The View from St. Paul

 D. J. Tice

      D. J. Tice is an editorial page writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. These articles are reprinted from the Pioneer Press.

Iraq is Like Vietnam Mainly in the Confusions It Causes

      Two years after 9/11, two years into America’s war on terrorism, the lessons of Vietnam are on Americans’ minds, especially the restless minds of President Bush’s critics. It’s a subject that will evidently not be exhausted (never mind the weariness it causes) until my “Vietnam generation” breathes its last.

      Critics of President Bush’s policy in Iraq were likening the effort to Vietnam even before the first M-1 tank rolled toward Baghdad. Such comparisons are self-fulfilling in one sense.

      The dissension and criticism the Iraq mission has generated from the beginning is one way it actually does resemble the Vietnam conflict (along with other small controversial wars such as Korea, the Spanish-American War, and the Mexican War) and not the “great” or “good” wars the American people supported with more of a single voice.

      Beyond that, it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that a six month-military deployment already resembles a 15-year ordeal. It’s especially imaginative when the six-month mission has long since toppled the enemy regime and ended militarily meaningful resistance—things the 15-year ordeal never achieved or even fully attempted.

      Naturally, America’s opponents in Iraq hope the mission is like Vietnam in another respect. They hope America’s commitment to this undertaking is ultimately not firm enough for the nation to endure persistent losses, and frustrations, if only they can provide those in sufficient abundance and regularity. Americans’ lack of unity can only encourage such hopes.

      This state of affairs has several curious effects. First, the struggle in and around Baghdad today actually tends to make Bush’s case that Iraq is “the central front” in the broader war on terror stronger than it has ever been before.

      The best question raised about the Iraq mission has always been whether this was the right battle for America to be fighting. It has never been conclusively plain that the link was strong enough between Saddam Hussein’s loathsome tyranny and the religious radicals of the terror culture to make removing Saddam, as a strategy in the broader war, worth all its costs in blood, treasure, estrangement from with allies, internal disunity and the rest.

      Now, with bombings and ambushes and other signature terrorist tactics being used against Americans and others in Iraq daily—and with non-Iraqi members of the larger terror network apparently launching some of those attacks—the Iraq-terrorism link Bush claimed all along is difficult to miss.

      Arguably, the U.S. invasion created or at least strengthened that link. But could there be a strategy in this, if only an inadvertent one? Could the American presence in Iraq serve as a kind of trap luring terrorists into battles they cannot win—a sort of “lure and destroy” mission?

      Maybe, but the original question remains: How important is this specific battle? And here is another way the Iraq debate is a bit like that of the Vietnam era.

      As in the Cold War against Communism, America today is engaged in a large and complex struggle that must by its nature be fought on many very different small battlefields. And as, during the Cold War, not all Americans are convinced of the justice of America’s cause in this larger war, while others merely have doubts about the tactical wisdom of fighting a particular engagement.

      All this can easily become confused, as any veteran of the Vietnam years can attest. Patriotic Americans, reacting angrily to the undermining, in some quarters, of the nation’s greater mission, can come to see every disagreement about any individual strategy as a product of disloyalty or at least utter foolishness. Simultaneously, those who really oppose the entire American war effort may sometimes dress their arguments up in the more respectable garb of mere differences over specific tactics.

      It isn’t impossible to imagine all this producing a Vietnam-like befuddlement over the strategic value and purpose of the particular mission at hand. Clarity in such things isn’t easy. Surely America must avoid sending the messages it ultimately sent in Vietnam—that our friends could not really trust us and our enemies need not really fear us. Since 9/11 the United States has delivered the message to all regimes willingly or unwillingly connected with transnational terror that becoming an enemy of America is a bad idea. Surely we must stay the course in Iraq long enough to produce an improved political and economic reality there, thus sending the message that becoming a friend of America is rewarding.

      But how fully, lastingly and single-handedly should the U.S. assume responsibility for the political destiny of Iraq—and at what cost? How high should our expectations be for the dawn of democracy and modernity?

      These are hard questions requiring calm consideration.

Deficits Symptom of the Real Problem —Too Much Spending, All Around

      Just about 30 months ago, shortly after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan endorsed the new president’s tax cut idea. Greenspan explained that the federal budget faced the specter of “excess surpluses.” No less than excess deficits, they would be “bad for the country.”

      Already, by that time, Greenspan saw indications of a looming economic downturn. But budget projections were calling for a ten-year accumulated surplus of nearly $6 trillion that would pay off the entire national debt and, Greenspan warned, “distort the structure of private economic growth.” He did not foresee anything altering that basic trend.

      Bush’s critics would interpret this recollection largely as a measure of the president’s mismanagement. The “excess surpluses” he inherited have turned into large and growing deficits that, according to some recent projections, will only get worse.

      But surely one other possible interpretation is that budget projections over anything but the short term ought not be taken with excess seriousness. The oversized surpluses Greenspan was worried about, after all, had also come as a surprise, defying projections of continuing deficits made only a few years earlier.

      But Bush’s detractors are as earnest as buzzards as they survey the “disastrous” deficits now facing the country. These skeptics seem quite prepared to assume that today’s bleak projections could not possibly turn out to be faulty.

      Americans could be excused for getting confused by the deficit debate. As recently as 1997, Republicans and conservatives far and wide were promoting a “balanced budget amendment” to the U.S. Constitution. They argued that the federal government should have to make ends meet every year, just as a family does.

      Today, many of those same fiscal disciplinarians are more inclined to shrug off deficits, suggesting that, to the extent the red ink is caused by Bush’s tax cuts, it will fuel renewed economic growth and prove self-correcting.

      The conservative change of heart is no stranger than the phobia toward deficit spending that suddenly has seized liberals. Most Democrats and progressives fought the balanced budget amendment, arguing that deficits are OK, even desirable, in times of economic sluggishness.

      Times like the present, for instance?

      Political opportunism explains many of these contortions. But there is also genuine uncertainty and misunderstanding about the effects of deficits. The basic mistake is to suppose that deficit financing is, in itself, what America needs to be concerned about. In fact, the real issue is the overall balance of savings and consumption in the economy.

      It is often said that the trouble with running up government debt is that it passes today’s costs on to “our children and grandchildren.”

      Well, yes, but everything we consume today represents a cost to our children and grandchildren—whether it’s consumed privately or publicly, and whether we borrow or pay cash to obtain it.

      Say you have $1,000 in the bank that you’d like to pass on to your heirs. Now suppose you decide to spend $100 on yourself. Whether you borrow the $100 or withdraw $100 and pay cash, your heirs will be poorer by $100—plus interest.

      If you borrow, you or your heirs will have to pay interest on a $100 loan. If you use cash, you and your heirs will lose interest on $100 that would have stayed in the bank if you hadn’t spent it. Either way, the true future cost is the same.

      The main way deficits matter right now is that they show America is consuming too much and saving too little. The nation needs to be stepping up productive investment to get ready for the approaching retirement boom of the ’60s generation.

      Above all, it is private investment that counts—the kinds of investment that can make tomorrow’s economy more productive.

      Government surpluses, or at least smaller deficits, are good because they can reliably reduce national debt (or increase national savings). The trouble with tax cuts is that there’s no way to ensure they are applied to savings and not spending.

      In any case, if a balanced budget is achieved through high taxes, which reduce private investment, rather than restrained spending, the apparent fiscal discipline is an illusion. We’ve simply traded private savings for public spending.

      This is why Greenspan warned of the distorting effects of both large deficits and large surpluses. A middle course is needed.

      The hard truth is that reduced consumption is what America needs over the long haul—in the public sector and the private sector alike. Nobody much likes that truth, so they’d just as soon remain confused.

Press Champions of Campaign Reform Should Try Arguments on Themselves

      A recent Op-Ed page, a Washington Post editorial makes an impressive case that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law must be upheld in its entirety when its constitutionality is tested before the U.S. Supreme Court this fall.

      One can only hope the editorialists’ elegant argument fails. It chills the blood to think how easily such reasoning could be used someday to silence articulate and reasonable voices like these editorialists’ very own.

      The Post admirably simplifies the campaign finance reform issue. The new restrictions the court must consider are merely, we learn, a “modest effort” to restore the principle that corporations, labor unions and interest groups ought not be free to spend the money they please to help elect or defeat candidates for public office.

      The indirect methods such groups use nowadays to “reinsert their coffers into the political system”—so-called “soft money” donations to parties, or called “issue” ads supporting or opposing candidates—have corrupted American politics, the Post believes, in a way the federal government simply must be able to remedy, whatever the Constitution says.

      Now what I have never been able to understand is this: If this argument is correct, why would the Washington Post Co. be any different from any other company?

      Like every major newspaper and media firm, the Post expends large sums of unregulated money to produce and disseminate political commentary. Much of that rhetoric, to be sure, pretends to be about “issues.” But the Post, again like many papers, explicitly endorses and lambastes candidates, and often “within the immediate time frame of [an] election.”

      If the First Amendment allows the government to restrict the political expression of all other organizations in America, by what reasoning could one deny government’s right to limit the investment of newspapers and media firms on influencing political outcomes?

      Is freedom of the press somehow a more spacious liberty than the general “free speech” that is guaranteed in the same clause of the same Constitutional amendment—and in fact is mentioned first?

      We are presumably expected to believe that the Constitution confers on the Washington Post editorial board an absolute right to call (explicitly or in so many words) for President Bush’s defeat in his re-election bid, as often as it likes and at any time it pleases right up to Election Day. But the same Constitution couldn’t possibly, the Post says, leave the government powerless to muzzle advocacy groups, unions and business associations who want to take out an ad in the very same newspaper urging voters to follow their advice. The legal logic in this is elusive.

      Does anyone doubt that newspaper editorial boards and popular broadcasters influence political events more than ordinary voters do—in the end because of the money their employers spend amplifying their opinions?

      I suspect (actually, I desperately hope) that nearly every reader instinctively senses that political liberty would be endangered if such a governmental power to limit freedom of the press were accepted. Those who do must explain to themselves why it is any less hazardous to set government up in the business of limiting the free speech of every other association of Americans.

      They might also try explaining this to themselves: If we don’t trust politicians to put the public interest ahead of their own political self-interest under a current system that leaves them open to exposure and criticism from a crowded universe of well-financed and well-organized critics, why would we trust them to be public spirited once campaign finance reform has substantially quieted their detractors?

      And why would we want to give such cynical grafters the power to restrict the most basic political freedom of them all?     Ω