Tim Blair’s latest column is a fisking of a piece in the Guardian by Rod Liddle. Tim intersperses paras by Liddle (in italics) with his own comments. Perhaps this has been done in print before, but I haven’t seen it.

I’m not sure that this works. In the debate on fisking that took place on this blog a few months ago, the point was made that the potential for unfair distortion was offset by the standard practice of linking to the target article. This is more difficult in print – Tim mentions that the article appeared “on Tuesday” but the Oz doesn’t give a URL.

It doesn’t help that this inaugural print fisking is not one of Tim’s better efforts, being made up more of petty quibbles than of either reasoned responses or sharp putdowns. A fairly typical extract

The Prime Minister, John Howard, seems to suggest that his country will invade any Asian country it suspects of harbouring terrorists.

Howard suggested nothing of the sort. He said: “If you believed that somebody was going to launch an attack against your country, either of a conventional kind or of a terrorist kind, and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it.”

A distinction without a difference, as far as I can see.

I mentioned in a recent post that “we are all Keynesians now”, in the sense of accepting that governments will run deficits during recessions and surpluses during slumps to stabilise the economic cycle. While this is broadly true, the natural corollary, that, over the course of the economic cycle, the budget should balance, implying a stable ratio of public debt to GDP, is much more controversial.

Broadly speaking, social democrats accept this position in principle, although they lean towards some tolerance of deficits. On the other side of politics, opinion is sharply divided between hawks who want to wipe out public debt and ‘supply-siders’ who favor continuous budget deficit. Ken Davidson points out the many flaws in Costello’s advocacy of zero debt.

Meanwhile Anthony York at Salon reports that Stephen Friedman’s nomination as chair of Bush’s National Economic Council is running into opposition from ‘conservative opponents of balanced budgets’ . This description would have been an oxymoron before 1980, but it is now apparently routine. I was surprised, for example, to read that the Cato Institute opposes balanced budgets

Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, was not overly enthusiastic about the possibility of Friedman heading the council. But, he said, “Even if he comes in with a balanced budget philosophy, if he can be a team player, then I see no problem.

BTW, ‘Team player’ is a term that could benefit from analysis. As used here, it seems to mean someone willing to repudiate their own views for the sake of a prestigious entry on the vita.

New Zealand has ratified Kyoto and the Canadian parliament has endorsed the treaty, clearing the way for ratification. Provided Russia ratifies (this seems certain, but you can never be sure with Russia) the treaty will now come into force.

The Canadian report includes an estimate that the economic cost of Kyoto will be around 0.4 per cent of GDP. This is consistent with estimates made here by both supporters and opponents of Kyoto.

Manas (‘spicy hot’ in the main East Timorese language) is a new Ozplogger, focusing so far mainly on East Timor. As with other female bloggers, she includes a picture* (more than one, actually). The text looks promising so far.

*I don’t quite know why male bloggers are so shy. In my case, it’s just that I’m too lazy to make the necessary changes to my template – I have a picture on my website here. Actually, in view of the many comments on my beard, it’s not surprising that other males have been coy.

CalPundit has an easy introduction to Keynesian economics, pointing out that ‘we are all Keynesians now’.

To clarify this, nearly everyone accepts that the public sector acts, and should act, as an economic stabiliser by allowing tax revenues to decline and expenditure to rise during recessions (and the opposite during booms). Most economic policymakers are willing to supplement the automatic stabilisation arising from the tax-transfer system with some discretionary fiscal stimulus during recessions.

I didn’t get as skeptical a reaction as I expected to my prediction of no war with Iraq, but I thought I’d try and explain my reasoning a bit further anyway. The short route to war would arise if it could be proved that Iraq’s declaration on WMDs contained significant falsehoods. Obviously, this would be true if the declaration failed to account for stocks of germ and chemical weapons that have been found in previous rounds of inspections. But precisely because this is obvious, it was never likely that the Iraqi government would be so stupid. The table of contents of the declaration, available from the NYT as a PDF file includes a chapter of 22 pages headed “Unilateral destruction of chemical agents, weapons and precursors”.

A direct route to war would also arise if the US could prove that the Iraqis were lying, by pointing the inspectors to sites where weapons programs were underway. The dossiers that were being waved about a few months ago seemed to imply that the US Administration had direct evidence of particular sites being used for WMD production (remember all those grainy satellite photos). But now it appears that this was basically bluff. There could be a surprise in the next few days, but otherwise I think we have to conclude that the Administration doesn’t have the goods on Saddam

Several commentators have already raised the possibility that the US will invade Iraq anyway, either repudiating the UN resolutions or adopting some strained interpretation, such as attacks on planes enforcing the no-fly zone. The difficulty with this is the one that led Bush to go to the UN in the first place. No state in the region wants to be the springboard for an attack that will take place while inspectors are on the job in Iraq. Tony Blair might be willing, but he would almost certainly find it impossible to carry the British cabinet with him, and even Australia might refuse.

The best option for the US, on this analysis is to wait and see what the inspectors turn up. So far they’ve been tackling the obvious options, but with larger numbers they’ll be able to look harder. And some scientist may defect or leak a relevant secret. There was a report a week or so ago, that they’d found some shells with precursors for mustard gas that were supposed to have been destroyed, but nothing much has come of this as yet, and the coverage implied that this it an oversight rather than a carefully concealed weapons cache.

My guess, however, is that there may not be too much to leak. As far as I can tell, a nuclear weapons program can’t be hidden easily, and the last one was destroyed pretty thoroughly, so I’d guess that Iraq has given up on this line. As regards chemical and biological weapons, the rational thing for the Iraqi government would have been to destroy all the stocks, and have some trusted scientists memorise the recipes. It’s looking increasingly likely that this is what they’ve done. By contrast, the US Administration seems to have worked on the assumption that Saddam is crazy.

If my analysis is right, the rational policy on Iraq’s WMD programs from this point on is continued containment, keeping inspectors and monitoring equipment in place indefinitely. The other plausible case for war, based on liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam’s dictatorship, will have to wait for a more comprehensive approach to the Middle East including an imposed resolution to the Israel-Palestine problem.

According to the NYT, it’s the US Administration.

In private, administration officials concede that there is no single piece of intelligence that can undermine the Iraqi declarations.

Instead, they say, there are only patterns of Iraqi purchases, the scattered reports of defectors and Mr. Hussein’s own history of making “final” declarations that eventually proved to be neither final nor true.

Based on this and the reasoning I’ve set out previously, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that there will be no war with Iraq. There are a lot of uncertainties, and I could easily end up with egg on my face, but that’s what blogging’s all about.

A bit more on Turkey’s E.U. Future from Javier Solano. In effect, he’s laying down the conditions:
(a) A new package of democratic reforms
(b) Acceptance of the UN Cyprus settlement plan
If Turkey delivers on these, it’s hard to see how the EU can avoid opening negotiations. Giscard’s appeal to religious bias has clearly backfired, by narrowing the space for ambiguous evasions.

UpdateA long and well thought-out update on this from Nathan Lott. It appears at this stage, the most likely outcome is a ‘date for a date’. That is, the EU will commit to re-examine Turkey’s case in 2004, and if democratic reforms have been made, to start talks in 2005. This kind of compromise won’t please anyone, but the Turks may as well get used to it, since it’s the way Europe works. For that matter, it’s the way democracy works.

I’ve never paid a lot of attention to Steve Bracks, but it appears from this report that he’s going to keep a promise even though it reduces his power.

Bracks says he will introduce a proportional representation system for the Victorian Legislative Council (=Senate) and reduce its term to four years. On the plausible assumption that Labor will win the next election with a reduced majority in the lower house, this implies that minority parties will hold the balance of power in the upper house, whereas Labor now has a majority in both. If this actually happens, Bracks will rise greatly in my estimation.

It’s time for cards on the table as regards Iraq, and it’s clear that someone has been bluffing. The Iraqi government has delivered a declaration, which, it says, denies the existence of any weapons of mass destruction or any current program for producing them. It’s voluminous (11 000 pages) but as a number of people have pointed out, in an era of high-speed scanning and optical character recognition, this shouldn’t account for more than the week or so that has been allowed for the inspectors to go over the material. Then it’s time for the US to declare its hand. As Andrew Sullivan says, the Washington Post has it pretty much right.

The right course, in the event of a clearly false declaration, will be for the administration to immediately lay before the Security Council evidence of the Iraqi arsenal. “Any country on the face of the earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week. If that’s the case, then top secrets from the CIA shouldn’t be necessary; the facts available to all those other intelligence agencies will do. One place to start is the United Nations’ own evidence, including the official reports of the last inspection mission. These cited 360 tons of chemical warfare agents, 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, growth media sufficient to produce more than 25,000 liters of anthrax and 30,000 munitions for the delivery of chemical and biological agents that Iraq failed to account for before 1999. If this weekend’s report does not cover those materials, then the Security Council’s resolution has been breached.

Given that the Iraqi government has shown no signs of being suicidal thus far, it seems reasonable to assume that the declaration includes a claim that all the items previously discovered have been destroyed or converted to peaceful uses. It also seems reasonable to suppose that the Iraqis don’t believe that there is anything left that the inspectors can easily find, with or without US help.

The US response seems equally straightforward. The US government has steadily claimed direct knowledge about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and, as noted, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld repeated the claim last week. Now the Iraqis have put the noose around their necks by denying any weapons. All the US has to do is to advise the inspectors where to look and keep some surveillance planes ready to detect truckloads of equipment trying to escape, suspicious fires etc. Then they have their material breach, the UNSC will sign on or be bypassed, the Gulf states will come on board, and it’s on to Baghdad.

Obviously, these plausible accounts of US and Iraqi strategy can’t both be right. Someone is bluffing, but who?

While I’m on this topic, the NYT has an excellent discussion of The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq

Also I should note that I’m in the unusual position of agreeing with two posts in a row by Sullivan* – the Iraq post is followed by one denouncing the despicable Trent Lott and his retrospective endorsement of Strom Thurmonds racist “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign of 1948.

(*At least I think we agree. Sullivan says that the declaration shouldn’t form the basis of a new round of inspections, but I assume that he means by this that once an undeclared program has been verified, inspection should stop, not that an unproven assertion by the US that Saddam is lying should form a basis for war).