of equality of opportunity and outcomes respectively. In a long comments thread, no-one picked me up on this point, so maybe my judgement on this was accurate. My comments were addressed to the fairly large group of social democrats who genuinely think that, as long as you equalise opportunity, for example by providing good-quality schools for all, it’s not a problem if income inequality increases. To restate my point, that might be true for one generation, but in the second generation the rich parents will be looking to buy a headstart for their less-able children, for example by sending them to private schools where they will be coached in examination skills and equipped with an old school tie. Given highly unequal outcomes in the previous generation, it’s much harder to prevent the inheritance of inequality, and the achievement of equality of opportunity requires more, and more drastic, intervention rather than less.

In the real world, no-one advocates either perfect equality of outcomes or perfect equality of opportunity. My point is that, in the same real world, these two are complements, not substitutes. The more progress you make on equalising outcomes in one generation, the easier it is to equalise opportunities in the next. I don’t expect Irving Kristol to embrace this insight with hosannas, but then it’s a long time since I expected anything positive from Irving Kristol.

fn1. I’ll post more on this distinction soon, I hope.