I‘M READING THE MORNING PAPERS and my mood is shifting faster than Bob Brenly’s. The front page of the Washington Post tells me that American bombers are the military equivalent of Curt Schilling. The bombings have been “very effective,” destroying at least 15 Taliban tanks, according to a Northern Alliance leader in the town of Jabal Saraj. Consequently, the United States now feels that the stage is set for a major offensive against the Taliban.
But then I turn to the front page of the New York Times and see a headline: “Taliban’s Foes Say Bombing Is Poorly Aimed and Futile.” This report, which seems to come from a reporter directly on the front lines, asserts that as the B-52 bombers fly over, they create huge impressive explosions, and then after they’ve left the Taliban forces pop out of their caves and continue their assaults on the Northern Alliance. According to this report, senior Northern Alliance officials are saying the U.S. effort is “increasingly misguided and ineffectual.”
I’ve read both stories several times and I can’t figure out which is more persuasive. Both have several sources and some first-hand accounts. The Times piece has more details of why the B-52 bombs don’t work–they are too slow to keep up with the Taliban positions, which shift constantly. If you try to merge the accounts, you get the impression that our bombing has had only spotty results, but our allies are about to launch a major offensive anyway. If they lose a major battle, the call for U.S. ground troops will be deafening.
In search of clarity, I turn to the Washington Post business section, which has a story on falling mortgage rates. You can now get a 30 year loan at 6.56 percent. A year ago, you would have had to pay 7.73 percent for the same loan. That sounds good. It amounts to a massive tax cut for people who refinance. But then the Times depresses me again. Its business section carries the news that the United States is now suffering from deflation. Prices fell last quarter by 0.4 percent, the first quarterly drop since 1954.
I was at a conference of economists and market analysts a few weeks ago, and some of the talk was about the Japanese disease coming here. Deflation. Monetary policy rendered useless because interest rates drop to zero. Consumers decide not to spend because everything will be cheaper next month. Stimulus packages produce no results; you can pave over the country with public works projects without kick-starting the economy. The economists all said that the U.S. economy is more structurally sound than the Japanese economy, but they were pretty bearish. So maybe we are in for a period of multi-year stagnation.
Something’s got to cheer me up, so I turn to politics. The Republicans won a floor vote on the airline security bill. This is good news. The Republicans are right on the merits. The argument is over whether airline security workers should be federalized, or private and under federal supervision. At first, I thought they should be federal workers. It’s a law enforcement job, so they should work for the government. But then I heard Israeli and European experts argue that the private solution is better. They have no ideological stake in this, just experience. Their essential argument was that nationalized workers form a self-protective bureaucracy. But if you have strict supervision of private workers, then the oversight is tougher. Federal regulators try to sneak weapons through the system and expose the weaknesses in the system. That doesn’t happen when both regulators and operators are union brothers.
Needless to say, Republicans have managed to lose the argument, even with justice on their side. Dick Armey framed the debate politically. He said he didn’t want to create more unionized workers. That crass thinking allowed Democrats to seize the high ground. They spoke as if theirs was the law-and-order approach and won the media debate. Now the bills go to conference, where, lacking a White House veto threat, one has to assume that the Democratic approach will prevail. The workers will be federalized.
It’s depressing, but at least it’s not confusing.
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
