The Boy Who Cried Wolf

by WILLIAM GREIDER The Nation

[posted online on February 23, 2006]

David Brooks, the high-minded conservative pundit, dismissed the Dubai Ports controversy as an instance of political hysteria that will soon pass. He was commenting on PBS, and I thought I heard a little quaver in his voice when he said this was no big deal. Brooks consulted "the experts," and they assured him there's no national security risk in a foreign company owned by Middle East Muslims--actually, by an Arab government--managing six major American ports. Cool down, people. This is how the world works in the age of globalization.

Of course, he is correct. But what a killjoy. This is a fun flap, the kind that brings us together. Republicans and Democrats are frothing in unison, instead of polarizing incivilities. Together, they are all thumping righteously on the poor President. I expect he will fold or at least retreat tactically by ordering further investigation. The issue is indeed trivial. But Bush cannot escape the basic contradiction, because this dilemma is fundamental to his presidency.

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush's invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defense spending by more than 40 percent. Hysteria has been used to realign US foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world. Hysteria will justify the "long war" now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush's butt in 2004.

 

The Greatest Strategic Disaster in US History

Lmited Engagement..Closing Sooner Than You Think

On The Brink In Iraq
Robert Dreyfuss
February 24, 2006

With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.

The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney— to no avail— that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department’s chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
...”

It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated, and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife’s edge.

Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won’t be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and America’s deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn’t spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.

As Bush's Middle East Disaster continues to unfold to unremitting blows, we are sure to be heariing many variations on a dangerously fallacios argument.

Why jsut glancing at the papers today, the embattled Khalizad sound one such variant 'We've too much invested in Iraq. Iiraqi failures are our failures"

Well not quite Mister Ambassador. Now go get those Shia militias out of that Iraqified Security force...poor fella, I almost feel his pain 

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

by Werther*
April 22, 2004

*Werther is the pen name of a defense analyst who lives in Northern Virginia

Las Vegas has become the fastest-growing major city in the United States because it exploits the sunk cost fallacy. Not being fools, casino managers fix the odds in favor of the house, which means that on average, gamblers consistently lose to the house. And they keep on losing.

Some atavistic trait in human psychology causes human beings to value a past investment of money, effort or some intangible quality (e.g., "credibility" or "face") independent of the investment's probability of paying future dividends. At its most primitive, the trait makes us reluctant to leave the interminable line at the DMV: the more time we've "invested," the less likely we are to leave, regardless of how much longer we still have to wait and regardless of whether we could spend that time more profitably and come back another day. It is stubbornness; it is also the sunk cost phenomenon at work.

As a glance the newspaper will reveal, politicians are now trying out new rationales to anesthetize public unease about the rising tab at the Great Mesopotamian Casino. The old bromides about WMD, a self-financing occupation, peace between Israel and Palestine, and the grateful acclaim of the liberated now elicit at best a polite cough behind the hand.

Fortunately for our governing class, the sunk cost argument lies ready: "We've come this far; there's no turning back." Taxpayers have committed $121 billion and military families a much heavier cost, but the U.S. government has not accomplished a single major prewar objective save deposing the senile Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, marvelous benefits will accrue (no less than Changing the World) if we "stay the course" and don't "cut and run" - ominous slogans from Vietnam, another classic example of sunk cost rationales. Even more ominous, the president's 13 April press conference contains this: "As I have said to those who have lost loved ones, we will finish the work of the fallen." There, in embryo, is sunk cost - not in money, but in precious lives.

And just where is the Loyal Opposition on this weighty issue? Showing his penchant for cutting-edge thinking, the Democratic presidential challenger has issued this breathtaking proposal: add more troops and delay the handover of Iraq to its ostensible owners. Like Bill Bennett in Vegas, his gambling strategy is to up the ante.

Now just where on earth do cynics get the idea that Democrats and Republicans are two heads of the same hydra?"

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822

Acid flashbacks...I think the remorseless assault on the Bush ReaKtion have brought one one

Money and Corruption  - Kinks 1973

(sung by chorus)

We are sick and tired
Of being promised this and that.
We work all day, we sweat and slave
To keep the wealthy fat.
They fill our heads with promises
And bamboozle us with facts,
Then they put on false sincerity
Then they laugh behind our backs.

1st chorus
Money and corruption
Are ruining the land
Crooked politicians
Betray the working man,
Pocketing the profits
And treating us like sheep,
And we’re tired of hearing promises
That we know they’ll never keep.

Money and corruption
(etc. repeat 1st chorus above)

Promises, promises, all we get are promises.
Show us a man who’ll understand us, guide us and lead us.

We are sick and tired
Of having to ask them cap in hand
We crawl on the floor
We beg for more,
But still we are ignored.
We’re tired of being herded
Like a mindless flock of sheep
And we’re tired of hearing promises
That we know they’ll never keep.

1st chorus
Money and corruption
Are ruining the land
Crooked politicians
Betray the working man,
Pocketing the profits
And treating us like sheep,
And we’re tired of hearing promises
We know they’ll never keep.

We’ve got to stand together
Every woman, every man,
Because money and corruption are ruining the land.
Show us a man who’ll be our saviour and will lead us.
Show us a man who’ll understand us, guide us and lead us.
Show us a man.
Workers of the nation unite.
Workers of the nation unite.
(mr. black sings)

I visualise a day when people will be free
And we’ll be living in a new society.
No class distinction, no slums or poverty
I have a vision of a new society.
And every home will have a stereo and tv,
A deep freeze, quadrasonic and a washing machine.
So workers of the nation unite.

I am your man
I’ll work out a five-year plan
So vote for me brothers
And I will save this land
And we will nationalise the wealthy companies
And all the directors will be answerable to me,
There’ll be no shirking of responsibilities
So people of the nation unite.

Union man I’ll work with you hand in hand
For we’re all brothers to our union man.
I am your man,
Oh God how I love this land,
So join together save the fatherland.

I visualize a day when people will be free
And we’ll be living in a new society.
No class distinction, no slums or poverty,
So workers of the nation unite,
Workers of the nation unite,
People of the nation unite