One of the best ways to accomplish something or solve a big problem is to make sure you are always going in the right direction towards the accomplishment or solution.  Every day, if you make some progress, eventually you reach your goal.  So, while it is certainly true that electing a Democratic majority in Congress will not solve this problem, partly because so many of todays Democrats are part of the problem, having a Democratic Congress is a big step in the right direction. 

Once we have control of Congress, we can pressure our Democratic Congressmen and Senators to take the steps to make still more progress.  If we can keep this up, the day will come when labor is once again rewarded, when slothful wealthy folks are treated just like other citizens, when it is again possible to have a well-off middle class in this country.

So, lets start on the path to a solution by electing a Democratic Congress in November. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

"Some Republicans hope that a cross dressing former mayor of New York can save them from their morass, not realizing perhaps, that the Republican Party is the party of debt, doom and Darwin denial, that a Republican President can no more govern without selling out to religious extremists than Detroit can make a profit without selling gas guzzling SUVs."

But what about the lovely paramour turned wife, and that fat kid; those are boons, no?

Linus: rounder of numbers, baker of pies, scorner of mesh.

Or to put it somewhat differently, Stirling notices that labor's pre-tax share of GDP has fallen over the past 30 years but has no idea why that has happened and therefore, no ability to suggest what might be done to alter the situation.

A lengthy posting which might offer an analysis and a prescription comes down to being a rant.  Nothing wrong with rants; they're just not terribly productive. 

OK, I'll take #4.

Assuming that the assets are truly being held in trust (as hard as that is to assume) how will all the dead Iraquis recoup their interests in those assets? What's the number now? Somewhere over 100,000! Oh, but that's OK America really needs that oil, really, really. Sure, that's "just" as long as you don't mind the I.B. additive in your gas- Iraqui Blood. Not to mention all those young Ameri...oh never mind, I feel sick.

One analysis:
"So, applying that simple notion to the death rates before and after the US invasion of Iraq, we find that the confidence intervals around the estimated 100,000 "excess deaths" not only shrink considerably but also that the numbers move significantly higher. With a distribution-free approach, a 95 per cent confidence interval thereby becomes 53,000 to 279,000. (Recall that the Gaussian approach gave a 95 per cent confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000.) With an 80 per cent confidence interval, the lower bound is 78,000 and the upper bound is 229,000. This shift to higher excess deaths occurs because the real, as opposed to the Gaussian, distribution of the data is heavily skewed to the high side of the distribution center".

from http://www.voicesforpeace.com/talkshop/peace/messages/831.html

Are you sure that was the ONLY alternative to invasion?

In other words, you are still willing to trade blood for oil and call that just.

Hoppy, I agree, however I was thinking of applying insightful analysis to develop ways and means to elect more Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats.

For example, Stirling's earlier idea of the "tank" many "conservatives" want to live in and fight to preserve at all costs seems like it should yield some useful tactics. Maybe it suggests that engaging in debates with such people is counter productive because reason has no influence over them. I dunno, just grasping at this point, but maybe you see what I'm grasping at.

Nothing wrong with rants; they're just not terribly productive. 

 Now, do you really think there is nothing wrong with a rant, when the next thing you say is that they are not productive? 

Nothing wrong with sincerity either. 

PS -- I don't agree at all that this was a rant.  I found it very informative, and useful.  Is your point that no one should post anything here unless they can sew it up and define completely how to solve the problem they are discussing?   It would be pretty slim pickings if that were the standard. 

Jan Knaus

I'm afraid you've changed the terms of the discussion.

Thus far, we've identified two alternative policies:  continue sanctions or depose Saddam.

If you have an additional option, kindly present it together with your estimate of the likelihood of its coming to pass and of its accomplishing our or even, your goals.

 The world trusts the Saud family with billions and billions of oil dollars, and that family finances much of the world terrorism, finances a particularly hateful form of Islamic schools, and oppresses its people as much as any nation does.  So, in my opinion, the world's trust or lack of trust in Saddam was irrelevant.

The sanctions on Iraq could have been lifted, stopping the "killing of Iraqi children".  If Saddam were to then chose to wage war on another of his neighbors, that would have been the time for the UN to step in, and I'm sure they would have done so.

The oil produced anywhere in the world is either used in the country where it was produced or it is sold into the world oil market.  Once it is in that market it is available to the highest bidder.  So, we would not have lost any oil by allowing Iraq to produce its oil.  Our oil companies would not have reaped the maximum of profit from that oil, since they would not have controlled the production, nor would they have obtained the in the ground oil at dirt cheap prices, but our country should consist of more than oil companies.

In my opinion, there were and are no up sides to the Iraq invasion.  It was wrong from the get go, is wrong now, and will always be wrong. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Diplomacy is always an alternative tactic to military action.  But the question isn't one of tactics; it's one of results.

 Are you arguing that the results of this fiasco justify it?  Since we'll never know how diplomacy would have worked, especially with this bull-in-the-china-shop variety practiced by Condi, Bolton, et al we can only make educated guesses about diplomatic results.

Some of my guesses are that Saddam would have been isolated and thus weakened by other arab nations (they didn't like him anyway), Iran would not have become so emboldened as they are now, our allies would still respect us, and Osama's prediction that we would invade a Muslim nation for oil would have been proved wrong. 

Furthermore, and this is NOT a guess:

We would definitely not owe China the billions we have wasted in Iraq, the guys at Halliburton would only be millionaires rather than billionaires, and more than 2,500 American soldiers would still be alive that are now dead.

Jan Knaus

The issue must be addressed as of 2002.  Results are irrelevant to the discussion.

And the antipathy of authoritarian Arab elites directed at Saddam (it didn't stop him from invading Kuwait) has nothing much to do with whether given a newly recovered and very large export income he would not become very much more dangerous.

N.B.  As an aside whatever we'd done in respect to Iraq, we'd still owe the Chinese exactly what we owe them today -- although we could have spent the proceeds of the debt more wisely than we did in the Iraq disaster. 

As a rate you'd want to use a binomial distribution rather than a Gaussian to get a point estimate.

Ellen: But recall the alternative to invasion -- continued economic boycotts and sanctions and --According to many, 500,000 unnecessary deaths of Iraqis -- mostly children -- during the Clinton years.

Okay, this has to be the most unique rationalization to invade Iraq that I’ve heard yet (I know you're not arguing for the war). But, please- we invaded to save the Iraqis from our own sanctions? This doesn’t hold up, even on its face.

Your leaving out the inspectors though. By 2003 they were back in Iraq and if given time to finish the job would have found that there were no WMD. This would remove the reason for the sanctions and they could be lifted.

Since Sadaam's army was a joke and he had no WMD how much of a problem in the region could he have been?

I kind of wonder if that is the real reason for the invasion. Cheney et al were afraid that Sadaam was weak and feared that if we let the UN prove that he had no WMD Iran would take him out and we wanted to get Iraq before they did. Of course they got played and basically did Iran's work for them...

 The most thorough discussion I could find of the issue of the effects of the Sanctions was a reprint of the Nation article by David Cortright entitled A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions

Writing in 2001, Cortright says

The differential between child mortality rates in northern Iraq, where the UN manages the relief program, and in the south-center, where Saddam Hussein is in charge, says a great deal about relative responsibility for the continued crisis. As noted, child mortality rates have declined in the north but have more than doubled in the south-center. The difference is especially significant given the historical pattern prior to the Gulf War. In the 1970s child mortality rates in the northern Kurdish region were more than double those in the rest of the country. Today the situation is reversed, with child mortality rates in the south-center nearly double those in the north.

He also states that the authors of the report which drew attention to excess mortality figures in the range of 567,000 in the initial study in 1995 subsequently disavowed their own initial results, saying that they overestimated the numbers "several-fold".  But most significantly, the revisions were ignored by the very media which publicized the original numbers. 

None of this denies that the results of the sanctions program were horrific...but the essay as a whole is a reasoned attempt to explain what the flaws in the sanctions program were, to ascribe how responsibility for the humanitarian disaster shifted across the course of time  and to suggest what approaches aside from war were available to mitigate the effect of sanctions on civilians in general and children in particular.   Indeed, the author argues that remediation was already beginning in 2000, and further modifications creating a "smart sanctions" program were in the works. These would include

further steps toward the easing of civilian sanctions. Such steps would include permitting foreign investment in Iraq, eliminating restrictions on non-oil exports, and providing cash for the purchase of food and other goods from local producers rather than foreign suppliers.

It strikes me that persons of good will had not run out of alternatives, and that sanctions/war is a false forced choice.

 aMike

Actually, there was another alternative in containment. Colin Powell had talked the UNSC into lifting the sanctions on everything except dual use material. The UN would have been given control of the oil funds.

Nobody wanted Saddam to have a nuclear weapon. Even if the UN had to pay neighboring countries compensation for their losses in the energy black market as part of the deal to enforce the nuclear material embargo, they would have been paid from Saddam's money.

The UN would have distributed the funds to repair Iraq's oil infrastructure, also. So not only would the flow of oil not have been interrupted, there would eventually have been more oil flowing to the market.

Put the inspectors back in place and back all of this up with the threat of certain military action by the US and its coalition partners.

And looking at the worst case, if Saddam had somehow managed to get or make a nuclear weapon, he still had delivery problems. If he couldn't reach the US or Israel, what would have been the point of asking for certain war and removal from power?

Determent and containment worked with the USSR, a much bigger and smarter power than Saddam. What reasons were there to think war was a better option than deter and contain?

"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness." GWB-Aug. 30, 2000

I don't agree at all that this was a rant. I found it very informative, and useful.

Likewise.

Some people consider the ability to communicate information, concepts and ideas a valuable form of activism.

In fact, it's on the endangered list within the Democratic party. :-)

"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness." GWB-Aug. 30, 2000

Stirling's referring to polling numbers.  The word "performance" is a bit confusing.

The results you were talking about were known; the results I was talking about were anticipated.

In designing a policy its makers cannot know the results; therefore, when criticising a policy choice, it is unfair and anachronistic to bring in post hoc results -- results which at that point are known.

As to GWB's difficulty in finding uses for China's export earnings, how about additional tax cuts? China's money has to go somewhere and unless we're going to sell them the Kennebunkport golf course -- simply a different type of obligation, by the way -- it has to go into treasuries (or maybe, into a bigger housing bubble?).

Re the collapse of sanctions:  I'm afraid "oh well" -- much like hope -- is not a plan.

According to Scott Ritter, the demonization of Saddam after the Kuwait invasion trapped US leaders into the regime change policy. He says we could have certified Iraq as weapons-free by 1996. However, that would have required un-demonizing Saddam.

Just like drug laws, once an issue becomes moral compromise is out. That it was unlikely for sanctions to be dropped is not a justification for war, however. Placing blame on sanctions-imposing countries for internal damage is the same as blaming the police when a hostage-taker shoots a hostage. The proximate responsibility is the hostage-taker's.

What if Saddam had used the oil money responsibly? That would have caused plenty of consternation and no doubt propaganda would have continued to demonize him.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Well, maybe a policy designer can't absolutely know the precise results, but the mess that we have in Iraq was expected and predicted by many around the world, and by generals in our own army.

And when results went from bad to worse to worse and on, and the "policy designers" only claimed that they were right all along, and that staying the course was the only right thing to do...When we learned AFTER THE FACT what this administration knew all along; that the troops did not have proper armor, and that the original general said more men were needed (and went into forced retirement for that opinion), well, um yes...it certainly is fair and resonable to say that they original policy was piss-poor.

I have no idea what you mean about being "anachronistic;" odd choice of words, that. But if it is something like Monday morning quarterbacking, it really doesn't apply here. If you have a policy of telling your daughter to walk down deserted alleys to get home from work late at night, even though you don't KNOW the outcome, you would deserve criticism for making a bad policy because your original judgement did not consider potential negative outcomes.

Jan Knaus

Did you even read his response to you?

This: Re the collapse of sanctions: I'm afraid "oh well" -- much like hope -- is not a plan...

is childish and disrespectful.  It also shows a complete disregard for a thoughtful post.  If you are trying to show how much smarter you are than everyone else here, I think you should probably just stop posting at all.

Jan Knaus

 "Is the U.S. government responsible for the 9/11 attacks?"

No, of course not.  The men who planned this while living in Germany, who got themselves trained to fly jumbo jets, who boarded those aircraft and hijacked them, are responsible.  The US government is, however, responsible for not catching them before they did that.  There was adequate intelligence available for them to have been caught. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

I suspect, CVilleDem, your standards of what constitutes a "thoughtful post" and mine differ.

My comments have been limited to the issue faced by the USG as it tried to figure out what to do when, as it anticipated, sanctions expired. 

BruceW07's comments -- superciliously dismissive of the issue -- an issue, may I remind you, so consequential that Secretary of State Albright was willing to accept the deaths of 500,000 children because the sanctions were so necessary -- were unserious.

Argument follows.

Assume there are two ways to prevent Saddam from developing, as Secretaries Albright and Powell would put it, weapons of mass destruction and which method to employ is up the US:

1.  deny him the necessary development funds via sanctions, or

2.  depose him.

Morally, the US should chose the method which does the least harm to innocents, and the question of how much of its own blood and wealth to expend should not come up, at all.

Now, which method will do the least harm is a matter for debate.

Again, you miss the point.  M. Albright was conveying the importance of the sanctions.  If you disagree, take it up with her -- or her boss.

In addition to Gen.Shinseki, there was State Department project that produced 13 reports in 2002.  According to David L Phillips who wrote Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the Future of Iraq Project, a $5 million State Department effort, initiated in March 2002.... The project ultimately produced thirteen reports running to more than two thousand pages on a variety of postwar issues from oil to security. ... State Department project provided a coherent strategy for postwar Iraq that the Pentagon neoconservatives rejected without providing any alternative plan of their own.

That is a cheap answer and a cop-out. aMike's post does not support your statements. How about you supporting them?

Jan Knaus

I've read Phillips' book, also.  But I don't remember him saying that the State Department made any judgment of how many troops would be needed or more importantly, what the effect of limiting troop numbers to 130,000 or so would be.

In fact Bremer's de-Baathification order and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army were likely greater causes of the disaster than was the limited size of the US troop deployment. 

1. We should have deposed Sadam after the first war. Only the gag is that because of the Reagan-Bush deficits we couldn't afford it.

2. By this logic sanctions should have been lifted. Iraq was WMD free, and the threat of invasion was, empirically, enough to get Iraq to comply. The reality is that sanctions were kept in place for the same reason a coup was backed in 1996, to overthrow Saddam.

The real question of invasion is "could Saddam have been contained without sanctions?" The answer is "yes, but then there would be no room for the Republican inflation boom." It would have required that the US continue on the road of fiscal discipline and monetary restraint.

We invaded Iraq, because it was a necessary condition of the massive deficit spending that Bush had decided to engage in.

Your tax cuts at work.

Stirling Newberry http://www.bopnews.com

I stand corrected (I think, it's been a long time since I was familiar with such stuff).

OK, I'll take on #2 as well, although I'm beginning to understand what the term "Troll" means in the context of a forum. I think that the question posed is worth discussing and would only hope that troll like responses are kept to a minimum.

2. Should the goal have been stated honestly and up-front?

The simple answer is, if you want to adhere to the belief that this is a democracy, then yes, something as momentous as a casus belli should be stated honestly. There are many practical considerations as well that lead to your question #3, perhaps someone else would care to list them.

Stirling:

In the late 1890s, ruthless schemers, promoters and land speculators circulated handbills in Wales and parts of temperate northern Europe with drawings of verdant fields and and even hedges - the land that they were promoting as an attainable paradise for farming? Wyoming and Montana.

When the emigres arrived, they were in for a very rude awakening. The soil was sandy and rocky, the elevation and proximity to the towering Rocky Mountains not only made for an extremely short growing season, it also meant deadly, -40F winters the likes of which these people had never dreamed - and yet the summer's were actually much hotter than they were used to and much more arid so that Mountain's snow-pack runoff had to be judiciously channeled toward crop irrigation.

Yet most of them stayed and made a go of it toiling from dusk to dawn to eke out their "American Dream" of land ownership and self reliance. For about a decade, it was actually possible to raise a crop and have some money left over after expenses. Some even started buying mechanized tractors and Model Ts. You might know that J.C. Penney catalog actually started in Wyoming for example.

The problem was that, harsh as the conditions were, this was a time of unusual fertility for that arid region. Annual precipitation was actually far above average in that period. Toward the end of the teens, the precipitation returned to normal and this small scale style of agriculture began to fail. People went bankrupt and simply abandoned dwellings, seeking work in mines or timber. You can still find these little cabins around Wyoming - surrouned by 90 year old tin cans - a skillet perched precariously on an iron woodstove - as if someone abandoned the place immediately after preparing a last meal.

Yet a 'pseudoscience' developed around this time that insisted that "rain follows cultivation" - even as people went deeply in debt and sold off possesions and re-doubled their already backbreaking labor. But the mountain runoff got scarcer every year, and the saving grace of summer rains...'evaporated'.

Though the immigrants had originally scarcely bothered with spiritual matters (since earthly ones occupied every waking minute), as the land dried out, they picked up their Bibles and found all the fire and brimstone. They sought to appease the angry God that dashed their humble dreams and Herculian efforts.

Perhaps the modern worker of today seeks similar solace. He theorizes that with personal grit and tenacity he can overcome the elements - even if those elemental 'forces' are Wall Street, NAFTA and the Military Industrial Complex.

The truly vicious circle is that as workers become poorer, their desperation causes them to grasp for more bottles of GOP "values" snake oil - more no-money down real estate seminars, pyramid schemes or high stakes day-trading.

The GOP declared the war of all against all is "nature" and so we develop a gilded age style scheming and scamming economy. Workers turn to religious opiates to make sense of a world gone mad, and the GOP hijacks churches for votes. Workers pledge allegiance to predators and shed a patriot's tear at the NASCAR track as what could have been free healthcare, infrastructure, and world class education screeches over them with a blood curdling sonic boom.

Your 'tax cuts' at work.

Please copy this over to a diary; it is a great essay.

sPh

Echoes of the Grapes of Wrath.

CSPAN junkies visit http://spannerbackup.ipbhost.com

Maybe I have drawn the wrong conclusions from the book but when the Whigs wanted unregulated banks issuing bonds and other paper, and the Jacksonians wanted a regulated system, it might be fair to charge Jacksoniamns with too restrictive a monetary system but it was more soundly grounded than the Whig system.

Aren't we now closer, with the Fed, to the Jacksonian segregation of banking and government than the 19th cent. Bank of the United States?

Hard to see how enhancing Presidential power as Jackson did makes him in favor of decentralization. He wanted more majoritarian rule, not fragmented local or elite rule, from the impression I get.

True that the Democrats avoided slavery discussions and positions. In this they resemble today's Dem approach to abortion, I feel. Typically morality is not invoked, but rights and practicality. It is the Republicans that make it moral and non-negotiable. (Here we disregard the mechanical differences between slavery and abortion.)

I find another parallel in the more disorganized character of the 19th Cent Dems, at least for the 1840 election, which had a very effective Whig organization employing promotional merchandise.

Jackson does sound Bush-like in his disregard for the Court and a preference in simply doing things and worrrying about them later. To be fair, on the Cherokee he apparently felt there was no hope of protecting them, in political terms, in their home area. If he had tried an Eisenhower (as in Little Rock) he might have gotten a Civil War. There was the nullification scare, after all.

John Quincy Adams was exceptional in his principled anti-slavery stance, but I feel the movers behind the Whigs were exactly the same privileged few that feel entitled to run the country. These are the people Jackson opposed (and that Bush courts). Although the first years of America's independence seemed to require the self-selected elite of Washington, Hamilton, Madison, etc., it was time to broaden the base.

And now the GOP, using "common man" cliches, acts to serve the money, not the many.

By 'this' do you mean GOP pseudoscience? The above Iraq discussion implies maybe you think 9-11 was employed as a causus beli against Iraq - I guess it was literally in that through-the-looking-glass circuitous neocon 'logic.'

But do mean Cheney helped facilitate Iraq as an excuse for warrin' good times?

Stirling's written one of his clearest essays, and here we are debating on a footnote. Nonetheless this is a better debate on this often-rehashed footnote than most in blogland. The points above about the tenuous link of sanctions to deaths of children are convincing to me.

However, with no desire to troll (yeah, sometimes I have that desire, so I can recognize its absence), there's a near-parallel argument about the deaths from the option taken - war. Few - a significant but small number of - Iraqis have been killed by American troops. Certainly fewer than were killed by Saddam's various armed forces in a comparable period. Yet Iraqis and others have managed to kill a great number of Iraqis (and maim or kill thousands of our troops).

Now, I'm pleasantly surprised that Stirling sees we should have removed Saddam the first time around. But didn't the range of possible outcomes then include the Iraqi people turning on themselves, just as it did in our belated act of Saddam removal? That is, wasn't the current outcome always foreseeable as one of the range of possibilities - wasn't this (along with the tendency of national leaders to unduly respect other nation's leaders) why Bush I didn't pursue Saddam?

Yet, wasn't there also, in the range of truly possible results in the time of either Bush, the possiblity that the Iraqis would have more sanely grasped their good fortune in being rid of Saddam's police state, have given us a warm kiss on the cheek, and then politely but emphtically requested that we leave - which due to international pressures would have succeeded?

Expecting that the Iraqis would be stupid enough to create the very conditions that would keep us there indefinitely - as if willingly sacrificing themselves and their nation to the dreams of the "US is Satan" Islamists - would have been rating the intelligence of the Iraqis very low indeed. Does it make one morally culpable to not hold a denigrating opinion of the intelligence and common sense of someone one would help?

While I fully agree that the occupation of Iraq, as run by Rumsfeld, has been an utter fiasco, for me the arguments that the US by either possible course - whether continued sanctions or the military action of deposing Saddam - is responsible for Iraqi deaths are empty and false. The Iraqis are the ones with primary responsibility for the deaths of Iraqis in both scenarios. Perhaps we are at fault for not withdrawing quickly to leave them to it - especially in terms of the costs to our troops and treasury - but all these attempts to place Iraqi deaths at our feet are premised on the notion that only we are adults, and that as children the Iraqis don't bear the responsibility any adult would bear for doing the actual killing of each other they did under Saddam, and persist in during our occupation.

And that is so fundamentally racist I have to wonder why it is so repeated in various venues of a left which pretends that it is above racism.

There is a pretty important difference between depsoing Sadaam after the initial Gulf war and now. At teh time Sadaam had just invaded Kuwait and there was a multinational force unified. Admitedly Bush I didn't get support from all the countries for the overthrow of Sadaam. But given the ease with which the Iraqi army had been defeated he might have been able to negotiate for it. A lot (all?) of Sadaam's neighbors were just as interested in seeing him removed as we were. ANd the fresh in their minds invasion of Kuwait may have been enough justification to sell it.

A multinational peace keeping force would have been in place right away and a much more competent set of leaders (Powell, etc) were in charge.

" But didn't the range of possible outcomes then include the Iraqi people turning on themselves, just as it did in our belated act of Saddam removal?"

In 1991 Iraq had a larger middle class, a better infrastructure, and had not had years of sanctions which had pushed people towards one of the few industries which could survive the "cold peace" of the 1990's - namely religion. The Shia shrines are estimated to bring in over a billion dollars of foreign currency a year by some observers.

That was the time to remove Saddam, particularly because the policy of hoping that others would overthrow him created armed militias and the Kurds as an organized political and military force. Dealing with Iraq then would have been economically difficult - for one thing oil wasn't in as short a supply, so the profits for being there were much lower - but the strong dollar era, pre the destruction of the Iraqi economy would have been the time to effect "regime change".

"While I fully agree that the occupation of Iraq, as run by Rumsfeld, has been an utter fiasco, "

It isn't just Rumsfeld. That we were going to invade Iraq was decided when the dust cleared from the election of 2000. The American public returned the Republicans to control of the House, and allowed Bush to be seated as the chief executive. Once the tax packages were passed in 2001, the amount of money available to invade Iraq with was also fixed.

The invasion we got was the invasion we could afford. What got Americans into trouble is that they debated a host of options which did not exist, and were allowed to, because that was to the advantage of Bush and those who supported him. People were "drawing dead" by staying in the Iraq Invasion hand.

Could Iraq have been invaded by some other means with different results? Certainly - we could have done a panama, installed a general as the new President of Iraq, told him that he was to keep the oil flowing, and not play with forbidden weapons - and that otherwise we didn't care about what happened. Or we could have not slashed government revenues and afforded a massive invasion, with lots of boots on the ground and a huge aid package that would have transitioned the state over the course of 10 years from a US mandate to a semi-sovereign state.

But neither of these two possibilities were on offer, ever. Arguing over them was simply noise.