Matt Yglesias

Petraeus’ Indifference Problem

Peter Beinart has a pretty clever column about how it would be good if David Petraeus ran for President as a Republican in 2012. It’s clever in the sense that he uses the conceit to make various smart points. But the conceit itself is dumb. Alex Massie makes some good points about this. But the larger issue is that there’s no evidence that the public cares at all about Petraeus’ signature issues. Stroll over to Polling Report’s problems and priorities page. A recent CBS News poll indicates that . . . nobody cares:

If you expand the choice set offered to people, you get somewhat different answers. For example, an August CNN/Opinion Research poll let people say “education” and it turns out that just as many people think this is the most important issue as think Iraq and Afghanistan is:

As it happens, former Bush administration Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is, like David Petraeus, an example of a Bush administration official who you can find Democrats who’ll praise. But I don’t see anyone touting her as a likely presidential contender. Because, you know, she was a second-tier cabinet member working on a second-tier issue.

Declare Victory and Go Talk to Your Favorite Reporter

Bill Gertz yesterday:

On the one side were Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, who argued in closed-door meetings for a minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan that one source described as a “lowest common denominator” approach. [...] The other side of the debate was led by Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy for the region, who along with U.S. Central Command leader Gen. David H. Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for a major nation-building effort.

The Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton faction, according to the sources, prevailed. The result is expected to be a major, long-term military and civilian program to reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least developed nations to a relatively prosperous democratic state.

Also yesterday, Marc Ambinder reported precisley the opposite:

The new bearing reflects Vice President Joe Biden’s imprint. He has been arguing internally for a more focused counterterrorism mission rather than a larger, more complex counterinsurgency mission, which would involve significantly more American resources and troops.

I would say that the white paper is actually a document you could sort of read either way. The quantity of forces involved, however, suggests to me a more “Biden” approach. That said, if the account of the factions is correct than operational implementation of the strategy is in the hands of people—Holbrooke and Petraeus—who lean toward a maximalist vision.

The Ideology of Incentives

With the exception of his stint as head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq in 2004, throughout his career the general sense has been that General David Petraeus has been performing well. And yet, nowhere along his path from West Point to heading up United States Central Command has he received a multi-million dollar bonus payment. No stock options. Not even a decent salary by Wall Street standards—Generals seem to max out at around $216 grand a year plus what is, admittedly, a pretty solid benefits package. According to prevailing economic wisdom, it should be completely impossible for the United States Army to field a high-quality officer corps or to motivate its personnel to perform at a high level. And yet something seems wrong with this theoretical picture.

That, I think, rather than the now-banal point that Wall Street bonuses create perverse incentives is the most provocative element of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest:

Finally, I was involved in trading for 21 years and I can testify that traders consciously play the free option game. On the other hand, I worked (in my other job as risk adviser) with various military organisations and people watching over our safety. We trust military and homeland security people with our lives, yet they do not get a bonus. They get promotions, the honour of a job well done and the disincentive of shame if they fail. Roman soldiers signed a sacramentum accepting punishment in the event of failure.

Now I don’t particularly know where this leaves you. But I think it’s a provocative reality staring us in the face. And it’s important to observe that even though there are a lot of economics PhD programs in the United States and a lot of business schools in the United States, you wouldn’t exactly say that looking into ways to design incentive schemes that don’t involve windfall financial rewards for organizational leaders has been a huge research priority of these institutions. Not, I think, because anyone would strictly deny that alternative motivational schemes exist. Or really because anyone consciously says to themselves “my job is to produce work that’s pleasing to the sort of monied individuals who finance the existence of the sort of institutions that employ me.” But somehow things work out the way they do, and I don’t think it’s unrelated to the fact that part of the power of money is that it carriers with it the power to call flatterers into existence. If I recall correctly, this is how Marx used the term “ideology” — to describe the process by which a society inevitably managers to create a set of ideas that justify the existing hierarchy. And when the hierarchy’s power starts to crack, then so does the power of its ideas.

Brad DeLong is not, I know, a fan of Marx. But yesterday he was writing about the return of neo-Hooverite economics:

Back in 2000 my teacher Olivier Blanchard wrote an article: “What Do We Know About Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?” (PDF). But he wrote the wrong article. The Cato Institute and the Republican Party demonstrate that we economists have forgotten–or at least can no longer reach consensus on–things that Fisher and Wicksell knew very well indeed.

I think you need understand this process of “forgetting” at least in part in these kind of terms. The collapse of the Gilded Age ushered in an era in which we “knew” various things about the virtues of the mixed economy and the non-automatic nature of economic growth. The rise of the New Gilded Age caused those ideas to be “forgotten.” But note that Ed Prescott, who DeLong is complaining about, hasn’t actually forgotten the old ideas, he’s developed some rather ingenious, if somewhat laughable, new theoretical models that just reach the same conclusions as the liquidationists of old.

Near the end of his very interesting book, A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark also does a bit of work toward developing the idea that the role of “incentives” in economic growth is overstated. You can get a flavor here where he argues that neoclassical theory predicts that Malawi should be richer than Sweden which, obviously, it isn’t.

The Success of the Surge

Anthony Shadid has a great story in The Washington Post that offers a microcosm look at the kind of compromises by which we’ve brought down the level of violence in Iraq. Specifically, he takes at Nadhim Khalil, the bossman of a Sunni Arab town called Thuluyah. I would say that these compromises have been worth making, but they really don’t look much like victory:

His zeal soon drew him into the ranks of an incipient insurgency, leading 30 armed men and meeting colleagues in Baghdad, where he sometimes sought shelter at the Um al-Qura mosque. He ventured to the Anbar province capital of Ramadi, towns in Diyala province, and across the border to Syria. The U.S. military jailed him twice: as prisoner No. 159705 when he spent nearly six months in the massive prison at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and as No. 200331 when he was incarcerated for a similar stint at Camp Cropper in Baghdad nearly two years later. By his count, U.S. soldiers searched his house 67 times. They occasionally brought dogs, he said, to inspect his mosque.

By August 2006, after a meeting in Homs, Syria, he had joined al-Qaeda in Iraq, a homegrown Sunni movement that U.S. officials say is led by foreigners and that embraced a radical strain of Islam.

Later, he abandoned that path. But he’s not really repentant about it, he’s practical. He’s a successful case of appeasement. And notwithstanding the extent to which he’s been successfully appeased, he’s not a cuddly pro-Western democrat:

But he still calls himself an Islamist, and to his followers, his words remain harsh.

“Our country is occupied and our bodies are torn apart, but we shouldn’t forget our families in Palestine,” he proclaimed in a sermon recently to an overflow crowd in his austere mosque, its white walls gouged by shrapnel from his assassination attempt.

“Those sons of monkeys, enemies of God and killers of prophets,” he declared, his voice rising in denunciation of Jews, “are killing our brothers and sisters in Palestine.”

The city has a city council. There’s also an organization of tribal elders. But real political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and he has it, the result of his command of a militia that wears “mismatched uniforms or civilian clothes” and is loyal to him rather than to the Iraqi state or the formal city government. The militia’s efficacy stems in part from the fact that the US military collaborates with them. This is all definitely better than what was happening before. But the irony of the conservative celebration of General Petraeus and the past two years’ worth of efforts in Iraq is the extent to which it goes against everything the right normally believes about the conduct of these things. We haven’t defeated an insurgent like Khalik — we’ve barely even co-opted him. Rather, we’ve agreed to help him gain power and in exchange his men don’t try to kill our men.