Saturday, August 28, 2004

An interesting hypothesis from Chris Sanders of Sanders Research.  The US has chosen to address the problem that it does not make enough of what the rest of the world wants by going to war to monopolize control of the supply and distribution of what the world needs, petroleum. There are other war aims, of course, but control of the global hydrocarbon net is certainly the most important. One may believe otherwise, but then one may believe in magic and the tooth fairy too. The truth is that the dangerously destabilizing idea has rooted in Washington that, in the words of Vice President Cheney, "deficits don't matter (we proved that in the 90s)." He is right of course in pure power terms; a fuller expression of Cheney's dictum might well add, "as long as we are able to force everyone else to accept them (deficits)." This is interesting because it recognizes that the US is one of many participants in a highly competitive network of global markets (an invention that helped us win the cold war). Within this context, we aren't doing that well (some would say we are losing badly). One of the factors that hinders us from robust competitiveness is our defense burden -- our excess burden is the equivalent of our yearly government deficits. So the question becomes: how do you finance these defense expenditures? Sanders concludes that the Bush solution has been to become the world's oil policeman (oil is increasingly being produced in unstable geographies). He posits that this lets us run deficits that the world is loathe to avoid funding. 11:33:02 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

William Lind on Najaf.  But the real winner is likely once again to be the new Desert Fox, Mr. al-Sadr. How can that be, if in the end his militia could not stand against American troops? 11:07:58 AM    Comment_ Trackback []