Vacant Lots

My absence from this space will continue for the forseeable future, with the possible exception of an infrequent essay. As I courtesy to readers, I recommend checking this space no more than three times a month.

Western Civ

While watching "Into the West" on TNT, I noticed the Spielberg series is not a faithfully drawn portrait of the life and times of the era. To their credit, though, the producers have attempted greater historical fidelity than Disney's Pocahontas, but even so, they've modified some key events in the interests of both drama and political correctness. For example, in one of the two most recent episodes, we find a minor displacement of fact. We're given a view of Lawrence KS as a dangerous place just prior to the War of the Rebellion -- the subtitle gave a date of 1859 or 1860. History tells us hostilities subsided after August 1858 when the citizens rejected the Lecompton constitution (by a margin of 11,812 to 1,926). This resounding defeat of the slave interests brought hostilities virtually to an end, but I imagine the writer needed to establish a basis for Quantrill's raid without getting into too much detail.

Another example -- Custer shows up in North Platte, Nebraska, during construction of the Union Pacific railroad. Custer, however, was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, assigned to the region in which the Kansas-Pacific route was constructed. He never made it into Nebraska during this period. Considering Custer's prominence in the key events of the fourth and fifth episodes of "Into the West," this is another easily excused error.

Less forgivable is the depiction of Custer's action on the Washita. Custer is shown riding sedately into a peaceful Cheyenne village where he proceeds to slaughter the residents. This may be accurate to a certain extent -- Custer did enter the village before first light, but his troops were opposed to the extent that the losses he inflicted were fairly matched by losses among his own troops. Nor was his action without cause. He found the tribe's winter quarters by following the tracks left by a one hundred fifty man war party returning from a raid on settlements to the north. The tracks were easily followed -- they were left in a foot of snow. Considering that the village size was about 50 lodges, something like half the warriors in the village may have been in the war party. The producers omit these details while excusing the post-treaty raids with a few words from Black Kettle about "bad men on both sides." True enough, but I'd like to have seen it shaded in the direction of self-government of everyman's evil impulses.

Space Between

Each of us has a different comfort setting for the tipping point between privacy and publicity. Some bloggers open their personal identity to public inspection proclaiming from a house top what others, more circumspect, might only utter in muffled tones. Either way, what matters most to me is whether I can independently confirm the blogger's observations and inferences. Nevertheless, a Golden Rule to follow is respect for a person's private personal life as it may exist separate from the words he or she openly expresses in a public forum, unless he or she commits an actionable tort.

Back in my Weekly Reader days, I developed an appetite for visual humor of the printed variety. I spent hours thumbing through my Dad's collections of Punch, H.G.Webster, and Walt Kelly. Appetite whet, I consumed whatever I could find. Weekly Reader offered a title, so I saved up my allowance and ordered a copy.

Light fare. Only one cartoon earned a spot in my memory. Here it is in words -- you can draw your own picture. Imagine two ten year olds -- a boy and a girl -- seated on a park bench enjoying a snack on a warm summer day. The little girl gazes with eager admiration at her companion, but the little boy warns her off, "Don't sit so close to me, you're melting my ice cream."

MV, don't sit so close to IP. You're melting his ice cream.

Bubbly

Take a look at Carbon Dioxide for Sale in case you're not aware of the after-market for greenhouse byproducts of coal gasification.

One Tenth of One Percent

According to Rumsfeld and the three generals offering testimony last Thursday to the Senate Armed Services committee, "one tenth of one percent" represents the proportion of Iraq's population who are actively engaged in armed combat against the emerging constitutional democracy. Due to the tactics employed, the generals indicate the threat requires a military force ten times as large. Ten times one tenth of one percent equals one percent of the population.

All these participation rate calculations naturally lead me to wonder, "What are the other 98.9 percent of the citizens up to?" Not too many reporters give us a glimpse of what's going on in the hearts and minds of Iraq's self-governing citizens, possibly because American editors are pushing for stories on people who die, or things that blow up, or plans that unravel. So I'm left to my imagination, which, according to an apocalyptic Einstein story, occupies the nerve cells of a mere one-percent of my brain.

Like so many other self-governing American citizens, I'm also in the dark about the progress of the coalition's transition plan for Iraq. This darkness has a depressing effect on support for the administration's efforts in Iraq. In an apparently helpful mood, Senator McCain urged the administration to publish benchmarks and milestones so citizens could assess the progress for themselves. As any project manager can confirm, publishing a plan with achievable milestones is essential to maintaining support for a high-profile project. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable request. One of the generals responded that they'd be happy to brief senators behind closed doors, but couldn't brief the public because benchmarks and milestones are classified.

Despite this question and response, or perhaps in conjunction with it, Senator Kerry gave a well-publicized speech on the Senate floor advising the president to publish a clear plan for transition in Iraq with visible benchmarks and milestones (timeframes optional). Unlike Sen. McCain, Sen. Kerry asserted no such plan exists. This assertion flies in the face of both sworn testimony and common sense. It makes you wonder whether Sen. Kerry has maintained the work habits that achieved such scholastic mediocrity during his college days; it's clear he hasn't done his homework.

Even if we haven't seen a published plan, a citizen can reasonably infer that one exists. For example, we know from frequent public statements by the administration that one of the military milestones for success will be reached when the coalition trains an Iraqi force sufficient to deal with the ongoing force level of the terrorist attackers. However, not many people are interested enough in how to achieve this objective that they research publicly available sources to drill down to the day-to-day tasks required to reach the milestone. With the military's penchant for standard processes and procedures, you can be sure there are detailed documents specifying the baby steps involved with every phase of the military transition from enlistment through debriefing. Certainly some of the details will be closely held because they hold the potential to compromise national security, but you have to wonder why no member of the press has pieced together a list of high level milestones and projected timeframes then tracked them week by week in their publications. I'm sure historians will be able to pore through a ton of status reports, requisition forms, unit readiness reports, and volume after volume of processes and procedures. Is it really too much to hope that an enterprising investigative journalist will draw together a reasoned summary of progress measurements while we're actively engaged?

Let me give an example of a high level objective that might satisfy Senators McCain and Kerry, and that might help inform citizens about the rate of progress in Iraq:

Objective	Turn over security operations to Iraq
Benchmark	Train 200,000 Iraqi troops to operate against a force of 20,000 insurgents.
Milestone	US troops return home
Timeframe	Within 24 months after engagement (slipped to 48 months)
% complete	20%

It doesn't take an Einstein to figure this out. In raw numbers, Iraq harbors an estimated ten to twenty thousand enemy combatants, while the Iraq military has grown to something between 100,000 and 200,000 -- 160,000 is the number the president offered in last night's speech. Currently, the Iraqis are fronted by a coalition force of similar size, which leads to the inference that few of the Iraqi units are capable of effectively meeting the threat. This inference was confirmed by testimony at congressional hearings during the past couple weeks. Transition of security responsibilities is going to take awhile. If you listen with a certain ear to Rumsfeld's words, it'll take at least two years from today. It seems like a reasonable timeframe within which the US and Iraq can accomplish the goal. Within broad parameters, "within the next four years from engagement" is roughly equivalent to a pre-war estimate of "no less than twenty-four months and no more than forty-eight months." Every three months, it'd be nice to see a change in the estimated progress toward completion. It doesn't have to be more complex than that.

I don't expect fulfillment of this dream of progress reports, although as a citizen-watcher, I'd like the information because it helps me assess the effectiveness of the plan's detailed actions. Right now, the details are spread across the minds of one tenth of one percent of the population.

The difficulty here is that the audience for any published plans are managers, not people engaged in the action, not reporters, and especially not citizens remote from the theater of action. Managers are responsible for a plan's execution. These particular managers are members of the executive branch of the US government. By design, citizens elect officials who in turn appoint other officials who are approved by other elected officials who in turn hire, contract, and/or oversee other officers of the state. The president and his chief advisors lay down high level objectives. Rumsfeld and the three generals translate these objectives into actions. Military and civilian managers up and down the chain of command design and execute specific aspects of the plan.

But in a republic, or any form of government other than a communitarian democracy, citizens rarely-if-ever are provided a close-in view of the active details for a plan of war. Instead, ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, we're left to our imaginations.

Lagging Indicators

A caller on a morning talk radio noted that we can train a US soldier in six weeks, then asked "So why does it take two years to train Iraqis to replace them?" From his tone, it seemed like the caller believes the administration is either incompetent or dissembling.

In his brief splice of air time, the caller displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of two issues. I don't necessarily disagree with his implied inferences about the competence and fidelity of the top layers of any bureaucratic administration -- a glance at a few of the Iraqi army's operating bases will give a good idea of lack of progress meeting logistic challenges. Still, it might help to recall the progress of the local National Guard unit currently deployed in the Sunni Triangle.

First, the level of training provided to US combat teams consumes far more than six weeks of basic training. The local National Guard unit called up to duty left Urbana in December but didn't ship for Iraq until May. They received nearly six months of intensive training before shipping for duty, beginning with individual training for Theater Specific Readiness and progressing through training regimens for squad, platoon, company, battalion, and brigade operations. This training comes on top of six weeks basic training provided at enlistment, plus a dozen weekends of drill per year, plus two weeks of 'camp' each year. All this before the first bootheel grazes the desert sand.

Second, the most difficult gaps to fill are not hard skills like weapons training, but soft skills like leadership and teamwork. To meet this need, 100 of the best leaders from the 48th Brigade Combat Team have been pulled from their leadership roles and assigned to work with the Iraqi army. There are all sorts of problems with an 'insert foriegn leader here' approach in addition to the gap it leaves in the 48th BCT. Language difficulties and mutual respect are two of the more obvious challenges. It'll take several months to build esprit de corps. Seems to me that not even Baron von Steuben or Casimir Pulaski would have immediate success in Iraq.

Confounded Spite

A few days ago on C-SPAN, Ralph Nader reminded America what a terrible thing it is to base a war on a false premise. Nader was harping about the current war in Iraq, but he may as well have been talking about nearly any other war. In conflict after conflict, either the contemporary interpretation of the precipitating event or some other overt reason for escalation has been shown false in later light. For example:

• Vietnam - Gulf of Tonkin incident was grossly misrepresented


• Cuba Missile Crisis - the US hid from its citizens that the Cuban crisis was caused because it had covertly installed missiles in Turkey on the Russian border, prompting a parallel Soviet response


• Bay of Pigs - Cubans supposedly would spontaeously revolt against Castro


• World War II - attacked by Japan in the Pacific, the US invaded neutral French North Africa.


• World War I - the Lusitania was carrying interdicted armaments to the Allies despite US statements to the contrary


• Spanish-American War - no evidence that the explosion of the battleship Maine was due to sabotage; probably caused by spontaneous combustion in munitions storage

We can keeping tracing backward as far as we want -- the pattern fits fairly well for most conflicts. The difficulty dealing with Nader's statement is not how to assess its factual underpinning, but rather how to assess its conceptual validity. The assertion is misleading because Nader confounds the popular trigger for armed conflict with the conflict's strategic objective. The trigger represents a concentrated subset of motives that arouse popular passions. A "lie" about a trigger hardly negates the validity of either party's strategic aim.

The substitution of popular appeal for covert calculation is the subject of Tim Robbin's anti-war production, Embedded (recently released on DVD). In a Sunday afternoon conversation with Bob McChesney (WILL-AM), Tim Robbins explained that his satire depicts a world in which US leaders have adopted the views of Leo Strauss. The Straussian theory of governance relies on the premise that the populace can't handle the truth, so enlightened policy makers invent overtly popular reasons for their actions, while covertly pursuing a more or less rational strategic objective. In Robbins' view, the administration's ostensibly covert objective of spreading democracy in the Middle East is both irrational and poorly executed. He believes the American people would not have supported the war if the covert objective were known. Despite Robbins' efforts to decieve the public, the covert objective of spreading democracy has long been overt. "Spreading democracy" was repeated time and again by the Executive branch and legislators prior to the war. Happily, it's a matter of public record. Also happily, it's not a terrible thing to base a satire on a false premise.

It is, however, a terrible thing to misrepresent the truth while accusing someone of being a liar. When Nader and Robbins focus on the missing WMD stockpile and lack of involvement by Iraq in the 9-11 attacks, they conveniently ignore observations detremental to their view, the exact charge they levee on the Bush administration. For example, the Duelfer final report points out that Iraq retained material, personnel, and facilities for production of WMD so that the nation could rapidly resurrect an interdicted weapons program on short notice as soon as Hussein felt he could get away with it. Further, despite a lack of direct evidence that Hussein was connected to the 11 Sep 2001 attacks, we've learned that Iraq under Hussein provided safe harbor, money, waapons, and training to a wide variety of terrorists. Setting this evidence aside while claiming there is no evidence of WMD or links to terror has the character of a lie as much any reputedly shady assertion issued by the Bush administration in the days preceding the war.

Now or Later

A week ago Tuesday, former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar once again both declined to enter the governor's race and declined to affirm that he never would run for the office again. Edgar's answer resembled something Senator John Sherman (R-Ohio) might have uttered prior to 1880. It reminded me of a line in a Shirley Temple movie, possibly Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm: "I won't say 'Yes,' I won't say 'No,' I'll just say 'Mebbe.'" No one expects Edgar to run, but a politician's instinct for contingency prevents him from answering like Sen. Sherman's brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman: "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve."

Speaking to Stevie J. on WDWS-AM, Edgar assessed the impact of the recent budget deal passed by the Democrats. His take: It's a bad deal. "For every dollar that we defer from the pension plan over the next two years, it may take as much as $13 to make up later." Edgar seems to be basing his estimate on the likely scenario that a retiree's pension deficit will be unmet until payout begins. For example, with a projected annual growth of ten percent, an investment would double about every seven years, which sums up to $13 if the skipped contributions to the pension plan go unmet for as long as 28 years. In today's Chicago Tribune, Steve Rauschenburger comes up with a similar estimate. He says the $2 billion pension deferral will end up costing taxpayers $25 billion.

In Edgar's view (and in mine), the "winners" in this deal are legislators who received funding for pet projects benefiting local constituents. The biggest winner, if voters allow it, will be Gov. Blagojevich, who successfully deferred until after the next election a choice between politically difficult budget cuts and politically unpalatable tax and fee increases.