The Islamic State of Saddam’s Iraq

ISIS/Daesh wasn’t created by the American invasion. It’s the logical aftermath and post regnum of Saddam’s Salafized regime

Alongside the Faith Campaign, Mr. Hussein’s regime constructed a system of cross-border smuggling networks designed to evade the sanctions. This funded a system of patronage, much of it distributed through mosques, that maintained a series of militias directly loyal to the ruler, like the Fedayeen Saddam and the Sunni tribes, as a hedge against any repeat of the 1991 Shiite revolt. These networks, which are deeply entrenched in the local populations, especially the tribes of western Iraq, are now run by the Islamic State, adding to the difficulty of uprooting the “caliphate.”

This also throws cold water on the belief that Christians were better off under Saddam. It’s true that they were marginally better off with secular Baathists in power than radical Islamists, but that was no longer the case after the Gulf War. In fact, the trouble started even before that with the tyrannical Arabization campaigns that tried to erase the Kurds from history. They also victimized all non-Arabs, including Christians. The biggest problems for Iraqi Christians after 2003 were largely the result of many trying to reclaim lost property, possessions, and dominion. The lack of legal authority and rule of law meant inflamed tensions and retaliations that culminated in the total ethnic cleansing of the past few years, but the roots of the brutality reach farther back.

The refusal of the Obama Administration to recognize or even acknowledge the plight of Christians in Syria and Iraq is now worsening the already grim situation. It’s obvious now that the official American policy is continuation of the Arabization of the region.

October at the Wall

All over the city people are coming out of their houses. This is the nature of Thomson’s homer. It makes people want to be in the streets, joined with others, telling others what has happened, those few who haven’t heard — comparing faces and states of mind.
 
And Russ has a hot mike in front of him and has to find someone to take it and talk so he can get down to the field and find a way to pass intact through all that mangle.
 
Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks they will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power. People are climbing lampposts on Amsterdam Avenue, tooting car horns in Little Italy. Isn’t it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses — the mapped visions that pierce our dreams? Russ wants to believe a thing like this keeps us safe in some undetermined way. This is the thing that will pulse in his brain come old age and double vision and dizzy spells — the surge sensation, the leap of people already standing, that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in. This is the people’s history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren — they’ll be gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen, pressing in with medicine breath, that they were here when it happened.
 
“Pafko at the Wall” by Don DeLillo

Organized sports have a hold on us unlike other cultural institutions. With precise rules, boundaries, and metrics, these various games of skillful competition provide dependable amusements and diversions. Just as sure as the seasons change, baseball starts up in the spring and football in the autumn. We can’t be certain what our schools will be teaching our children from year to year or which government agency will stomp on our individual rights next, but we do know that three strikes will always result in an out and ten yards a first down.

Aside from satisfying leisurely pursuits and expectations, there are also other things sports provide. For the athlete, when skills, training, discipline, and focus all come together and reach a certain threshold, the state of optimal experience is said to occur. The best example I always think of for this is Michael Jordan in his prime playing the game on some seemingly subconscious level. At his peak Jordan could be counted on to perform “in the zone” to carry the whole team, often all the way to championships. He hit several game winning shots with the most notable being his last game with the Bulls to win the title in 1998.

The baseball equivalent of this particular rare quality of being able to elevate your team to victory at the crucial decisive moment is the clutch hitter. Except the statisticians would tell us that they can’t find any statistical significance between performance in the “clutch” and at other times. They say consistency in the regular season simply carries over to important times in games which brings the associative positive expectancy.

Of course, fans watching and players participating would find the significance of it was not any statistical frequency or probability but that the big play occurred at the appropriate moment. Rising to the occasion when the occasion presents the ultimate trial and pressure. Seizing the day when all involved are maximally invested in the outcome, whether it be facilitating or preventing it. In the context of the aforementioned flow experience, there’s a paradox of simultaneously living in the moment by being mentally outside the moment in order to dominate the moment.

It’s impossible to quantify situations like that, and that’s why we see them as transcending numbers or rules or frames of reference. All the participants – players, fans, officials – are witnessing something outside normative behaviors. It’s a transcendence of outward conventional description but still operating in immanent territory that’s opaque and obscured to the rules-givers, stat compilers, and deciders,

Where I’m going with all this is that if you’ve been following baseball lately then you’ve probably noticed that the Chicago Cubs have entered the playoffs. They aren’t just playing in the postseason, but they are looking pretty good, maybe even good enough to go all the way. Now to some this may seem like we’re really tempting fate even talking about it here because the Cubs haven’t won the World Series in over a century. I’m not going to mention it specifically because I think it’s too silly, but if you even have just a casual awareness of the Cubs history then you know why many believe the Cubs can’t win.

Again the statisticians would just tell us about numbers or probabilities or splits, but the rest of us who’ve been following the team through thick and thin for our entire lives know that there’s just a bit more that goes into either winning or, far too often in the Cubs history, losing.

For one thing, the matchups in the playoffs really are significant this time. If you remember when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls went on their historic string of championships in the ’90s, they first had to overcome and surpass a bitter rival, the Detroit Pistons. The Pistons had won two years in a row, roughing the Bulls up in the process. When the Bulls finally beat them to advance into the finals, it felt like an immense hurdle was overcome on the path to a championship.

The Cubs have seemed to be on a similar track so far in the playoffs. They just faced and defeated their historic rival, the St. Louis Cardinals in the division playoffs. Their rivalry is another example of transcending the evident situation or matchup. The Cardinals have hall of fame players and managers come and go but still always seem to finish in first place. Last season, the New York Times mapped out fan boundaries for all the major league teams. The boundary between the Cubs and the Cardinals also closely follows the voting pattern for the 1860 presidential election between Lincoln and Douglas. There’s an ancient demarcation between these two teams, and for the Cubs to beat them now feels like we just overcame a big obstacle, perhaps on the level of the Bulls and the Pistons. Perhaps it was an even bigger test.

This next series is now for the National League Championship, and it’s against the New York Mets. Many long time fans of the game may recall that the Mets were an unlikely Cinderella story in 1969 when they went on a historic run to win the World Series. They’ve since been dubbed the “Amazins” or the “Miracle” Mets or other such obnoxious monikers. Unfortunately, in Chicago that season is known for the opposite because the Cubs were the team that they overtook late in the season to win the Pennant.

The Cubs team of the late ’60s may be the most beloved of any, mostly because of its connections with baby boomer fans coming of age but also because of its many terrific players, notably the great Ernie Banks who just passed away this summer. Despite being loaded with talent, the team never made the playoffs, and their collapse in 1969 has always been the nexus of the fans’ bittersweet love for the team.

I’m sure the current team doesn’t care about it or shouldn’t care about it, but for many fans this next test is a chance to finally come to terms with their complicated fandom for the Chicago Cubs.

We don’t even want to think about what might come after that. The Cubs have a great team this year performing at its peak just at the right time. Matchups and stats and metrics confirm it, but to get over the ultimate hurdle will require intangible and unquantifiable efforts. And in turn, this “old safe game” of ours that we’ve been playing and watching for so long that it’s become a part of us will give back unsaid reward and maybe a little redemption for those efforts.

Sic Transit Gloria China

  • Shoeshine boy trading club, China chapter

  • There’s an old Wall Street legend about Joseph Kennedy, bootlegger and head of America’s original soap opera political family. At the height of the stock market mania in the ’20s, he received a stock tip from a shoeshine boy. It goes something like this:

    But the boy was not of the timid kind. “Oh yeah,” he yelled back at Kennedy, “well, I got a tip for you too: buy Hindenburg!” Intrigued, Kennedy turned around and walked back. “What did you say?” – “Buy Hindenburg, they are a fine company,” said the boy. “How do you know that?” –- “A guy before you said he was gonna buy a bunch of their stocks, that’s how.” – “I see,” said Kennedy. “That’s a fine tip. I suppose, I was a little harsh on you earlier,” he said, pulling off a glove and reaching in his side pocket for some change. “Here, you’ve earned it.”
     
    Little did the boy know that Kennedy, a cunning investor, thought to himself: “You know it’s time to sell when shoeshine boys give you stock tips. This bull market is over.”

    This is supposedly how Joe avoided the financial ruin of the crash. He was probably too busy stockpiling whiskey to really care very much, but it does make for a good story.

    We’re reminded of this old saw today with some distant rumblings in the markets. Last week I was wondering what might cause our stock market to break out of its summer doldrums. Over the past few days we may have gotten the answer. While everyone was looking at the Greek crisis, China’s stock market has been crashing.

    The Shanghai Composite Index more than doubled in the last year up until a few weeks ago. All that time it was rising, economic reports indicated the Chinese economy was slowing. Since the peak in mid June, it has dropped over 30%. Last night it was down another 6%, and it would have been more if not for the Chinese government halting trading in most of the stocks. Bloomberg is reporting that Chinese regulators have banned major shareholders, corporate executives and directors from selling stakes in listed companies for six months.

    Investors with stakes exceeding 5 percent must maintain their positions, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a statement. The rule is intended to guard capital-market stability amid an “unreasonable plunge” in share prices, the CSRC said.

    This rule sounds like it’s meant to ban bigwigs and fatcats from bailing out on the economy. However, like Kennedy in the ’20s, all the big money already exited and left regular citizens holding the bag. The Chinese always had a high rate of savings, but recently they have been putting more of it into their stock market using margin to to double down on already precarious positions.

    Chinese brokers have extended 2.1 trillion yuan ($339 billion) of margin finance to investors, double the amount at the start of the year. But this often-cited figure is only part of the mountain of debt taken out to finance share purchases. Another 1.7 trillion yuan may have flowed into stock market investment from wealth management products, online lending sites and other sources, according to a Bloomberg survey of analysts.

    This was a good old fashioned bubble, and now it looks like it’s bursting. This will have repercussions all over the world. As of this morning, US stock markets are down over 1%. With the reliance of our industrial and financial industries on the hyper-interconnected global markets, this one probably won’t go down quietly.

    Midsummer Reflections on the Stock Market

    As we’re all getting ready for the Independence Day weekend, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on how the first half of the year has been going. Many developments have arrived and passed in the news which have caused various actions and reactions. One day it seems nagging, complex issues are about to be resolved just when other more vexing problems take their place. The only constant, as the cliché goes, is the constant of change.

    That is except in the stock market. It’s less than 1% above where it opened the year and has been moving basically sideways in that time. From speculation about the Fed raising rates to languidly growing economy to Greek debt dramas, the market seems to be carelessly bobbing along, flotsam-like, awaiting some direction.

    Asking, ‘how did we get here’, is easy. When you shoot for mediocrity as a country and society, sometimes that’s what you get (or worse). Now might be a good time to ask, where do we go from here?

    Today’s jobs report doesn’t give us much of a clue. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.3%, close to a level which in the past used to be described as full employment. On the other hand, labor force participation is the lowest it’s been since the 1970s, a time before women were fully entering the workforce and life expectancy for men was below 70 years of age.

    Those that dropped out of the labor force aren’t counted in the unemployment rate, and they aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. However, they haven’t just disappeared off the face of the earth. Many have passed from a temporary welfare program to the more permanent one of social security disability. Well, more permanent until the program runs out of funds as soon as next year.

    But that’s old news. The complacent collective market sees what it wants to see and has chosen to see the government’s version of economic reality.

    We can look at ways of fundamentally gauging the valuation of the stock market such as price to earnings ratio or the so-called Warren Buffet Indicator of total market cap to GDP ratio. I like to look at the Q ratio which is a simple comparison of the total price of the stock market to the replacement costs of all companies listed. This is the favored metric of billionaire black swan investor Mark Spitznagel, who by the way wrote a most excellent book, The Dao of Capital, about Boydian investment strategies.

  • Q ratio – Pricey but is it dicey?

  • By this measure, the market looks to be at a pricey level compared to other points in time. 1907, 1929, 1937, and 1968 were all years when the stock market peaked and saw a significant decline. The problem is it’s also at the same level as 1997, which had a small pause before marking the half way point in a multi-year rally. We generally have seen regression to the mean in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily suggest it has to ever happen again. We could be waiting a long time for a sanity check to take hold, especially if the definition of sanity has changed.

    A shorter term answer possibly comes from the world’s best econometrics blog Political Calculations. They believe, convincingly in my opinion, that expectations for future dividends drive stock prices in the near future, absent any surprising shocks to upset the apple cart. Those of us who used to watch Larry Kudlow on CNBC (since his show was cancelled there hasn’t been any reason to watch that silly network anymore) remember he used to say ‘earnings are the mother’s milk of stocks’. Well if that’s true than dividends are your father’s pemmican.

    What they do is take values of dividend futures traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange and apply a multiple (and some other math) to convert them to expected stock prices. Their calculations show a possible slide in prices for the next few weeks to few months. It has worked reasonably well in the past with a few caveats.

    There are different instruments traded for different times in the future. Prices can and do take leaps from one trajectory to the other. It usually happens when someone from the FED talks about raising rates, and then the financial press speculates what specific month or quarter it can happen. In this way, stock prices behave similar to quantum particles bouncing from one energy level to another. It’s not a good way to pin down exactly where stocks are going but just gives a range.

    The other caveat is this measurement only works when the market is in a state of relative order, and not buoyed or rattled by some overly cheery or dreary news. While at a smaller level the market seems to obey quantum mechanics, at the macro level it acts like a natural system, following mathematical probabilities such as those observed in predators hunting or even groups of people foraging. The market moves from more easily observable and predictable periods until the forageables (earnings and dividends) run out, in which case it moves into chaos and unpredictability until new expectations are established.

    What will trigger rapid moves in either direction and out of the current financial horse latitudes is anybody’s guess. There’s a big vote in Greece this weekend, but how many times has that situation reached a cliffhanger? Perhaps too many to matter anymore. As unsatisfactory as it sounds, what usually occurs is something we weren’t expecting, not an event that seems to replay itself over and over again. The best we can really predict is that we won’t be drifting forever, and the time will come when the stock market will move far away from this level. The key is to stay ready for it when it finally does.

    [Jonathan adds: If the right side of the included graphic is hidden on your screen — the date scale should go to 2020 — try right-clicking on the graphic and opening it in a new tab.]

    The very heart and soul of conservatism

    There was a brief discussion in the previous post about Reagan and his true ideological credentials. This topic seems to come up from time to time. Whether it’s deficits, immigration, tax policy, etc., it’s become somewhat of a revisionist pastime to go through the historical records with a fine tooth comb and compare them side-by-side to our zoological political classifications, performing a tidy checklist one-by-one.

    Now, blessed with this luxury of spurious hindsight, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that Reagan was not a conservative. He was apparently some sort of mutant. He was possibly really a Democrat that created a pretend, Hollywood version of Conservatism. Perhaps he was really just a war-monger, and what’s conservative about that?

    Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate and debate the motives of the man like he was some sort of long lost, half-mythical figure. Others thought of this already when he was still around and did the legwork for us. In this 1975 Reason magazine interview, Ronald Reagan lays it all on the table about what he really thinks about conservatism, libertarianism, and the role of government in our lives.

    This interview was from a time when Conservatism was enduring a low water mark. It was shortly after Watergate and during the discouraging Ford presidency. One of the few bright spots was Reagan and his exhortation for “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people”.

    In the Reason interview he states unequivocally right off the bat that

    If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

    He then goes on to say

    Well, the first and most important thing is that government exists to protect us from each other. Government exists, of course, for the defense of the nation, and for the defense of the rights of the individual.

    Government exists and has too, but the best government is the one that is kept to a minimum. His thoughts on the central libertarian concerns about coercion are important on this matter

    REASON: Of course, if you’re talking about starting from scratch–the shipwrecked people on the island– you’re really talking about a voluntary approach, aren’t you–as against taxation?
     
     
    REAGAN: Well, we’re inclined to think that our government here is a voluntary approach and that we’ve set up a government to perform certain things, such as the national protection, etc.
     
     
    REASON: Aren’t we deluding ourselves to talk in terms of consent, though? When we talk about taxation, aren’t we really dealing with force and coercion and nothing less than that?
     
     
    REAGAN: Well, government’s only weapons are force and coercion and that’s why we shouldn’t let it get out of hand. And that’s what the founding fathers had in mind with the Constitution, that you don’t let it get out of hand.
     
    But you say voluntary on the island. Let’s take a single thing. Let’s say that there was some force on the island, whether it’s hostiles or whether it was an animal, that represented a threat and required round the-clock guard duty for the safety of the community. Now I’m sure it would be voluntary but you get together and you say look, we’re all going to have to take turns guarding. Now what do you think would happen in that community if some individual said “Not me; I won’t stand guard.” Well, I think the community would expel him and say “Well, we’re not going to guard you.” So voluntarism does get into a kind of force and coercion where there is a legitimate need for it.

    It’s clear from this article, that Reagan is stating that he is really a proponent of what we call now Minarchism.

    More specifically Reagan was a Right-Minarchist

    R-M reject the non-aggression principle with respect to national defense. They do so not because they favor aggression but because the principle, in its standard interpretation, is a non-action principle. It would not allow a preemptive attack on an antagonistic state that is armed, capable of striking us at any time, and known to be contemplating a strike. R-M, in other words, tend toward hawkishness when it comes to national defense.

    Many of the card-carrying Anarcho-Libertarians have declared that, after Ferguson, Minarchism is dead because the Night Watchmen have grown into fleecers, swindlers, and oppressors. However, they’re misguided. What’s really happening there is not Minarchism but Statism.

    Statism lives not in a big tent but in a colossal coliseum. It comprises a broad set of attitudes about government’s role, propounded by “types” ranging from redneck yahoos to campus radicals, each type proclaiming itself benign (for some, if not for others). But each type would — in thought and word, if not deed — set loose the dogs of the state upon its political opponents and the vast, hapless majority.

    Minarchists advocate that

    the ideal government is restricted to the protection of negative rights. Such rights, as opposed to positive rights, do not involve claims against others; instead, they involve the right to be left alone by others. Negative rights include the right to conduct one’s affairs without being killed, maimed, or forced or tricked into doing something against one’s will; the right to own property, as against the right of others to abscond with property or claim it as their own; the right to work for a wage and not as a slave to an “owner” who claims the product of one’s labor; and the right to move and transact business freely within government’s sphere of sovereignty (which can include overseas movements and transactions, given a government strong enough to protect them).

    The right to be left alone includes being left alone from a morally bankrupt fine levying system unfairly absconding money and hard earned possessions.

    We see the basis of Minarchism comes from the person Reagan called “the prophet of American conservatism,” Russell Kirk. There’s no single Conservative Manifesto or one conservative ideal, so Kirk set out to list six basic assumptions that generally reflect the values of Conservatives

    “Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.
     
    “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
     
    “Conviction that the only true equality is moral equality, that all attempts to extend equality to economics and politics, if enforced by positive legislation, lead to despair, and that civilized society requires order and classes.
     
    “Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not economic progress.
     
    “Faith in what conservatives call ‘prescription’—the accumulation of ‘traditions and sound prejudice,’ i.e., common sense.
     
    “Recognition that change and reform are not the same things, and that ‘innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.’”

    These canons are balancing and reconciling innovation with prudent permanence. We defer to these traditional values and methods that are the elemental building blocks of common sense because, in the swirling convolutions of our complex system, these customs have passed the test of time.

    Surviving the proving grounds of generations takes precedence over the latest lobbyist driven state mandates. The same can probably be said for much of the layers and encumbrances of modern society piled on for many reasons long since forgotten or obsolete. This is why the minimum state is the best option, but only with its guard still up.

    This is the real emphasis of Traditional Conservatives and their modern scions Minarchists. Reagan possessed this balance and used it to skillfully helm the ship of state through the rough seas of the 20th century.

    This is why Ronald Reagan was a Conservative, and his legacy is Minarchism.