My posts on the Spanish election outcome have generated plenty of discussion and trackbacks, both here and in the crossposting at Crooked Timber, but nothing as bizarrely obtuse as this piece from Tim Blair. He quotes (without the emphasis I’ve added[1]) the final para

“The key element of the case against Blair, Aznar and Howard is not that they’ve stepped to the forefront of the war against terrorism when prudence would have dictated leaving the Americans to fight it by themselves,” writes Australian economist John Quiggin. “Rather it’s that they’ve aided and abetted the Bush administration in its decision to use the war against terrorism as a pretext for settling old and unrelated scores.”

then, after a long digression on the Spanish Caliphate, comes back to my post, reading as if the word not had been omitted, saying “leaving America to fight this war by itself would be “prudent” to the point of shame.”

With sufficient ill-will, it would be possible, as one of Tim’s commenters suggests, to read this as not only. But no-one who read the entire post could possibly sustain this.

Update In a long and tedious comments thread to his post, Tim Blair stands on his right to misrepresent anyone whose words he finds ambiguous, and is backed up by his inane cheer squad. I used to wonder how Blair could believe in the WMD story, not only before the war, but as recently as October last year. Now that I’ve seen the reality filter in action, I don’t wonder any more.

fn1. The emphasis was included in an email I sent Tim, protesting about a previous similarly bizarre episode in which he put up my Monday Message Board notice (posted, as it happens, before I’d heard the outcome of the Spanish election) as my “reaction” to the election outcome. He changed this (before reading my email – reader “warbo” had already protested) but then proceeded to compound the offence in this way.

The warblogosphere has gone into a predictably frenzy over the Spanish election results. In my previous post, I argued, from an antiwar position, that it was a mistake to interpret the result as punishment for Aznar taking a prominent stance in the struggle against terrorism. Now, following Micah’s advice I’ll present a couple of points that might be more convincing to those on the other side of the fence from me (or at least the subset who are open to argument of any kind).

First, it seems to be universally agreed, and was certainly believed by the PP government, that it would have electorally beneficial had it turned out that the bomb was planted by ETA. But the Aznar government was notable for its hardline stance against ETA. If the Spanish people were the cowards painted by their erstwhile admirers, this would make no sense.

Second (as far as I know), there has been no suggestion from the Socialists that Spanish troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan[1]. If the Spanish people are terrified of bin Laden and want to appease him, it seems strange to show this through continued backing of attempts to capture or kill him and prevent the restoration of the only government that’s ever openly embraced him.

fn1. Of course, the same point applies to most opponents of the war in Iraq. The great majority supported the overthrow of the Taliban. Of the minority who opposed the Afghanistan war, most did not do so on prudential grounds but from a position of general opposition to US foreign policy (eg Chomsky).

There’s a lot of confusion about the perpetrators of the Madrid terrorist bombings, with a letter, purportedly from Al-Qaeda, claiming responsibility, and leaders associated with ETA disclaiming it. There’s evidence pointing both ways and, of course, it’s possible that more than one group was involved. Meanwhile, another letter, also purportedly from Al Qaeda, disclaimed responsibility for the even bloodier atrocity in Karbala last week.

I don’t think it’s necessary to come to a conclusive finding as to who set up which bombs. All groups and individuals that embrace terrorism as a method share the guilt of, and responsibility for, these crimes. Both in practical and symbolic terms, terrorist acts by one group provide assistance and support to all those who follow in their footsteps. The observation of apparent links between groups that seemingly have nothing in common in political terms (the IRA and FARC, for example) illustrates the point. Denials of particular accusations are beside the point unless they are accompanied by a renunciation of terrorism.

This point isn’t only applicable to terrorists. For example, governments that engage in, or endorse, torture in any context share in the guilt of criminals like Saddam, whether or not they were directly complicit in particular crimes.

The announcement that Ralph Nader will again run for the Presidency raises the (almost) unaskable question -are there any circumstances under which we should hope for, promote, or even passively assist, the re-election of George W. Bush as against either of the remaining Democrat contenders? I feel nervous even raising this question, but I think it’s worth a hard and dispassionate look.

Regardless of their political persuasion, most people will agree, at least in retrospect, that it would have been better for their own side (defined either in ideological or in party terms) to have lost some of the elections they won. Most obviously, this was the case for the US Republican Party in 1928. Hoover’s victory, and his inability to cope with the Depression, paved the way for four successive victories for FDR and two generations of Democratic and liberal hegemony, which didn’t finally come to an end until the Reagan revolution in 1980. The same was true on the other side of poltiics in Australia and the UK, where Labour governments were elected just before the Depression, split over measures of retrenchment demanded by the maxims of orthodox finance and sat out the 1930s in Opposition, watching their own former leaders implement the disastrous policies they had rejected, but had been unable to counter.

So, is 2004 one of those occasions? The case that it is rests primarily on arguments about fiscal policy. Bush’s policies have set the United States on a path to national bankruptcy, a fact that is likely to become apparent some time between now and 2008. Assuming that actual or effective bankruptcy (repudiation of debt or deliberate resort to inflation) is unthinkable, this is going to entail some painful decisions for the next President and Congress, almost certainly involving both increases in taxation and cuts in expenditure. On the expenditure side, this will mean a lot more than the obvious targets of corporate welfare and FDW[1]. Either significant cuts in the big entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) or deep cuts in everything else the government does will be needed, even with substantial increases in taxes (to see the nasty arithmetic read these CBO projections, and replace the baseline with the more realistic “Policy Alternatives Not Included in CBO’s Baseline”)
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My post on Cyprus raised some eyebrows with its reference to the relative insignificance, in geopolitical terms, of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Looking back, I’m not surprised that this was controversial. After all, the idea that the war in Iraq is crucially important is a common background assumption in most of the debate, shared by both supporters and critics. Of course, geopolitics isn’t the only criterion of importance – the costs and benefits in terms of lives lost and saved, human rights and so on need to be discussed, not to mention economic impacts. But still, I think it’s fair to say that most people assumed that the presence in Iraq of more than 100 000 US troops, with a demonstrated capacity and willingness to overthrow governments, would make for big changes one way or another.

The most obvious candidate for such effects is Iran¹. It is number 2 country in the Axis of Evil (and everyone knows North Korea was only thrown in at the last moment for rhetorical balance). It has advanced weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program activities. And its current rulers are the same ones who humiliated the US in 1979 and who were, until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, US Public Enemy Number 1 in the region.
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In the middle of yet another scandal about American college sports, the NYT chooses to run an editorial calling for cheerleading to be recognised as a competitive sport (It is implied, though not clearly stated, that this sport would be open only to women).

I prefer watching cheerleading to watching American football and I have no problem with claims about its athleticism and so on. And I’ll concede Allen’s arguments that injuries might be reduced if the activity were run on a more professional basis (of course she doesn’t use the dreaded word ‘professional’, anathema to the NCAA).

Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a case where unsound premises have been pushed to their logical conclusions, with predictably bizarre results. The basic problem is the mixture of higher education and professional sport, which makes about us much sense as if high school cafeterias doubled as French restaurants.

Isn’t there even one university president prepared to take up the banner of Robert Maynard Hutchins and get universities out of the entertainment industry?

No one much has noticed, but what will probably turn out to be the biggest geopolitical event of the year took place last weekend. I’m referring to the announcement by Kofi Annan of a referendum on the reunification of Cyprus to be held on 21 April this year. There’s still room for something to go wrong, but I’ll present my analysis on the basis that the referendum will be held and approved, which seems likely at present.

Why should settlement of a long-running dispute on a Mediterranean island, with no recent flare-ups, be so important ? Let me count the ways.

First, this is another victory for the boring old UN processes so disdained by unilateralists.

Second, a settlement of the Cyprus dispute would mark the end of hostilities between the modern states of Greece and Turkey that go back to the achievement of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire 200 years ago. Taking a longer historical view, the predecessor states of the modern Greece and Turkey have been at the frontline of hostilities between Islam and Christendom for 1000 years or more. By comparison with this dispute, the troubles in Ireland are of recent vintage.

Third, and most important, the positive role played by the Turkish government, until now the sponsor of the separatist government in Northern Cyprus, will greatly strengthen Turkey’s case to become a candidate for admission to the European Union. Admission of Turkey, which could be expected to follow by around 2010 would dramatically change the dynamic of Middle Eastern politics. Iraq, Iran and Syria would all have borders with Europe. With membership of the EU, Turkey would provide a model of an increasingly prosperous, secular and democratic state in a predominantly Islamic country. By comparison, the replacement of the odious Saddam Hussein with an imperfectly democratic Islamist government dominated by Shiites (the most plausible current outcome for Iraq) would fade into insignifance.

A decision by the EU to reject Turkey, despite its dramatic progress towards a fully democratic system of government, would be equally significant, but in the negative direction. The advocates of rejection, most notably the German Christian (!) Democrats would correctly be seen as being motivated primarily by anti-Islamic prejudice. This would be a big setback in the struggle against terrorist forms of Islamism.

The NYT presents this story with an oddly positive spin. The guts of it is a World Bank study estimating that Iraq can only ‘absorb’ $6 billion in reconstruction spending in 2004. To put it another way, given a total cost estimate of $55 billion (which has not been challenged), only about one-tenth of the job will be done by the time the US and presumably (if things are going at all well) Iraqi elections are held next year.

This is ‘good news’, because it seems likely that the total amount available from non-US donors might be a couple of billion, which, as a proportion of $6 billion, can be spun as a successful outcome.

But the unnamed American officials quoted at the end of the story are right to be ‘ unhappy over any suggestion that Iraq cannot “absorb” more than $6 billion in the first year’. As one correctly observes, “You can’t get the country back on its feet until the power is back on.” So, if the World Bank is right, and all the evidence so far suggests that it is, Iraq is not going to be back on its feet for quite a few years to come.

There’s no easy resolution here. The correct policy would have to been to let the UN inspections proceed, relax economic sanctions when no weapons were found and try to deal with the problems of the Middle East as a whole before focusing on Iraq. As it is, the world, and particularly the Coalition of the Willing will have to make the best of a bad job. It’s still not clear exactly what this will mean, but the process of lowering expectations has already begun.

Update Even with lowered expectations, I find this story in The Economist hard to believe. Apparently, thousands of workers from Bangladesh and India have been imported for all the jobs on American bases in Iraq because “Iraqis are a security risk”. Can this be true?

For anyone who cared to look at the issue logically, it was obvious that the question of Saddam’s putative weapons of mass destruction would be decided on day one of the war. As I said, the day before the war started,

the “best” time for Saddam to use them is before the US attack commences, which means almost immediately … If, in the face of an invasion aimed at killing him or seizing him for a war crimes trial, Saddam still refrains from using WMDs, only two conclusions are possible:
(a) there were no weapons; or
(b) they were not, even in the most drastic circumstances, a threat to the US

This is clear enough, but still, some reasonable people might have taken a little longer to be convinced, and, as we’ve seen, there’s still the possibility of a leftover test-tube in a fridge somewhere. But after six months, anyone who continues to think that illegal weapons in working order are going to be discovered is revealing more about their own psychology than about the real world. What then, is to be said about the report that Polish troops had discovered four French Roland missiles, manufactured in 2003 and delivered to Iraq at a time when massive US forces were already surrounding the country, and when the capture of such missiles would have utterly discredited the French government?

This story was so unlikely that any rational person would have dismissed it out of hand, especially in the presence of a clear alternative explanation, that the missiles had been delivered before the imposition of sanctions in 1990* , and the Poles just got the dates wrong (as they subsequently admitted). In its combination of wish fulfilment and total implausibility, it was on a par with the various rumours that Jews/Muslims/highly placed Americans had been tipped off before September 11 and stayed away from the World Trade Center.

So, who fell for it? As far as I can tell, a large proportion of warbloggerdom bought the story and hardly any debunked it.

At the top of the list, there’s, Instapundit, LGF, samizdata and Kevin Donahue

Google reveals so many suckers for this story that it’s impossible to list them all, but I estimate the number must be into the hundreds, even excluding those who reproduced the story without comment. A few linked to the subsequent retraction, but mostly in a way that failed to admit that the original report had been completely falsified. For example, Instapundit is still suggesting that the Polish retraction is part of a coverup.

Hat-tip to Roger Ailes whose link to Instapundit I followed.

*That is, in the days when Saddam was “a mass murderer, but our mass murderer”.