There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq!!  We was lied to!  People died, after all, I mean, you know?  The NYT has told us so, for cryin’ out loud.  What is it with you people who keep suspecting that a fellow who had actually used chemical weapons not only against an enemy with whom at war, but also his own subjects, might still have a few lying around the pantry, and that when we didn’t find the stuff when we invaded in 2003, we needed to study on where they might be.

Ignore all those trucks trundling back and forth between Iraq and Syria in the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

And now, Dear Leader admonishes the Syrians not to use any chemical weapons on their own citizens.  No mention is made of where the Syrians might have got the weapons, the delivery systems, and their respective components in this Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article.  Syria got its first such weapons from Egypt in the 1970s, and thereafter continued to build up its stockpile, with everything from a blind eye from to the actual connivance of some few of the western countries now so earnestly lecturing them on using what’s in their arsenal.  During the run-up to the 2003 invasion, satellite imagery showed convoys of trucks headed from Iraq to Syria.  Captured documents show the active participation of Putin’s spetsnaz in moving chemical weapons and components, rockets and their components, and other weapons systems from Iraq to Syria.  Apparently during the war and its aftermath it was common for U.S. soldiers to stumble upon something suspicious, but, having no trained weapons inspectors with them, by the time they came back a day or two later with folks who would know, what they’d found was gone.

Let’s also take a moment and ask why it is that Turkey is so keen to have a Patriot missile defense shield, just now.  Patriots, if the gentle reader will recall, proved themselves very capable at taking out Scud missiles in flight.  What’s that, you say?  Did those naughty North Koreans build Assad an underground factory for assembly of Scud missiles?  Why yes, yes they did.

Now, not everyone agrees that Saddam, a man who pretty much never did what he told you he was going to do (unless it suited him), and who subverted every attempt short of war to rein him in (I’m thinking specifically of his corrupting the entire U.N. oil-for-food program, in which he bribed luminaries such as Kofi Annan and his family to ignore a constant influx of oil-funded contraband), on this one occasion actually did what he said and destroyed his entire stockpile of chemical weapons after the butt-kicking he took in 1991.  The International Herald-Tribune doesn’t seem to think much of the possibility of Iraq’s weapons’ having made their way to Syria, quoting some anecdotes of potential eye-witnesses to the truck convoys on the one hand, and on the other a senior official to scout the possibility.  Who is not cited in the article is the Director of National Intelligence who, relying at least in part on the referenced satellite imagery, stated his opinion that such a transfer did occur.  In any event, at least the author is honest enough to admit that if we ever get a peek inside Assad’s world we may just have to revise some of our received wisdom on whether Geo. W. Bush’s stated basis for war in 2003 was or was not a “lie.”  Reckon there are bets being hedged among the Deep Thinkers?  Reckon they’ll actually report it if found?  Yeah, I don’t either.

The International Herald-Tribune is owned by The New York Times.  You’ll remember them as the ones of whom it was correctly observed, as they betrayed one national security secret after another while our country was actively engaged in a war, that “they’re not anti-war; they’re just on the other side.”  If you Google the topic, more than a few of the skeptical reports, e.g. this one, link back to articles in the NYT and/or its subsidiaries.  The first linked article above is to the London Daily Mail, which is (ahem!) neither owned by the NYT nor an unpaid adjunct to the DNC. 

Then of course there is a Kris Alexander, who it seems actually was on the ground in Iraq post-war, as a weapons expert, and found nothing.  He’s got a few articles over at Wired, in which he pretty vigorously dismisses the suggestion that Iraqi chemical (or other sorts of) WMD made it to Syria in 2003.  I certainly am not going to dispute his statements about what he did or did not find.  His dismissal of the possibility as being nothing more than the fevered imaginations of conspiracy lunatics ought, I think, to engage a bit more fully with the evaluation of what was observed and has not been explained yet.  The satellite images showed what they showed.  What does Alexander believe to have been in those trucks?  Were those the last desperate deliveries of export goods previously contracted for, which Saddam in a mechanical fashion continued to deliver, just like the last Soviet train bearing raw materials crossed the border in the late hours of June 21, 1941?

Other than his personal observations, which as mentioned I’m perfectly willing to take undiscounted, much of Alexander’s analysis in the linked article comes back around to the idea that Saddam’s shunting his most potent weapons off to Syria on the eve of an invasion just makes no sense.  It’s a plausible argument.  I beg to offer a dissenting opinion.  For starts, dictators, especially those who’ve been in power for a good while, do not think like you or I.  They tend to think that no matter what happens, they’ll survive, somehow, by a miracle (Hitler in his bunker in Berlin, literally able to hear the concussion of Soviet artillery shells through the walls, was convinced that FDR’s death on April 12 was the miracle deliverance he’d been waiting for, just like Frederick the Great was saved in the 1700s by a similarly fortuitous death).  Saddam had, by the way, a concrete data point to support him in his evaluation of his post-invasion chances.  The U.S. had already invaded once, destroyed most of his combat army and air force, and still had pulled its punch in leaving him in power.  And that was after he’d actually invaded a neighbor.  In 2001-3 all he’d done was welcome the stray Al Qaeda operative.  And if he intended to give up on coming back, why did he go into hiding for months afterward?  Why did he not just disappear into the shadow world of Arab politics?

With all possible respect for those like Brer Alexander and the others who rely on the essentially psychological argument that it makes no sense for Saddam to have done what is mooted, I think the better interpretation of why he acted as he did is that he fully intended to return to power, once the U.S. had held its victory parades and gone home.  Just like 1991.  His chemical weapons weren’t built to use against America; even a lunatic understands what happens when you pull that kind of trigger against someone who so vastly overpowers you.  You guarantee your personal destruction.  Trying to think myself into the shoes of a madman is pretty presumptuous, of course, but Saddam can be forgiven for thinking that the U.S. would do again what it had done in the past:  Crow on its conquered dunghill and then, weary of the effort, trundle on home.  At which point Saddam, with Assad’s assistance and that of his most loyal followers, who had (let’s not forget) largely melted back into the populace by that point, would re-emerge, and re-armed with his WMD place himself back in power.  He might have to contend with a few opponents here and there, but he’d be the only one armed and backed by a friendly power, and he’d certainly be the only one with non-conventional weapons.  Which he was quite willing to use on his people.  So removing his WMD from the scene in the interim would have served two very realistic goals for him: (i) It would have removed a temptation for the U.S. to hang around, which would be fatal to his hopes; and, (ii) It would preserve his ability to re-impose himself on the country after the U.S. left.

In the end here we are, with a paper tiger at our head, desperately hoping that the Assad regime won’t decide that if it’s going down, it will do so with an empty magazine.  That’s a safe bet.

But they sure can tell when something devalues what they’re in the process of getting and paying for.  Of students polled at Brown University, one of the most famously left-wing campuses in the country, 58% disapproved of the use of racial preferences in admissions, and only 34% approved.

You see, when you dole out a credential on any basis other than demonstrated ability to earn that credential, you cheapen it, not only for the people who got it on that discounted basis, but also for every other holder.  Dare we hope that these students have figured that out?  Unfortunately, as the article points out, we can’t assume that the students’ opinions reflects any lack of mandatory group-think: None was willing to go on record with a disapproving opinion.

The linked article is brief, so we can’t know whether the polling was done with any statistical degree of rigor, nor are we told anything about the sampling population.  It would be interesting to know.  This may be just some “man on the street” sort of interview.  But however it was done, having that percentage even admit in private to heterodox views on the subject has to be seen as some sort of encouraging.

A short screed here, on the word “merit.”  That word is way too value-laden for my liking.  I have absolutely no way of weighing any other human’s “merit,” either in the abstract or concretely.  I can pretty well tell when someone is unmeritorious, but beyond gross-scale differentiation (e.g., I’m reasonably sure that a senior Taliban official responsible for oppression of females in Afghanistan does not deserve to live, let alone to be enrolled at Yale University in preference to any single other of school’s thousands of applicants), but my ability runs out at that point.  All that I can adequately measure is demonstrated (i) ability, or (ii) achievement in some relevant related human activity.  To the extent that I claim I’m taking anything else into account I’m more or less making it up as I go along.  I mean, how do you make any sort of meaningful distinction between the applicant whose mother was an unmarried crack whore living in a beat-up single wide in, say, Harlan County, Kentucky on the one hand and on the other the Vietnamese boat person’s kid who arrived on these shores with a bundle that could be carried in one hand, not knowing the language, but with an intact family and a phenomenal work ethic?  You can’t; you just can’t.  To say that one is more “meritorious” than the other pretends to a degree of knowledge that humans have never possessed and never will.

Except it is.  You have to be a Deep Thinker to be amazed by that fact, though.  You see, Deep Thinkers don’t mix with the rest of us.  They’re so much better than we are, you see.  They live in the correct ZIP Codes, after all; they vote for the correct people, donate to the right causes, and all get their panties in a wad together over the obligatory things, like someone cutting down a tree halfway around the world.  We ignernt incestuous beetle-browed clingers?  They really don’t have any idea about us, except what they read in the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT, New Yorker, TNR, and see on MSNBC.  And don’t let’s forget how thoroughly those infotainment outlets try to understand anyone other than their readership.

So of course the Deep Thinkers know — they just know! — that if you let us have something that will push a .45 cal. bullet downrange at 1,000 f.p.s. or better, we’re all going to put on our face camouflage and go hunt us some Hispanics, or something like that.

Thus when, as the Associated Press reports, gun sales in Virginia increase by 73% and gun-related crime goes down by 24% during the same period, that only “seems to contradict the premise that more guns lead to more crime in Virginia,” according to the feller who did the study, a professor Baker of Virginia Commonwealth University, and they just get all plum comflusterated a-tryin’ to cipher it out.  Well, prof., it’s been 27 or so years since I took statistics for liberal arts folks (i.e. people who can’t do math), but I’ll share something with you: The existence of two measurable diametrically opposing trends, when one of the trends is three times the magnitude of the other, does not “seem to contradict” the proposition that the two variables are positively correlated.  It in fact falsifies that statement.  Had gun sales gone up by 22% and gun-related crime increased by 5%, you might say there was evidence that they are not or only weakly positively correlated.  You might be forgiven for saying further research was needed to see if, as a hireling of the anti-personal-liberty lobby d.b.a. the “Virginia Center for Public Safety” (I’ll remind the gentle reader that tyrants since the days of Robespierre have done business under the banner of “public safety”) allows, “But is the crime going down because more people are buying guns, or is the crime going down because the crime is going down?”  But you cannot intelligently make those statements when the numbers move opposite to each other and by those magnitudes.

[Yes, dear, there are in fact crimes other than gun-related crimes, but are we really interested in whether a three-quarters increase in gun purchases moves the needle on tax fraud, meth labs, or importing rosewood which you can’t prove was harvested in a “sustainable” manner?]

I’ll also observe that not only are the numbers moving opposite to each other, but they’re doing so precisely during a period, 2006-2011, when all the other factors which we rednecks are assured actually cause crime, such as poverty, economic dislocation, long-term unemployment, increasing political polarization, folks losing their homes, etc., have been going through the roof.  In short, everything, literally everything which according to their predictive models would produce measurable increase in gun-related crime has not only failed to produce any increase at all, but has failed to stop the decrease.  Thus, not only has a near-doubling of Input 1 not produced any increase at all in Outcome X but rather a 24% decrease in observable Outcome X, but the simultaneous near doubling of Inputs 2 (e.g., going from 5% unemployment to 8.2% unemployment is a 64% increase) through n have likewise failed to produce any increase. 

Mind you, for the past half-century or so we’ve had our pocketbooks repeatedly visited by those like the “public safety” feller, on the basis — among many others, admittedly — that certain things “cause crime,” and that we need to shell out billions upon billions of dollars to “fight” this, that, or the other self-destructive behavior because if we don’t, it will “cause crime to increase,” and so forth.  Now this “public safety” feller wants us to understand that crime just goes up and down because it . . . well, because it just goes up and down, magically on its own, and independently of any other varying, measurable behavior in society at large.  What he’s really telling me is some one or more of the following statements:  (i) I am an idiot; (ii) I have been lying to you all these years while I gulled you into forking out your money; (iii) I cannot understand basic notions of statistics; (iv) I have never heard the name Karl Popper; or, (v) I, too, am afraid of losing my job.

 Dan Mitchell over at International Liberty has the correct two-sentence summation of the Deep Thinkers’ outlook:  “Gee, there are more innocent people with guns and people are surprised that criminals are now more reluctant to commit crimes? I guess you have to be a reporter or an academic to be surprised by this common-sense observation.”

Last night the EU parliament approved a new series of regulation of the rating agencies, such as Standard & Poor, Fitch, and Moody’s.  They are now to be liable for, among other things, “grossly negligent” ratings.  Issuers who own 10% or more of one of the agencies are forbidden to use that agency to issue a rating on their securities; ownership of 5% of a rating agency must be publicly disclosed.  Every three years issuers of certain complex products must change at least one of the agencies rating their securities; the one they change out must then wait four years before being permitted to rate another security of that issuer.  The agencies are also to be required to issue a uniform, mathematically-expressed rating in addition to their alphabetical ratings.  By 2020 no investor is to be required automatically to regard an issued rating (presumably this is to insulate fiduciaries from being prohibited from making investments unless they have a particular rating).

Now, a good-faith argument can be made for all of the above measures.  The whole ratings game can, just as with any other repeat-player dynamic, easily mutate into a mutual accommodation society.  There seems to have been more than a tad of that going on in the run-up to the 2008 collapse.  Of course, the single biggest part of the bubble — the U.S. housing bubble — was not only being deliberately inflated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but its pet Congressmen were publicly and vehemently denying any problems at all with their donor’s portfolio or finances.  The statements of, e.g. Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd were far more egregious than anything put out by S&P or any of the others.  But we aren’t talking about that.

 The question that’s niggling away in the back of my mind on this particular set of regulations is:  Why only now?  All of the problems with rating agencies have been known for years; their role in the 2008 collapse has been known for years; the measures adopted by the EU are not terribly complicated measures.  Why has it taken just over four whole years to enact a fairly modest slate of reforms to the industry?

OK; I admit I wasn’t being entirely forthcoming in that preceding paragraph.  The Eurocrats tipped their hand.  Their sudden concern for all the poor downtrodden investors out there has got bugger all to do with what Moody’s has to say about issues of Ford Motor Corporation, and everything to do with what it has to say about whether it’s a good idea to keep buying European sovereign debt.  I deliberately didn’t mention above all of the new regulations.  F’rinstance, the agencies are now prohibited from issuing ratings with respect to EU-area sovereign debt except three times a year, and only when the European exchanges are closed.  The proposal was initially floated to forbid them outright from expressing an opinion at all about whether Greece, which within the past couple of days has just got another few dozen billion Euros, at zero percent interest, and obtained extensions on its existing debts, and is proposing write-downs of its fellow-states’ holdings, might not be the best place to park your money.

According to the linked article, those super-dooper diligent Eurocrats are have been just worrying themselves sick (cue Pete Puma:  “I’m the little feller’s mother and I’ve been so wooooorrrried about him!“) that the ratings agencies have been over-valuing private issues of securities.  Bullshit, as the same article makes clear:  They’re worried that by cluing in the pigeons investors in EU sovereign debt that buying paper from such paragons of financial probity as Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and/or France is shooting one’s money up a wild hog’s ass, those worthies might have to pay market price for their promises to pay the money back, and that the market price for their worthless paper might actually fluctuate according to their own behavior. 

When you ponder those additional nuggets, the underlying purpose behind absolving investors from paying attention to whether S&P says a particular bond is junk or gilt becomes a bit clearer.  Who are the big purchasers of sovereign debt?  Pension funds and financial institutions.  They are, in other words, investors who are bound by fiduciary obligations, or whose own soundness is at issue on a daily basis.  If, for example, Dresdner Bank is required by German banking regulation not to hold more than X% of paper in its portfolio that is rated Aab or worse, then it cannot legally continue to purchase worthless Greek paper.  If the pension fund for, say, a bunch of Dutch shipyard workers is held to a fiduciary’s standard of prudence in investing its members’ retirement assets, then wouldn’t it be nice for the EU simply to declare that putting the whole wad in Portuguese sovereign debt is just hunky-dorey?

Just to make the actual agenda even more abundantly clear, even to someone as dense as a NYT pundit:  One of the German SPD members has demanded nothing less than — you really do have to admire the brass on this guy — a specifically EU-run ratings agency to express opinions as to the soundness of the EU’s and its member states’ obligations.  Really.  He really said that.

You know, if only the emperor in the story had thought to pass a decree declaring it illegal to express an opinion on another person’s clothing except on three stipulated occasions per year, he’d have done so much better.

Updated (28 Nov 12): To add link to relevant video of Pete Puma.

Some years ago I decided why I don’t like identity politics.  It’s not because a group of my fellow citizens happens to agree on a particular range of issues and publicly identify themselves as so agreeing.  Hell’s bells; that’s why political parties form, among other reasons.  Why I don’t like identity politics is that by your choosing to draw a line in the sand, between you and me, in front of whatever “identity” you choose (let’s be clear here: the “identity” you choose as your political identity is entirely a volitional act), by the very act of defining me as not of that identity, you force me into an oppositional stance.  This in spite of any thought or feeling I might harbor for you — or others “like” you — otherwise.

If you define your political objectives as whatever is Good for Group X Over Not-Group X is what you support, and you’ve defined me out of Group X, then you force me to adopt as my political identity Not-Group X.  Well, perhaps not force, because I always have the option, I suppose, of just sitting back and taking whatever you choose to pour upon my head because I’m not part of Group X.  You’re going to have to excuse me if I decline to accept that as a legitimate “choice.” 

What if, however, I do not want to have my political “identity” chosen for me, least of all by you?  What if I’d like to have the freedom to support or oppose whatever measure is under consideration not based upon whether it’s Good For Group X, or Beneficial to Group Y, but whether it so improves Things Overall that I can afford to disregard whether it incidentally helps or harms, advances or leaves by the roadside, any subset (however defined) of citizens? 

It’s true, of course, that most measures, most of the time, will have an effect on groups, to the extent they can be said to have specific effects on identifiable groups at all, that defined themselves based on self-selected attributes.  For instance, the environmentalists.  One chooses to be an environmentalist or not.  One may join, leave, and re-join that group at will; one is not born to it.  So that everyone’s electricity rates going through the roof because the environmentalists want to feel good about themselves for shutting down coal-generated electricity is something I can engage on its merits, irrespective of whatever group identifier is chosen by its proponents.  But there are attributes which I cannot change; I was born a Caucasian male.  For all intents and purposes, I’m stuck where I live; I cannot just up and move a law practice to an entirely different part of the country.  So when you choose to back a particular proposal because it will advance Group X over whites, or males, or my part of the country, then I do not have the luxury of disregarding any of those attributes of mine in pondering my response to you.

I resent the hell out of that.  Who do you think you are, to put me in a box?

This Wall Street Journal article alludes to that dynamic.  When you divide the American electorate into all manner of “ethnic” groupings, each of which shares as its principal attribute “not-white,” then what you’ve done is to re-create the white identity politics of the pre-1970s.  You have, whether you admit it or not, re-issued Bull Connor (a member of the Democratic National Committee, don’t let’s forget) his invitation to the dance.  I’ll share a li’l nugget of history with you:  Bull Connor didn’t play well with others.

I wish you joy of him.

During the presidential campaign, by anyone:  “What good are gay rights if your country is falling apart?”

“Gay” “rights” and “reproductive freedom,” “climate change,” and all those other cheap, shiny bangles which appear, based on the election post-mortems, to have enticed enormous swathes of the American public to vote for an avowedly socialistic, race-baiting anti-American demagogue who rejoices when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over entire countries — and leaves American ambassadors to be murdered while watching the live video of the attack — despite the worst record of economic improvement of any president since World War II, are luxury issues to be indulged in by countries that are not broke and going more so.

Unsubsidized poverty is a very effective form of birth control.  No one cares who calls himself “married” when he’s living under a bridge.  Who’s paying for Her Pill won’t move a single piece of REO off the local bank’s books.  When the pay earned at 10:00 a.m. today will not buy half the loaf of bread it would have bought at 3:00 p.m. yesterday nobody really gives a damn whether you Ask or Tell.  When you can tell whether the Planet is Cooling from the soles of your feet on the pavement, felt directly through the gaping holes in your shoes, you begin to care measurably less whether the rosewood on some drug-addled musician’s guitar neck was harvested in a “sustainable” manner or not.

A humble prediction:  This is the last time a question like this will appear in the New York Times.