NEW PAUL KRUGMAN

Ever since the New York Times started putting Paul Krugman essays behind a pay-per-view firewall, it's been extraordinarly difficult to post his work for my bloggy response. There was one site for a while there that was just reposting them in their entirety, and I was able to carry on with my always fun Krugman blogging, but they got caught, and were issued a cease-and-desist order. Finally, I've found somebody else who seems to be doing almost the same thing, with, maybe, only a couple of deletions to make it all intellectual-property safe.

Anyway, without any further ado, from the New York Times via Economist's View, the latest Paul Krugman essay:

Quagmire of the Vanities

The only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden ... thinks they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be “the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize ... for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

And

Mr. Bush is expected to announce his plan for escalation in the next few days. According to the BBC, the theme of his speech will be “sacrifice.” But sacrifice for what? Not for the national interest, which would be best served by withdrawing before the strain of the war breaks our ground forces. No, Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities — a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won’t admit that they were wrong.

Click here for the rest.

You know, at this point I think it's safe to say that pretty much nobody really knows why we're still in Iraq. I mean, okay, the point of view that says we can't leave the Iraqis high and dry isn't unreasonable, but I don't think anybody has any idea of how the US military is going to make things better--at best, we're only keeping things from getting worse, and they're pretty bad as it is; at worst, our presence, and our support for the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi puppet government, is actually throwing gasoline on the fire. But as far as what's in the minds of Bush and Cheney, your guess is as good as mine. Is it politics? Does Rove still think there's mileage in the "war president" schtick? Is it, like Krugman asserts, simply ego? That they just can't imagine that they're wrong?

Personally, I still like the "control the spigot" theory that the invasion was a way of transmuting our vast military power into global economic leverage by taking control of the oil markets before our own financial strength gives out. The five massive, expensive, and permanent bases we're currently constructing in Iraq strongly suggest that may be the case, that we're there for the long haul whether we like it or not. On the other hand, the ongoing carnage over there, the absolute chaos in which Iraq is mired, suggests that Bush and Cheney have no idea what they're doing.

We probably won't really know what's going on for at least a decade after Bush is out of office, and maybe not until after he's dead.

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