Prairie Weather

A progressive tax proposal

From the Center for American Progress, a tax proposal. 

It comes in two forms, both in PDF:  the two-page summary (easy to load); and the long-form (32 pages, took four minutes to load on dial-up). It looks eminently sensible, even conservative.  In the old-fashioned sense of the word, of course! 

I mean, imagine this:

How about all those bases in Iraq? Are we planning to leave?

Pepe Escobar has written a really interesting piece on how the Bush administration was out-foxed by al-Sistani -- and how it will maneuver to maintain control of political outcomes in Iraq:

The White House, the Pentagon and the neo-conservatives were forced - by Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's brilliant brinkmanship - to accept these elections, in which a Shi'ite victory is assured. For many Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ite, Washington's endgame is not withdrawal, but finding the right proxy government: only the naive may believe that an imperial power would voluntarily abandon the dream scenario of a cluster of military bases planted over virtually unlimited reserves of oil.

Washington doesn't even try to disguise it, and in Baghdad, US-appointed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is widely referred to as either "the man from the Americans" or "Saddam without a moustache".

So how did Allawi get elected?  What is the American role now?   Read on.

 

Social Security without tears

Brad DeLong has done what appears (to this amateur) to be a really elegant job of tweaking Social Security -- enough to keep SS out of the reach of its prospective assassins.  The comments which follow his plan are also worth reading. 

Iraqi elections and promotion democracy in the Middle East

The best commentary I've seen so far on the Iraqi elections  in at Peter Levine's blog.  He reports on a speech by Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Institute:

While American administrations have traditionally believed that our national interests are best protected by stability in the Middle East, the Bush people believe that the existing autocratic regimes hurt us, and that we would be better off with democratic ones. Many liberal types in Washington agree with this goal, although they doubt the administration's competence and sincerity. Thus "democracy-promotion" has achieved consensus in DC, at least as an ideal. However, in Western Europe and the Middle East, absolutely everyone is against a project of US-sponsored democratic regime change.

Carothers feels that the project will be extremely difficult, at best. The US lacks credibility with Arabs and Muslims because of our traditional support for autocratic regimes, our tilt to Israel, and our botched invasion of Iraq. Many powerful actors in the US have mixed motives, wanting to preserve cosy business relationships or to cooperate with Arab police states in the "war on terror."

Read on...

Just don't go getting ideas...

Slate notes:

The Battle of Algiers was the premier political film of the 1960s. It was studied by the campus left for its lessons in revolutionary-cell organization and was obligatory viewing for Black Panthers. The first part of the film depicts the campaign of terror launched by the National Liberation Front (FLN, called "the organization" in the film) against French colonial rule in 1956.

I watched "The Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo's film about freedom fighters in the casbah of Algiers, tonight for the first time.  It's on the Pentagon's must-see movie list, a primer for urban warfare. 

Slate quotes from a Pentagon invitaton to watch the film:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ...

Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor.

Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically.

To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

It's a terrific movie -- don't miss it if you haven't seen it.

But above all, watch and listen to the torture scene and the statements which justify torture.  They will sound uncannily familiar.

LA Times letter writer gives Boot the Hersh!

Good letters to the editor in the LA Times in reaction to a Max Boot piece about Seymour Hersh.  This one pleases me at more than one level:

Max Boot may not like the stories Hersh digs up or how he writes them. But here's a question: Boot is a well-connected fellow, at ease in the halls of power and among those in the know; what stunning, paradigm-shifting stories has he brought to the public square lately?

Boot can fact-check Hersh and attack him all he wants — the fact remains that while there are dozens of Max Boots beating the drums of war and frantically spinning rationalizations in defense of the powers that be, Hersh is a virtually peerless gadfly. Whatever his flaws, Hersh's very rarity makes him a precious commodity. Long may he rave.

Thank you, Ben Dickinson of New York!  Nice going!