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Robert Scheer, TruthDig, September 11, 2007

Of course Gen. David Petraeus predicts success in the Iraq war. What wonders couldn’t generals achieve with more troops and more time? The battle is always going well until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public.

There’s no shortage of retired generals who will tell you we could have won in Vietnam if only we had sent more troops, or bombed the dikes in the North, or been willing to kill more than the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died along with 59,000 American soldiers. Instead, the politicians and public, led by that bleeding heart President Richard Nixon, lost the will to win. Thus, the dominoes fell to communism, and Red China and Red Vietnam now rule the world by dint of military force. Have you been to Wal-Mart lately? The triumph of communism is total.

Once again, we have a general repeatedly promising to save Western civilization by turning the corner in yet another intractable and unnecessary foreign war. Back on Sept. 26, 2004, in the weeks before the midterm congressional elections, Petraeus took to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to make sure the voters didn’t vote wrong. Despite appearances, he claimed the war in Iraq was going very well: “I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up,” Petraeus wrote. “The institutions that oversee them are being re-established from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously. … There has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security, something they are keen to do.”

So keen, it makes one’s heart swell. So keen that three years later, after the expenditure of $450 billion more in taxpayer funds, and more U.S. troops in proportion to the Iraqi population than we had in Vietnam at the height of that war, the good general now insists it would be disastrous to even think about bringing any American troops home before next summer.

That’s at least another $150 billion and many more Iraqi and U.S. lives wasted. But waitRyan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, also testified before Congress this week with Petraeus, and he has more good news about what he still celebrates as the “liberation of Iraq.” Remember that Bush administration promise that the oil-rich Iraqis would pick up the check for the cost of their liberation? Well, Crocker is bullish on that front: the Iraqi economy is on schedule to grow by 6 percent, according to his testimony. Perhaps he is referring to the additional money dumped into Iraq’s economy by American taxpayers chipping in for the “surge.”

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The Hill, September 13, 2007

The resounding Democratic victory in the 2006 Senate campaign creates a historic anomaly in which the Senate Democratic Caucus could increase to more than 60 senators, with historic implications for American politics and all three branches of government.

The media are simply focusing on the 22 Senate Republican seats at stake in 2008. But the Republican senators considering whether to retire, and the smart K Street money, are homed in on the 2010 elections as well, where another 19 Republican Senate seats are at stake.

Do the math. Locked into the fate of one of America’s most unpopular presidents in history, with the national mood favoring a tidal wave of change, with Republicans plagued by endless scandals, and with a president pushing a disastrous war onto the desk of his successor, 41 Senate Republican seats are in jeopardy in 2008 and 2010.

Of course, many of the most distinguished Republican senators choose to retire, fearing they will spend in the rest of their careers in a shrinking Republican minority.

Of course, the smart-money contributors on K Street increasingly tilt toward Senate Democrats, a trend that will accelerate going into November 2008 and skyrocket off the charts by 2010.

In Washington politics, if you want a friend, buy a dog, and if you want influence, don’t bet on the loser. With 41 Republican seats in jeopardy in the next two elections under extremely unfavorable circumstances, with business money wanting friends in the right places, and with a tidal wave of grassroots money from the often-maligned Democratic base, the money advantage to Democrats becomes exponential.

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In the early days after the 9/11 attack, nearly the whole world stood by us in condemning the deed and those who had planned and implemented it. For a short time, the United States became not the beacon of hope it once was, but a shocked and injured entity with which the whole world mourned.

It could have been a watershed moment for us all. It could have been the impetus for a joyous reconciliation of all the mistakes we’d made as a nation, and given us the chance to rise above our admittedly rocky history to become something greater than we’d ever been.

We had the chance to show the world how strong America really was. How proud, and how open-hearted Americans can be.

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Oliver R. Goodenough, The Rutland Herald Online, September 12, 2007

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player’s total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to “irrationally” accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq.

America is long past the possibility of some kind of profitable outcome in Iraq. Neo-con dreams of a quick, cheap victory, delivering democracy and peace and self-financed from Iraq’s own oil revenue, got us started on this misadventure. Like the students, the early bidding seemed like a fun adventure to the boys in the Bush administration. “Bring ‘em on,” the chief boy said about the other bidders. And like the economics class, suddenly we were in the thing up to our necks, with only bad choices available at an ever-escalating cost.

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