Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
E-mail this blog's author, Scott Rosenberg:  |
|
When is a warhead not a warhead?
I have been scratching my head all afternoon trying to understand the latest wrinkle in Iraq-WMD rhetoric.
"WARHEADS FOUND," screams the headline on MSNBC's home page. The story page, slightly more soberly, is headlined, "Empty chemical warheads found."
The New York Times, even more carefully, has a headline now that reads: "Inspectors Find Empty Warheads Able to Carry Chemical Agents."
Now, technically speaking, a "warhead" is the part of the missile, typically the head or tip, that gets loaded with whatever weaponry payload the missile is supposed to deliver. So an "empty warhead" is not a weapon at all but a delivery system.
Presumably what has been found in Iraq is a kind of warhead that is specially designed for chemical weapons. That's certainly worth paying attention to, and we're told that the U.N. inspectors will next try to determine whether these warheads show any evidence of having ever been loaded with chemical weapons.
But in the meantime, the media frenzy conveys the distinct impression that today's news represents a smoking-gun finding of actual chemical weapons -- when the truth seems considerably more complex. But then blurring these complexities has been a part of the Bush war plan from the start.
Look closely -- you may find "empty warheads" in the White House, too.
|
|
Is deflation a Chinese import?
Today's Journal contains a sobering economic report suggesting that the December producer prices report contains further evidence of a deflationary trend. (If you thought inflation was bad, deflation is its evil twin -- a descending spiral of prices and wages that economists have very little clue how to end once it's begun.) While prices for energy and services are up, manufactured goods continue to drop.
Now, I'm no macroeconomic expert, but there's one confusing aspect to all this. The month-to-month price-report stories that tend to deal with these matters never bring up what I can't help imagining is the elephant in the room: China. In the past few years Chinese manufacturing has gone global in a huge way. When you walk into your Costco, your Home Depot, any store that sells large quantities of manufactured goods, virtually everything for sale is now manufactured in China. China has an enormous labor force and, by Western standards, extremely low labor costs. The result: cheap goods.
I can't help thinking that the long-term downward pressure on manufactured-goods prices comes from the simple fact that the Chinese economy is now plugged into ours. What I would love to have a thoughtful economist explain (wave arms in Brad DeLong's direction) is whether deflationary trends caused by such low-priced imports and competition are to be feared as greatly as other kinds of deflation that we've been reading about -- the "Japan trap" that Paul Krugman and others have warned about. Are these phenomena similar or different?
From the consumer-in-the-street perspective, you think, hey, this is great -- my furniture, tools, DVD player and so forth all cost less than they used to! Then you start wondering whether those low prices mean that your neighbor -- or the entire population of the Midwest -- now faces unemployment, and it doesn't feel as good.
|
|
So, Saddam, when did you stop beating your wife?
Confirming evidence that our government is now taking its rhetorical plays directly from the pages of "1984" comes with this CNN report from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's press conference yesterday:
| | The failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction "could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation" with U.N. disarmament resolutions, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday....
The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council last week that his teams had found no "smoking gun" in nearly two months of inspections but urged more "active cooperation" from Iraq.
"The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation," Rumsfeld said. |
Commentary seems almost superfluous. Iraqis! If we find evidence of your WMD program, we will invade you! If we do not find evidence, that is evidence that you have not cooperated -- so we will invade you!
What's really going on here, I suppose, is that Rumsfeld never wanted inspections to resume in the first place, always wanted to invade first and ask questions later, and is now trying to exploit the situation by closing a Catch-22 pincer upon the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately for him, Rumsfeld's contortions wind up painting himself as a purveyor of paradoxical doublethink more worthy of "Dr. Strangelove" than the real world of geopolitics.
|
|
|
