Patty Cake, Patty Cake
WTF is this duet? It would not even qualify for a Poli Sci 101 essay in a local community college for the Motivationally Challenged. Michael Hayden seems determined to underscore to the public that the L’esprit Bureaucratique encrusting the Community grows in new and baroque ways. Together with his turn with Timmy, what’s poor boy to do? cause in sleepy Langley town, theres just no place for a street fighting man.
MR. RUSSERT: I want to go back to ’07 when Bob Woodward wrote a piece in The Washington Post about comments you made to the Iraqi Study Group, and have a chance to talk about that regarding Iraq.
“On the morning of November 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered … in the … Roosevelt Room of the White House. CIA Director Michael Hayden … said, `the inability of the [Iraqi] government to govern seems irreversible,’ adding that he could not `point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,’ according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.
“`The government is unable to govern,’ Hayden concluded. `We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balance, and it cannot function.'”
Is that an accurate assessment of what you said?
GEN. HAYDEN: It’s an incomplete assessment of, of what I said. What, what I said was inability to govern or turn this around in the short term is, is what I precisely said. And then I, I tried to use a sports metaphor. I talked about running a marathon, and what I, what I said to the, to the group there is I’d run a marathon in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh’s pretty hilly, as you know, and at about mile 21 there’s a two-mile downhill stretch. And as you get down to the bottom of that hill, it’s only three miles to the finish and you run three miles before church on Sunday. So I knew if I got to mile 22, there was a natural break that would begin to turn things into my favor. What I was saying to the commission was, there were no longer any natural breaks lying ahead of us that would turn things in our favor. It had to be done with just slogging through hard work. There were no upcoming elections, for example, no upcoming changes in the political structure that would be natural breaks. That’s what I was trying to say to the committee.
Now his Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson duet. Perhaps next a pop-up book in time, you know, for the kids, for back to school.
Dick Helms must be rolling over in his grave.
When Even Your Best Rah Rah Friends Say This . . .
Nothing startling here, i.e., any reader of this blog could drum this up over a beverage of choice. But The Economist still has mind share among the NYC-DC shuttle set, so it is worth noting:
Most importantly, the next president will want to broaden American foreign policy from its preoccupation with the “war on terror”. The Olympic games in Beijing this summer will remind Americans of China’s growing economic might, at a time when America is nervous about its own economic performance and faces powerful protectionist pressures at home. Russia’s growing authoritarianism and assertiveness is also bound to pose a big strategic problem.
Even so, the issues that dominated the Bush presidency will not go away. Defeating radical Islam will remain a mainspring of American policy. Al-Qaeda still seems determined to inflict massive casualties on America’s civilian population. It is still powerful and continues to pursue biological and even nuclear weapons. The president’s first job is to protect the American people from attack, so al-Qaeda will remain an overriding worry.
A Democratic president might bring a change of strategy to the “war on terror”, with less martial rhetoric and a shift of focus from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mr Obama is saying that America should be fighting terrorism (but in Iraq it has chosen the wrong battlefield). He has expressed his willingness to go after high-value al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan without the permission of Pakistan’s government, something that Mr Bush refused to do. The Bush administration itself is already toning down its rhetoric and trying harder to work with local elites and use non-military tools. There would be more of this under a Democratic president.
Whoever wins, America’s foreign policy will continue to be bedevilled by three problems that Mr Bush has had to contend with. The first is partisanship at home. America will remain deeply divided about how to deal with radical Islam. Conservatives believe that this is the defining struggle of the age, whereas liberals see it as a hysterical response that will only add to the problem . . .
Perhaps after L’Affaire Wright has made those plunky fans of all things Yankee to be sheepish about audacity.
When He’s Right, He’s Right
We’ve deliberately eschewed weighing in on the race to the bottom of recent weeks. Perhaps the static pages here have been disappointing.
We return to a matter raised below; it’s more pressing to us — the inevitable coming effort to nationalize (however disguised) large segments of our financial infrastructure.
We’ve had lunch before with Sebastian Mallaby; his World Bank book left us unmoved. Yet here, he makes a narrow but important point.
Having A Bad Day
Slate today asks the obvious in “When did American companies become incompetent?” (Or least many). Apparently the decade plus of Dilbert was denied access to the rarified airs at Slate. There are so many real reasons to explain this but none of us here are paid to correct Slate.
Moving on, the sense of doom sparked by the fire sale of Bear Sterns is spreading. This beyond lowering the Fed Discount Rate another point. A rate cut is is unlikley to ease commercial credit. Many financial institutions leverages of 20 or 30 times capital. But many many more are as exposed to those unbelievably complex and now obviously reckless sub prime mortgage instruments? No one knows the scale of other Bear Sterns out there. Not even Bob Rubin at City Corp. who said in January of this year that there was no looming crisis. And the Fed’s power is weak anyway. The Bank of Japan, as Bernake knows better than most, literally had a 0% interest rate and it failed to move a moribund Japanese Lost Decade economy. The real question is how do financial markets burdened with deflating assets come to equilibrium in an inflationary environment of possibly staggering dimensions.
Perhaps the Warlord can tap dance again for us. It might raise some badly needed cash.
Also looming along with the strategic implications of the global economy abandoning the dollar in favor of the Euro, etc. the true cost of Operation Iraqi Adventure is far greater than direct outlays. The service lifetime of the U.S. military hardware shortened greatly because of combat deployment. These platforms will require replacement in a remarkable close time frame. It is bordering on lunacy to think even in a normal economic environment that even most of the alleged new mission critical (transformational or not) can be funded. The actual cost in today’s dollar is staggering. In a stagflationary situation. Simply ain’t gonna happen.
One might ponder other demands for attention such as a collapsing public infrastructure nation wide, health care, social security, etc. Quite a challenge even per above competent management. In the end, the Stifung believes that the Fed has a drastically reduced and limited role to play here. Can Congress step up to the plate and pass the necessary legislation to encourage financial institutions exposure by ameliorating the proximate cause re the mortgage exposure. While keeping the moral hazard of giving a get out jail free card to prevent more reckless behavior?
We’ll see sooner than most anticipate. Or are prepared for.
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