Assuming there is to be a war in Iraq, it is, as the Administration is fond of saying, a matter of weeks not months. So the lack of any clear statement of what is to happen afterwards is more troubling than ever.

I’ll start with a basic question of legality. Let’s suppose that there is a second UNSC resolution on Iraqi weapons* and a group of UN members led by the US acts to enforce it, destroying Saddam’s weapons and overthrowing him in the process. At that point, as far as I can see, any legal basis for a continued US armed presence ceases. The US could simply withdraw (the option that the Pentagon would prefer, I’m sure). Alternatively, the UNSC could pass a new resolution establishing some sort of UN mandate.

But, as far as I can see, neither course of action is being contemplated. The option that seems to be uppermost in Bush’s mind, that of installing a US-controlled government, would convert an enforcement action based on a UN mandate to a war of aggression – explicitly forbidden under the UN charter.** I’m not an international lawyer, but it seems to me that an action of this kind would wipe out any claim to legality for the original intervention.

I had a look at the precedents of Germany and Japan after WWII. In both cases, the occupation government was nominally one established by the Allies (who were also, in some sense, the UN). In Germany this was also the reality on the ground, while in Japan the government was effectively controlled by the Americans. The most recent war, in Afghanistan, wasn’t problematic at all in this sense. No-one recognised the Taliban, and the new government was established under the auspices of the UN. Similarly in Kosovo, although NATO intervened without an explicit UN resolution to stop attacks on civilians, the subsequent occupation was UN-authorised.

* Actually, this isn’t critical. The same arguments apply if the invasion is justified by reference to 1441 and past resolutions. A real difference would arise only if the US explicitly repudiated the UNSC.

* *This was the line taken by the US government in relation to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which was justified both as self-defence and by the horrific nature of the Pol Pot regime. In fact, the US government took an even harder line since it continued to recognise Pol Pot rather than taking the more defensible position that neither Pol Pot nor Hun Sen represented a legal government.

Update Several commentators suggest that the proposed US controlled government is an interim step towards a democratic Iraq. In fact, according to the Washington Post, democracy has been explicitly ruled out (Blair refused to commit to democracy a week ago, and presumably this is why)

officials emphasized that they would not expect to “democratize” Iraq along the lines of the U.S. governing system. Instead, they speak of a “representative Iraqi government.”

There’s also no mention of the word “interim” or of “elections” or of anything that implies a specific finite timeframe. Obviously the US doesn’t plan to occupy Iraq permanently, but the implied position is one of indefinite occupation until the position of a pro-US government is secure, regardless of whether it has any democratic legitimacy.

The report also indicates that the Iraqi opposition (for all its faults, the only democratic force on offer) has been told to forget about any ideas it might have for a provisional government followed by democratic elections. A reaction from Kanan Makiya of the Iraqi National Congress, with a reference to those Iraqis who might serve in a US-controlled administration as ‘quislings’, is here.

I should emphasise that this is all attributed either to unnamed ‘officials’ or to experts outside the Administration, and could be misinformation of some kind. With an invasion apparently no more than a few weeks away, we have no official policy and, in particular, no explanation of how the enforcement of UN resolutions can legitimately be turned into a war of conquest.

Further update An error on my part – the article does indeed refer to the rule of a civilian administrator as “interim”. However, the rejection of “democratization” is clear-cut.

The Green Flag by Robert Kee, is a three volume history of Ireland, from the Norman invasion led by Strongbow to the end of the Civil War. Excellent background for anyone wanting to understand the current situation in Northern Ireland.

In reading this, it struck me that, although I have significant Scottish ancestry, I don’t have any real clue about Scottish history prior to Mary Queen of Scots. I know a bunch of jumbled up names and stories – Sir Patrick Spens and the Maid of Norway, MacBeth and Duncan, John Knox and Darnley, Bruce, Balliol and Wallace, but no real idea of how they all fit together. I’m not even quite sure which ones are real and which fictional.

Arguably, this doesn’t matter. I’m not greatly interested in history of the ‘kings and battles’ kind, and the developments that really affected the world of today, such as the rise of Parliament, took place in England. And my family links are to the Highlanders of the Isles, who were largely unaffected by what went on in Edinburgh and London at this time. Still, it would be good to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge.

In responding to a post by Uncle of ABCWatch, a while ago I accepted the premise of the post, namely that Frida Kahlo was a committed Stalinist. In fact, she and her husband Diego Rivera sheltered the exiled Trotsky and Kahlo had a brief affair with him. As this brief summary suggests, it’s a tangled story and I don’t want to claim that Kahlo was a saint, but it’s important to get basic facts straight.

Am I just paying more attention to the news or are there even more disasters than usual? Two nightclub disasters in the US, the train fire in Korea and plane crashes in Iran and Pakistan among others. Then there’s the continuing pandemic of HIV/AIDS, particularly in Africa and of course all the everyday tragedy of routine death that never makes the news.

As Me No No pointed out in a comments thread recently, it’s impossible to feel equal empathy for everybody. Instinctively, I feel a lot more empathy for Korean commuters than for Iranian ‘elite troops’, but obviously they all had families and loved ones. I don’t really have a point in all this, but I suppose it’s better to pay attention to such things than to adopt the natural response of ignoring them.

As just reported in the NYT United Nations weapons inspectors said today that they would order Iraq to destroy hundreds of ballistic missiles and rocket engines that were found to be in violation of the cease-fire agreement Iraq signed at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

It’s clear that a refusal would lead directly to war, very probably with the backing of the UNSC. And, since such a refusal would be clear evidence that Saddam is irrationally devoted to his weapons, it would lead me to drop my opposition to war.

But, precisely because of this analysis, I anticipate that the demand will be accepted, though doubtless with very bad grace and after attempts to wiggle out of doing anything (offering to handicap the missiles perhaps) have failed. Once this happens, it will be very hard for the “coalition of the willing” to argue that inspections are useless. The case for taking another six months will be that much stronger. Even if inspections ultimately run up against clear non-compliance, Saddam will have been weakened by the loss of the rockets, and by the necessity to keep weapons so carefully concealed that they will not be readily available to him in the event of a war (one story has them on ships in the Indian Ocean!)

One of the odd features of the free-market thinktanks in Australia is their insistence that standard economic theory does not apply to education. The Institute of Public Affairs spent several years running the line that class sizes are irrelevant to educational outcomes. Now Jennifer Buckingham at the CIS has picked up the ball, taking almost the identical line.

The basis for the argument is the fact that it’s extremely difficult to detect effects of class sizes in statistical studies. This is not exactly surprising. It’s very hard to measure anything here. Ideally, we would like to be able to measure how ‘educated’ students are when they start a school year, how ‘educated’ they are when they finish and then take the difference as the contribution of the school. The best available measure, in most cases, is that provided by US standardised tests, which are notoriously unsatisfactory, being designed for cheap mass administration rather than careful assessment. Then there are the many other factors like teacher quality, some of which are even harder to measure.

American economist Rick Hanushek has tried to overcome these problems by collecting lots of studies and counting the results. He comes up with no effect, and is pretty strongly committed to the view that this reflects reality. But experts in meta-analysis have pointed out that Hanushek’s method of ‘counting studies’ is amateurish and unsatisfactory, and have proposed alternative methods that do find positive results.

As with lots of controversies involving statistics, the end result is inconclusive, and most people will go on believing whatever seems most reasonable to them. (Disputes over guns and crime provide a pretty good parallel.) With that warning in mind, you can read my summary of the evidence here.

For an economist, the answer is straightforward. Other things equal, more inputs mean more outputs. This is true, even in the presence of ‘distortions’, such as overstaffing or union restrictions on technology. Hence, unless education is a special activity not governed by the normal laws of production economics, we would expect to see an inverse correlation between class sizes and outcomes.

But wait, there’s more. The CIS (or at least, Jennifer Buckingham) is discarding consumer sovereignty as well. Thanks to the existence of private schools, we have market evidence (in the absence of tight zoning, we get similar evidence from the preferences of parents when they choose between state schools). If small sizes are valueless, we’d expect parents to prefer private schools to spend their money on other things, such as computers or study tours. But in fact there is very little difference between the proportions of resources allocated to teaching staff and other resources for private and public schools. The more money the school has, the lower the class sizes.

To rationalise this practice you have to assume that parents (all former students themselves, of course) not only have mistaken beliefs when they initially choose to send kids to schools with low class sizes, but are incapable of telling whether the education their kids are getting is good or bad once it’s underway. If this weren’t true, schools could gradually shift resources from teaching staff to other uses, and parents would see the benefits and keep their kids in school.

Of course, once you accept this, the whole case for any sort of choice (individual or collective) goes out the window. If as Buckingham explicitly asserts, teachers, parents and governments are all fundamentally mistaken about what makes for good education, the only reasonable policy option is to appoint people like Buckingham and Hanushek to make our choices for us.

Google’s takeover of Blogger has been followed by the disappearance of large numbers of Blogspot sites – I think this may affect everyone who hasn’t paid for the premium package. I hope this is not a taste of things to come!

According to Pyra, those affected should try republishing their blogs.

A sensible and elegantly written piece on national stereotyping, with particular reference to current US stereotypes about the French and Germans in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.

Bloggers have done most of the spadework in exposing the curious misrepresentations of John Lott/Mary Rosh. But the dead-tree media have their strengths, notably including a reach that puts even Instapundit to shame. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, stories on Lott have been appearing in major US newspapers with circulations in the millions, recently including Chicago, where he supposedly conducted his survey. By now the story ought to have reached the attention of dozens of respondents to the putative survey, not to mention the student volunteers who supposedly conducted it. Yet the only person to come forward as a participant has been a pro-gun activist with a record of sharp practice to match that of Mary Rosh.

I think we can conclude with a high degree of confidence that no survey was ever undertaken. This raises the question of whether Lott still meets the ethical standards of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a visiting scholar. A few years ago, he would undoubtedly have been shown the door. But the AEI has gone a long way downhill, and Lott is probably safe for the moment.

In my last post about my American likes and dislikes, I mentioned the resurgence of the coffee wars. Walt Pohl has sprung to the defence of American beer, hamburgers and coffee, saying “The U.S. makes a fine beer, just not Budweiser, Coors, Miller, or any other brand you’ve ever heard of. ” Among the alternatives he mentions, I’m pleased to say I have sampled Anchor Steam, which is pretty good. Similarly, with hamburgers, the place to go is not McDonalds or Wendy’s, but a bar and grill.

On coffee, though, Walt is forced to narrow his defence to his hometown of Seattle, and its ‘thousands of fine coffeeshops’, as opposed to its export product, Starbucks, the only sample of Seattle-style coffee known to the great majority of the coffee-drinking world.

At this point I’ve been meaning to mention an advertising letter I got, suggesting I might want to attend a commercial telecoms conference in London. Normally this kind of stuff goes straight in the circular file, but this one was headed “Wake up and smell the coffee”, and there were enough other references to give you the impression that either the conference or the marketing material I got was specifically aimed at caffeine-addicted telecommunications economists. So, is this a niche large enough for its own conference or has the promise of individually targeted marketing material finally been realised – perhaps other people got a letter with references to real ale instead of coffee.

Update There’s already a lively discussion in the comments thread. At the risk of not delivering, I’ll foreshadow a post in which I plan an explanation of the success of the US in exporting chains like Starbucks and McDonalds based on economic rather than cultural factors. Those interested can try and anticipate my line.