The Aug 11, 2008 Russ Roberts Econtalk interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita was fascinating. You can directly download the MP3 audio of the interview here. Better, subscribe to the Econtalk series at iTunes.
Russ has a short and very terse set of notes from the interview, including a couple of paragraphs on the threat profile of Iran, and of particular interest, how important is Pres. Ahmadinejad in the Iranian hierarchy? We knew he was effectively a figurehead or “front man” for the Supreme Council. But, typically, de Mesquita’s research puts Ahmadinejad at 18th in the ranking:
Intro. Danger, threats to the United States. Are Iran Ahmadinejad a threat to the U.S.? Threat to our friends. No missiles with sufficient range to reach the U.S. Can it smuggle a bomb into the U.S.? That’s more a matter of movies. Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran, but virtually all power there is held by the Supreme Council. Has veto power, can remove people from office; all people elected including Ahmadinejad serve at the pleasure of the Supreme Council. Interviews, Ahmadinejad ranked 18th in terms of power. At odds with most people’s public perception. Maybe he’s 17th or 19th; but he’s not 3rd or 4th. He is a very outspoken man, says many outrageous things, so he gets a lot of news coverage. Came to power by election from being mayor of Teheran by carving out a constituency of not-very-well educated who saw in him someone who would advance Iranian nationalist sentiment. His power has faded and his party keeps losing by elections. Media attention also because American media has poor or no access to Ali Khamenei, head of the Supreme Council, most powerful person in Iran. Putin had audience with Khamenei; Western leaders only get to see Ahmadinejad. Why would Khamenei want Ahmadinejad in power? Good for floating trial balloons, has a salutary effect in terms of foreign policy; has convinced some people that the Iranian leadership is irrational, and in doing so have attained a certain amount of deterrent clout. Very Schellingesque (Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner), soft application of game theory to national security problems, brinksmanship. Strategy that if you convince the other guy that you’ll drive off the cliff, the other guy gets pretty nervous about it.
At 7:43 in the audio:
Do the 17 people ranked in front of Ahmadinejad have similar views? Do they want to build a nuclear weapon? Ahmadinejad would like to. Ali Khamenei would probably like the capacity to make weapons’ grade fuel, bargaining chip, but a weapon itself could lead to a pre-emptive attack by the Israelis. Others in power much more pragmatic, likely to advocate no more than a fuel cycle at the research level, not to produce enough actually to make a bomb. As a social scientist it makes sense to treat these people as if they are rational. Track record of predictions, last 24 years: 1984 predicted in print who would succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, designed someone; predicted instead shared leadership between Ali Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Khomeini died 5 years later. Based prediction on rationality assumption. Rationality doesn’t mean doing good things. It means doing things based on their own best interest. Logic of Political Survival, previous podcast, leaders want to keep their jobs. Data are consistent with Ali Khamenei’s wanting to stay in power. What would their motivations be to building a nuclear bomb? If they could get far enough without Israel’s attacking, they have a deterrent. India and Pakistan: since they both detonated nuclear weapons they have made an effort to get along. Argument is that deterrence claim is false because Israelis will move beforehand. Iran, Shiite force, is in competition with Al Qaeda, Sunni force to be the dominant leader in the Islamic world. They hate each other. Bomb would be a way of achieving nationalist pride, which keeps the party in power while the economy goes to hell. Rational reasons for wanting to build a nuclear weapon. They say want to develop nuclear power for peaceful energy uses, which is their right.
From other reading we have learned that de Mesquita has done repeated consulting assignments for the CIA. In this interview he said his work on Iran was for “confidential sources”.
Readers not familiar with de Mesquita’s work may conclude from this interview that he is an “Iran expert”. In fact the “Iran experts” called him a quack when in 1984, in “Forecasting Policy Decisions: An Expected Utility Approach to Post-Khomeini Iran,” Political Science (Spring, 1984), pp. 226-236, five years before the eventual succession, he correctly predicted that the successors to Khomeni would be the unknown clerics Rafsanjani and Khameini. His forecasting record has been built entirely upon the application of game theory to the politicians’ incentives — in the setting of their political structure.
Highly recommended.
Triggered by the desire to calibrate the value of the game theory research of Bruce Bueno De Mesquita (BDM) I found a useful review of his work by Michael Lerner. Following is a sample from the article — of BDM’s thoughts on more effective approaches to the Middle East conflict:
Recently, he’s applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”
Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”
As we have learned, “incentives matter”, in foreign policy just as in economics. Surely BDM’s proposal would at least improve the possibility of future cooperation. Will it take two generations of such policies to wash away enough of the Palestinian indoctrination of their young?
BDM founded Decision Insights Incorporated in 1981 and the New York consulting firm Mesquita & Roundell in 2003, but has been consulting independently for years for clients in the private sector and for a long list of governments:
…As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it’s defined.
To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”
Lerner closes with “A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s wilder—and most accurate—predictions”
Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.
Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. “The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility,” he says.
Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.
Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China’s hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.
Predicted France’s hair’s-breadth passage of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty.
Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.
Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.
For readers interested in a deeper assessment of Bueno de Mesquita’s work, see his 17-page CV at NYU [PDF].
Jack Keane, Frederick W. Kagan & Kimberly Kagan were key architects of the new strategy generally known as “the surge”. Here’s their current thinking as of 09/22/2008:
…With Barack Obama’s recent declaration that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, it should now be possible to move beyond that debate and squarely address the current situation in Iraq and the future. Reductions in violence permitting political change were the goal of the surge, but they are not the sole measure of success in Iraq.
…Reducing our troop strength solely on the basis of trends in violence also misses the critical point that the mission of American forces in Iraq is shifting rapidly from counterinsurgency to peace enforcement. The counter-insurgency fight that characterized 2007 continues mainly in areas of northern Iraq. The ability of organized enemy groups, either Sunni or Shia, to conduct large-scale military or terrorist operations and to threaten the existence of the Iraqi government is gone for now. No area of Iraq today requires the massive, violent, and dangerous military operations that American and Iraqi forces had to conduct over the last 18 months in order to pacify various places or restore them to government control. Although enemy networks and organizations have survived and are regrouping, they will likely need considerable time to rebuild their capabilities to levels that pose more than a local challenge–and intelligent political, economic, military, and police efforts can prevent them from rebuilding at all.
American troops continue to conduct counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has not given up, and against Iranian-backed Special Groups, which are also reconstituting. U.S. forces support Iraqi forces conducting counterinsurgency operations in the handful of areas where any significant insurgent capability remains. But mostly our troops are enforcing the peace.
…Indeed, American combat brigades have become the principal enablers of economic and political development in Iraq. When an American brigade is withdrawn from an area, there is nothing to take its place–all of these functions go unperformed. Clearly, then, the number of brigades needed in Iraq should be tied not to the level of violence but to the roles the Americans perform and the importance of those roles to the further development of Iraq as a stable and peaceful state.
But American brigades do more than that. They also give us leverage at every level to restrain malign actors within the Iraqi government and to insist that Iraqi leaders make concessions and take political risks they would rather avoid. The notion, popular in some American political discussions, that withdrawing our forces increases our leverage is nonsensical. The presence of 140,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq requires the Iraqi leadership to pay attention to America’s suggestions in a way that nothing else can. Every brigade that leaves reduces our leverage just when we need it most.
For all the progress made to date, the next president will face significant challenges in Iraq. In recent testimony, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates enumerated them: “the prospect of violence in the lead-up to elections, worrisome reports about sectarian efforts to slow the assimilation of the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi security forces, Iranian influence, the very real threat that al Qaeda continues to pose, and the possibility that Jaysh al-Mahdi could return.”
The existence of malign sectarian actors in the Iraqi parliament and in the prime minister’s inner circle is not news. Nor is it news that Iraqi politicians, elected under a closed-list system that emphasized ethnosectarian identity at the expense of political interest, have weak electoral bases and much reason to fear the results of open and honest elections. It is similarly well known that Iran seeks to drive the United States out of Iraq and has been putting tremendous pressure on Iraq’s leaders to obey Tehran and reject Washington. These three factors help explain the development of significant negative trends in Iraq in recent months: the downward spiral of negotiations over the Strategic Framework Agreement, delays in the passage of an electoral law, escalating tensions along the Arab-Kurd border, and Iraqi government attacks on certain Sons of Iraq groups in and around Baghdad.
American errors have contributed to these developments. At the outset of negotiations over the Strategic Framework Agreement, for instance, we should have offered Iraq a security guarantee. Iraq’s signing a Strategic Framework Agreement would have openly and publicly committed themselves to the United States–and against Iran, in the zero-sum thinking of Tehran. It was only reasonable that Maliki and others in the Iraqi government should have expected an American commitment to match their own, and we should have given it to them. But American domestic politics made that impossible.
Leading congressmen and senators insisted that a security guarantee would raise the Strategic Framework Agreement to the level of a treaty requiring Senate ratification–which is true. They also made clear that no such ratification would be forthcoming if the document bound the next administration. The Bush administration therefore had to tell Baghdad at the outset that America would not match the commitment we were asking the Iraqis to make with an equal commitment of our own. American domestic politics also prevented the administration from placing the security agreement in the larger context of a U.S.-Iraqi strategic partnership, since that concept was ridiculed by those who refused to accept the possibility of success in Iraq.
The Iranians sensed an opportunity and responded with a massive public information campaign in Iraq and a virulent private campaign to put pressure on Iraq’s leaders. America’s refusal to offer a long-term security guarantee gave weight to the constant Iranian refrain that Iran will always be there, while America will ultimately leave Iraq to its fate. Shrewdly refusing to admit the degree of direct Iranian pressure, Maliki and his associates used the cloak of “Iraqi sovereignty” to conceal their uneasiness at taking responsibility for making a deal with the United States–uneasiness not before their own people, but before Tehran. As a result, the negotiations have dragged on, Iraqi demands have increased, and it is possible that Maliki will now wait until after the American election to see who wins–all because domestic political constraints prevented the Bush administration from making the necessary opening bid.
Maliki has been using “Iraqi sovereignty” to do more than delay those negotiations, however. He has also used it to insist on the accelerated transfer of Iraq’s cities, especially Baghdad, to Iraqi control and the withdrawal of American forces from those cities. As a result, the problems that premature transition can cause are on display in the city of Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad.
Michael O’Hanlon, Kenneth Pollack were equally cautious in the Brookings symposium Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Policy Challenges This Fall and Beyond. I recommend a careful read of the transcript, and their related Foreign Affairs essay Building on Progress in Iraq:
…Today, however, there is reason to believe that the debate over Iraq can change. A series of positive developments in the past year and a half offers hope that the desire of so many Americans to bring the troops home can be fulfilled without leaving Iraq in chaos. The right approach, in other words, can partly square Obama’s goal of redeploying large numbers of U.S. forces sooner rather than later with McCain’s goal of ensuring stability in Iraq.
If the prognosis in Iraq were hopelessly grim, it might make sense for the United States to threaten withdrawal, hold its breath, and hope for the best. But the prognosis is now much more promising than it has been in years, making a threat of withdrawal far from necessary. With a degree of patience, the United State can build on a pattern of positive change in Iraq that offers it a chance to draw down troops soon without giving up hope for sustained stability.
The last 18 months have brought major changes in the underlying strategic calculus facing Iraq’s main combatants — undermining the Sunni insurgency, weakening the Shiite militias, severely degrading al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), strengthening the Iraqi security forces (ISF), and creating new, more positive political dynamics and incentives. But these developments have also brought new, if less acute, challenges to the fore — demanding corresponding changes in U.S. and Iraqi strategy. Simply staying the course will not work under the new conditions in Iraq.
Both to deal with the new problems and to guard against any revival of the old ones, any further troop drawdowns, now that the “surge” is over, should be modest until after Iraq gets through two big rounds of elections — in late 2008 at the provincial level and in late 2009 at the national level — which have the potential either to reinforce important gains or to reopen old wounds. But starting in 2010, if current trends continue, the United States may be able to start cutting back its troop presence substantially, possibly even halving the total U.S. commitment by sometime in 2011, without running excessive risks with the stability of Iraq and the wider Persian Gulf region.
Most Americans have a mental image of Iraq that is defined by the chaos of 2006. But Iraq today is a very different place than it was two years ago. Overall violence is down at least 80 percent since the surge began, and ethno-sectarian violence — the kind that seemed to be sucking Iraq into all-out civil war in 2006 — is down by over 90 percent. Through June, the number of violent civilian deaths has averaged about 700 a month in 2008, a lower rate than in any previous year of the war (with the possible exception of 2003). U.S. military deaths in Iraq have dropped from about 70 a month in early 2007 to about 25 a month now, and the death rate for the ISF has fallen by half, from 200 a month to about 100. Although refugees and internally displaced people are not yet returning home in large numbers, so few Iraqis are now being evicted that the net displacement rate is about zero.
…But today, there is a real chance that U.S. persistence in the short term can secure a stable Iraq and enable major withdrawals in 2010 and 2011 without undermining that stability. The American people — to say nothing of the servicemen and servicewomen who are fighting — have every right to be tired of this war and to question whether it should have ever been fought. But understandable frustration with past mistakes, sorrow over lives lost, anger at resources wasted, and fatigue with a war that has at times seemed endless must not blind Americans to the major change of the last 18 months. The developments of 2007 and 2008 have created new possibilities. If the United States is willing to seize them, it could yet emerge from Mesopotamia with something that may still fall well short of Eden on the Euphrates but that prevents the horrors of all-out civil war, avoids the danger of a wider war, and yields a stability that endures as Americans come home.
Obama likes to talk about his “judgment” in opposing the war in Iraq. But if he is going to use that as the big test of his wisdom, you also have to consider his judgment with respect to the troop surge in Iraq. As indicated in the chart, Obama introduced a bill to withdraw U.S. forces even though sectarian violence was at its very height:
More analysis of Obama’s judgement by John Wixted.
Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor — a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing “interest defined as power,” to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the “objective law” of international power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau’s disciples to remind us that Russia’s latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?
Today’s “realists,” who we’re told are locked in some titanic struggle with “neoconservatives” on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus.
They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, had nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of “people who could not face the truth about human nature” and “preferred to preserve their illusions intact.” He strongly supported the NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not in international institutions but in “the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States.” He aimed to build a “preponderance of power” and to create “situations of strength” around the world. Until the United States acquired this predominant power, he believed, negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office.
…Leading realists today see the world not as Mr. Morgenthau did, as an anarchic system in which nations consistently pursue “interest defined as power,” but as a world of converging interests, in which economics, not power, is the primary driving force. Thus Russia and China are not interested in expanding their power so much as in enhancing their economic well-being and security. If they use force against their neighbors, or engage in arms buildups, it is not because this is in the nature of great powers. It is because the United States or the West has provoked them. The natural state of the world is harmonious; only aggressive behavior by the United States disturbs the harmony.
Excellent analysis by Robert Kagan — enjoy.
Americans who worry that China might overtake the United States are worrying about the wrong thing. They should instead be concerned that Beijing may not make key reforms or that it will face significant economic difficulties down the road. Serious troubles in China’s economy could threaten the stability of the U.S. and global economies.
Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson in Foreign Affairs Sep/Oct 2008 — on the challenges ahead for China. Excerpt:
…Economic nationalism, for one thing, has been a growing concern in the United States in recent years. Low-cost imports, particularly from China, sometimes have a negative image among the American public, even though they have helped the United States contain inflation and both maximized the choice of products available to Americans and minimized their costs. Foreign investment into the United States, especially by sovereign wealth funds and state-owned enterprises, is also increasingly viewed with suspicion by some U.S. companies, various members of the national security community, and the American public at large, despite regulations by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States that provide sufficient protections in sensitive sectors.
These concerns are misplaced. Like many countries accumulating large foreign exchange reserves, China is simply looking for profitable places to invest them over the long term. China invests its reserves in U.S. securities, including U.S. Treasuries, but there is little Chinese direct investment in the United States. This is largely because Chinese companies are just beginning to invest in their export markets and are unsure whether they are welcome. In any event, the United States would do well to encourage such investment from anywhere in the world — including China — because it represents a vote of confidence in the U.S. economy and it promotes growth, jobs, and productivity in the United States.
The size of the bilateral trade imbalance — $256.2 billion in 2007 — has also been a bone of contention. It is a source of anxiety in both the United States and China. Beijing believes that the trade deficit could be reduced if Washington dropped export controls and allowed sensitive technologies that may also have military applications to reach Chinese markets. In fact, U.S. export controls have only a marginal effect on the bilateral trade imbalance: in 2007, export license applications were required for $9.7 billion worth of U.S. goods destined for China, and just 0.7 percent of these applications were denied — a drop in the bucket. Removing all export controls in 2007 would have affected only 0.0265 percent of the U.S.-Chinese trade deficit.
A real issue is the inadequate protection of intellectual property rights in China, which has been an obstacle to increased U.S. trade with and investment in China and has prevented a reduction in the bilateral trade imbalance. This and the theft or pirating of goods are big problems for many U.S. companies operating in China and a reason others are reluctant to do business there. To protect themselves, some U.S. companies purposefully introduce older products into the Chinese market, releasing the newer goods only once the older ones have been copied.
But these and other strategies are merely stopgap measures. As China pursues its quest to develop a modern economy focused on technology, the Chinese government and Chinese companies will increasingly recognize the need to reward the creativity of their own firms and entrepreneurs by strengthening and enforcing intellectual property laws and regulations. It is by improving and enforcing its intellectual property laws that China will accelerate the development and competitiveness of its economy and also open up new market opportunities in China for companies around the world.
Recommended.
The one-child policy will start to bite by 2015. Will the chinese get old before they get rich? If the answer is yes, the growing financial burden will definitely cut growth rates, and could well lead to instability.
Three challenges especially stand out for the Chinese: The nation’s changing work force, a widening in the gap between rich and poor and severely constrained supplies of energy and environmental resources.
Population
The precedents aren’t encouraging. Many developing countries in Latin America and the Middle East stagnated after periods of rapid growth. Economists sometimes call this the “middle-income trap” because so many countries have failed to achieve consistent growth that would deliver higher prosperity.
In the next few years, China will cross the threshold to a majority-urban society. China’s urbanization rate is about 40% to 45% now, well below levels of about 75% in most of Western Europe and Latin America, but statistics show that growth in China’s urban population is already slowing. Since urban workers earn more than three times as much as rural ones, the annual migration of more than 10 million farmers into cities has boosted the economy.
Moreover, a smaller number of workers will have to support an increasing number of elderly. The United Nations projects that China’s working-age population will account for a decreasing share of the total after 2010, and will start shrinking in absolute terms after 2015 — the long-delayed effect of the strict family-planning policies that came in the 1970s.
The “demographic dividend” from a young and growing work force may have been responsible for a quarter of China’s growth to date, says Wang Dewen, a demographer at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In the future, he and other scholars argue, China will have to grow by making more productive use of fewer resources — working not just harder, but smarter.
More by Andrew Batson and Jason Dean.
…the last of the 2008 Olympic sailing medal ceremonies took place on a small concrete platform lodged between the dramatic Qingdao skyline and the breakwater that hosts the Olympic Sailing Center spectator area. The conditions—wind-whipped and rain-drenched—were less than optimal. (One British sailor described the scene as “very English.”) The few spectators who remained took shelter under umbrellas and rain ponchos, and watched as three Olympic hostesses, wearing nothing more than sleeveless dresses and the precise eight-tooth smiles they’ve been trained to display no matter what the conditions, carried medals and flowers onto a catwalk. Between them, the athletes and the attending IOC officials took their places in full rain gear.
…Two Qingdao locals told me, as the last of the racing events finished up, that they were more than happy to see the games finally leaving town. It’s not as if the games have provided this city of 7 million with a tourist bonanza. In fact, according to the locals with whom I spoke, Qingdao has suffered a decline in visitors during the Olympics. Qingdao’s famed beer festival, always held in mid-August, was cancelled by a government fearful of drunken locals, and, the bogeyman of every Chinese government: instability. But even before the cancellation of the beer festival, Qingdao—a tourist town—was less than welcoming to outsiders interested in attending the sailing events. Tickets were cheap, but they were only available for purchase in Qingdao’s post offices (events in other cities were available through a Chinese joint venture with Ticketmaster). The result has been mass vacancies in Qingdao’s hotels, made much worse by the proud refusal of local hoteliers to drop their Olympic room-rates despite the low occupancy rates.
More at The Atlantic by Adam Minter
Just received an email from Michael Yon from Bangkok:
I have just left Nepal and landed in Bangkok, en route to Kabul. My plan is to spend some time in Afghanistan, head back over to Iraq in late September, then possibly return to Afghanistan before the year’s end. In any case, I plan to keep my boots in Iraq and Afghanistan through the U.S. elections.
Meanwhile, Michael just put up a dispatch which begins:
By now, no credible person denies the dramatic success that continues to manifest itself in Iraq. No doubt, there will be years of political dramas ahead for that country, and when they occur, we will blame ourselves for them, as is our habit. Americans have a tendency to blame ourselves nearly everything from wildfires to genocidal wars on the other side of the globe. And what we don’t blame ourselves for, others will. Some might see our ability to take initiative and shoulder responsibility as naiveté. I think it’s one of America’s greatest strengths.
Many people around the world see America in decline. As someone who travels a great deal, I see the opposite. America is just getting started. Yes, we face enormous challenges and dangerous enemies. But the soul of our country, the initiative of our people, and the depth of the collective intelligence are all far stronger than our critics, and even many Americans, imagine. Al Qaeda thought that America would fall to her knees after 9/11. They were wrong. Today we hunt them like jackals.
Of course, the Iraq war has led some to think that the United States has committed a tragic imperial overreach. Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant, a truth widely accepted by the international community. Yet the international community can do little about evil tyrants. They leave that up to us, complaining when we do nothing and criticizing when we take action.
However history finally judges him, President Bush will be remembered for two decisions. In 2003, he invaded Iraq. And in 2006, he did not surrender.
Whether or not the first decision was right seems difficult to answer definitively without falling back onto ideological bias, partisan politics, or wishful thinking. Reasonable people likely will disagree about that decision for as long as the event is remembered. If Iraq falls apart or again becomes a tyrant state, then Bush was a brash, imperialistic President invading a sovereign nation without cause, who made things worse and spent lots of money and lives in doing so. If Iraq becomes a stable and prosperous nation even vaguely similar to the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, then most fair-minded people likely will judge Mr. Bush as a little-understood visionary who paid a moderate price to dramatically improve an important region of the world.
But few reasonable people who have been paying attention can disagree that the second decision was correct. In January 2007, one prominent Senator predicted that the Surge would only deepen the sectarian conflict in Iraq. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there: In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”
Now it’s difficult to tell exactly what Senator Obama thinks about the Surge, for each remark he makes on the subject seems to veer in a different direction without ever actually going anywhere.
More… And please don’t neglect the “tip jar” or buying Moment of Truth — the only financial support Michael has for this mission.
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson reflects on then and now, separated by only 12 months:
A little more than a year ago most Americans—and nearly all the Democratic opposition in Congress—opposed the surge of troops into Iraq and Gen. David Petraeus’s change of tactics.
The conventional wisdom after four long years of war was that we were stuck in the middle of a hopeless civil war. There was no American military solution to quell the violence. The Iraq government was not only incompetent, but proof that democratic government itself was incompatible with Middle Eastern culture and religion.
Pundits were advocating trisecting the country into separate Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. Our presence in Iraq caused us to have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, while empowering Iran, and helping al Qaedi to gain new recruits in a new theater of operations. Democratic presidential candidates were hammering each other over Iraq and demanding that those who had voted to authorize the invasion apologize for their vote. Barack Obama wanted all American troops out by March 2008.
A New Political Reality
And now? July is closing with the fewest number of American combat fatalities since the war started. There is no civil war. The Maliki government has put down Shiite militias and won back Sunnis into the elected administration, and, as an autonomous and confident government, is in tense negotiations with the US over future basing of American troops. Al Qaeda has been humiliated and routed from Iraq. American troops, versed in counterinsurgency, are being redeployed to Afghanistan to reapply what worked against jihadists in Iraq. Iranian-backed militias are being disbanded or have fled back into Iran. The additional surge troops are now out of Iraq. Democratic opponents suddenly concede that the withdrawal of American troops should be predicated on conditions on the ground. Anti-war activists critique Iraq more as a possibly successful war not worth the human and material costs rather than an effort long ago lost.
What Happened?
So what happened in the last twelve months to cause such a radical turn-about in Iraq and here at home? The surge added some needed troops, but more importantly sent the symbolic message that the United States was not leaving, but determined—militarily—to defeat terrorists and give the Iraqi government critical time to consolidate its authority.
The so-called Anbar awakening in which Sunni tribal leaders turned on al Qaeda and joined forces with us was not caused directly by the surge, but would have failed without the confidence more Americans were on the way to support their fight against al Qaeda. Americans began to turn from counter-terrorism to counterinsurgency tactics that meant dispersing combat troops out of compounds and into Iraqi neighborhoods where they could protect Iraqis who resisted terrorism.
Don’t Forget …
Two critical developments are relatively unappreciated, but likewise proved critical. The first was the continual growth and improvement in the Iraqi security forces that now include many veteran units that have learned to confront and defeat terrorists.
Second, between 2003-7 American forces took an enormous toll on jihadists. We have heard mostly how many Americans have been lost, rarely how many of the enemy they have killed or wounded—but the aggregate number is in the tens of thousands. Even in postmodern wars, there are finite numbers of skilled combatants—and many of them simply did not survive their encounter with American troops.
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