War Commentary

Some Thoughts On Iran And The NIE

Not from me, but from Victor Davis Hanson. Here are a couple:

Why would a country that produces 4 million barrels of oil per day at $90 per barrel not use its windfall profits to expand and refurbish an ailing oil industry to get in further on the obscene profit-making, rather than divert resources in the billions for the acquisition of a reactor that is not needed for power production (natural gas is still burned off at the wellhead)?

We suffer collective amnesia in suggesting that the chill in Iranian relations was a phenomenon of the last few years alone. Not restoring formal diplomatic relations was a bipartisan policy, presumably based on the notion that neither the Carter nor the Clinton administration ever got genuine positive feedback from their efforts to expand diplomatic channels with the Iranians. After all, what President wanted to be responsible for opening-and losing-another embassy in Teheran? In this regard, the recent hostage-taking of British soldiers abroad reaffirms that Iranian ways have not changed much since 1979.

They are food for thought.

[Thursday morning update]

Some more thoughts, from John Bolton:

…the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”

It is amazing how many people who have been quick to criticize the NIE in the past have been so eager to embrace it now.

Political Commentary

Huckabee Problems

Ace says not to nominate another liberal“compassionate conservative” Republican for president.

And do we really want a man who was completely unaware of some of the biggest foreign policy news of the week?

I really think that a Huckabee nomination would result in some kind of third-party or independent run, by someone.

[Update in the early evening]

But not by Mike Bloomberg. By someone who actually has some sense of libertarian/conservative principles.

In fact, it strikes me that most viable third-party candidates are “centrists” (assuming for the sake of the argument that political positions really are simple enough to put on a one-dimensional left/right scale) who attempt to appeal to the so-called moderates (John Anderson, a liberal Republican in 1980, being a representative example).

In this case the cause for a new entrant wouldn’t be a perception of polarization, but from a sense that there was little choice between the two candidates. I mean, if you’re a Democrat, what’s not to like about Huckabee, other than his position on abortion and guns? I can imagine that in a Clinton/Huckabee race, he might very well pull a lot of the Democrat vote. Most Republicans would vote for him purely out of an antipathy to Hillary!, albeit while holding both nostrils tightly shut. He may, in that sense, be the most electable “Republican.”

The question is, if a true conservative ran, how much would he take from Huckabee? Would it be like Perot (who wasn’t really a conservative–he didn’t have any coherent beliefs whatsoever), who took enough votes from Bush to give the election to Clinton? Or would a charismatic conservative candidate manage to get a majority, and split the Dems between the two liberal candidates?

I don’t know, but this promises to be one of the most interesting (and probably depressing, for a classical liberal) elections in my lifetime. My guess is that Huckabee won’t get the nomination, for many reasons, like the ones that started off this post.

Technology and Society

Smart Cars

John Tierney has an interesting piece on the current state of the art.

I don’t really look forward to this particular future–I like driving (though I have to confess that having a computer replace most of the other lousy drivers out there appeals to me greatly).

But my biggest concern, that I never see addressed, is reliability. Not just of the smarts in the car, but in the car itself. What happens if cars are barreling along at ninety miles an hour ten feet apart, and a tire blows? Or the brakes fail? Or the engine dies?

There simply won’t be the margin to avoid a collision, as we (generally, but not always) have at current spacing. You can make the cars as smart as you want, but physics will remain physics.

Political Commentary

Saving The Planet

Lileks:

I suspect that the impulse to bring all these untidy unhelpful examples of flagrant individualism under the steady hand of the Ministry of Rational Allocation has something to do with that fretful busybody insistence that people are simply not living right. If we had Star Trek replicators in every house that would conjure goods and meals out of boundless energy produced by antimatter teased from a three-micron fissure that opened into a universe populated entirely by unicorns who crapped antimatter in such abundance they were happy we used it up, and used their shiny pointy horns to poke more of it through the aperture into our dimension, columnists would bemoan the disconnect between labor and goods, and the soul-corrupting influence of endless ersatz vegetables. You can

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!