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Tuesday, July 29, 2003
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Power Struggle
The always-excellent Talking Points Memo linked to this Fred Kaplan piece in Slate, which is a great read on the current Administration in-fighting over Iraq.
There are two very important things in the Slate piece.
First, the reporter embeds are no more. Turns out some of the troops had some real unflattering things to say about Rumsfeld, Bush et al. That'll fire up the folks back home! Guess when the stories coming out of the war aren't that great anymore, there's no point in having reporters around. No News is Good News.
But the second point is very interesting, and very fun to read. It is speculation from yesterday, in the Washington Post, that James Baker might be going to Iraq, based on an overture from President Bush. This is momentous for a couple of reasons. One is that Baker is a heavy hitter who played a key role in getting Bush into the White House in the first place. If Baker were going to Iraq, it wouldn't be as an underling to Paul Bremer-it would be as the de facto leader of the reconstruction itself.
The second reason is that Baker is a multilateralist, and is on record as opposing the way we went about the early diplomacy in Iraq. In other words, Baker's views are much more in line with Colin Powell and the diplomats' view of how to proceed than he is in line with the neocons like Wolfowitz, Rummy, and Cheney.
But to get the full impact, you have to read to the bottom, for today's update to the story:
Update, July 29, 2003: Today, the Post is reporting that Baker will not be offered the job after all, and that the current bureaucratic arrangement—which has Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, serving under and reporting to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld—will remain in place, unaltered.
It is not entirely clear what this intriguing sequence of leaks and counter-leaks has signified. But it looks as if the diplomatic wing of the Bush administration (those who believe, like Baker, that the United States must mend its ties to the allies) attempted an end-run around the unilateralist neo-cons who currently dominate policymaking—and got crushed in the process.
Examine the wording of the Post's lead: Baker, it says, "will not join the Iraq reconstruction effort, as some administration officials had hoped." (Italics added.)
Keeping in mind this guidepost—the signal that the entire story is about internecine conflict—it becomes clear how to fill in the blanks, or decode the euphemisms, of the following passage, from later in the piece: "[W]hen the idea of reaching out to Baker was made public [i.e., when it appeared in the Post], it quickly became clear that it would be seen as undermining Bremer [i.e., undermining Bremer's boss, Rumsfeld] and any such notion was discarded [i.e., was beaten back severely]."
And so, let me revise my own lead from this article: Postwar Iraq is going badly, but it's not yet clear that Bush knows it—or is doing anything about it.
3:15:33 PM 
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Condi In Trouble?
The Iraq/Niger uranium flap has left headlines, but the fallout from the story is just starting to heat up. There was a key article in the Washington Post this Sunday that casts a very poor light on Condoleeza Rice. The issue, more or less, is that based on Rice's own statements and the facts as they are now known, Rice is guilty of one of two things. She either wasn't reading key pieces of intelligence relating to Iraq on the even of a Presidential address about Iraq, or she did read them and chose to take a course of deception with the American public.
Neither option is appetizing, in the least. You knew somebody was going to take the fall for this. It's looking like it might be Rice. This is too bad in a lot of ways; Rice is very highly regarded by both intelligence and military people. It's hard to remember back to the 2000 election, but Rice was one of the key pieces of Bush's team, in that she gave him a lot of credibility on international affairs. Now what?
3:02:07 PM
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States
Linus has been really interested in the States lately. He has long been able to pick out Minnesota, to the point of minor annoyance on the part of his parents. I mean, the kid can spot Minnesota anywhere. And when you live in Minnesota, well, that happens a lot.
But now, he's branching out. He noticed a sticker on our maple syrup bottle the other night, and asked "What state is that?" Turns out it was Wisconsin...but how did he know that was a state?
He can now pick out Wisconsin, Kansas, California, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and perhaps Maine on a map. And, of course, Minnesota.
We tried explaining Canada and Mexico to him, that those were other countries. That was a little harder to grasp for him. Countries? We'll have that conversation another day.
Speaking of conversations to have another day, at one point he pointed to Minnesota on our map, and mentioned that Tino isn't in Minnesota anymore. Tino was one of our beloved cats, who died on December 24, 2001. That was a long time ago, and yet Linus has started talking about Tino a lot. But he never asks where Tino is-he only mentions that Tino died.
I figured this was going to be our first Death conversation. Naturally, he would follow up and ask where Tino was, if he wasn't in Minnesota any more. But he didn't. He just moved on.
And then, as we were discussing Texas, Jane broke into song as she and Lily sat on the bed in Linus' room: The stars at night, are big and bright...Deep in the heart of Texas!
Naturally, I made the hand claps at the appropriate spot. Linus thought this was a hoot, so we taught him the song. Well, at least the part of the song we know, which is the part of the song listed above, which coincidentally is the only part of the song that appears in Pee Wee's Big Adventure.
Linus wanted to know the songs for the other states. Crap. We knew very few. Let's see...There's Neil Young's "Ohio". There's that Wilco/Billy Bragg cover of Woody Guthrie's "California Stars". There's, uh, Public Enemy's "By The Time I Get To Arizona"...
It's an incomplete list, to be sure. To compensate for that, I promised myself that I would teach him all of the Texas song. Here it is...
The stars at night are big and bright
Deep in the heart of Texas
The prairie sky is wide and high
Deep in the heart of Texas
The sage in bloom is like perfume
Deep in the heart of Texas
Reminds me of the one that I love
Deep in the heart of Texas
The coyotes wail along the trail
Deep in the heart of Texas
The rabbits rush around the brush
Deep in the heart of Texas
The cowboys cry, "Ki yippee yi!"
Deep in the heart of Texas
The dogies bawl and bawl and bawl
Deep in the heart of Texas
The stars at night are big and bright
Deep in the heart of Texas
The prairie sky is wide and high
Deep in the heart of Texas
Deep in the heart of Texas
Deep in the heart of Texas
Deep in the heart of Texas
Deep in the heart of Texas
Crap. I'll never learn that. And that's a lot of clapping, too. I think I'd rather tell him where Tino is.
2:14:22 PM
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DARPA's Get Rick Quick Scheme
Unbelievable. DARPA, headed by John Poindexter, has come up with a plan to implement a futures market, where anonymous traders can buy options on possible terror scenarios. Using real money. Starting this Friday.
This is how it works: Say you buy futures on a plane being crashed into a U.S. nuclear facility. At the time you buy, that is deemed an unlikely scenario, and the futures only cost $5. But then, let's say an intelligence report comes out saying that there is a greater hijacking risk for late summer. Hey, your plane crash scenario's looking good! The same futures you bought for $5 just got bumped to $15.
Then, let's say that a new report comes out that says that nuclear facilities are uniquely at risk. BAM! Your futures are now worth $80. Then, the strike happens, and the futures payout is $100. You make $95 per future you originally purchased.
What a player you're going to be at the casino that night. I'm sure you'll want to whoop it up with your entourage as you bust through the doors. "Whoo baby! Rolling in it! Plane crash at Diablo Canyon Jackpot, baby! Drinks for everybody in the house!"
Why would DARPA do this? Their thinking is that futures markets tend to be very good predictors of things, and that this is a diagnostic tool that can help them.
Well, first of all, that's not encouraging, that DARPA feels like they don't already have a handle on their intelligence. We know that to be the case, but you still like to think that they have made progress. Second, how could DARPA not see that this is going to be an extremely controversial, and even offensive plan to most of America? Is their intelligence so bad that they feel they have to alienate the public to get this data?
And that's the more troubling part, that this likely wouldn't produce any usable data at all. The players are anonymous, acting on information that could be real, a hunch, or whatever. The analogy to the stock market is interesting; the market is highly regulated; all of the data is in theory public data, and vetted, unless you're Enron, Tyco, an HMO, Fruit of the Loom, etc., etc. But the point is, the stock market operates on open data.
The DARPA futures market wouldn't operate on anything close to open data-quite the opposite. Maybe 20% of the people putting their money down would have inside knowledge and classified information. Maybe 20% think they do, but don't. Maybe 20% are just rich tycoons playing for laughs. Maybe the rest are people with a real stake in political issues around the world, and are playing with their hearts and not their minds.
How would DARPA know? And if they don't know the quality of the data that investment assumptions are made on, how can they get a read on the "value" of that future?
The worst part? The White House gave $8 million to this project through 2005. The Senate blocked all spending on the program, but the House did not. But after Senators Byron Dorgan and Ron Wyden went public with this plan, the Pentagon altered the website for the plan to remove certain futures that one could place bets on.
The irony of this, as Loyal Pipeline Reader and International Smart Guy Brian E. tells us, is that the real stock market is perhaps the best historical indicator of political events, even including terrorist attacks. It may not be able to tell us which specific attacks are going to happen, though.
That's what we have intelligence for. You wonder how much that $8 mil could get for us in the way of intelligence. Could we buy some people who have good info? Could we hire more Arabic-speaking people for the intelligence services, instead of cutting them because they are gay? I'll bet we could do a lot more with it than what DARPA has in mind.
11:04:08 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Doug Hennessee.
Last update: 8/1/2003; 1:13:22 PM.
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