Category Archives: Strategic

T. Boone Pickens’ plan for energy independence

Assuming the link works for you, I invite you to go read T. Boone Pickens’ piece in the WSJ today, headlined, "My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil."

Now I know what you’re thinking: Mr. Pickens being an oil man from way back, his plan for independence is likely to be as simple and monolithic as Joe Wilson‘s — specifically, drill.

But while he says, way down in the piece, "Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well," it plays less of a role in his vision than it does in the Energy Party‘s, if that. It comes after he urges us to "explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation."

Turbines All of that follows his exploration of his main idea, which is to convert a large portion of our energy
generation to wind power, which he lauds by saying "Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean." He would use natural gas thereby freed up from power generation to run our vehicles.

All that is great, but I think the best passage in the piece is when he explains why we must take extraordinary measures to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I leave you with that excerpt:

Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.
This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world’s oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world’s reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.
In fact, if we don’t do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history…

Herbal domino theory

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A couple of weeks back we accompanied my brother and his family to the farmers’ market up in Greenville. We were in the market for herbs, particularly cilantro, because of an excellent recipe for three-bean salad my eldest daughter makes. It calls for fresh cilantro, a.k.a. coriander.

But all they had was something very different looking called "Vietnamese cilantro." The vendors said this variety was particularly well suited to our climate. So OK; we bought some, and added it to several other little pots of herbs we had bought in recent days.

Having recently given up on a plant at my office that didn’t seem to respond well to watering only when I felt like it, I decided to stick several of these herbs in a pot (with my wife’s supervision, because what I don’t know about plants would fill a library) and take them to the office.

I’ve been quite attentive to this little herb garden, watering it constantly (the terra cotta soaks up a lot of it) and rearranging my office in order to keep it in the sun. And what has been the result?

The Vietnamese cilantro has taken over. Relentlessly. The other plants — Spicy Globe Basil, Greek oregano, and plain old sweet basil — have seen it coming and just curled up and died in its path, like so many dominoes. Only the tiniest sprigs of the oregano and sweet basil remain, and you can’t see them because the Vietnamese herb has grown to three or four times its original size.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe all that watering has created a rice-paddy-like environment. Maybe it’s my failure to keep significant numbers of ground troops in-country. In any case, I think it’s time to send in a tiny helicopter and get the oregano and basil out.

Vietnam_paddy

Our Joe cup overfloweth

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Y‘all saw where I bragged on Joe for his fine piece in the WSJ the other day. Well, today we have a counterpoint from Joe in that same publication, so our cup overfloweth.

OK, for those of you too lazy to follow links, I’m talking Lieberman and Biden, respectively. Both of them are good guys. We endorsed the first Joe in his presidential bid in 2004, and might well have endorsed the other this time around if he hadn’t dropped out before the S.C. primary (we went with Obama instead, you’ll recall). Both are blessed with essential Joe-ness, as I’ve explained before.

And although these pieces are set against each other, there is much to love in each of them, infused as they are with Joe-ness. In other words, they are written by rational men who are not entirely enslaved by the idiotic partisan extremes of our times. Joe is much more inclined to support his party’s nominee, but that’s because he hasn’t made the radical break that Joe was forced into. But you still don’t find the kind of polarized claptrap that you usually hear from the party faithful on either side.

OK, I’ll start using last names, although it sounds unfriendly…

Here’s one of the best parts of Mr. Biden’s piece. It repeats a point that I’ve praised him for making in the past, which is that President Bush blew a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lead this nation, and the Western alliance, into a far better place than the sad situation that Joe, I mean Tom, Friedman described the other day. Anyway, here’s the Biden excerpt:

Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush’s reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.
The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead – by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests – Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

As with Lieberman, though, there are weak spots. In particular, there’s this contradictory passage:

Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and countries are using it toward very different goals. Messrs. Bush and McCain lump together, as a single threat, extremist groups and states more at odds with each other than with us: Sunnis and Shiites, Persians and Arabs, Iraq and Iran, al Qaeda and Shiite militias. If they can’t identify the enemy or describe the war we’re fighting, it’s difficult to see how we will win.
The results speak for themselves.
On George Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom, has been on the march: Iran is much closer to the bomb; its influence in Iraq is expanding; its terrorist proxy Hezbollah is ascendant in Lebanon and that country is on the brink of civil war.

The problem is that on the one hand, he feels constrained (since he’s still in the party) to state the party line that terrorism is a means, not an end, or even a coherent enemy — all of which is true, but his litany of all the different contending actors is belied by the truth he later embraces: That through it all, Iran has been on the march, and gaining against us. That would have been an excellent point to make; it’s just too bad he weakened it by making the situation seem less coherent than it is two paragraphs before (this incoherence of the enemy is essential to the modern Democratic ideology that Lieberman abhors — the refusal to clearly see and clearly state the degree to which we face a coherent, albeit complex, enemy).

I refer to another recent Friedman column, which — thanks to the fact that he isn’t carrying anybody‘s political water — states how all of these superficially disparate issues are connected, to our nation’s great disadvantage (largely due to the Bush failures that Biden refers to):

The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran.
That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, “In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S.”

Anyway, if the link works for you, I recommend you read this one as well as the last one. Between the two of them, you’ll see an intelligent way to debate foreign policy, as opposed to the idiocy of left and right, Democrat and Republican.

Joe laments loss of the party of FDR, Truman, JFK

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This is why I like Joe Lieberman so much — he’s always writing stuff that sounds like I wrote it myself, always giving me cause to think, Thank God I’m not alone here…

Specifically, he wrote in an op-ed piece in today’s WSJ:

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?…

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

He goes on to lament how this unraveled over Vietnam. He writes wistfully of efforts by such Democrats as himself (remember the Third Way?) to pull the party back from a condition in which it blamed America for all its international troubles, as the party became "prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy."

There are flaws in the piece, admittedly. He uses the inaccurate common terminology, referring to this trend toward self-loathing isolationism as a move "to the left" — when I would assert that it is the rejection of the kind of idealistic, internationalist liberalism of FDR, JFK and the rest. Isolationism is, if nothing else, a manifestation of conservatism — and not the better sort of conservatism, either.

But set that aside. He ends strongly, with a quote from "a great Democratic secretary of state," Dean Acheson (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was from Connecticut):

(N)o people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.

Go into Burma with guns blazing

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Alternative headline for this post, for those of you who thought that one a bit too lurid:

I’m down with R2P

I refer here to the alleged United Nations principle of "responsibility to protect," which Trudy Rubin wrote about in her column on today’s op-ed page. I say alleged because it’s one of those things the U.N. talks about, but doesn’t do. To help you catch up, here’s an excerpt from the column:

What do you do when the world is lined up to help more than a million desperate people hit by a cyclone, and Myanmar’s hard-line junta blocks that help?
That is the unprecedented situation confronting the United Nations, Western aid agencies and humanitarian organizations. No one has ever seen anything like it….
So should, or can, U.N. member states force the junta to accept the world’s outstretched hand?
Ironically, U.N. members adopted a concept back in fall 2005 that would seem to answer that question. At the urging of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the General Assembly endorsed the following principle: The international community has a “responsibility to protect” civilians when their governments can’t or won’t stop genocide or crimes against humanity — even if this means violating a country’s national sovereignty.
This concept, known variously as “humanitarian intervention” or by the abbreviation “R2P,” has gone nowhere. It has not proved useful in dealing with the quasi-genocide in Darfur. Authoritarian regimes view R2P as a potential cover for Western military efforts at regime change.
But if it ever had any relevance, the concept ought to apply to the horrific situation in Myanmar…

Trudy says that this situation would not involve regime change, but hey — wouldn’t that be a wonderful byproduct?

Unfortunately, instead of using our military proactively to shove thugs and tyrants out of the way so we can help our people, we’re still arguing over whether we should have gone into Iraq. In other words, instead of expanding our capacity to project force — the way China’s doing like gangbusters — we’re arguing about whether to make use of the military we have.

Not only can we not get off the DIME as the world’s one (for the moment) superpower, we can’t even decide to use the "M."

So the dying continues in Darfur. And Myanmar, a.k.a. Burma.

Let’s talk military buildup

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There are certain things that worry me, and nobody seems to be talking about them. In fact, our public conversations tend to go off in directions entirely opposed to where the discussion should be going. For instance:

Children’s brains are essentially formed, in terms of their ability to learn for the rest of their lives, by age 3. What do we do about that? I don’t know, but it’s weird that we can’t even make up our minds to fund 4K for all the kids who could benefit from it.
Also on education — we need to bring about serious reforms in public education, from consolidating districts to merit pay to empowering principals. But thanks to our governor and his ilk, we talk about whether we want to support public schools at all.
China is growing and modernizing its military at a pace that matches its economic growth. It won’t be all that long before it achieves parity with our own. But instead of talking about matching that R&D, we can’t make up our minds to commit the resources necessary to fight a low-intensity conflict against relatively weak enemies with low-tech weapons.

Anyway, there was an op-ed piece in the WSJ today about the latter worry:

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat.

Unlike the U.S., which governs itself almost unconsciously, reactively and primarily for the short term, China has plotted a long course, in which with great deliberation it joins economic growth to military power. Thirty years ago, in what may be called the "gift of the Meiji," Deng Xiaoping transformed the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong arms) into China’s 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military."

Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves. And if you can, try to get the people running for president to talk about it. We need them to…

The Energy Party Manifesto: Feb. 4, 2007

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Since, I’m on my Energy Party kick again, it occurs to me to provide you with something never previously published on the blog: My original Energy Party column from the paper. Since it was based on a blog post to start with, I didn’t post it here. Consequently, when I do my obligatory "Energy Party" link, it’s always to the incomplete, rough draft version of the party manifesto.

So, if only to give myself something more complete to link to in the future, is the full column version, published in The State on Feb. 4, 2007. Here’s a PDF of the original page, and here’s the column itself:

THE STATE
JOIN MY PARTY, AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE. REALLY.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY talks about the weather, which is as boring and pointless as the cliche suggests. So let’s do something about it.
And while we’re at it, let’s win the war on terror, undermine tyrants around the globe, repair our trade imbalance, make our air more breathable, drastically reduce highway deaths and just generally make the whole world a safer, cleaner place.
It’ll be easy, once we make up our minds to do it. But first, you Democrats and Republicans must throw off the ideological chains that bind you, and we independents must get off the sidelines and into the game.
In other words, join my new party. No, not the Unparty I’ve written about in the past. You might say that one lacked focus.
This one will be the Energy Party. Or the "Responsible Party," "Pragmatic Party" or "Grownup Party." Any will do as far as I’m concerned, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going with "Energy" for now.
Like weather, everybody talks about Energy, but nobody proposes a comprehensive, hardnosed plan to git ‘er done. So let’s change that, go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do.
I’ve made a start on the plan (and mind, I’m not speaking for the editorial board here). Join me, and we’ll refine it as we go along:
— * Jack up CAFE standards. No messing around with Detroit on this one. It’s possible to make cars that go 50 miles to the gallon. OK, so maybe your family won’t fit in a Prius. Let’s play nice and compromise: Set a fleet average of 40 mph within five years.
— * Raise the price of gasoline permanently to $4. When the price of gas is $2, slap on a $2 tax. When demand slacks off and forces the price down to $1.50, jack the tax up to $2.50. If somebody nukes some oil fields we depend upon, raising the price to $3, the tax drops to $1. Sure, you’ll be paying more, but only as long as you keep consuming as much of it as you have been. Which you won’t. Or if you do, we’ll go to $5.
— * You say the poor will have trouble with the tax? So will I. Good thing we’re going to have public transportation for a change (including my favorite, light rail). That’s one thing we’ll spend that new tax money on.
— * Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power.
— * Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bends my ear about it almost daily. He apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez, bless him.) This will drastically reduce our transportation-related fuel consumption, and have the happy side benefit of saving thousands of lives on our highways. And yes, you can drive 55.
— * Enforce the blasted speed limits. If states say they can’t (and right now, given our shortage of troopers, South Carolina can’t), give them the resources out of the gas tax money. No excuses.
— * Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course). It makes me tired to hear people who are stuck in the 1970s talk about all the dangerous waste from nuke plants. Nuclear waste is compact and containable. Coal waste (just to cite one "safe" alternative) disperses into the atmosphere, contaminates all our lungs and melts the polar ice caps. Yeah, I know; it would be keen if everyone went back to the land and stopped using electricity, but give it up — it ain’t happening.
— * Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the winthe- war kitty.
— * If we don’t ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Say, "Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps." (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.
— * Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin’ slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity. But to keep us focused, limit all of these activities to no more than 20 years. Put the limit into the Constitution.
You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right. Yeah, I know some of this is, um, provocative. But that’s what we need. We have to wake up, go allout to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
Then, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored, or how hard you think it is to do what needs doing. Stop whining and grow up. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that? Let me know, because we need to get going on this stuff.

Join the party at my — I mean, our– Web Headquarters: http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

We’d KILL a guy for passing intel to Israel?

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Somehow I just caught up with this news, and I’ve got to ask, We’re talking about killing a guy for passing intel to the Israelis?

That’s what the NYT reported this morning:

On Wednesday, one day after Mr. Kadish, 84, was charged with slipping secret military documents to the Israeli government during the 1980s, they were trying to square the gruff, kindly man they knew as so honorable as never to cheat at cards with a criminal suspect who could face the death penalty if convicted.

You’re kidding, right?

I mean, look at the sweet old guy (above): So this is James Bond all of a sudden? Or perhaps I should say, Kim Philby (whom we didn’t kill, by the way, even though he was working for the real bad guys)?

For one thing, what secrets do we think we could possibly have that the Mossad didn’t know already?

Second, we’re talking the Israelis here, people! Don’t we tell them stuff anyway? And don’t they tell us stuff? I mean, am I expected to believe that George W. Bush and the boys figured out the whole North Korea-Syria nuke thing all by their lonesome?

Sure, there are certain lines one doesn’t cross (unless invited to) even with your best friends, but come on — this would be like whacking a guy for passing info to the Brits (speaking of Mr. Philby).

And when’s the last time we did that? Major André? Speaking of which — and I hope this isn’t going to get me into a lot of trouble — I recently crossed paths with Major André. Really.

You know that column I had Sunday about my conversation with the Pennsylvania waitress? Immediately Andre
after that conversation, I walked up the street and ran into the historical marker at right (which tells you which diner, if you’re really, really good at central PA geography).

In fact, I took the picture on my phone — and then promptly forgot about it, until I happened to read about Mr. Kadish, and got to thinking about executing spies, and the Israelis, and the British, which led to Major André, which led to "Hey, I think I shot a picture of that."

And now that I think further about it, it occurs to me that the compact device I used to capture that image would probably have been described as a "spy camera" back in the early ’80s, which is when Mr. Kadish was allegedly letting an Israeli "diplomat" take pictures in his basement of stuff he brought home from work. Makes ya think, huh?

Danger is my middle name.

Forget Real ID; Big Brother’s going private

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While Gov. Mark Sanford and other opponents of Big Gummint are busily fighting that hyper-scary Threat to All We Hold Sacred, the Real ID program, Big Brother’s turning to the private sector to get the dirty deed done.

The Financial Times reports that, under a program (that’s "programme" to you Brits) run by Homeland Security, air travelers are voluntarily turning their most intimate identifying info over to private contractors:

Until recently the only thing apart from love that money could not
buy was a guaranteed place at the front of an airport security queue.
That is changing, as an additional 500 US air passengers a day agree to
hand over a $100 (£50) annual fee, plus their fingerprints and iris
scans, for the right to become “registered travellers” in private
programmes supervised by the Department of Homeland Security.

Once
the authorities have run an applicant’s background checks to ensure he
or she is not a threat to airline security, the successful RT receives
a credit card-style pass containing biometric information and the
privilege of joining specially designated fast lanes at a growing
number of US airports. The market leader, Verified Identity Pass (VIP),
has received about 100,000 applications, of which 75,000 have been
approved.

I suppose the reader reaction to this news will serve as a sort of litmus test: Libertarians will say, "See? Told you the private sector can get the job done better than gummint!"

Others among us would far rather give up such information only to Uncle Sam, who is constrained by laws written by the representives we elect, than to someone with a profit motive, who might choose to do whatever he pleases with it. Different strokes.

First we outsource warfighting. Now this.

Don’t back down on the 100-year remark!

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My least favorite thing John McCain has said in this campaign was that "no new taxes" nonsense. But one of the best things he’s said was the bit about our being in Iraq 100 years.

It was about time somebody said it. Sure, maybe it was a tad hyperbolic (Why’d you say 100, Luke? I thought it was a nice, round number), but the point needed to be made. This is a long-term commitment. We’re not getting out any time soon. Everybody knows that, including the Democratic candidates (although they have to tiptoe around it much of the time). They say no, we won’t be out in 2013, but fortunately no one asks them about beyond that. McCain, like grumpy old Dad, just told us kids to stop asking if we’re there yet — it’s a long trip, so settle back.

It has always seemed obvious to me, from the moment we went in, that our involvement with Iraq would be long, too long to predict the end, if there is an end. If you want to be mad at Bush for committing us this way, be mad. But there’s no changing the fact — we’re committed. No friend could ever again trust us, and no enemy ever be deterred, if we walked away from that.

I don’t know how long we’ll need to have troops there, and neither does McCain. Saying "100 years" moves us off the absurdity of talking about how fast we can skedaddle, and helps us focus on, "Well, we’re here — so what do we do next?" And, not least among the advantages, we no longer encourage terrorists to think, "Just one more car bomb, and they’ll leave!"

It’s also a gift to the antiwar folks. No longer need they moan vaguely about "unending war." Now, their grievance can be specific: "100 years of war!" It clarifies things for everybody.

So you can imagine how distressed I was to see this headline today: "McCain says 100-year remark distorted." No! I thought — don’t take it back!

But he wasn’t. He was just explaining that he meant what I’d always thought he’d meant — we’d have a presence there over the next century in the same way we’ve been in Korea and Germany for over half a century now. He wasn’t talking about fighting that long. In fact, he said, we "will win the war in Iraq and win it fairly soon."

That brings us to the semantic question of when a war ends, which is not as simple as it sounds in this post-Clausewitzian world. Conventional warfare ended a few weeks after we invaded in 2003. Although there have been some good-sized ground actions since then, they have not formed a coherent whole, in the sense that there’s no specific, unified enemy out there to surrender to us — which is how a war normally ends. So we get into movable measurements of relative peace. Is the war over when there are this many casualties in a month? No? How about this many?

Does the mere presence of troops on the ground constitute a state of war? Some would probably say "yes," but I certainly would not — and point, once again, to Germany. We kept our troops there as a stabilizing force, long decades after the shooting stopped. It’s worked beautifully. It’s worked, somewhat less easily, in Korea and Bosnia as well.

The thing is, 100 years from now, we will have troops in a lot of places around the globe. There are Bosnias not yet thought of. That’s assuming we’re still the unipolar power. There are reasons to think we won’t be, and plenty of Americans today think that would be fine. We won’t be if the Chinese have their way, and it’s certainly not the vision of the future that Putin’s peddling. This faces us with a question — is the world a better place with its first and greatest liberal democracy still dominant, or with a KGB or Tiananmen Square sort of regime?

Another county heard from on endowed chairs

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Samuel Tenenbaum (pictured above, back when he was running Columbia’s Katrina relief effort) hipped me to this editorial from over in Anderson this morning. An excerpt:

We’re puzzled by Gov. Mark Sanford’s estimation of the effectiveness of endowed chairs for research, especially considering his usually forward-thinking positions on technology and economic development.
Last week, Mr. Sanford encouraged House lawmakers to reconsider a proposal that removes the cap on lottery proceeds for the Centers of Economic Excellence program…..
Before the lottery became official in South Carolina, we questioned whether endowed chairs were the best use of funds. But it’s clear that transforming our state into one that is in the forefront of research into health care, automotives and other economic development opportunities could not have gotten this far without the financial boost from lottery proceeds.
For once, South Carolina is thinking not just about what next year might bring but what could develop in five years or 10 years or even 20 years in the future as a result of research efforts right here at home.

Frankly, I’m puzzled as to why the Anderson paper is puzzled. Maybe it’s because it labors under the mistaken impression that Mr. Sanford "usually" manifests "forward-thinking positions on technology and economic development." Where they got that, I don’t know. If he’s done that, I must have been looking somewhere else at the time. His pattern ranges from neutral to hostile when it comes to ecodevo investments. If you’ll recall, his first big move in that arena came in his first month in office, when he put the brakes on Clemson’s I-CAR program. Soon after being hit by a tsunami of outrage from Upstate leaders, he let the project go ahead. Here’s what the chair of our endowed chairs board had to say Sunday about what that project has produced:

For instance, the endowed chairs program is a central component of the Clemson International Center for Automotive Research. The recruiting of three world-renowned experts in automotive engineering has already attracted major investment from companies such as BMW, Timken, Sun Microsystems and Michelin, and — all told more than $220 million in private investment and 500 jobs in the Upstate with an average salary of $75,000.

Also, here’s what BMW had to say recently about that partnership.

Again, as I said in my column Sunday, our governor doesn’t believe, deep down, in public investment in building our economy, whether we’re talking K-12 public schools or endowed chairs. He believes all that is needed for a robust economy is the right "soil conditions," which to him largely means reduced income taxes.

Finally, why did Samuel, the head of the Energy Party’s think tank, bring this to my attention? Because Samuel is the father of endowed chairs. He came up with the idea of spending lottery funds this way, he fought to convince Gov. Jim Hodges to go along with it, and has fought ever since against short-sighted efforts in the Legislature to kill or curtail the program and spend the money on something more immediately politically appealing. Samuel also served on the endowed chairs board from its inception until Mark Sanford replaced him last year.

But while he may be a cheerleader without portfolio, he cheers just as loudly as ever, and for good reason. The endowed chairs program, his baby, offers a lot to cheer about — and will continue to do so, if it survives the likes of Mark Sanford.

Sanford fails to derail progress — this time

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LATE WEDNESDAY, I thought I had come up with an excuse to say something encouraging about Gov. Mark Sanford.
Such opportunities come so seldom that I didn’t want this idea to get away from me. I sent a note to my colleagues to enlist their help in remembering: “Should we do some kind of attaboy on the governor using his bully pulpit for this good cause (as opposed to some of the others he is wont to push)?” I was referring to his efforts to jawbone the Legislature into meaningful reform of our DUI law.
Moments later, I read the governor’s guest column on our op-ed page about a flat tax, which was his latest attempt to slip through an income tax cut, which at times seems to be the only thing he cares about doing as governor. This chased thoughts of praise from my mind.
For the gazillionth time, he cited Tom Friedman in a way that would likely mortify the columnist and author. His “argument,” if you want to call it that: Since The World Is Flat, folks on the other side of the world are going to get ahead of us if we take a couple of hours to pull together our receipts and file a tax return. Really. “Rooting around shoeboxes of receipts” once a year was going to do us in. (And never mind the fact that most paperwork is done on the federal return, with the state return piggybacking on that.)
Then, he argued that his plan for cutting the income tax (which was his point, not avoiding the onerous filing) was necessary to offset a proposed cigarette tax increase. The alternative would be “to grow government,” which is how he describes using revenue to get a three-to-one federal match to provide health care for some of our uninsured citizens.
Here in the real world, folks want to raise our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax to price the coffin nails beyond the means of teenagers. Everybody who has in any way participated in conversations at the State House about the issue over the last several years knows this. Yet the governor of our state, who seems only to have conversations with himself, can ask this about raising that tax: “(W)hat for, more government or a lower-tax option?” In his narrowly limited version of reality, those are the only considerations.
But enough about that essay from an alternative dimension. What I read on the front page the next morning drove it from my mind: “Sanford: ‘Endowed chairs’ a failure.” It was about his latest attack on one of the few really smart, strategic moves this state has made in the past decade.
It’s the one good thing to come out of Gov. Jim Hodges’ execrable state lottery. (I used to struggle to come up with good things to say about him, too, but this was one such thing.) The scholarships? We were doing that without the lottery, and would have expanded them without the lottery except Gov. Hodges vetoed that bill (because he wanted a lottery).
But a small chunk of the new “chump tax” was set aside to provide seed money to attract some of the best and brightest minds to South Carolina, and put them to work building our economy. Gov. Sanford has never liked this idea, because he doesn’t like the state to invest in the future in any appreciable way apart from land conservation (which is a fine idea, but hardly a shot in the arm to the economy). He believes we don’t need to invest more in education, or research, or even our Department of Commerce, which he takes such pride in having trimmed. His entire “economic development” plan is to cut the income tax. This attracts folks who have already made their pile and are looking for a tax haven in which to hide it, and makes him a hero to the only political entity in the nation that sees him as a hot property: the Club for Growth, whose president showed just how out of touch that group is with even the Republican portion of the electorate by suggesting John McCain pick Mr. Sanford as his running mate.
The thing that made this outburst from the governor particularly galling is that on Wednesday, I had met Jay Moskowitz, the new head of Health Sciences South Carolina — a consortium of universities and hospitals teaming together to make our state healthier, both physically and economically.
Dr. Moskowitz is the former deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, and most recently held a stack of impressive titles at Penn State, including “chief scientific officer.” He made it clear that he would not be here if not for the endowed chairs program. Nor would others. He spoke of the top people he’s recruited in his few months here, who have in turn recruited others, an example of the “cascade of people that are going to be recruited with each of these chairs.”
These folks aren’t just coming to buy a few T-shirts at the beach and leave. They’re here to make their home, and to build their new home into the kind of place that will attract other creative minds. The endowed chairs program is the principal factor that convinces them to pull up stakes and make the effort. “I had a wonderful job in Pennsylvania,” said Dr. Moskowitz, and he wouldn’t have left it without believing that South Carolina was committed to moving forward on a broad research front.
He doesn’t say it this way, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t have come if he had thought Mark Sanford’s “leave it alone” approach was typical of our state’s leadership.
Fortunately, it is not. The S.C. House, led by Speaker Bobby Harrell, rose up in response to the governor’s naysaying and voted unanimously to extend the endowed chairs program.
This is a moment of high irony for me. For 17 years I’ve pushed to give more power to South Carolina’s governor because our state so badly needed visionary leadership, and I thought there was little reason to expect it would come from our Legislature.
But on Thursday, it did. And if the Senate has the wisdom to follow suit, your children and my grandchildren will have reason to be grateful.

Meanwhile, Britannia no longer rules waves

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As long as I’m on a naval-news kick today, this was in the Daily Mail — you know, the paper the "Paperback Writer‘s" character’s son worked for:

Iran turned up the heat in the propaganda war with the West yesterday by parading a Royal Navy boat through Tehran.

The boat had been captured in 2004 together with six Royal
Marines and two sailors in the Shatt al Arab waterway that divides Iraq
and Iran.

To outrage in Britain, Tehran humiliated the servicemen by
parading them blindfolded on TV and forcing two to read out apologies
after alleging they had strayed into its territorial waters – claims
categorically denied by Britain.

Yesterday Iran sought to embarrass Britain once again, trundling the boat through the capital raised up on the back of a lorry.

In the back of a bleeding lorry, of all things. This being too late for Jack Aubrey to conduct a cutting-out expedition to get it back (sorry, but I’m going to keep trolling until I find somebody who’s read those books), I suppose we and our special-relationship chums will just have to keep a stiff upper lip over it all.

Of course, it’s kind of pathetic that the Iranians are so proud to have captured something so small that a post captain’s coxswain would be mortified to see him riding ashore in it (yes, that was another esoteric stab in the dark). On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised were the Admiralty to ask the Cousins for some help in developing an anti-Ahmadinejad missile.

How to drop a satellite

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The Pentagon has sent out a release to ‘splain how it is that we’re confident the Navy can shoot down that satellite:

Although the chances of an impact in a populated area are small, the potential consequences would be of enough concern to consider mitigating actions. Therefore, the
President has decided to take action to mitigate the risk to human lives by engaging the non-functioning satellite. Because our missile defense system is not designed to engage satellites, extraordinary measures have been taken to temporarily modify three sea-based tactical missiles and three ships to carry out the engagement.
Based on modeling and analysis, our officials have high confidence that the engagement will be successful. As for when this engagement will occur, we will determine the optimal time, location, and geometry for a successful engagement based on a number of factors. As the satellite’s path continues to decay, there will be a window of opportunity between late February and early March to conduct this engagement. The decision to engage the satellite has to be made before a precise prediction of impact location is available.

Sounds a bit fishy to me. We’re just gonna go out and DO it, based on nothing more than "modeling and analysis?" We’ve never done this before? Yeah, OK. I hope it works. Otherwise, we’re going to have a hydrazine mess on our hands, and I hear that’s not good.

By the way, in the picture above right, Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright promises that if the Navy’s fancy-schmancy missile doesn’t work, he will personally take out the satellite with a single punch. (Not really, it just looks that way.)

I didn’t know we could do that

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More Tom Clancy stuff. This time it’s like Cardinal of the Kremlin, only set in Beijing:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Pentagon is planning to shoot down a broken spy satellite expected to hit the Earth in early March, The Associated Press has learned.
U.S. officials said Thursday that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth’s atmosphere.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the options will not be publicly discussed until a later Pentagon briefing.
The disabled satellite is expected to hit the Earth the first week of March. Officials said the Navy would likely shoot it down before then, using a special missile modified for the task.
Other details about the missile and the targeting were not immediately available. But the decision involves several U.S. agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Defense and the State Department.
Shooting down a satellite is particularly sensitive because of the controversy surrounding China’s anti-satellite test last year, when Beijing shot down one of its defunct weather satellites, drawing immediate criticism from the U.S. and other countries.

The recent Chinese development worried me. Why, you ask? Because it meant they could wipe out our economy with a few well-placed missiles. You say they wouldn’t want to do that? Maybe not at this particular moment, no. But I’m almost certain that they’d love to have it as an option.

I’m only slightly reassured that we seem to have a cruiser-based capability in this regard. Or is it that we want the Chinese to think we do? I don’t know; I haven’t kept up with this stuff, so the cruiser bit took me by surprise.

Now I’ll probably hear from the "all countries are morally equal" crowd to the effect of, "why is OK for us to be able to do it and not THEM?" And if you can conceive of that question and ask it without embarrassment, there’s probably not much I can say to persuade you.

For my part, I was no fan of Reagan’s "Star Wars" initiative. And not just because it was a particularly risky, destabilizing gambit in the era of MAD. Also, while it was fine by me to beef up conventional forces (AND diplomatic efforts, and economic ties, and every other way we might engage the rest of the world comprehensively), there seemed to be an isolationist fantasy involved in the notion that we could put up a missile-shield umbrella that enabled us to ignore the rest of the world.

But if somebody’s going to have this technology, I’d infinitely rather it be the world’s first and biggest liberal democracy than the Tiananmen-Square crowd.

Crazy Ivans

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And here I thought we’d put the "Hunt for Red October" days behind us. The nouveau-oil-riche Russians are continuing to try to prove that they’ve got big ones, too — bombers, that is:

{Russia says bombers’ flyover of US aircraft carrier part of routine} patrol
{Eds: PMs.}
MOSCOW (AP) – The Russian military said Tuesday that its bombers’ flyover of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Pacific was part of a routine patrol conducted in accordance with international rules.
Russian air force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky said in a statement carried by Russian news wires that the Tu-95 bombers didn’t violate any rules of engagement when they flew over the Pacific on Saturday.
U.S. military officials said that one Tu-95 buzzed the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz twice, at a low altitude of about 2,000 feet, while another bomber circled about 50 nautical miles out. U.S. fighters were scrambled from Nimitz to intercept the bombers.
Drobyshevsky said the Russian bombers conducted their flight "in strict compliance with the international rules of using airspace rules, over neutral waters and without any violation of other countries’ borders." He said the bombers were fulfilling their "assigned task" when they were escorted by the U.S. carrierborne fighters.
The Saturday incident came amid heightened tensions between the United States and Russia over U.S. plans for a missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The U.S. has defended the plan as necessary to protect its European allies from possible attacks by Iran. But the Kremlin has condemned the proposal, saying it would threaten Russia’s security.
Such Russian encounters with U.S. ships were common during the Cold War, but have been rare since then. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin Russia revived the Soviet-era practice of long-range patrols by strategic bombers over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans last August.

Boys and their toys — right, ladies? Combine that facet of the male character with the Russian’s titanic inferiority complex over how the Cold War ended, and you’ve got … well, the New French. I wonder what the term is for Russian deGaullism? Putinism, perhaps? But that describes so many unpleasant things, doesn’t it?

Expect to see more of these incidents. And let’s pray one of them doesn’t turn really, really ugly.

This is why — or rather, this is another reason why, in addition to the war on terror, the rise of China, etc. — that in an era in which so many want to obsess about domestic issues, America’s role in the world is the first thing we ask presidential candidates about. Because that is Job One for the chief executive.

The brass come out for McCain

A bit of perspective on our place in the world, by the numbers

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Energy Party consultant Samuel sent me this, which figures. Samuel is the guy who came up with the idea for the endowed chairs program, which bore impressive fruit yet again this week. He’s still the most enthusiastic cheerleader of that program, even after our governor replaced him on the panel that oversees it:

This video — really, sort of a powerpoint presentation, only on YouTube, is worth watching. There are some figures in it that I find suspect (I’m always that way with attempts to quantify the unknowable, which in this case applies to prediction about the future), but others that are essentially beyond reproach, and ought to make us think.

What they ought to make us think is this: So much of what we base the selection of our next president on — party affiliation, ideological purity, our respective preferences on various cultural attitudes — is wildly irrelevant to the challenges of the world in which this person will attempt to be the leader of the planet’s foremost nation. Foremost nation for now, that is. If we don’t start thinking a lot more pragmatically, it won’t be for long.

1962 NIE: No Cuban Missiles

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FYI, the WSJ notes today that the NIE of Sept. 19, 1962 said:

The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.

That’s 25 days before the start of what we call the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So do you think the CIA is better at that stuff now, or then? And is it better than it was in 2005, when it concluded the opposite of what the latest NIE concluded? And is it better than the Israelis, or the Brits?

Someone on this post raises the yellowcake case to discredit MI6. First, like the NIE, that whole thing was a lot more complicated than either side’s shorthand version. Second, the British are historically seen as better at human intelligence than we are. The Americans do satellites, the Brits do people. And the latest NIE was based, in part, on humint.

Brits say our spooks did their sums wrong