Has Tom Ricks Sold Out?

This Slate article is a teaser for a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review. Here's a link to that story, which was written by Tara McKelvey.

I read Tom Ricks's book Fiasco. I read it in the summer of 2007, while traveling to the Pacific Northwest. It was very critical of the way the Bush administration and the military had handled Iraq to that point. I have also read his more recent book, Gamble. The focus of that book is very different, and it takes a much more favorable view of the U.S. military. In particular, Gamble is very high on General David Petraeus, and it gives much of the credit for the "surge" to General Ray Odierno. In this, it is somewhat at odds with The War Within by Bob Woodward, which attributes much of the impetus for the surge to Stephen Hadley, Mr. Bush's second National Security Advisor.

The perception that Ricks has turned into an admirer of the military, somehow reversing his positions along the way, is, I think, as mistaken as the perception that Woodward turned on the White House and changed from an admirer to a critic of Mr. Bush. To some degree, both men may have been victims of the thinking that recent trends will continue. When Woodward wrote Bush at War, the war in Afghanistan was looking like a success, and Iraq had not yet been invaded. When he wrote Plan of Attack, the situation in Iraq was looking very dicey. When Ricks wrote Fiasco, about the same time that Martha Raddatz published The Long Road Home, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran published Imperial Life in the Emerald City, nobody thought that the war in Iraq was going well. There were differences among observers about why it was going so badly, but it was hard to find an admirer of the Bush strategy in Iraq back in 2006-2007.

The surge actually did turn things around, although it did so in ways that may not be sustainable. For one thing, it appears that the Iraqi government doesn't like the concrete barriers Petraeus ordered erected all over Baghdad, and there have been several recent bombing as a result.

In any event, I would urge you to read Ms. McKelvey's article, and read Gamble, and make up your own mind.

Was Lehman to Blame for the Fall in World Trade?

Was the collapse and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers a year ago the cause of the abrupt shrinkage in global trade? Daniel Gross thinks so, and he gives his reasons in the accompanying article. (Click on the title of this post to go to the article.)

Catching Up with Health Care

Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn, officially, which means that today is the last day of summer. I've had a good summer, generally speaking, including two very good vacation trips - one to Tennessee and one to the Four Corners region. But I have been neglecting my blog, and my e-mail, periodical, and other reading has piled up. So I've been playing catch-up here in September. Earlier today I posted on a column by Daniel Gross, who writes for Slate and Newsweek. Today I have Mr. Gross's column from September 10, which is only (only!!!) eleven days ago.

This column should be a sobering reminder to those of us who rely on employer-provided health care programs that change is coming, with or without the reforms being pressed by President Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

The Economics of the Cupcake

Remember those pictures from the Depression of men in threadbare coats selling apples on street corners? Daniel Gross has spotted a trend that may be the Bush Recession equivalent: cupcakes. I haven't seen this locally, but maybe the north end of Colorado Springs is just too suburban for such a trend to catch hold. Gross has a number of reasons for thinking that the cupcake boomlet is too sweet to last.

AbeBooks High School Reading List

AbeBooks has a very nice article in this issue of the newsletter. It's entitled "Required Reading Worldwide," and is about the books which staff members at AbeBooks encountered in high school. Their point, and probably a good one, is that most of us with a life-long reading habit moved into high gear, and identified some of the literature we would always enjoy, in high school. We should give praise to the teachers who assigned us Julius Caesar and Macbeth, and to the compilers of those selected literature books who introduced me to John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury and Jack Finney, among others.

Enjoy!

The Failure Caucus: A Good Name

I'm back with another Moneybox column by Daniel Gross from Slate. In this column, Gross identifies a number of groups he designates as part of the "failure caucus." It is hard to believe that any Americans, especially those sworn to public service, would be so cynical, and so hard-hearted, as to want to delay economic recovery, simply in order to paint the administration as a failure.

Here's the key paragraph on the political front: "That risk is highest for the political division of the Failure Caucus. The conventional wisdom on the right holds that President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are setting themselves up for a big fall through their overreaching. But I'd argue that it's the Republican Party, which was always on the side of greater growth, higher stock prices, and more wealth, that has painted itself into a corner. Many Republicans opposed the initial bailouts because they were conducted by an unpopular Republican president in conjunction with a Democratic Congress. (In Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair article, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson conspicuously praises congressional Democrats and conspicuously says little about congressional Republicans.) Then they doubled down with virtually uniform opposition to the Obama stimulus bill, which had been watered down to attract Republican votes. In order for Republicans to be vindicated politically, the bailouts and the stimulus—and the economy at large—must fail. Thus considered, every positive data point, every sign of stabilization in the housing market, every rise in the S&P 500, every TARP repayment, is something of a rebuke. As the clouds part, the historic party of economic sunshine is in the strange position of praying for rain."

I think "failure caucus" is a good name for these self-interested prophets of doom, and I think it particularly appropriate that a picture of John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, is at the top of Gross's column.

Did Bush and Paulson Do Something Right?

Daniel Gross, author of Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, takes on a simple question in this column from Slate. Back when TARP - the Troubled Asset Repurchase Program - was created, there was a lot of skepticism about the program. From what I heard, a lot of people believed that we had seen the last of that $700 billion dollars. As Gross explains that pessimism was incorrect. The banks and other companies bailed out by the government have paid back around a third of the money, with interest. We, the taxpayers, may be making 17% on the money invested. This article provides a good account of the current situation with our $700 billion.