Jonathan

Edward Said phones in from an alternate universe to set us straight about the war in Iraq:

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons not found, the Stalingrads that didn’t occur, the artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him, his family, and his money leave in return for the country. The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn’t risk the same in Baghdad. On 6 April, a Russian convoy leaving Iraq was bombed; Condi Rice appeared in Russia on 7 April; Baghdad fell 9 April.

Nevertheless, Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly and Bush looks like a cowboy. On matters of the gravest importance, constitutional principles have been violated and the electorate lied to. We are the ones who must have our democracy back.

That’s our Eddie! Such an agile mind.

The Poor Man has a point.

Did I mention that I don’t like Castro? Here’s a concise summary of my thoughts about him.

What’s the connection? Each of these topics is the subject of a very interesting essay on the Val e-diction blog.

Val writes in considerable detail about his experiences as a military pilot in Venezuela back in the day, when he flew the Mirage III. The Mirage was France’s first-generation Mach 2 fighter, a classic aircraft of the 1960s in the same way that the Spitfire was a classic of an earlier period. (The Mirage’s reputation was made by Israel, which used it with spectacular success in the Six Day War.) The Mirage, like the Spitfire, was beautiful. And as with the Spitfire, the Mirage’s brilliant design was achieved partly at the cost of design tradeoffs which limited its overall effectiveness — low fuel capacity and short range in the case of the Spit; an oversimplified, slatless and flapless (!) delta wing with lousy low-speed handling characteristics in the case of the Mirage. This is a fascinating post if you have any interest whatsoever in aviation or military history.

Val has many other great posts on his blog, including this reminder that Castro has used our distraction in Iraq as an occasion to make an example of Cuban dissidents, and a long and thoughtful discourse on tennis, from which I know nothing.

But after his Mirage post, which for me was pure vicarious fun, his most insightful comments may be the ones he makes in discussing the political history of Venezuela. It’s not all about oil, apparently. Rather, Val argues that the country’s chronic problems result from a combination of uncontested socialist theory in the political realm and a Spanish legacy of poorly defined and allocated property rights:

In other words, during the entire second half of the Twentieth Century and while previously poorer countries like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong were busily and successfully developing under capitalist systems, Venezuela suffered the worst-possible combination of Seventeenth-Century Mercantilism and Twentieth-Century Marxism, as if Adam Smith had never been born. That’s why Emeterio Gómez, one of Venezuela’s top economists, says the country has to relive the Eighteenth Century before it can modernize.

. . . I cannot overemphasize the importance of the historical fact that there were no pro-capitalist political parties or influential pro-market economists in Venezuela during the entire Twentieth Century.

[. . .]

But most importantly, contrary to what happened to the colonies of North America where parliamentary democracy, general access to property and individual rights were part of the English legacy, Venezuela (and Latin America) inherited from Spain an absolutist culture that cultivated state power and opposed individual liberty, responsibility and property beyond personal and basic commercial goods. In Spanish law, later adopted by Latin America in full, the state owned everything, including soil and subsoil and their riches. Contrary to what many pundits believe, Venezuela’s strong and ubiquitous state did not appear suddenly from the oil-polluted sea, like a modern Aphrodite, in a Shell.

Hmm. . . sounds familiar. And worth reading.

(I confess that I may have had a hand in provoking the Venezuela essay. IIRC I asked Val a naive question in which I suggested a parallel between Venezuela’s corruption and that of the Arab oil states. I also plead guilty to egging Val on to write about his air force experiences.)

If this article is accurate, Russia has been subverting the U.S.-UK anti-Hussein alliance, has been supporting the Iraqi military and intelligence apparatus at an intimate level, and has done so until very recently. As the article puts it,

It is not known how the Russians obtained such potentially sensitive information, but the revelation that Moscow passed it on to Baghdad is likely to have a devastating effect on relations between Britain and Russia and come as a personal blow to Mr Blair. The Prime Minister declared a “new era” in relations with President Putin when they met in Moscow in October 2001 in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.

And obviously these revelations, if true, are likely to have a similar negative effect on U.S.-Russia relations.

Perry de Havilland wonders how Putin could have been so foolish as to imagine that Iraq could possibly defeat the U.S. and allies, or that Russia’s role in aiding Hussein would not eventually be publicized. You might as well ask why the French could be so stupid to assume they will get away scot free after alienating the U.S., or why Saddam Hussein could imagine that he would prevail once the U.S. and its allies decided to fight.

People miscalculate. Powerful people, especially if they are sheltered from information that contradicts long-held or official positions, can make big mistakes. Saddam Hussein is an obvious example, but even Putin and Chirac may have suffered from bad advice delivered by advisors with mutually supporting opinions. (The just-as-bad alternative is that they ignored good advice. I think this is possible in Chirac’s case, as he shows some Captain Ahab-type tendencies. Putin may have been badly advised by Russian military “experts” whose expertise was at best outdated.)

No one is immune from such mistakes. Better leaders try to prevent them. Bush has succeeded largely because he is decisive and sees the big picture accurately, but also because he is a good manager and selected excellent advisors whose diverse views — e.g., Powell vs. Rumsfeld — make big conceptual errors less likely. It was not so long ago that people were asking how Bush’s predecessor, an intelligent man, could be so foolish as to make various bad decisions for which he is notorious. Hubris and overconfidence are deadly no matter who you are. Good decision makers guard against them and try to minimize their effects.