The Ken Pollack of the 'war on the deficit,' Jeffrey Sachs.
In this week of Iraq Debacle
mea culpas, I was most struck by the entry submitted by
Ezra Klein. Not because it shed any new light, but rather for the excuse he uses for why he supported the Iraq Debacle (to be clear, I'm forgiving of what an 18-year-old kid with no actual influence thought about the Iraq Debacle. I'm not sure a
mea culpa from him was really necessary.) Klein wrote:
[A]t the core of my support for the war was an analytical failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support -- an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration. In particular, I supported Kenneth Pollack’s Iraq war.
If you weren't paying close attention at the time, you may not know that Ken Pollack's support for the Iraq Debacle was one of the most important pieces of the selling of the Iraq War to Democrats. As Klein notes:
In 2002, Pollack, a Persian Gulf expert who’d worked at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, published “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” Pollack’s argument, in short, was that Saddam Hussein was an unusually reckless, cruel and self-deluded dictator who either had weapons of mass destruction or was very close to attaining them. His past, which included catastrophic wars with Iran and Kuwait, murderous rampages against his own people, erratic personal behavior and a clear aspiration toward regional hegemony, suggested that he wasn’t the sort of tyrant who could be contained or reasoned with, and so Pollack’s reluctant, unhappy conclusion was that he was the sort of tyrant who must be stopped before the right weaponry made him unstoppable.
Frankly, that sounded a lot like Dick Cheney's Iraq Debacle to me. But Pollack protests to this day that he did not support Dick Cheney's war. Klein reports:
[Pollack's] re-evaluation of the Iraq War has been limited. “For me,” he said, “the two big revelations, one of which was becoming clear when we went to war and the other which wasn’t clear until afterward was the way the Bush administration handled it, and then the absence of the WMDs.
Whether that should have come as a surprise to anyone is a matter of opinion (mine is decidedly ... No), as is whether it even makes sense on its own terms (what if Saddam had chemical weapons? Really worth the debacle?) But the real failing is to pretend that the people in charge were going to do it your way. Join me the below the fold as we explore how this ties in with current views on the deficit.
Today, a new "war" has been declared—on the deficit. Or, more accurately, for austerity. And the role of Ken Pollack in this fight is being played by Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is for deficit concern and austerity, but he wants to fight his war on the deficit, not the Tea Party's. What Sachs fails to understand is that the "war on deficits" will not be fought as he wants. Sachs has joined the likes of Joe Scarborough, ignoring that Scarborough does not actually agree with him, and as a result, attaching his name to nonsense like this:
Reasonable liberals and conservatives can disagree on what role the federal government should play yet still believe that government should resume paying its way.
Of course they can. The question is
when and
how "the government should resume paying its way." Joining forces with the likes of a Joe Scarborough and the Pete Peterson crowd is the equivalent of Ken Pollack's support for the Iraq Debacle. Just as Bush did not fight Ken Pollack's Iraq War, it's not going to be Jeff Sachs' "war on the deficit," it will be the Tea Party War on the Deficit: no revenue increases, slashing everything from the social safety net to research funding, from infrastructure spending to
any program a progressive might support. (Remember an important part of the conservative project is to oppose anything a liberal might support.) How can Sachs join forces with Scarborough and his ilk after penning this paean to
the progressive budget in 2011?
Just when it seemed that all of Washington had lost its values and its connection with the American people, a bolt of hope has arrived. It is the People's Budget put forward by the co-chairs of the 80-member Congressional Progressive Caucus. Their plan is humane, responsible, and most of all sensible, reflecting the true values of the American people and the real needs of the floundering economy. Unlike Paul Ryan's almost absurdly vicious attack on the poor and working class, the People's Budget would close the deficit by raising taxes on the rich, taming health care costs (including a public option), and ending the military spending on wars and wasteful weapons systems.
Sachs believes he is helping to forward
that agenda with his call to arms with
Joe Fucking Scarborough for a war on the deficit? It would take a supremely naive or stupid person to think so. What is really amazing is that Sachs still pens progressive missives.
A few days after perversely joining Joe Scarborough on the pages of the Washington Post, Sachs, writing for himself, described in more detail what "Jeff Sachs' War on the Deficit" would look like:
The Administration should indeed have taken several months in 2009 to design and advocate for long-term investment programs for renewable energy, fast intercity rail, large-scale highway upgrading, large-scale skill and job training, and so forth, rather than rushing to pass a stimulus package of hundreds of billions of dollars of shortsighted and largely ineffective temporary tax cuts and transfer programs. The budget should have paid for such new long-term investments by allowing the temporary Bush-era tax cuts to expire on schedule in 2010 (or by negotiating equivalent revenues of 2-3 percent of GDP per year as the price for maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts).
Let's unpack this paragraph. Sachs is for:
(1)Long-term investment programs for renewable energy
(2) Fast intercity rail
(3) Large-scale highway upgrading
(4) Large-scale skill and job training
(5) Allowing the temporary Bush-era tax cuts to expire.
Does anyone at this blog disagree with a single proposal Sachs offers here? Who in the hell is against that?
I'll tell you who: Joe Scarborough and other of Jeff Sachs' new best friends.
Sachs has fallen prey to Ken Pollock disease, believing that his new best friends will help fight his war, not their war.
It is supremely naive, or supremely idiotic.
There is a third alternative I guess—that Sachs really does not believe in these progressive ideas and is only vying to be the "even the liberal" who agrees with Joe Scarborough. For myself, I cannot think of a more shameful position to be in than in league with Joe Fucking Scarborough.