Brendan Nyhan

While I was in Costa Rica, I picked up Neil Sheehan’s extraordinary book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, the best book I’ve read about the Vietnam War. The book centers on Vann, a lieutenant colonel who believed the war could be won, but became increasingly disillusioned with the way it was being conducted and went public with his concerns (he spent years attepting to salvage the war, eventually dying in a helicopter crash in 1972).

I despise facile, simplistic analogies between Vietnam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but readers today can hardly miss the undeniable echoes of what’s happening today in Iraq: a profound lack of accurate intelligence; areas of the country that are too dangerous to visit; an enemy that does not need to win, but fights at the time and place of its choosing, inflicts damage and then withdraws to wait out the US forces; civilian leaders who only see progress and ignore negative reports; intense pressure on reporters to deliver positive coverage; and a civilian population that turns against the US as the conduct of the war takes a mounting toll. The analogy is hardly complete; there are important differences between the two situations, and our effort in Iraq may still be salvaged. But the strategic logic of the war is undeniably against us, as it was in Vietnam, and the conflict is taking a massive toll on the military.

My question is this: Who will be the John Paul Vann of Iraq? Who will be the patriotic American soldier or diplomat who puts his or her career on the line to try to change the direction of the US effort in Iraq, or to help preserve the capacity of our overtaxed military? The emergence of such a figure is only a matter of time, it seems, given the internal discontent in the military and diplomatic corps.

Right now, you could point to Lt. Gen. James R. “Ron” Helmly, the head of the Army Reserve, who recently warned in an internal memo that the Reserves are “rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken’ force.” The same clearly applies to the National Guard, also under intense stress from prolonged, repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But no high-ranking official has yet openly broken with our specific policies in Iraq as Vann did in Vietnam. Keep an eye out — it could change the whole dynamic of the debate in a matter of weeks.

Update 1/8: According to an AP story, Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and a member of the influential Pentagon advisory group known as the Defense Policy Board, has a new book coming out that criticizes President Bush’s policies in Iraq (in part). It’s not exactly Vann, but interesting nonetheless.

Update 1/17: An astute reader points out that Vann’s views of US strategy in Vietnam evolved during his time there. To be more clear, I’m talking above about the Vann of ’61-’64 who criticized early US strategy, heavily influencing David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and other American journalists covering the conflict (he later became unreasonably optimistic). As far as comments from readers about Vann not being well-known at the time, I think this indirect influence via the press mattered quite a bit.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined the redistricting reform movement. From

A little over a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger did an end run around politics as usual in the recall election that made him governor of California, he is embarking on a new campaign against the status quo here.

Amen. I’ve been banging the drum for redistricting reform since I started this blog (see here and here). California’s corrupt and insular political system needs a shakeup. And, even better, Kevin Drum says that a deal to make it happen might extend term limits substantially (yet another disastrous California policy that I’ll get into some other time).

The problem, as Drum points out, is that Democrats would be politically foolish to turn over their ultimate stronghold to a redistricting commission while Tom DeLay is redistricting Texas Democrats out of their seats. It’s a classic coordination problem. We’re collectively better off if every state had competitive districts, but neither party has any incentive to unilaterally weaken its hold on seats it has locked up. Drum suggests that Democrats turn over California to a redistricting commission if Republicans do the same thing in Texas. That’s implausible, but I wonder if it’s constitutionally possible for states to coordinate their actions through some sort of redistricting convention. Think of international treaties that only go into effect if a certain number of countries ratify them. Why couldn’t states do the same thing with redistricting reform?

In a short jab at Paul Krugman last month, ABC’s The Note encapsulates everything I hate about the DC insider journalist perspective:

Paul “Pauly One-Note” Krugman of the New York Times looks at international examples of privatizing retirement funds and says he isn’t buying the Administration’s arguments, saying that privatization cuts benefits and leaves more retirees in poverty. LINK

Not only is The Note obviously uninterested in actual policy issues like Social Security (the reason we have politics in the first place), but it dismisses Krugman with casual disdain as “Pauly One-Note”. This attitude is why Slate tries so desperately to be counter-intuitive — because elite journalism prizes being unpredictable above all else. Krugman is consistently anti-Bush; therefore his writing is dismissed as partisan hackery even when it’s not. What’s sad about this is the press has a pitiful level of understanding of Social Security, and they could learn something from Krugman, one of the top economists alive (who has written a nice primer on the issue for the online-only Economists’ Voice [196K PDF]). Here’s a case in point: numerous reporters can’t even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts. It’s certainly true that Krugman sometimes bangs the drum too hard or fails to find fault with liberals, but there’s nothing wrong in principle with being a forceful and consistent advocate for your views.

(For the best in-depth look at this issue, see Nick Confessore’s 2001 profile of Krugman for Washington Monthly.)

Update 1/25: I’ve written a response to criticism of this post by Ken Waight and Donald Luskin.

We compiled a long list of tax and budget whoppers from the Bush administration in All the President’s Spin, but the progression of spin over the last month is shocking even to me. Up is down!

Economic Policy Institute, 12/8/04: The Bush budget released in February 2004 projects a deficit in fiscal 2009 of 1.6% of GDP (the much-touted reduction of more than half of the fiscal 2004 deficit), but reasonable assumptions from EPI show it will actually be 3.4% of GDP in fiscal 2009, more than twice as high as projected.

The Associated Press, 12/9/04: “White House budget director Joshua Bolten said the cost of implementing Bush’s [Social Security] plans would not undercut Bush’s goal of cutting the deficit in half over the next five years,” even though a transition cost of $1-2 trillion over ten years would push the deficit higher than the projection of 3.4% of GDP above. Bolten added that “such costs ‘may well’ add to short-term annual deficits. ‘I don’t want to prejudge how they might be accounted for,’ Bolten said.’If we maintain the policies the president has put out, I believe our path out over the next five to 10 years looks sufficiently strong that we could absorb transition financing’ costs without swelling deficits that are too large compared to the economy, he said.”

New York Times, 1/2/05:

To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security.

To make Mr. Bush’s goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year’s actual shortfall of $413 billion.

By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush’s five-year budget window.

The five-year plan, due in February, is likely to reaffirm previous predictions of a $217 billion surge in tax revenues in 2005, the biggest one-year jump on record, and almost $800 billion a year by 2009.

…As in past years, the budget will exclude costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could reach $100 billion in 2005 and are likely to remain high for years to come. The budget is also expected to exclude Mr. Bush’s goal to replace Social Security in part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration officials concede that such a plan could require the government to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two.

Among the costs that are expected in the five years after 2009 are nearly $1 trillion to make Mr. Bush’s tax cuts permanent, nearly $500 billion for the new Medicare prescription drug program and at least $400 billion to address widely acknowledged problems with the so-called alternative minimum tax.

…White House officials are making several budgeting decisions that make their tax revenues look higher and their spending look lower than many analysts think is realistic.

The first is to exclude a wide range of future costs for proposals, like those for military operations in Iraq, that White House officials say are impossible to predict.

Mr. Bush has consistently refused to include Iraq costs in his annual budget request, seeking money through a supplemental appropriations bill that lies outside the official budget. The White House asked for and received $87 billion for the last fiscal year, as well as another $25 billion to cover the first few months of the 2005 fiscal year. The administration is expecting to ask for as much as $80 billion more in the next few months, but it will not include any cost estimates in Mr. Bush’s budget for the 2006 fiscal year.

…Administration officials are omitting a second big group of costs for goals Mr. Bush has identified but not formally proposed.

By far the biggest of these is his plan to privatize Social Security in part and let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts.

Republican and Democratic analysts alike say the proposal would require the government to incur “transition costs” of $2 trillion or more over the next decade or two. That is because payroll tax revenue would immediately plunge, while benefits owed to retirees would decline only gradually.

Administration officials say any such transition costs should be treated separately from the regular budget, because they would eventually be recouped as benefits decline sharply over the next 75 years.

But the issue poses a ticklish problem for the administration, because it is already using surplus revenues in the Social Security trust fund to cover part of the annual budget deficit. The Social Security and Medicare trust funds took in about $146 billion more than they paid out in benefits in the last fiscal year, which reduced the government’s overall deficit to $413 billion from about $560 billion.

One idea to prevent private savings accounts from causing an abrupt rise in annual deficits is to treat deposits into private savings accounts as a “transfer” within the government. Another idea is to include all the borrowing for transition costs in an account that would be separate from the government’s operating budget.

White House officials say it is reasonable to treat the expected transition costs separately, because they will eventually be repaid as the government’s obligation to pay benefits declines sharply after 30 or 40 years.

“These aren’t costs, they are savings,” said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush’s spokesman, at a recent news conference.

See Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 of ATPS for more. This is right out of the White House budget playbook – omit costs, move the goalposts on the deficit reduction plan (now on its second or third iteration), make shaky projections, etc.

Update 1/8: See this Campaign Desk destruction of a Reuters story on more budget mumbo jumbo.

In the wake of the cancellation of “Crossfire,” there’s been a lot of piling on. As you might guess, I will shed no tears at the demise of a show that helped pioneer the food-fight style of political debate. But the show was on in the afternoon for the last couple of years after being superseded by “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor.” Its cancellation is no great victory for civil discourse on television. So let’s not get carried away.

And, following Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, I will add a word in defense of Tucker Carlson, whose departure from CNN has been mixed up with news of the cancellation. As Sullivan points out, Carlson “is a rare, intellectually independent conservative” who has withstood the intense pressure in DC to follow the party line. He wrote a controversial piece for Talk about George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential primaries and came out against the war in Iraq, among other heresies. The format of “Crossfire” forced him into the standard left-right box, but if you watched the show carefully over the last couple of years you might have noticed that while Carlson was extremely critical of guests from the left (often rightly so), he didn’t tout orthodox views of Bush, the war, etc. like almost every other conservative on television. And as Kaus points out, his PBS show is not exactly a shoutfest, though Carlson does challenge his guests.

Anyway, he’s a very smart guy who was once regarded as one of the most promising and talented print journalists in Washington. I hope he finds a better format, and a boss that will treat him with more class than Jonathan Klein.

(Disclosure: I once had lunch with Carlson, and he wrote a nice blurb for All the President’s Spin.)

Chris Mooney, who’s writing a book on the politics of science, flags the newest development in the spin war over global warming. The New York Times reported last month on disagreement at a UN conference on the issue:

Those sharply different perceptions led to a clash even over what language should be used in discussing disaster relief. Bush administration emissaries opposed the use of the phrase “climate change,” employed since the days of the first Bush administration, in favor of “climate variability,” a much more nebulous term.

In Chapter 5 of All the President’s Spin, we discuss how the Bush administration consciously shifted from using the term “global warming” to “climate change”. This is just one more step down the road toward language-twisting euphemisms that obscure more than they reveal. As Chris writes, the term “climate variability” is “not just nebulous: It implies natural variability, which is not what scientists think they’re seeing out there in the real world.”

The ugly synergy between attacks on dissent and direct mail fundraising lives on. The Nyhan mailbag recently included a letter from Oliver North’s Freedom Alliance suggesting that the media is encouraging the enemy in Iraq. The most blatant accusation comes in the the enclosed reply letter, which says “Dear Ollie… I want to help you counter the distortions of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and others in the liberal media who are undermining our war effort and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Therefore, I am immediately signing my REFERENDUM ON THE MEDIA AND IRAQ and rushing it back to you today along with my most-generous, tax-deductible gift of…”

Tom DeLay was up to the same tricks a couple of weeks ago on the radio with North (surprise!), accusing critics of Donald Rumsfeld of aiding the enemy (via Tapped):

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, blasting congressional and media critics of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday that the constant drumbeat of attacks on the Pentagon chief was undermining the war effort.

“What worries me is that we are aiding and abetting the enemy,” DeLay told Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was filling in on Sean Hannity’s ABC Radio network broadcast.

Without naming names, DeLay pointed the finger at “all these naysayers” who he said “constantly criticize and call everything a mistake.”

The repeated attacks on Rumsfeld are only emboldening terrorists and their allies, the Texas conservative said.

(Scans of the North letter and reply form will be posted upon request.)

In an editorial Thursday (free registration required), the Wall Street Journal describes waterboarding as “the most coercive interrogation technique that was ever actually authorized” against Al Qaeda. According to the Journal, “it involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning.” This, the Journal says, “is pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior” but the editors ask for a debate on the question of whether it is “immoral, or unjustified, in the cause of preventing another mass casualty attack on U.S. soil.”

This afternoon, James Taranto quotes the Journal’s definition in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ’s OpinionJournal.com site, using it to mock Ted Kennedy, who referred to descriptions of waterboarding as “drowning someone to that kind of point” during confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales yesterday.

But dripping water on a towel didn’t sound like what I had read about in the past, and it turns out that other journalists describe the practice very differently than the Journal. The New York Times reported in May that waterboarding was used by the CIA on Khalid Shaik Mohammed, an Al Qaeda leader. This is how the paper described the practice: “a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.” No towels, no dripping — the prisoner is pushed under water. And today the Washington Post defined waterboarding as “an interrogation technique in which a detainee is strapped to a board and pushed underwater to make him think he might drown.”

So who’s right? This is a hugely important issue, both for US policy toward its prisoners and for the Gonzales confirmation hearings. It would be nice to get some clarity from the press.

Update 1/19: Taranto points out by email that a January 4 story in the Post uses the Journal’s definition. I’m emailing the paper to try to get some clarity on this. I’ll update this post if I find out more.

Update 1/20: R. Jeffrey Smith, one of the authors of the January 4 story cited above, responded to my email to say that he is confident that the dripping-water definition is correct:

Mr. Nyhan —

Thank you for calling attention to conflicting accounts in the Post and
other newspapers of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding. I
am utterly confident — based on careful reporting — that the description
of this technique in our recent article about Mr. Gonzales is a correct and
complete account, and that the other depictions are, at best, loosely
paraphrased accounts of this technique.

All best regards,

R. Jeffrey Smith

Well, I can report that Costa Rica is a wonderful country for all your honeymoon needs. After spending ten days before the trip on the couch wishing for death, my immune system finally put the flu down for the count a couple days into the trip. Then my wife got sick for a few days, but luckily not as badly as me; we still had a great time. Now it’s back to the real world (sigh). Every time I visit a place like Costa Rica, the idea of living there is a little tempting, though watching the sad, drunken exploits of the 15 expats in a little beach town we visited made it clear that life down south isn’t as perfect as it seems.

The flu decided not to cooperate with me, so no posting before I leave for an undisclosed tropical location tomorrow. Back in January. Until then, check out the archives.