A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to Peter Wehner, who discovered a devastating error in Peter Beinart’s new book The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. As Wehner pointed out on Commentary’s blog Contentions, Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, takes aim at Charles Krauthammer (a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard), citing an essay by the latter that Beinart thinks is a particularly compelling example of hubris. Notes Wehner:
Beinart didn’t like “The Unipolar Moment” and wrote this: “It was no coincidence that Krauthammer published [this essay] soon after the Gulf War. As usual in the development of hubris bubbles, it was only once things that formerly looked hard—like liberating Kuwait—had been made to look easy that people set their sights higher. Had America proved militarily unable to keep Saddam from gobbling his neighbors, Krauthammer could not have seriously proposed launching a new war, inside Iraq itself, to rid him of his unconventional weapons.”
Wehner continues, “That all sounds very intriguing, except for one thing. On the first page of the Krauthammer essay, in the byline, we read this: ‘Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist. This article is adapted from the author’s Henry M. Jackson Memorial Lecture delivered in Washington, D.C., Sept. 18, 1990.’ ”
Note well the date. As Wehner explains,
In reading “The Unipolar Moment”—which was published months after the lecture on which it was based and which is not substantively different from the September 18 lecture—it is clear that the outcome of the war was unknown at the time it was written.
So Krauthammer didn’t set his sights higher because the liberation of Kuwait had been “made to look easy.” When he articulated his views on the “unipolar moment,” Kuwait had been invaded but it hadn’t been liberated. The U.S. was still months away from war. And, in fact, many predicted that if America went to war, it would be a difficult and bloody undertaking. . . . (“ ‘The 45,000 body bags that the Pentagon has sent to the gulf are all the evidence we need of the high cost in blood,’ said Senator Edward Kennedy. He added some military experts have estimated American casualties at the rate of 3,000 a week.”) That explains, in part, why the Senate vote on the Gulf War resolution was so close (52-47).
All of this is noteworthy not simply because of Beinart’s sloppiness (which is noteworthy enough), but because Beinart concocts an interpretative theory that is utter nonsense. It is based on a completely wrong premise. He builds a false explanation based on a false fact.
Amusingly, as Wehner goes on to recount, Beinart is not the first former New Republic editor to embarrass himself by going after a Krauthammer article that he failed to date correctly:
There was one problem with Sullivan’s analysis: the column he refers to was published not in November 2009 but in May 2008—when George W. Bush was still president and Barack Obama hadn’t yet won the Democratic nomination. Krauthammer proceeded to eviscerate Sullivan, who had the decency to issue an abject apology and correction.
The Scrapbook can’t begin to explain the curious, fatal attraction in Krauthammer’s work that lures his critics into intellectual shipwrecks. But we must say that Peter Beinart has taught a valuable lesson about hubris, even if it wasn’t the one he intended to teach. ♦
Sentences
We Didn’t Finish
“If Marshall McLuhan was right, then for this presidential address the setting was the message. For the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama sat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and addressed his fellow Americans. From that room presidents have sent millions of Americans to war. They have sought to heal broken hearts, to remake our government and revive our economy. Barack Obama has, at turns, done all those things—but never from the Oval Office. Even before he opened his mouth he communicated the most important message . . . ” (“Obama Swoops in to Save the Day,” Paul Begala, The Daily Beast, June 15). ♦
Obama’s $50 Billion Wish List
President Obama sent a letter to the House and Senate leaders of both parties last week asking for $50 billion to “address the devastating economic impact of budget cuts at the state and local levels that are leading to massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters.”
This is a classic instance of something Charlie Peters, the retired editor of the Washington Monthly, famously labeled the “Firemen First Principle.” As Peters explained, “The basic idea is that, when faced with a budget cut, the bureaucrat translates it into bad news. . . . In other words, he chops where it will hurt constituents the most, not the least. At the local government level, this is most often done by threatening reductions in fire and police protection.”
In short, even if one were to take at face value Obama’s contention that devastating budget cuts are taking place at the state and local level, why should these entail massive layoffs of “teachers, police and firefighters”?
An illustration: The Scrapbook hangs its homburg each night in lovely but profligate Arlington County, Virginia, where tax-receipts thanks to the housing bubble were increasing at double digit rates before the crash, and where the county government therefore went on a bender. Now it whines about austerity. Our local version of “firemen first” (since we have almost no fires and very little serious crime) is a cut-back in public library hours, which the County Board has just announced in the name of fiscal discipline. This will, in fact, inconvenience and tick off a significant number of local taxpayers. That’s our punishment for complaining about high property taxes.
Meanwhile, Arlington County is advertising to fill a couple of dozen job vacancies, many of which could be left unfilled without the slightest inconvenience to (or notice by) 99.9 percent of the citizens. A sampling:
• Community Inspector II (Recycling): “Arlington County’s Solid Waste Bureau is seeking an individual to join a team that performs on-site visits to Arlington multi-family and commercial properties. The purpose of these visits is to ensure that property owners and tenants are complying at least minimally with the County’s recycling rules and to encourage and assist them in doing more—$37,564.80 – $62,088.00 annually.” (We think this is what Obama would call a Green Job, by the way, and it’s no wonder China is ahead of us in this arena: They have deep experience in the arts of propaganda and reeducation.)
• New Media Curator, Artisphere Cultural Center: “This position will create, implement and manage exhibitions that involve electronic media including digital cinema, interactive environments, and sound installations” at “Artisphere, Arlington’s new 62,000 sq. ft. cultural center that is scheduled to open in October of 2010—$43,804.80-$72,425.60 annually.” (Harrumph. Artisphere. Harrumph. We suspect better “new media” can be found on YouTube—for free.)
• Affordable Housing Development Specialist/Trainee: “This employee is responsible for aggressively pursuing opportunities for creating new affordable units and/or contributions and preserving existing affordable housing that is at risk of being redeveloped and working on policies and programs to create and preserve affordable housing—($50,315.20-$83,220.80 annually.” (By the way, thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble, the market is doing a fine job all on its own, without any assistance whatsoever from government “specialist/trainees,” at creating more “affordable housing.”)
The Scrapbook is confident that examples such as these could be multiplied several thousand times over at state and local governments across the country. What’s more, where is it written in stone that budget discipline requires public sector layoffs?
Econblogger Arnold Kling writes: “I think what is needed is for every deficit-plagued government to lower public sector salaries by 10 percent until the crisis blows over. The worst thing that could happen is that cutting wages could reduce aggregate demand through Keynesian channels. But gosh, look at some of the alternatives: sovereign defaults, bank runs, cuts in public sector jobs? A cut in public sector pay is probably the least unpalatable option.” Unless, of course, you’re a president beholden to public sector unions, in which case you hyperventilate about “devastation” and demand that taxpayers hand over another
$50 billion, and fast. ♦
Congressional Oversight Watch
In a classic display of crackpot priorities, Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) used her opportunity to question General David -Petraeus in his appearance before the House Armed Services committee last week to ask about . . . renewable energy.
After getting in an unnecessary jab (“the largest user of energy on the planet is actually the United States Air Force and the DoD is the largest user of energy in the United States”), Giffords cited plans for “serious repairs and upgrades to the energy system” in the upcoming Kandahar offensive in Afghanistan, including “small-scale solar and hydropower systems and also some solar-powered streetlights.”
Giffords then asked a question that must weigh heavily on the mind of a CENTCOM chief dealing with the unreliable Afghan politicians and a resurgent Taliban: “I’m just curious whether or not there’s plans to utilize any of those same technologies at our bases around Afghanistan, and wouldn’t that greatly reduce our need for fuel?”
The usually unflappable Petraeus paused before he answered, pointing out first that in the U.S. bases in Afghanistan, “we don’t have hydropower, obviously.” Clearly a bit nonplussed, the general continued: “There has been a significant effort, which has reduced very substantially actually, what we needed for the cooling and heating of our workplaces and living places. And that is sometimes as simple as pumping extra insulation into the roof and walls of these fairly rudimentary, temporary buildings we have, sometimes even the tents.”
It was an admirable attempt to respond to a silly question. As if to remove any doubt that the question was a political stunt, Giffords now features the video on her YouTube account and titles it, “Encouraging Smart Energy Use in Afghanistan.” Perhaps America needs to encourage smart energy use in congressional hearings, instead. ♦
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