Zero-Sum Thinking
(or thinking like an insurance company actuary)


The human species is still relatively unevolved. Our adrenal glands are too big and our frontal lobes are too small. So, when pundits try to stoke tribal thinking and fear and paranoia, as Yglesias and Steve Walt do here, it usually works.

But it’s not as though the United States hasn’t started some big public works projects over the past decade or so; it just hasn’t been doing them here at home. We’ve spent billions constructing military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, and another billion or more on a giant embassy in Baghdad and another one in Pakistan. Needless to say, those "public works" projects are a drain on the U.S. economy rather than a source of additional productivity.

Likewise I guess foreign humanitarian aid is a total waste down the rat hole. Dark skin foreigners will never change. (or maybe they will)

Analysts say the deals on three of the country’s top fields show that Iraq, after an embarrassing start, may be on a path to joining the world’s major oil-producing nations, which could in turn upset the equilibrium in OPEC and increase tensions with the neighboring oil giants Iran and Saudi Arabia. Adding to those strains, development rights to 10 other Iraqi oil fields will be offered to foreign companies at a public auction in Baghdad on Dec. 11.

And then Yglesias writes

It seems I should write my official What I Think About Obama’s Escalation in Afghanistan post. Mostly the whole situation makes me want to sigh. I don’t think the kind of effort that as best I understand it we’re undertaking in Afghanistan meets any kind of plausible cost benefit test.

And yet he offers no cost-benefit analysis, not even a heavily spun - i.e. full of lies and ommissions - one.  The main point is that Walt and Yglesias aren't worried about costs, they're not that conservative. No they're just focused on opposing Republican foreign policy whatever that may entail.

I just don't believe Obama is so cynical that he would surge in Afghanistan without believing it was the right thing to do from a security perspective. Granted he is enough of a realist to formally recognize  fraudulent elections in Iran and Honduras as somehow legit, so as not to upset their newly "elected" governments.

Yesterday Yglesias linked to the even worse Alex Massie. Who links to the even worse right-wing Daniel Larison. Who I won't link to because he doesn't deserve the traffic. Massie opines:

To take but one obvious example: if US foreign policy is "largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims" or freeing them from tyranny, then why, the Muslim Street might reasonably ask, does the US support repressive dictatorships in Egypt and Libya and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

Is Massie really that stupid? Libya was for a long time a pariah, but now the US "supports" Libya by lifting sanctions b/c they gave up their nuclear program. Egypt is supported along with Israel, because essentially we are buying them off from killing each other and blowing up the Middle East. Same with Saudi Arabia, one of the worlds largest oil-exporter. Also the Saudis don't talk about wiping Israel from the map on daily basis as Iran does. Seems like Massie prefers Iran to these Arab countries who receive favorable treatment? Or maybe he doesn't like Israel. Or the US. He certainly attempts to ventriloquize the "Muslim Street" in an anti-American fashion.

But basically Yglesias and Massie misquote Tom Friedman and omit some of the column which proves their theses wrong. The main subject of his column was Major Hasan who shot up Fort Hood. Yglesias and Massie don't even mention that.

Hitchens in Slate:

When the throat-slitters and school-burners and woman-stoners come to the villagers of Pakistan and Afghanistan at dead of night, they have one great psychological advantage. "One day, the Americans and the Europeans will go," they say. "But we will always be here." There's some truth in this: Most of the talk in this country is now of an "exit strategy," and for all the good they are doing, most of the other NATO contingents might as well have shipped out already.

Massie, Yglesias, Walt, and Larison want to divide the world up between the Evil US Empire and the rest of the world. But I see the Afghans and Americans as inhabiting the same planet. We are all residents of Earth and the more privileged among us shouldn't leave the less fortunate in the hands of the  thoat-slitters and school-burners and woman-stoners.