Glen Johnson, writing for the Louisville Courier Journal, has an article on Obama’s recent visit to West Lafayette for a panel discussion on security. (Yours truly did not merit an invite – probably best that I did not have a tempting distraction from paying work.)
Democrat Barack Obama warned yesterday about the danger of “fighting the last war” as he pledged to focus on emerging nuclear, biological and cyber threats if elected president.
Two goals of his administration would be to secure all loose nuclear material during his first term and to rid the world of nuclear weapons, Obama told an audience before a roundtable discussion at Purdue University.
He warned against fighting the last war, responding to threats only once they develop. Obama proposes developing better methods to detect biological threats, and enhancing international intelligence and law enforcement infrastructures. Cybersecurity should also be a priority, he says.
Obama was, unsurprisingly, critical of the Bush/McCain approach to security:
“Instead of adjusting to the stateless threats of the 21st century, we invaded and occupied a state that had no collaborative relationship with al-Qaida. Instead of taking aggressive steps to secure the world’s most dangerous weapons and technology, we spent almost a trillion dollars to occupy a country in the heart of the Middle East that no longer had any weapons of mass destruction.”
Well, when you put it that way, the Bush-McCain strategy seems almost criminally wasteful.
You had no way to know that they didn’t have a nuclear program or ties to AQ until you overthrew them.
Obama is a great Monday morning QB. Like all MMQB’s, he’s never really played the game, and has no special expertiese in the field. But he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.
The biggest threat after millitant Islam could be Chinese nationalism. Funny that he didn’t mention that.
Remember that the first crisis that Dubya faced was our spy plane being forced down in China, and our airmen so much as being held hostage for a time.
Funny, I don’t recall Dick Cheney going on the TV, saying “We don’t really know whether Iraq has ties to al Qaeda or whether it has any WMDs we ought to be concerned about, but we figure we should invade to find out.”
Actually, not “funny.” More like “infuriating.” Cheney feigned certainty on these issues. Turns out that such information as he used as a fig leaf for his faux certainty came from known con-man, Ahmed Chalabi and from information obtained through torture, information which is notoriously suspect.
Iraq war, converted to police confrontation. Replace suspect for Iraq, police for US:
Suspect: I’ve got a bomb, and I’m not afraid to use it.
Police: Give me the bomb.
S: No
P: If you don’t, you’re going to jail
S: I don’t really have a bomb
P: Fine, I’m getting a search warrant to find it.
S: Ok, but the court needs to give me a few days notice before you come.
P: (Two days later with warrant) Ok, I’ve searched the living room. Now let me into the bedroom.
S: No, you can’t search in there.
Court (UN): Well, you searched his living room, so he must not have a bomb.
How do you expect this situation to end? Do you just take the suspect for his word?
Your analogy is, at best, incomplete. It’s as if we went to the judge and got a search warrant and had not completed the search of the house. The suspect was effectively in custody during this period.
We then went to the judge (U.N.) and were applying for a warrant to conduct a body cavity search for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. When we got wind that the judge might not sign off on the body cavity search, we decided not to wait for his decision and, instead, executed the suspect before conducting an anal probe which produced nothing.
Fair enough, I see your point.
My point is that Saddam did his best to keep us from knowing that he truly didn’t have WMDs, and Iraq was invaded because of that. It wasn’t like he was being open with us.
The US made some big mistakes that lead to the war. You could even argue that some were not mistakes but done on purpose, although I still don’t understand what the motive people are tying Bush to other than “He tried to kill my daddy”.
However, Iraq under Saddam’s leadership make some equally big mistakes to cause the war, and some you could also argue were done on purpose. It take two to screw things up this bad.
I think Bush himself was largely too lazy to think things through; had a “gut feeling” that we should do bad stuff to Saddam; and relied on folks like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to work out the details. Those guys were already on record from 1998 or so as wanting to use military force to take out Hussein as part of their Project for the New American Century. PNAC had an unrealistic view of war and a dogmatic belief that the U.S. needed a large military force in the Persian Gulf region. For them, it seems like it was something like a real life version of Risk.
Incidentally, I agree that Hussein was a shit head and played his hand badly. But, our policies shouldn’t really hinge on the skill (or lack thereof) of our adversaries.
I *hate* it when I get a shitty role of the dice when attacking. That stupid rule about the defender getting three dice while the attacker only gets two can really screw you up…
(Another disclaimer. I’m not trying to make light of the loss of life in Iraq. However, I sometimes have to go by Richard Pryor’s idea that if you don’t laugh, you die.)
But, our policies shouldn’t really hinge on the skill (or lack thereof) of our adversaries.
But it has always been that way: Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW1, WW2. Maybe Korea (the Soviets boycotting the UN Security Council allowing the US to win the vote to respond to the NoKos invasion of SoKo).
I think if we’re going to be parking large numbers of American troops in foreign countries, Iraq is the perfect place for them to be.
If we need to bring troops home, let’s bring them home from Germany, Japan, and Korea first.
Jason- The attacker gets three dice. The defender gets two.
Axis & Allies is a better game. I would see Risk as president Bush’s choice. It involves far less planning, and is just a simple roll of the dice.
We’d have to consider the relative benefits gained by having the soldiers in these locations. It’s entirely possible that soldiers in either location confer the same level of security benefits to the United States — e.g. little-to-none. (Though, best I can tell, having soldiers in Iraq is making us *less* secure.)
Second, we’d have to consider the marginal costs of maintaining troop presence in those locations. I’m guessing that the cost to maintain a soldier in Iraq is more expensive than the cost to maintain a soldier in Germany.
To me, the Bush/McCain insistence on staying in Iraq reflects a juvenile hang up on the notion of “winning” and “losing;” instead of on the more difficult concepts of costs and benefits. But, this isn’t some kind of game where we get to add one to the “W” or “L” column.
And then the defender wins a tie, right?
Saddam did his best to keep us from knowing, right up to the point where he let inspectors go to whatever sites they wanted for several months up until the start of the war. Sure he wavered briefly on “Presidential sites”, but those were being opened up, too. He was also allowing the inspectors to dismantle all of his missiles that violated the permissible range under the terms agreed to after the 1991 war.
He was being as open with us as we were demanding him to be. The trouble was that former regime defectors on our payroll and conman Chalabi and the like said he had a bunch of stuff, and we demanded it be surrendered. That’s a hell of a bind to be in, to have to turn over something you don’t have. In the absence of any other information, though, you would have to attack the guy rather than trust him. But we did have other information, from the inspectors, with more information each day.
Bush was seeing his rationale for war disappear. He pulled the inspectors and had the war.
What was the urgency, under those conditions? Why did the war have to happen that week, or that month? If another six months had passed with all sites inspected and no WMD, would that have been enough to preempt the war? We eventually discredited the Iraq-Atta connection. Would that have been enough?
I thought Axis & Allies® was Risk® with cutesy little plastic men and tanks instead of little colored cubes?
It may be that, VG, but it also includes the factor of ‘units of production’. I imagine Bush would have ignored these, and just pushed the cutesy tanks around the board making ‘vroom vroom’ sounds.
You have an old version of Risk. It now also has cutesy plastic figures.
Doug- The defender does win the tie.
I have a game purchased no later than 1970 and my pieces are wood, not plastic. No doubt produced before most of you Axis & Allies® fanboys were even born.
…instead of on the more difficult concepts of costs and benefits
Hey, I’ve got an idea… let’s try that with our domestic programs.
Public education for example. Cost per student higher and higher (far more than other countries), achievement levels lower and lower (now below the worldwide average).
Hey, I’ve got an idea… let’s try that with our domestic programs.
Ha! Not bloody likely.
All right. Let’s figure out what South Korea, Japan, Finland, Canada, and Australia are doing differently and see if we can’t emulate them.
Providing good education for immigrants is identified as one effective way to improve one’s educational system.
I can tell you what SK and Japan are doing, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the school system in any way, shape, or form.
It’s cultural. Korean and Japanese parents aren’t whiners. They’re hardcore. They push their kids to suceed.
There are more Korean kids at Harvard than any other foreign group, and their average SAT score is 200 points higher than the average for Exeter students!
Regarding the Finns, go ahead and look at their schools.
Their success is baffling. Maybe you can just chalk it up to being a small, homogenous country. That’s probably helping the Koreans and Japanese, too.
Since there are two parts to cost-benefit, while we’re trying to emulate their success let’s also try to figure out how Japan averages around $2K cost per student vs $9K in the US.
Jeez, I love how this stuff gets tossed out as though it were established fact when it’s not even broadly supportable, and that’s before we get to the fruit of the matter: the apples/oranges comparison and the cherry-picked data. The United States does not “spend far more than other countries” on education. Check here. In 2004 (latest figures without a subscription) as a % of GDP we were outspent by France, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Portugal, just to compare Western Europe; we’re also outspent by Mexico, for the record. Our mean reading scores are better than Germany, Austria, or Denmark, and roughly equal to France and the rest of Western Europe save Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. We do less well at math; we’re a bit stronger than that in science. Perhaps if we improve our performance in those two areas our future citizens will be able to process information instead of relying on their imaginations.
Japan actually outspends us on secondary education, and Korea outspends us on private education, on which it spends nearly twice what it spends on public education, something no other country comes close to doing. But then, they get to rely on our military spending for their security, which must allow them to pocket a few bucks.
Percentage of GDP?
That’s like saying Bill Gates spent a smaller percentage of his income on food than my family did on our income. The apples-to-apples comparison would instead look at the amount spent per people fed.
Might as well divide the number of schools by the land mass of the country and see where we come out. Yeesh.