The Compleat Vector

I had meant for the following to consitute my profile. Turns out that profile descriptions are limited to 500 characters. So much do I know about blogging. So, while we're all on our holiday hayrides, this post will keep the Vector lamp burning; and in future, it will be linked from my profile to serve as my introduction.

I make no claim of expertise in any of the subjects I write about. But I have made an extensive acquaintance of people who are experts. The following list includes almost every non-fiction book I have read in the past 25 years. They are grouped according to topic; and works that have acquired some canonical status in Western culture are in one group, although their topics vary.

With some 600 books still waitng on my shelves, the reading never stops. But this list will be final as of 2009. It is not meant to establish qualifications for anything & everything I may ever write about; it is only meant to indicate the intellectual journey that led up to this blog.

• The Political Economy of International Relations    Robert Gilpin
• Politics and Markets     Charles Lindblom
• Economics    Paul Samuelson, William Nordhaus
• Macroeconomics     Robert Gordon
• Global Tranformations     Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, Perraton
• Levels of Socio-Economic Development Theory     David Jaffee
• One World, Ready or Not     William Greider
• The End of History and the Last Man     Francis Fukuyama
• The Economic Illusion     Robert Kuttner
• Economic Development in the Third World     Michael Todaro
• The Evolution of Economic Thought     Jacob Oser, William Blanchfield
• The Ideal Worlds of Economics     Benjamin Ward
• The Future of Capitalism     Lester Thurow
• The Theory of Capitalist Development     Paul Sweezy
• The Wealth and Poverty of Nations     David Landes
• Money: Who has How Much and Why     Andrew Hacker
• Wealth and Democracy     Kevin Phillips
• Comparative Economic Systems     Paul Gregory, Robert Stuart

• A History of Political Theory     George Sabine
• Western Political Heritage     William Elliott, Neil McDonald
• Democracy's Discontent     Michael Sandel
• The Closing of the American Mind     Allan Bloom
• Bureaucracy     James Wilson
• Regulation and its Reform     Stephen Breyer
• The End of Liberalism     Theodore Lowi
• Groups, Interests, and US Public Policy     William Browne
• Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution     Leonard Levy
• Federal Tax Policy     Joseph Pechman
• Taxing Ourselves     Joel Slemrod, Jon Bakija
• Freedom and the Court     Henry Abraham
• The New Politics of the Budgetary Process     Aaron Wildavsky
• Balanced Budgets and American Politics     James Savage

• The Republic     Plato
• Politics     Aristotle
• The City of God     Augustine
• The Prince     Niccolo Machiavelli
• Leviathan     Thomas Hobbes
• The Second Treatise on Civil Government     John Locke
• Political Discourses     David Hume
• The Wealth of Nations     Adam Smith
• The Social Contract     Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Reflections on the Revolution in France     Edmund Burke
• The Federalist     Hamilton, Madison, Jay
• The Rights of Man     Tom Paine
• Das Kapital (abridged)     Karl Marx
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism     Max Weber
• Imperialism     JA Hobson
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money    John Maynard Keynes

• The Rise of the West     William McNeill
• The Story of Civilization  11 volumes     Will & Ariel Durant
• A History of Western Philosophy     Bertrand Russell
• A History of Christianity  2 volumes     Kenneth Scott Latourette
• Men in Arms: a History of Warfare     Richard Preston, Sydney Wise

• The Culture of Ancient Egypt     John Wilson
• A History of Greece     JB Bury, Russell Meiggs
• Histoy of Rome     Michael Grant
• The Civilization of the Middle Ages     Norman Cantor
• The Making of the Middle Ages     RW Southern
• Economic History of Europe     Shepard Clough, Charles Cole
• The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages     Robert Lopez
• Before the Industrial Revolution     Carlo Cipolla
• Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Centuries  3 volumes     Fernand Braudel
• The Age of Reconnaissance     JH Parry
• A History of the Modern World     RR Palmer
• From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life     Jacques Barzun
• The Age of Revolution     EJ Hobsbawm
• Peaceful Conquest: the Industrialization of Europe 1760-1970     Sidney Pollard
• The Pattern of Imperialism     Tony Smith
• The Prize     Daniel Yergin
• The Modern Mind     Peter Watson

• The Oxford History of the American People     Samuel Eliot Morison
• The New American Nation series - all of the volumes of national political history from the Revolution to World War II
  
• The Last Americans: the Indian in American Culture     William Brandon
• The Americans: a Social History of the United States 1587-1914     JC Furnas
• Religion in America     Winthrop Hudson
• Becoming American: an Ethnic History     Thomas Archdeacon
• From Slavery to Freedom     John Hope Franklin
• Westward Expansion: a History of the American Frontier     Ray Billington
• A History of American Law     Lawrence Friedman
• A History of Urban America     Charles Glaab, A Theodore Brown
• Drugs in America: a Social History 1800-1980     H Wayne Morgan
• Main Currents in American Thought     Vernon Parrington

• American Odyssey 1607-1789     Paul Lucas
• Liberty and Power 1600-1760     Oscar & Lilian Handlin
• The Glorious Cause: the American Revolution 1763-1789     Robert Middlekauff
• Ideological Origins of the American Revolution     Bernard Bailyn
• The Birth of the Bill of Rights 1776-1791     Robert Rutland
• Miracle at Philadelphia     Catherine Drinker Bowen
• The Vineyard of Liberty     James M Burns
• The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic     David Rothman
• Liberty and Power: the Politics of Jacksonian America     Harry Watson
• The Civil War and Reconstruction     JG Randall, David Donald
• With Malice Towards None: a Life of Abraham Lincoln     Stephen Oates
• Theodore Roosevelt     Nathan Miller
• The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt     Lewis Gould
• Over Here: the First World War and American Society     David Kennedy
• Great Times: an Informal Social History of the United States 1914-1929     JC Furnas
• Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Home Front 1941-1945     Richard Lingemann
• The Glory and the Dream: a Narrative History of America 1932-1972     William Manchester
• The Truman Presidency     Cabell Phillips
• The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930-1980     ed. Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstle
• American Foreign Policy Since World War II     John Spanier
• A Dream of Greatness: the American People 1945-1963     Geoffrey Perrett
• God's Country: America in the Fifties     J Ronald Oakley
• America in Our Time     Godfrey Hodgson
• Coming Apart: an Informal History of America in the 60's     William O'Neill
• Vietnam      Stanley Karnow
• It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: the Tragedy & Promise of America in the 1970's     Peter Carroll
• Chain Reaction: the Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics     Thomas & Mary Edsall
• The World Turned Right Side Up: a History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America     Godfrey Hodgson

• History of the American Economy     Gary Walton, Hugh Rockoff
• A Financial History of the United States     Margaret Myers
• The History of American Business & Industry     Alex Groner
• The Enterprising Americans     John Chamberlain
• The Economic Transformation of America     Robert Heilbroner
• The Emergence of Industrial America     Peter George
• Titan: the Life of John D Rockefeller     Ron Chernow
• The House of Morgan     Ron Chernow
• American Business in the 20th Century     Thomas Cochran
• Ford: the Men and the Machine     Robert Lacey
• Fat Years and Lean: the American Economy Since Roosevelt     Bernard Nossiter
• The Tax Decade     C Eugene Steuerle
• Barbarians at the Gate     Bryan Burrough, John Helyar
• Fluctuating Fortunes: the Political Power of Business in America     David Vogel

• The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain     ed. Kenneth Morgan
• Stuart England     JP Kenyon
• Cromwell     Antonia Fraser
• Court and Country: England 1658-1715     JR Jones
• Inventing the People: the Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England & America     Edmund Morgan
• England in the 18th Century     JH Plumb
• The Industrial Revolution     TS Ashton
• The Making of Modern England 1783-1867     Asa Briggs
• England 1870-1914     RKC Ensor
• English History 1914-1945     AJP Taylor
• Postwar Britain     Alan Sked, Chris Cook

• France     Albert Guerard
• Richelieu and the French Monarchy     CV Wedgwood
• Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen     Pierre Goubert
• The French Revolution     JM Thompson
• Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution     Simon Schama
• France Since 1789     Paul Gagnon
• France in Modern Times     Gordon Wright

• Modern German History     Ralph Flenley
• Germany in Western Civilization     William Maehl
• A History of Modern Germany  2 of 3 volumes     Hajo Holborn
• Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany 1815-1871     Theodore Hamerow

• Italy: a Modern History     Dennis Mack Smith
• Spain: a Modern History     Rhea Marsh Smith
• Spain: the Root and the Flower     John Crow

• Eastern Europe in the Postwar World     Thomas Simons
• A History of Russia   1-volume     George Vernadsky
• A History of Russia     Nicholas Riasanovsky
• The First 50 Years: Soviet Russia 1917-1967     Ian Grey
• Economic Development of the USSR     Roger Munting
• Stalin     Adam Ulam

• A History of Latin America     Hubert Herring
• Modern Latin America     Thomas Skidmore, Peter Smith
• The Course of Mexican History     Michael Meyer, William Sherman
• A Short History of the West Indies     Parry, Sherlock, Maingot

• Japan: a Short Cultural History     GB Sansom
• Modern Japan     Mikiso Hane
• State and Society in Postwar Japan     Bernard Eccleston
• The Enigma of Japanese Power     Karel Van Wolferen
• MITI and the Japanese Miracle     Chalmers Johnson

• The Chinese Empire     John Harrison
• The Pattern of the Chinese Past     Mark Elvin
• The United States and China     John King Fairbank
• The Search for Modern China     Jonathan Spence

• The Oxford History of India     ed. Percival Spear
• A New History of India     Stanley Wolpert
• A History of Southeast Asia     DGE Hall

• A History of Islamic Societies     Ira Lapidus
• A History of the Arabs     Phillip Hitti
• The Arabs     Peter Mansfield
• The Ottoman Centuries     Lord Kinross
• War Without End: the Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response     Dilip Hiro

• A Political History of Tropical Africa     Robert Rotberg
• Africa Since 1800     Roland Oliver
• The African Genius     Basil Davidson
• Africa South of the Sahara 1988     Europa Publications
• History of Southern Africa     JD Omer-Cooper    

The blue chip bitch

"While I was busy during better times, and not paying attention to what was going on on the national scene, there were people making decisions and investments in New York City, or on the East Coast, that, when it failed for them, was going to rip my world apart."

Those are the words of a man interviewed for the Dec. 11 installment of the "Patchwork Nation" series of reports about economic distress across America, on PBS' Newshour with Jim Lehrer. In almost every sense, this man is about as far away from New York as an American can get. He lives in a small town in Oregon. He's not an employee of any major company; the little business he runs is no part of the Fortune 500 food chain. He's an antiques dealer.

It's an ironic image. The antiques business would seem at once both precariously small, and peculiarly safe. Antiques are not articles of mass production. This is one business that should be safe from conglomerate conquest; this is one corner shop that should be immune to the predations of discount retail juggernauts. This is a trade you would want to ply to preserve your yeoman stake in the Jeffersonian vision against the impersonal immensities of modern corporate enterprise.

This is not a man who went after major power in the economy. But the major powers have come after him.

The 19th-century farmer knows the feeling. No sooner had he busted the Midwestern sod than the railroads began to cloud his horizon. The railroads -- "America's first big business", in the analysis of historian Alfred Chandler -- made Midwestern settlement & farming possible beyond all previous bounds. So the people who depended on them came to harbor the mixed feelings of dependents. The railroads did not invent the large-scale market for farm products, but they got a stranglehold on it that localized water transport never could. The American farmer imagined himself a hero of self-reliance -- and found himself all but an employee of the railroads.

So the first round of modern economic regulation in America was an answer to the prayer of the little guy. Big business had to be controlled because it exploited the humble folk. In 1884, after a decade of Congressional squabbling, the Interstate Commerce Commission became the first federal regulatory authority.

But the Industrial Revolution was transforming the economy at such radical speed that new laws were overtaken by new shocks. Even as the ICC was emerging, John Rockefeller was sweeping the American oil industry into the arms of Standard Oil. A business big enough to dictate terms to the railroads was a threat, not just to the little guy, but to the competitive soul of free enterprise. Monopoly power had to be broken. In 1890, the Sherman Act gave the federal government the power to punish "restraint of trade". 108 years later, the rugged old law was aimed at Microsoft.

History is not so long ago. If we are not as superstitious about big business as the Midwestern farmer was, we are still wary of its incongruity with American ideals. Political scientist Charles Lindblom -- no Marxist -- closed his 1977 book Politics and Markets with these words:

The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit.

The experience of 2 more breakdowns -- the savings & loan crisis of Pres. Reagan's second term, and our present straits -- has revealed a new dimension of the problem. And this one may be more economically cogent than the original concerns about exploitation and monopoly. It is evident now that a single business, especially in the financial sector, can acquire such gravitational magnitude that its collapse would drag down enough other businesses to disrupt, if not cripple, the whole economy. Decisions made in New York rip a world apart in Oregon.

This new form of hazard will lead regulation into new forms of action. In the decades after their inception, the original policies of regulation and of prosecution of monopoly resolved themselves into rival theories of government intervention. Partisans of regulation argued that big business was here to stay, so government should supervise it rather than fight it. But the trustbusters saw big business as a dam against competition: demolition was the only remedy. 

Regulation typically governs whole industries -- the ICC set rates for all railroads. Prosecution of monopoly tackles individual businesses -- Standard Oil was dismantled in 1911. The new regulation of "systemically significant" individual businesses will be a fusion of two purposes that had been historically distinct; a merger of the old rivals. Even the specific regulation of the single "natural monopoly" of the local utility company is not precedent enough. That regulation was still in the passive, static tradition of approving rate changes and fee structures. The new regulation will have to be dynamic; it will have to surf the wave of risk along with management. 

Life offers us our choice of drawbacks; but it requires us to choose. We have had plenty enough experience of, and scholarship about, economic regulation to know how many ironies attend its practice. Even in the early years of that experience, a Supreme Court decision waxed pessimistic:

Competition, free and unrestrained, is the general rule which governs all the ordinary business pursuits and transactions of life. Evils, as well as benefits, result therefrom . . . That free and unrestricted competition in the matter of railroad charges may be productive of evils does not militate against the fact that such is the law now governing the subject. No law can be enacted nor system be devised for the control of human affairs that in its enforcement does not produce some evil results, no matter how beneficial its general purpose may be.

(United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association)

The strikingly obvious fact about this passage is that -- in itself -- it is not an argument; on the contrary, it is an equation. "Evils" are attributed to the market; "evil" is attributed to regulation. The Supreme Court of 1897 was no stranger to hard times; they had lived through 2 severe economic slumps. But they could not see the future. We have had a bellyful of the evils of the market. If -- as this Supreme Court seemed to say -- it's all the same, we'd like to risk some evils of regulation for a change. 

We may all be regulators now; we accept big business like the sunrise, but we don't want to get burned. Even some Republicans -- including the party's last presidential nominee -- are contending that the crash of 2008 happened because existing regulations were not being enforced. Sic transit gloria Reagan!  Whether such concessions and the new public militance will be enough to demolish the legislative dam of the bank lobby on Capitol Hill . . . only your Congressman knows. But if, as we are always told, America is a pragmatic polity, preferring the lessons of experience to the precepts of textbooks, then it is time for one lesson of repeated experience to sink in. Complacence is not an option.

Copyright 2009 Charles Jolliffe

The tort placebo

You know the joke. A passerby finds a man looking for his keys under a streetlamp. He asks the man where he lost them (actually a stupid question, when you think about it; but necessary to the joke). "Over there," replies the man. "Then why are you looking over here?" asks his insatiably curious interrogator.

"Because the light is better here."

And you know its myriad applications to the varieties of human folly. Well, make that a myriad and one. It's hard not to chuckle at the Republican party as they insist on looking for the key to health care reform, not in the health care industry, but in the gawdy glare of blame for their pet scapegoat: lawyers.

The fact that the Republican notion of an "alternative" reform bill seizes on usual suspects rather than actual culprits is less a matter of fidelity to fatcats -- as too many liberals are too quick to charge -- than it is simply the dogmatic doldrums of an unhappy minority. An alternative has to be an alternative. But with Americans demanding progress, and Democrats defining it, there's not much for the Republicans to offer but a plate of their favorite leftovers.

Health care reform has been such a loser for the Republicans that they are even betrayed by their own breakthroughs. It was Republican congressmen who made the case recently that over one-third of America's uninsured population are young people, shrugging off the need for insurance in the bloom of health. That was a solid blow against the Democrats' argument that 46 million Americans are desperate for insurance they can't afford. But it also had a logic that has to be followed through. Youth is fleeting. The carefree kids who shun insurance today are heading for the trap of the pre-existing condition exclusion that is standard in insurance contracts. The longer they delay, the more likely they are to develop some health problem that their eventual insurance carrier can then refuse to cover. The pre-existing condition trap is the reason why "fully insured" Americans need reform just as urgently as the uninsured do.

But the Republican alternative bill lets the pre-existing condition exclusion continue to cheat insured Americans out of their money's worth -- and set up today's youth for a rude awakening.

Tort reform -- in this case, the restriction of awards in medical malpractice lawsuits -- has been around long enough that the party of old ideas can embrace it while the rest of us can observe its checkered record. The Republican case is as simple as it is oblique: a reduction in damage awards will ripple upstream to lower costs throughout the health care system. The insurance companies will save money on payouts; so the doctors will save money on insurance premiums; so you will save money on getting sick. The only people who lose are lawyers, and they deserve to suffer for not voting Republican.

The Republicans are the party of tradition, and tradition is history with the facts left out. So perhaps they can be forgiven for ignoring the fact that the history of medical malpractice tort reform does not fulfill their dream. While it has never been enacted at the federal level, the states have racked up more than three decades of experience with limits on damage awards in malpractice lawsuits.

The fact that these are the decades in which health care costs have spiralled upward does not bode well for the Republican cause. After all, the national experience is just the aggregate of the state experiences. If it is possible for tort reform to tame health care inflation, we should see the state actions making some impact on national totals.

Much as I hate to do my own research, I have not come across any study that frames the question in quite those terms. But the stats I have been able to track down do enough damage to the tort reform case to be worth laying out.

In the nature of experiments, the state record is not as smoothly linear as one would like. Through the 1980's and 1990's, a number of state laws were struck down by supreme courts. So we find some states weaving in and out of the tort reform lane through these years (Ohio, three times). Nevertheless, there is enough consistency to warrant the comparison of state efforts with national results.

As of 1987, 21 states had laws limiting awards for non-economic damages in malpractice suits. Over the next 5 years, 2 more states passed such laws, while 4 lost theirs. During this period, with 19 states sustaining limit laws, total national spending on health care rose 66.7%.

In the next 5-year period, ending in 1997, 2 more states came aboard; 1 passed through; and 1 dropped out. The total at the end of this period was 20 states. With a net difference of only 1 state limiting awards, the increase in national spending for the period mysteriously plunged to 28.8%.

The next 5-year period, to 2002, was relatively static: 1 state out; 1 in and out. Excluding states that passed limits that year, the total at the end of the period was back down to 19 states. Yet the increase in national spending jumped to 37.6%.

My stats for the states fall a few years short in the last 5-year period. But through 2005, the vogue tallied 8 new members. With Wisconsin hanging in until that year, 28 states had malpractice limits on non-economic damages as of 2005. To what avail? As of 2007, the 5-year increase in national health care spending hardly budged, at 37.3%.

Serious students of statistical investigation will snort at this grab-bag methodology. But that is, to a great extent, precisely my point: to prove a mess. The experience of 32 states with malpractice limit laws cannot be correlated with the national experience of health care cost increases. No clear pattern emerges. And so the Republican case can be answered with a question: if the actions of so many states did not have a consistent effect on national costs, what more could we expect from a federal law?

To say much more on the subject would be to repeat what others have already said, much more expertly, at websites that are easy enough to find. But a little repetition would be to their credit. The most authoritative treatment of the question has to be the 2004 study by the Congressional Budget Office, which you can read for yourself here:

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/49xx/doc4968/01-08-MedicalMalpractice.pdf

The CBO's conclusions are not unlike mine: there is less to tort reform than meets the Republican sweet spot. Since the total cost of malpractice amounts to just 2% of the nation's health care bill, the fraction shaved off of that 2% by reform would be a trifle against the magnitude of the problem. 

And a 2005 study by Amitabh Chandra, of Dartmouth College, established that damage awards in malpractice suits were rising in proportion with the general trend of health care costs:

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.240/DC1

Therefore, the amounts that insurance companies were paying out could not be the cause of the nasty spike in premiums that the companies were charging doctors. Chandra's study offers some tentative support to the CBO's speculation that insurance companies may have been gouging doctors at that time to make up for a slump in their investment income.

And in the spirit of impartiality which I have otherwise disdained in this post, I will point out this 2006 study from the American Journal of Public Health:

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/reprint/96/8/1375.pdf

The authors find that states with limit laws have experienced measurable reduction in per capita health care expenses (as distinguished from my showing here that state laws have had doubtful impact on the national total). I would call the measure fairly unimpressive -- little over 3% savings -- but then, I'm not a Republican clutching at straws of credibility. The value of this study to me is right up front in its first paragraph: a Harvard study found that only 2% of malpractice injuries lead to any legal action! So much for the bonfire of the shysters that Republicans claim has been ruining American society. 

The goal of health care reform should be the same as the goal of the health care system: the benefit of the consumer. In typical trickle-down fashion, the Republican proposal mandates benefit for corporations and providers -- and just assumes that such benefit will rub off on you and I, the humble consumers. As the Democratic proposal stands at this writing, America will still be another round or two of reform away from a system that truly delivers "the best health care in the world" to every citizen. But at least the Democrats know where the keys are. 

Copyright 2009 Charles Jolliffe

A is for action

This is the conversation that should have taken place in the White House months ago:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Now that we've committed to a departure from Iraq, we need to resolve the future of our mission in Afghanistan. I have called this a war of necessity, and I'm ready to do as much as we need to do to accomplish our goals there. But a growing number of people, especially in our own party, believe the war is going wrong; that main force will not be able to finish the job of dislodging the Taliban and eradicating Al-Qaida.

I need to give the American people an honest account of what we aim to accomplish there, and what it will take to accomplish that.

ADVISER: And, sir, if I may say so, there is also a duty to our troops.

PRES: American lives are at stake. Our national security is on the line. Skip the niceties. I need you to be blunt.

ADV: Well, sir -- well, you are President first. But you are also Commander in Chief. Our soldiers are fighting for America in general, but they're fighting under you officially. They need you to lead. They need to know that the risk is worth their lives, and they need to hear that from you.

PRES: I'm with them heart and soul. But General McChrystal wants 40,000 more troops. I can't throw that many Americans into harm's way until I'm sure it's worth it.

ADV: We already have 86,000 Americans in harm's way. And the longer it takes to make your decision, the more doubt those soldiers will start to have about their mission. The more time you spend thinking about whether to send more troops into battle, the more the troops who are already in battle will wonder why.

PRES: After 8 years of war, you don't think we have the luxury of a little deliberation? We didn't need much time to think in 2001; and then the Iraq war monopolized the national debate. Frankly I think we're overdue for a spell of review.

ADV: Morale matters on the home front too. Every day without a decision is another day for critics of the war to score points and change minds. Deliberation has the same effect as it does in a jury trial. The longer the jury is out, the more the scales tilt toward one verdict and against the other. I don't think we can just let those scales tilt. The American people need you to lead, too.

PRES: You know the story of Vietnam. We escalated and escalated, and failed and failed. I'm not going to drag our country through that again.

ADV: And quagmire is a political phenomenon, not a military one. Any army can get out of any war at any time. But war is a political commitment to the most difficult of tasks. The calculation of that commitment varies among the leaders and supporters of the war, and over time. When those calculations diverge enough, quagmire begins.

Vietnam was a quagmire because Pres. Johnson couldn't end his own war, and Pres. Nixon dragged his feet.

But historical analogy is always hazardous, and never moreso than in comparing wars. I'm surprised at the number of people who see the face of Vietnam in the mirror of Afghanistan.

PRES: The analogy is not groundless. They're both wars fought largely on guerilla terms; both fought on the most difficult terrain; and -- at least, lately we can say -- both fought in support of dubious governments in countries with little tradition of strong central rule.

ADV: But the enemy is entirely different. Many analysts, both at the time and since, have regarded Ho Chi Minh as the champion of Vietnamese nationalism, not just the leader of the Communists. Whether that was true of him or not, no one could make that claim for the Taliban or Al-Qaida. The type of fanatic Islam they want to impose is pretty alien to Afghan society.

The Vietnamese were remarkably tenacious, but they hardly beat us with backbone alone. They were abundantly supplied by two of the world's major powers: the Soviet Union and Communist China. The Taliban and Al-Qaida have no foreign patron; just some furtive friends in Pakistan. None of the surrounding countries want them to win. Even Iran, which would love to see us fall on our face, is unsympathetic to the Taliban.

We lost 57,000 lives in 8 years of combat in Vietnam. We have lost around 800 lives in 8 years of combat in Afghanistan. If we couldn't bear that kind of loss, America would be defenseless.

Vietnam was the domino war; every justification began with the word "if". If we don't fight in Vietnam, our European allies may think we won't fight for them. If Saigon falls, Southeast Asia will fall. If we don't fight the local wars now, we'll have to fight the world war soon enough.

We're not fighting for "if" in Afghanistan; we invaded on the clearest claim of right that any nation has ever had. The Vietnam analogy implies that there is no difference between the Tonkin Gulf incident and the September 11 attacks. Well, our memories are not that short, and our patriotism is not that lightly insulted.

PRES: A fine rebuttal. But I'm afraid I missed the part about escalation. That, after all, is the crux of the present decision.

ADV: A decision that you should not even have to make. It was the responsibility of Pres. Bush to pass on to you a war that was being waged with all the resources necessary to success. Instead, they dumped their failure at your door.

If any decision costs us Afghanistan, it will be Bush's decision to start another war in 2003. That split our whole military capacity -- troops, materiel, support, leadership -- in two.

PRES: And we started losing the war we have to win, so we could win the war we never had to fight.

ADV: Because of the dereliction of the Bush administration, you can think of this decision less in terms of escalation and more as a restoration of troop levels we should have had years ago.

Which leads to my second point: don't make the Rumsfeld mistake. If you're going to escalate -- pour it on. If the Bush administration didn't learn anything else, they learned that you can't scrimp your way to victory. Unfortunately, they only got wise in Iraq, where the President's pride was at stake. But escalation did have its part to play in turning that war around. That suggests that it could be part of a turnaround in Afghanistan. It won't be the whole reason, and the turnaround won't be so dramatic. But we can't just think ourselves out of an option that has passed the test of experience.

PRES: Can we turn the war around without turning Afghanistan around? Critics of the war -- opponents of escalation -- argue that we need to confine our efforts to our own national security objectives. They think that pinpoint operations by special forces can accomplish more than the sledgehammer; and the fight for Afghanistan can be left to the Afghans.

ADV: Our grip on Afghanistan has been slipping; so we have a glimpse of the future if we let it go. The Taliban is already the de facto government of two provinces. I don't see how there can be any doubt that if we leave Afghanistan to its fate, everything we have fought for will be lost.

PRES: Now wait a minute. I don't want anyone to suggest that American men and women died in vain. That's just not true. Even if worst did come to worst in Afghanistan, we have already made one point loud and clear. In 2001, Osama Bin Laden didn't believe that America would ever take the fight to him. Well, he knows better now. This war has already taken a terrible toll on Al-Qaida. Even if we were to pull our last man out tomorrow -- they all know better now.

ADV: I stand corrected, sir. Very true. But I still don't see how we could achieve goals within the country while losing the country. With the Taliban back in charge, we could expect to lose much of the intelligence network on which both our war on terror and the proposed special forces campaign depend. And not just in Afghanistan. If Pakistan sees us abandon their neighbor to the Taliban, we can say goodbye to any real, effective cooperation from the country which many people have called more crucial than Afghanistan. No more Swat Valley crusades. The nest will be left to the vipers.

Critics have argued that we don't actually know what would become of Afghanistan. To my mind, "we don't know" is the worst-case scenario. As long as we stay in Afghanistan, we have some say in what it becomes. If we let it go now, we've got nothing but hope and prayer.

PRES: We just had 8 years of President Control Freak. That's what got us mixed up in Iraq. We need to step back from this idea that we can fine tune the world with firepower. The most we can do is to nudge Afghanistan in the right direction. We can't guide its footsteps.

ADV: And by the same token, defective government is not reason enough to turn our back on Afghanistan. If we're not going to try to control them, then we can't demand perfection of them as the price of our support, either. The critics fall into a "control freak" logic of their own.

PRES: Well, we don't urge good government for our own sake; we urge it for the sake of the Afghan people.

ADV: Yet we judge its "goodness" by our standards, not theirs.

PRES: And that may be  something of a contradiction at the present time. President Karzai may believe that this is the only way, other than Taliban terror, to put together a national government in a poor country that has never really had one. But in the long run, "our standards" really are the best assurance of freedom and justice for the people of Afghanistan.

I've saved the toughest test for last. I just saw an interview on CSPAN with David Axe, the journalist who has been embedded twice in Afghanistan; once in 2007 and once this year. I jotted down some of his remarks so I could quote them exactly:

It's a challenge, though, working with Afghan local government, because there's not a mindset that these governments exist to provide services . . . more than the Taliban, the enemy is corruption. The enemy is an Afghan government that has had a chance to pull its act together, and has declined to do so -- repeatedly. It seems that most senior Afghan officials -- actually, most Afghan officials, senior or not -- just want to get rich; just want to gather power for themselves, and don't care about Afghanistan . . . You can't win this war, by the definition of war that we've settled on, until there's an Afghan government that takes governing seriously -- and that's just not happening.

ADV: That is tough. I have the greatest respect for David Axe's work. And it's just because he's such a fine reporter that he can only speak to the present situation. Your decision has to look to the future. How long can things continue to not change?

PRES: We know that the Guomindang lost the Chinese Civil War in large part because of corruption. President Truman said "They're all thieves, every damn one of them", and cut off American aid to Chiang Kai-Shek. Will I be repeating Truman's lament someday?

ADV: China was no more critical to American national security than Vietnam was. We should be able to say the same of Afghanistan -- but we can't. Our country was attacked from that country.

I would differ with David Axe's sweeping language, but I don't doubt the evidence of his eyes. It may well be that the political challenge is greater than the military challenge. If that is so, the worst that can come of military escalation is too many soldiers with too little to do. If all we end up wasting is time and money, then let's stick with our commitment.

And it has to be pointed out that corruption is neither inevitable nor necessary to Afghan politics. Ironically, the proof comes from our enemy. The Taliban has been capitalizing on its clean reputation, in contrast to the Karzai regime. And the Taliban is made up of 100% Afghan natives. If their makeshift administrations could govern without graft, we have solid reason to hope that legitimate government can "pull its act together" in Afghanistan.

PRES: Thank you for giving it to me straight. If Pres. Bush had let anyone besides Dick Cheney talk to him like this, we wouldn't be up the creek we are today. I think I know what I'm going to do. 

Copyright 2009 Charles Jolliffe