Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

Willy-nilly that's a world we're returning to except this time the inter-connections are huge relative to the independent pieces but the pieces are still critically important. The strategic hope is that we'll find a new world architecture that promotes balance and adjustment while sustaining growth. At the same time the inter-dependencies mean that local crisis and maladjustments will spread rapidly thru the rest of the system.

Several years ago the notion of Meme was developed to capture the idea that culture's ideas about how the world worked were as important as biology or economics. We're getting some harsh lessons in what happens when good memes go bad or bad memes, like bad viruses, spread. Below you'll find some perfect examples three of which are especially worthy of note:

1. Pakistan Domestic Breakdown - the internal divisions of Pakistani society were on view in Nov. when the three-part conflict between the military/Mushareff, the "modern" politicians and the Islamicist radicals were on view. This is my candidate for the geo-political story of the year. And if we don't handle it correctly the Century. Why ? Because by insisting on viewing Pakistan thru the lens of our own experiences and meme frameworks we badly mis-understand what's going on. The last time we took the domestically driven "high-road" of moral righteousness and the policy pursuit of mistaken shibboleths was when we "encouraged" the Shah to withdraw from power in Iran. In case you didn't know it was James Earl Carter who basically told the Shah to get out of town and set the foundations for the ME that's about to blow up in our faces today. If we don't ensure/insure that a stable but progressive regime is established in Pakistan with it's nuclear weapons, primitive tribesman and Islamic radicals the 911/alQuedea/Taliban disaster will look like a tempest in a teacup. This is the real deal indeed.
2. Understanding foreign cultures - the US and the rest of the West can no longer afford to pursue their own models of how the world works based on their isolated histories. We need to understand the internal dynamics and structures of the foreign societies actually work - not how we wish they'd work. It's called facing reality. In particular we need to make a significant effort to understand these cultures from the inside, the way their members do and use that understanding to inform and shape our thinking and policie. We can no longer afford to pursue our lives in blissful ignorance, isolation or narrowness. Talk about Greek tragedies several are in the making here. It's called Hubris !
   
3. Meme Malware in World Politics - meanwhile in various parts of the world the old policy software and errors continues to re-surface...and re-surface...and re-surface so on ad infinitum. Cases in point are Mexico's on-going troubles but in particular the return of populist/socialist ideologies in Latin America. Now some countries, e.g. Brazil are making the transition to a more developed view of things but Argentina has never gotten over it's Peronist history. Granted it's also never gotten over it's oligarchic DNA where the powerful landowners have run Argentina for their own benefit unless thrown out of power by the Peronistas. But the damage to the general well-being of the country has been severe and repeated. Chavez is mimicing these problems and worse. In this brave new world we need to ask ourselves can we afford to tolerate these breakdowns ? And what would be do about it ?

In addition to these readings you'll find extensive excerpts in Int'l Affairs that support our overall themes as well the preceeding arguments, more on the ME where progress in Iraq is sufficient to have apparantly taken it off the table as major club to beat the opponents with in the US election, more on the candidates & their positions and on various major policies. In the Politics & Policy section three articles are very noteworthy - all in the name of understanding the real data. One is on the real nature of tax numbers and cuts, another on the real numbers behind the health care debates and then several related ones on how our collection of candiates faces an unhappy electorate but isn't talking to the deep concerns with credible approachs and vision.

In the Science and Culture section you'll find some fascinating material on history and Picasso and in the Values section three excellent links on just how ideas develop, propogate and the problems with changing them. If the lesson isn't clear let me suggest two things:

1. Today's actions, choices, preferences and institutions are often the unknown but deeply embedded legacy of prior choices. In other words societies are their histories and to help understand where they're going you need to understand where they've been, how they're structured and how they moved and over what pathways to where they are now.
2. The most difficult thing in the world is to change an unconscious set of assumptions, become aware of what they are and then consciously evaluate and change them. Yet many of the political and policy debates in the US are today's victims of yesterday's beliefs, popular myths and failed/flawed analysis. It's often enormously easier to work 7 X 24 than it is to pause and examine things. The first only takes blind effort - the 2nd takes moral and spiritual re-thinking. For societies as well as individuals.
   

Special & General

Pakistan Gets My Vote for a Black Swan Event Washington is obsessed with the war in Iraq, the danger of Turkish troops clashing with Kurdish militants and President George W. Bush's possible showdown with Iran over its nuclear weapons ambitions. Yet the larger threat may be a so-called Black Swan event, something that is both far outside conventional expectations and of such extreme consequence that it might shift not only U.S. electoral dynamics but also the global security calculus. The odds are rising of such an event growing out of Pakistan, whose status as the most dangerous place on earth was further confirmed by President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule on Nov. 3. His suspension of the constitution, dismissal of the chief justice, restrictions on free speech, and roundup of some 1,500 lawyers, judges and political activists do little to change the nation's frightening course. Jihadist and extremist groups sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaeda have grown in frontier provinces and spread to Pakistan's main cities. Secular leadership is faltering in a nuclear-armed country. As Musharraf put it during an address to the nation: ``Inaction at the moment is the suicide of Pakistan, and I won't allow this country to commit suicide.'' What to watch is whether the emergency measures, which Musharraf's opponents say are aimed more at personal than national preservation, reverse these forces or merely push them underground to explode in the coming days and weeks. For now, what has died is a peaceful evolution toward secular, democratic rule through a power-sharing arrangement between the military- led regime and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Intact is the nightmare scenario: Musharraf's failure or death allows extremists, some of them certainly in the state security services, or ISI, to gain control of the country and its nuclear arsenal of 50 to 100 weapons.

U.S. Needs to Understand How Politics, Religion Mix Abroad The U.S. has been remarkably successful at balancing religion and civic life at home, but it has largely failed in its attempts to understand and address religious politics abroad, says Economist editor-in-chief John Micklethwait. Addressing that gap will be crucial to resolving some of the world’s most pressing problems, he says in a lengthy survey of religion and politics. In many parts of the world, with the notable exception of much of Western Europe, religion is playing a greater role in public life. For tradition-minded people everywhere, faith has served to soften the rapid pace of change. For the more prosperous, religion sometimes serves as a “lifestyle coach,” says Mr. Micklethwait—consider the enormous U.S. popularity of Pastor Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life.” Meanwhile, religious people have become more vocal in many fields, most notably business and politics. Yet despite a thriving religious pluralism at home, the U.S. government often has failed to stress religious freedom in its foreign policy. That is especially true in places like Egypt, where a secular but authoritarian government has been supported at the expense of religious parties. At the same time, the U.S. has neglected to trumpet its own Muslim community. “Playing down the role of religion in public life also means missing out on many potential solutions,” says Mr. Micklethwait. “For once religion is part of politics, it must also be part of the solution.”  Some Western policy makers were caught off guard by the revival of religion in the public sphere. Mr. Micklethwait concedes that his own publication came to recognize the shift belatedly—the Economist published an obituary of God in its millennium issue, long after it now says public faith had begun its resurgence.

Cry for Me, Argentina (and Russia and China) Price controls are so last-century. The notion of central planners telling private entities how much they should charge for goods and services seems about as dated as that "Government and Politics of the Soviet Union" course I took in 1987. Only the world's dwindling tanks of anticapitalist moonbats, led by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, still employ them. But price controls haven't been completely vanquished. Rather, they've lain dormant, waiting to be revived by the strong odor of inflation. Several years of synchronous global growth, powered by surging economies in Asia and dissolute monetary and fiscal policies (thanks, Messrs. Greenspan and Bush) are combining to push prices higher. The United States has dealt with the rise of inflation in a typically American way: by spinning it out of existence. Price controls, food subsidies, greater state control of the economy, a governor named Romney running for president. It seems like 1967, not 2007. And, of course, price controls create powerful disincentives for people and companies to invest in the sort of production capacity that could, in time, create the sort of competition that would help bring prices under control. This isn't a good time to invest in a cattle farm in Argentina, a cheese plant in Russia, or a gasoline refinery in China. If the price controls continue much longer, these economies could see the revival of another distressing factor that defined socialist economies in the 20th century: rationing.

Values and Attitudes

The Ghosts We Think We See That idea helps explain a number of supernatural beliefs, he argues: "The idea of spirits and souls appearing in this world becomes more plausible if we believe in general that the nonphysical can transfer over to the physical world." And believe it we do. A Gallup poll found that only 7 percent of Americans do not believe in telepathy, deja vu, ghosts, past lives or other supernatural phenomena, which may have more than a little to do with the soaring popularity of Halloween. Even eminent rationalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered natural selection (prompting Darwin to speed up his own work), believed in ghosts, haunted houses, levitation and clairvoyance. But "supernatural"—anything that cannot be explained by laws of physics or biology—also encompasses more mundane phenomena. It includes the belief that you can feel someone staring at you from behind, and that if you think about someone he is more likely to phone you (this doesn't work for getting first dates to call you for a second, however). Far from being pathological, the ubiquity of such beliefs is actually a clue to how the normal mind works, cognitive scientists now realize, for belief in the supernatural arises from the same mental processes that underlie everyday reasoning and perception. Chief among those normal processes is our neurons' habit of filling in the blanks. The brain takes messy, incomplete input and turns it into a meaningful, complete picture.

Apocalypse No The New Republic's editors seem to have mistaken Vietnam movies for real life. I'll jump here, or lurch I suppose, to something I am concerned about that I think I am observing accurately. It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. In terms of personal difficulties, they seem to have had less real-life experience, or rather different experiences, than their rougher predecessors. They grew up affluent in a city or suburb, cosseted in material terms, and generally directed toward academic and material success. Their lives seem to have been not crowded or fearful, but relatively peaceful, at least until September 2001, which was very hard.But this new leadership class, those roughly 35 to 40, grew up in a time when media dominated all. They studied, they entered a top-tier college, and then on to Washington or New York or Los Angeles. But their knowledge, their experience, is necessarily circumscribed. Too much is abstract to them, or symbolic. The education establishment did them few favors. They didn't have to read Dostoevsky, they had to read critiques and deconstruction of Dostoevsky. I'm not sure it's always good to grow up surrounded by stability, immersed in affluence, and having had it drummed into you that you are entitled to be a member of the next leadership class. To have this background in the modern era is to come from a ghetto, the luckiest ghetto in the world, a golden ghetto beyond whose walls it can be hard to see.

Lessons From Stock Market Wizards One of the first books I read in this business oh-so many years ago was Stock Market Wizards. It had a profound impact on my thinking about trading, psychology, risk, capital preservation, etc. Sometime ago, I came across a good discussion of the lessons from the book at Simply Options Trading. What follows is my edited adaptation of those rules he derived from Stock Market Wizards:

Int’l Affairs

U.S. on the Sidelines of Global Trends? …regardless, it is a very unusual experience for an American to be sitting listening to the foreign minister of another country, and a very small country at that, talk at some length about major global trends as if the United States didn’t exist. Unusual, and salutary. After all, many other countries endure that treatment from us. The Russians simply dropped off the map for almost a decade after the end of the Cold War. And Singapore has just had to endure President Bush’s last-minute cancellation of a planned summit with the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) leaders in Singapore on his way to Sydney for the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting (he went to Iraq instead). Yeo spoke about the phenomenal rise of Chinese cities and manufacturing areas, not only on the east coast of China but also in the interior. He spoke of China’s rise in the context of Asia’s rise, of a whole region finally coming into its own in world affairs, or rather returning to its historic importance. He described the burgeoning contacts between Asia and the Middle East — described rather as West Asia — and concluded with a review of ties between Asia as a region and the EU.

Combustible Countries From Pakistan to Lebanon to Russia, entire regions could explode. Combustion happens when fuel combined with oxygen, usually at high temperature, releases heat. While U.S. foreign policy has focused on so-called failed states, it should be concentrating on those countries with the right combination of high-temperature ingredients not just to implode, but to combust. Take Beirut. The atmosphere in this buzzing but beleaguered city is tense. The endless power-jockeying between sectarian factions and the constant threat of violence within Lebanon mean that there will always be one group for which it will be politically advantageous to goad Israel. Currently, that group is Hezbollah, against which Israel waged a war last year. Until the almost intractable sectarian divide within Lebanon is resolved, the country's combustibility will ensure the region's combustibility as well, threatening Israel's security and U.S. strategic interests. Another such combustible case is Pakistan, where U.S. ally President Pervez Musharraf just narrowly averted a full-scale insurrection by relinquishing his role as chief of the armed forces and allowing exiled opposition figures to return to the country. In the little time before the next challenge to his administration, he must focus on the parts of the country the central government does not effectively control. The third combustible state may at first seem surprising, but it presents the greatest threat to U.S. strategic interests in the long term. According to the conventional view, Russian President Vladimir Putin's growing authoritarian grip has brought stability and prosperity -- hence his sky-high approval ratings -- even as vast sections of the economy are effectively nationalized and the opposition and media are quashed. These developments create a stable, if overly confident Russia in the short term. But they are also a sign of Russia's underlying combustibility.

The Perils of Petrocracy Can Hugo Chávez’s ‘‘oil socialism’’ show resource-rich countries the way to stability and prosperity? Or is it just the old oil curse in a new guise? Who holds the world’s oil? You might assume it’s in the hands of big private oil companies like ExxonMobil. But in fact, 77 percent of the world’s oil reserves are held by national oil companies with no private equity, and there are 13 state-owned oil companies with more reserves than ExxonMobil, the largest multinational oil company. The popular perception in the United States is that if leaders of oil countries nationalize their oil, they are bucking a global trend toward privatization. In reality, nationalized oil is the trend. And the percentage of oil controlled by state-owned companies is likely to continue rising, mainly because of the demographics of oil. Deposits are being exhausted in wealthy countries — the ones that exploited their oil first and generally have the most private oil — and are being found largely in developing countries, where oil tends to belong to the state. Now as the record high price of oil has made exploitation worthwhile even in places that are remote or geologically complicated (Chad comes to mind), more underdeveloped countries have to choose what to do with their oil. Those that have long held oil must decide how to spend the incomprehensible amounts of money oil is now bringing them. Historically, almost every country dependent on the export of oil has answered this question in the same way: badly. It may seem paradoxical, but finding a hole in the ground that spouts money can be one of the worst things to happen to a nation. With one or two exceptions, oil-dependent countries are poorer, more conflict-ridden and despotic

RUSSIA: The Threat  The current government, led by former KGB official Vladimir Putin, is very popular. Former KGB officers predominate, and they are well educated and capable. The KGB was always the place to be, in the old Soviet Union, if you were bright, ambitious and not troubled with an overactive conscience. Putin's people have got the economy going (at six percent, Russia has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe), cracked down (but certainly not eliminated) on the lawlessness and corruption, and played to the popular affection for "restoring Russia's place in the world" (becoming a superpower again.) What worries the West the most is that Russian democracy has been modified to suit local tastes. That means a concentration of power. This scares most other democracies, because it makes it easier for the supreme leader to do something rash. Without a separation of powers (executive, legislature and courts balancing each other), the top guy can easily start trouble the country cannot afford. But most Russians prefer this concentration of power. Old customs die hard. Russians see themselves as victims, having been swindled out of their former wealth, glory and real estate by foreign plotters and exploiters. All this seems irrational to Westerners, but it means something to many Russians, although often at a subconscious level. This leads to an "anything goes" attitude towards foreigners. That explains Russian refusal to crack down on Russian hackers who are plundering Western businesses via the Internet. It also explains Russia's casual use of energy embargoes against countries (usually weaker ones that cannot.

·         Putin Builds Network of Allies to Help Him Retain Post-Presidential Power Vladimir Putin is doing his best to make sure he'll have friends in high places to help him wield power after he gives up Russia's presidency in May. In addition to his recent appointment of longtime friend and former aide Viktor Zubkov as prime minister, Putin has placed allies -- many with links to each other -- at the head of key government agencies and state-owned companies

Living Larger in the New Russia The Starodubovs' ascent from the hand-to-mouth existence of the 1990s to relative security today helps explain why President Vladimir Putin is perceived so differently in Russia than he is in the West. For many here, he is a hero. After nearly two decades of crazy desperation and living from one day to the next, the relative calm of the Putin era feels like such a tremendous achievement that for many in Russia, it's more than enough to earn their loyalty. Since Mr. Putin took office in 2000, about 20 million Russians have been lifted above the official poverty line (another 20 million remain in poverty, according to government figures). An oil-fired economic boom has brought long-awaited stability after a string of crises in the 1990s and more than doubled average incomes, adjusted for inflation, since 2000. A middle class is growing, but so is the gap between rich and poor. Still, the government is scrambling to pour tens of billions of dollars into rebuilding Russia's crumbling roads, power networks, hospitals and schools, all of which have seen little investment since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Gates's China Talks Yield Understanding Without Producing Shifts in Views Two days of talks between U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chinese leaders in Beijing produced what both sides called a deeper understanding of each other's views. The meetings didn't produce any shifts in those views. Gates and other U.S. officials shrugged off the lack of movement and said progress would be a long-term project requiring patience. The visit was a success, they said, simply because the two sides aired their views in greater depth than ever before. Gates, 64, came to Beijing for his first visit as defense secretary saying he was seeking clarity about China's decade- long drive to modernize its military. U.S. defense officials have complained for years that what they call China's lack of transparency about its military was giving rise to fears that the modernization program was aimed at changing the balance of power in Asia. U.S. officials addressed China's reluctance to step up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program because of the Chinese need for energy supplies to fuel economic growth. China relies on imports for almost half of its oil. Iran is the Middle East's second-biggest producer of crude, topped only by Saudi Arabia.

Sarkozy Seeks French-U.S. Harmony in Bush Talks, Ending `Crisis' Over Iraq Visiting Washington this week for the first time as president, Nicolas Sarkozy will depict France as a reliable U.S. ally once again, even as differences over exchange rates and trade simmer beneath the surface. Sarkozy's talks with President George W. Bush, starting with dinner at the White House tonight, will focus on shared opposition to Iran's nuclear program and on support for Kosovo's push for independence from Serbia

Skull-and-Dagger Image of Elite Rio Cops Has Recruits Clamoring to Join Brazilian director Jose Padilha set out to expose the tactics used by the most heavily armed unit of Rio de Janeiro's police force in his film ``Elite Troop.'' He didn't intend to inspire converts. Young police officers are flocking to join the Battalion of Special Operations, known as Bope, which uses snipers and heavy weapons to handle the state's most dangerous cases, such as hostage negotiations and fighting gangs for control of slums. Since the movie came out, stores have been selling out of costumes that bear the special squad's emblem of a skull with a dagger piercing its crown in front of two crossed handguns.

ME

WINNING: Bin Laden Admits Defeat in Iraq On October 22nd, Osama bin Laden admitted that al Qaeda had lost its war in Iraq. In an audiotape speech titled "Message to the people of Iraq," bin Laden complains of disunity and poor use of resources. He admits that al Qaeda made mistakes, and that all Sunni Arabs must unite to defeat the foreigners and Shia Moslems. What bin Laden is most upset about is the large number of Sunni Arab terrorists who have switched sides in Iraq. This has actually been going on for a while. Tribal leaders and warlords in the west (Anbar province) have been turning on terrorist groups, especially al Qaeda, for several years.  While bin Laden appeals for unity, he shows only a superficial appreciation of what is actually going on in Iraq. Al Qaeda?s Score Card …

The Empty Chair at the Iraq Hearings Effective foreign policy requires paying close attention to economics, not just security and politics. Policy often falters in practice because the economic or financial aspect is overlooked.Recall the hearings on Capitol Hill in September concerning progress in Iraq. Testifying on security issues was Gen. David Petraeus, offering his expertise on counterinsurgency warfare in theory and in practice. Next to him was Ambassador Ryan Crocker, able to answer virtually any question, no matter how detailed, on the political machinations within Iraq. And next to them was the seasoned expert on economic issues in Iraq. Oops. Actually, no one was next to them. An empty chair, perhaps. But had an expert been at the witness table, the testimony might have gone. . . . Empty Chair: I am happy to report that the central bank has implemented the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission in this area. It has raised the interest rate all the way to 20 percent to control inflation, and through such actions the inflation rate has come down sharply. The new Iraqi dinar, which was introduced in 2003, has proved popular and has appreciated nicely in the past year. The Central Bank of Iraq now has $21 billion in reserves, many times more than it had just after Saddam Hussein stole a billion dollars from its vaults in March 2003. This summer the Baghdad Stock Exchange opened to foreign investors, rose 85 percent in July and held its own in August. As the closely watched Grant's Interest Rate Observer noted Sept. 7, "Iraq has turned into a capital magnet. . . . Money is sometimes misinformed, but it is never insincere. Something is afoot in Iraq." So there are measurable signs of economic and financial progress.

NBC WEAPONS: NBC: Loose Nukes In Pakistan With the recent chaotic events in Pakistan, one has to ask what sort of options the United States has. The state of emergency in Pakistan has derailed plans for democracy, and risked the security of  Pakistan's nuclear weapons. This is one of the classic situations where American ideals and American interests may diverge big time. The big issue in all of this is the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear power, with as many as 95 nuclear warheads. Many of these designs are far more powerful than the first-generation devices the United States used in 1945, killing 140,000 people in two attacks. This is why stability and rationality in the Pakistani government is important. The problem is that stability may not be guaranteed. The in the 1990s, the Afghan Taliban regime was set up with the help of at least some elements of the Pakistani intelligence service. The other problem is Pakistan's history of coups. These can be bad enough due to the uncertainty of where a new government stands. Now, add the fact that nukes are involved.

For months, Pakistan's economy seems to have existed in a parallel universe to the country's turbulent politics. Despite street protests, militant attacks and legal challenges to the legitimacy of Pakistan's military strongman, nothing seriously dented the rise of the stock market or slowed one of Asia's fastest-growing economies. Over the past five years, Pakistan's economy has averaged 7% annual growth, and the economy is expected to expand about as fast this year. The benchmark index has risen 18% from a year ago even after yesterday's drop. So far this year, it is up 32%.

Pakistan's economy seems to have existed for months in a parallel universe to the country's turbulent politics. But emergency rule may be different. The economy has continued to hum despite some of the country's worst unrest in years. But the outlook is no longer so rosy, economists say. For one thing, billions of dollars in foreign assistance might be in jeopardy after Gen. Musharraf's veering away from a planned transition to civilian rule angered allies such as the U.S. It has sent nearly $11 billion in aid to Pakistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, mostly to the army to fight militants. Before those attacks, Pakistan was struggling to pay off international loans, and sanctions for nuclear testing had frozen U.S. aid. The U.S. is the largest investor in Pakistan, accounting for nearly one-third of the country's foreign direct investment from July to September this year, according to Pakistan's Ministry of Finance. Yesterday, credit-ratings agency Moody's Investors Service changed the outlook to negative, from stable, on the B1 government foreign- and local-currency bond ratings and placed a negative outlook on Pakistan's B2 foreign-currency country ceilings for bank deposits. The outlook for Pakistan's Ba3 foreign-currency country ceiling for bonds was unaffected and remains stable.

Politics and Policies

Voters angry, but Democrats get pass Republicans are being forced to play defense in 2008 elections. A bloody and unpopular war and worries about middle-class pocketbooks have left President Bush's approval ratings hovering near historical lows. But Congress, where Democrats last fall rode voter discontent to sweep to majorities in the House and Senate, fares even worse. In line with other national polls, a Washington Post/ABC News survey conducted Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 showed Bush's approval rating at a meager 33%, while Congress stood at 28%. Voters continue to believe the country is on the wrong track, with only 24% telling the Washington Post/ABC News poll the country is moving in the right direction compared to the 74% who said it was moving the wrong direction -- a finding that also tracks other recent nationwide surveys.

This Won't Be The Iraq Election The Presidential campaign has jostled this way and that, contenders have risen and fallen, but the one fixture in the political firmament has been Iraq. Polls have consistently said Iraq would be the central issue of the 2008 campaign. The candidates have developed elaborately studied and rehearsed positions on the war. But what if the subject moves off center stage? In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the economy now tops Iraq as the issue that voters say will most influence their choice for president, 22 percent to 19 percent. When the president announced the surge last January, I wrote a column arguing that it was likely to succeed militarily (by providing better security) but would probably fail politically (because of a lack of political reconciliation). I was both right and wrong. More U.S. troops have meant better security. But they are not at the heart of current improvements in Iraq. The key is that Petraeus has been willing to do what no American official has until now: accept Iraq for what it is and not what Washington wants it to be. Searching for a stable order, Petraeus has allied himself with whoever, within reason, could produce that order.

Pessimism Spells Trouble for Republicans In a sign of how demoralized GOP voters have become, a focus group of a dozen Virginia Republicans expressed doubts about the country's economic prospects and their party's slate of presidential candidates. It's almost un-American to believe that your children's generation won't be better off than your own. Yet that is just what a dozen Virginia Republicans unanimously agreed to when they gathered here Thursday night for a political focus group. That break with what has traditionally been the bedrock belief of an optimistic America was bad enough, from a Republican's standpoint. It captured how demoralized the party is these days, what with an unpopular Republican president waging an increasingly unpopular war amid rising gas prices. But what was worse: These Republicans didn't see a savior in the big field of candidates vying for their party's nomination to succeed George W. Bush.

Hillary Reveals Her Inner Self In the latest debates, Hillary Clinton reveals her inner self, writes Peggy Noonan.The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what's inside. It was startling. It's 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise. I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it's a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said. She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic-level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka. But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase "command and control." They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren't rich, who aren't protected, the old "my friends and I know best, and we'll fill you dullards in on the details later." What Mrs. Clinton revealed the other night was more than an unfortunate persona. What I think she revealed was that her baseline thinking has perhaps not changed that much since the 1990s, when she was a headband wearing, power suited, leftist-who-hadn't-been-wounded-yet.

·         Clinton Surge Sparks Party Debate on '08 Prospects, Impact on Other Races While national polls give Clinton a commanding lead for her party's nomination, some Democratic officials and officeholders fret that those surveys mask negative feelings about her. They say those perceptions raise questions about her ability to defeat a Republican nominee, and may cause trouble for other Democratic office-seekers in swing states like Missouri and in the South. Clinton's opponents for the party nomination are fanning the flames. In a debate last week, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd questioned whether she is ``electable'' and ``can bring the country together.'' In an October memo, the campaign of Illinois Senator Barack Obama said she would damage ``the hopes of other Democrats seeking office.''

A Conservative Sees Obama Ending the Culture Wars What is significant about Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy isn’t his policies or his experience, says Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic. It is that the Illinois senator is the only major candidate not locked in a culture war that baby boomers have been fighting since 1968. Mr. Sullivan is well-placed to recognize an attempt to transcend party lines. As a political commentator, he raises the ire of people on the left and the right. A self-professed conservative, he nevertheless has endorsed Bill Clinton and John Kerry, as well as Bob Dole and George W. Bush. A Catholic, he has been outspoken about gay rights. He fervently backed the U.S. invasion in Iraq, but lately has recanted his initial support. For Mr. Sullivan, one of Mr. Obama’s chief merits is his youth. At 46, Mr. Obama is the only major presidential candidate whose roots aren’t linked to support of or opposition to the Vietnam War. The current polarization of American politics has its origins in that era, and the gulf has widened since, through events such as the Robert Bork hearings, the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election and the Iraq war. “It was and is a toxic cycle, in which the interests of the United States are supplanted by domestic agendas born of pride and ruthlessness on the one hand and bitterness and alienation on the other.” Mr. Obama offers a way out of that mindset, says Mr. Sullivan. He doesn’t see Iraq as another Vietnam. He discusses his religious faith openly, but in a way that appeals to more-secular voters. Finally, on race, Mr. Sullivan says Mr. Obama’s mixed parentage and his self-conscious embrace of black identity in his 20s best represents the complex ways that his generation have shaped their identity in modern America. None of this means that Mr. Obama “will be the president some are dreaming of,” says Mr. Sullivan, or that he is even likely to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries. But for Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Obama is the candidate who best understands how to bridge America’s political divide.

Lawmaker Rebuilt Hometown on Earmarks If John Murtha were a businessman, he'd be the biggest employer in this town. The powerful U.S. congressman has used his clout on Capitol Hill to create thousands of jobs and steer billions of dollars in federal spending to help his hometown in western Pennsylvania recover from devastating floods and the flight of its steelmakers. More is on the way. In the massive 2008 military-spending bill now before Congress -- which could go to a House-Senate conference as soon as Thursday -- Mr. Murtha has steered more taxpayer funds to his congressional district than any other member. The Democratic lawmaker is chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which will oversee more than $459 billion in military spending this year. Johnstown's good fortune has come at the expense of taxpayers everywhere else. Defense contractors have found that if they open an office here and hire the right lobbyist, they can get lucrative, no-bid contracts. Over the past decade, Concurrent Technologies Corp., a defense-research firm that employs 800 here, got hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Rep. Murtha despite poor reviews by Pentagon auditors. The National Drug Intelligence Center, with 300 workers, got $509 million, though the White House has tried for years to shut it down as wasteful and unnecessary. Another beneficiary: MTS Technologies, run by a man who got his start some 40 years ago shining shoes at Mr. Murtha's Johnstown Minute Car Wash. A review by The Wall Street Journal of dozens of such contracts funded by Mr. Murtha's committee shows that many weren't sought by the military or federal agencies they were intended to benefit. Some were inefficient or mismanaged, according to interviews, public records and previously unpublished Pentagon audits. One Murtha-backed firm, ProLogic Inc., is under federal investigation for allegedly diverting public funds to develop commercial software, people close to the case say. The company denies wrongdoing and is in line to get millions of dollars more in the pending defense bill.

Plain Truth About Taxes and Cuts There are big philosophical questions about taxes that facts alone can’t answer. How important is it to let people keep the money that they earn? Will higher tax rates cause more cheating? How important is it to ensure that take-home pay is rising for every group of Americans?  But there are also some basic facts that ideology can’t change. If you keep these five in mind, you will have an easier time keeping up with the debate: As a group, the rich pay a greater share of taxes than in the past. There are two strange facts about corporate taxes. Everyone from Mr. Rangel on the left to Fred Thompson on the right is saying that high corporate taxes are hurting American companies. But the effective corporate tax rate isn’t any higher than it has been on average over the last 25 years, and it’s far lower than it was in the 1960s and ’70s. Put it all together — less corporate tax collection and lower individual tax rates, combined with more income for the people who face the highest tax rates — and the trends mostly cancel each other out. The taxes that the federal government took in last year equaled 18.4 percent of the gross domestic product, almost exactly the average since 1980. The overall tax burden rose in the 1990s, fell during Mr. Bush’s first term and has drifted up in the last few years as corporate profits and upper-end incomes surged. The obvious conclusion is that moderate shifts in taxes don’t dictate economic growth.

Clinton's Right on Delaying Social Security Fix: Some major decisions are going to have to be made over the next three years about the federal government's tax and spending policies. Those decisions, however, don't include dealing with Social Security's limited long-term funding problems caused by the nation's changing demographics. The program is nowhere near ``bankrupt,'' as President George W. Bush claimed a few years ago when he proposed partially privatizing it. To the contrary, Social Security is running annual surpluses that Bush and many members of Congress have used to justify income tax cuts and added spending. Until the politically explosive decisions are made about all these provisions, it makes no sense to try to get an agreement about what to do about Social Security's future because the two sets of issues are inextricably intertwined. Nevertheless, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards have criticized Senator Hillary Clinton, one of their competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination, for refusing to spell out now what she would do to fix Social Security. Clinton has defended herself by saying, ``Personally, I am not going to be advocating any specific fix until I am seriously approaching fiscal responsibility.'' In other words, until a broader path for federal tax and spending policies is determined. Interestingly, a new issue brief from the Treasury Department makes much the same point.

Beyond Those Health Care Numbers  WITH the health care system at the center of the political debate, a lot of scary claims are being thrown around. The dangerous ones are not those that are false; watchdogs in the news media are quick to debunk them. Rather, the dangerous ones are those that are true but don’t mean what people think they mean. Here are three of the true but misleading statements about health care that politicians and pundits love to use to frighten the public… Even if the rise in health care spending turns out to be less than they forecast, it is important to get reform right. Our health care system is not perfect, but it has been a major source of advances in our standard of living, and it will be a large share of the economy we bequeath to our children. As we look at reform plans, we should be careful not to be fooled by statistics into thinking that the problems we face are worse than they really are.

Heathcare Q & A In response to my recent NY Times piece on health care, I received numerous questions via email. Let me paraphrase and answer some of them:
 

Science and Culture

A Maritime Pompeii So far the excavation has turned up 39 ancient shipwrecks buried under nine centuries of silt, which preserved extraordinary artifacts. The copper nails and ancient wood are still intact, and in many cases cargo is still sealed in the original terra cotta amphorae, the jars used for shipment in the ancient world. They have also found a cask of the ancient Roman fish condiment known as garum and many mariners' skeletons—one crushed under the weight of a capsized ship. One ship carried scores of pork shoulder hams; another carried a live lion, likely en route from Africa to the gladiator fights in Rome. What's most dramatic about the discovery of this maritime graveyard is that the ships date from different centuries both before and after the advent of the Christian era, meaning the shipwrecks did not happen simultaneously but over time in the same area. The shipwrecks represent a significant piece of a puzzle that archeologists and anthropologists have struggled to understand for centuries. Studying the oldest boats' contents and the way those ships were built, archeologists now better understand just who the Romans and Etruscans traded with and how they lived and utilized the Mediterranean Sea. Some of the oldest ships belonged to the Greeks and the Phoenicians, which implies that the mysterious and little-understood Etruscans were in fact active traders. One ship carried amphorae sealed with sand from both Spain and from the volcanic regions of Campania in Italy, giving scientists vital clues to where these ships traveled.

'The Discovery of France' France is not a unified cultural monolith, but rather “a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations,” each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs. The moral of the story, as Graham Robb’s “Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War” makes clear, is that France is not a unified cultural monolith, but rather “a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations,” each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs. Yet according to Robb, who has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Arthur Rimbaud, these microcivilizations “were not formless planetoids waiting to be swallowed by a giant state,” and their inhabitants didn’t constitute “a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as ‘the French.’” With exhaustive research and a witty, engaging narrative style, Robb corrects this misconception by showing how, even as modern developments like democracy and the steam engine transformed France from “a land of ancient tribal divisions” into a centralized nation-state, a wealth of regional particularities persisted in “disparate, concurrent spheres.” In its pivotal years between the revolution and World War I, France emerges in Robb’s telling as a land where the past did not morph seamlessly into the future; a land where diversity existed in a permanent tug of war with uniformity; “a land in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris.”

'A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932' The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was deliberate, of course. As John Richardson reminds us in the third installment of his magisterial and definitive biography, Picasso not only worshiped the gods Dionysius, Priapus and Mithra (the god of light and wisdom), but also regarded himself as their confrère — an artist so prodigally talented, so daring and so virtuosic that he could reinvent the universe. He was a Nietzschean shaman who regarded art as a mysterious, magical force, offering the possibility of exorcism and transfiguration; a chameleon who effortlessly moved back and forth between Cubism and classicism, irony and sentimentality, cruelty and tenderness; a wily, self-mythologizing sorcerer who inhaled history, ideas and a cornucopia of styles with fierce, promiscuous abandon — all toward the end of exploding conventional ways of looking at the world and remaking that world anew. Mr. Richardson’s Picasso is not the destructive, misanthropic egomaniac portrayed in the Merchant-Ivory film “Surviving Picasso” or the heroic hipster artist depicted in Norman Mailer’s “Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.” Rather his Picasso is a mass of contradictions, a savage artist, who was often horribly cruel to his friends like Cocteau but who also “had a very loyal, if sometimes paradoxical heart”; a deeply superstitious trickster, who loved paradox in both his work and life, playing “volumetric representationalism off synthetic Cubist flatness, much as he enjoyed playing Olga’s conventionality against his own instinctive iconoclasm.”  Picasso once observed that his work was a kind of diary of his life, and in this continuing biography (of which there is one more volume to come) Mr. Richardson expertly explicates that diary for readers, showing us how the artist encoded his day-to-day relationships with women in his work; how his homes, his surroundings and his cannibalistic study of other painters’ work informed individual canvases and sketches.