Political MoJo

The Washington Post has a front-page report on the growing number of lobbyists thronging the nation's capital. But here's an important passage that, I think, misleads:

In the 1990s, lobbying was largely reactive. Corporations had to fend off proposals that would have restricted them or cost them money. But with pro-business officials running the executive and legislative branches, companies are also hiring well-placed lobbyists to go on the offensive and find ways to profit from the many tax breaks, loosened regulations and other government goodies that increasingly are available.

"People in industry are willing to invest money because they see opportunities here," said Patrick J. Griffin, who was President Bill Clinton's top lobbyist and is now in private practice. "They see that they can win things, that there's something to be gained. Washington has become a profit center."

Judging from the way the Post tells it, the story goes like this: In the good old noble days—i.e. the 1990s—corporations and other business groups were simply interested in preserving the "free market" and fending off those meddlesome government regulators and pesky bureaucrats. But now, alas, businesses have abandoned their good old conservative ways and have decided that taxpayer dollars are just one big cookie jar to be raided as quickly and as greedily as possible. Whereas once we had free markets, now we have businesses strewn about, pale and withered, hooked on corporate welfare and hiring legions of lobbyists to help them get another fix.

It's a depressing little tragedy, but it's also not entirely true. There was never a hallowed time when business interests were just trying to avoid the burden of government regulation and enjoy the free market. They've always, since the dawn of time, viewed Washington as a "profit center," where they can "win things," where there's "something to be gained."

Take the oil industry. Oil executives, Dick Cheney among them, love to rail nowadays against government regulation and/or funding for alternative energy sources, arguing that if an industry can't earn its way in the marketplace, it doesn't deserve to live. Sadly, that was never true for the oil industry: government, not markets, created oil's success. As Paul Sabin has described in Crude Politics, the oil boom essentially started when the federal government started granting oil rights to whoever can reach it from their lands. Fearing that their neighbors would start slant drilling, owners of oil-lots tried to pump out as much oil as they could reach from their land as quickly as they could, thus flooding the market with cheap crude. Low prices and thin profit margins then spurred oil industry leaders in the 1930s to beg the California government to set statewide production limits, which were granted. They clamored for tax breaks on drilling; granted. Meanwhile, vast government spending on highways ensured that demand for oil would continue to rise. (Not to mention the hundreds of billions we now spend stabilizing oil-producing regions of the world.) Washington has long been a "profit center" for the industry. Corporate handouts have always been with us.

This is why the so-called Gingrich "revolution" in 1994 was always a fraud. That fresh generation of conservative Republicans—who claimed to champion free markets and small, out-of-the-way governments—simply didn't understand how business works. Industries have always thrived off heavy-handed regulations and government intervention, and so long as businesses exist, lobbyists will flood the capital. It's not that the GOP philosophy of government has been "corrupted" by high-spenders and corporate welfare hounds like George Bush and Tom DeLay; that philosophy was corruptible right from the start. What we're seeing now is, sadly, the only logical conclusion to "free market" conservatism.

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Kevin Drum asks: "If Britain believed that Saddam Hussein's regime had no significant ties to al-Qaeda, why did Tony Blair support war against Iraq?" He claims the answer is that Britain truly believed Iraq had WMDs. I don't think that's quite right, although eventually they leaned on that rationale. Listed in the "Options Paper" is the main reason why, I think, the British government preferred regime change over containment and deterrence:

Within our objectives of preserving peace and stability in the Gulf and ensuring energy security, our current objectives toward Iraq are: the reintegration of a law-abiding Iraq which does not possess WMD or threaten its neighbors, into the international community. Implicitly, this cannot occur with Saddam in power.

Now it's hard to say exactly why the British government placed such an emphasis on "the reintegration of a law-abiding Iraq… into the international community," but that seemed to be an overriding concern here, and WMDs were only one part of it. Now the interesting twist is that the British government also didn't think "regime change" was a viable military objective. Here's a memo written by Peter Rickets to the Prime Minister:

Military operations need clear and compelling military objectives. For Kosovo it was: Serbs out, Kosovars back, peace-keepers in. For Afghanistan, destroying the Taleban and al Qaida military capability. For Iraq "regime change" does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam. Much better, as you have suggested, to make the objective ending the threat to the international community from Iraqi WMD before Saddam uses it or gives it to terrorists. This is at once easier to justify in terms of international law but also more demanding. … As with the fight against UBL, Bush would do well to de-personalize the objective, focus on elimination of WMD, and show that he is serious about UN Inspectors as the first choice means of achieving that…

So basically, the British government thought the main rationale for war was to preserve peace and stability in the Gulf—and preserve "energy security"—by reintegrating Iraq into the international community, something that couldn't be done with Saddam Hussein or even, necessarily, another Sunni General in power. But the British also seemed to realize that the only way to achieve this, "nation-building," was too vague an end state to make for a viable military objective. And thus they hoped to straddle this contradiction by focusing almost entirely on the WMD rationale and hoping that Saddam Hussein would refuse to let inspectors into Iraq (a prediction that was discussed in the "Options Paper"). But as it turned out, Saddam did let inspectors in, which screwed up that rationale. But by that point both the United States and Britain decided to blunder into war anyway. What emerges through all of this is just how muddled the planning was; not only was the rationales for war cocked up, but none of the people in charge seemed to be sure, exactly, what they even hoped to achieve from war.

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Shakespeare's Sister has one of the best overviews of the Downing Street Memos out there. The worst quote, to my mind, comes from the Ricketts Memo: "[The United States has not] satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better." The White House really had no clue what it was getting itself into, did it?

Meanwhile, there has been a bit of talk floating around that, like the CBS memos on Bush's TANG record, the Downing Street Memos might well be forged. The evidence? British reporter Michael Smith photocopied the original documents, and then destroyed the photocopies when he was done with them. Well, it sounds suspicious, but as Eugene Volokh points out, this seems precisely the sort of thing a reporter would have done if dealing with government documents. At any rate, if these documents exist, plenty of British officials have seen them, and not one has yet disputed their claims. At this point, it's safe to say they're real.

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Matthew Holt has a great post on "the misinformation campaign about Canadian health care." It's true, every time the health care debate emerges, and people start clamoring for national health care, right-wingers flock to the scene with faux-horror stories about the Canadian system, most of it false. In fact, Canadians get equal or better health care outcomes for far less money than we do. Now I'm not convinced that there are big savings on spending to be had for the United States by switching to single-payer, but it's certainly not going to be a catastrophe. Far from it—the 61 million Americans who currently have no or inadequate insurance will finally get coverage. That alone is worth the price of admission.

The other point we tend to forget is that America has an advantage that comes with being stuck in the Paleolithic age of health care: namely, that if and when we decide to overhaul the whole system and move to single-payer, technocrats in Washington can look at what other countries have done, observe what works and what doesn't, and design our system with an eye towards improving on those experiments abroad. We don't have to do everything exactly like Canada. If we think some people should be allowed to have private insurance to pay for new and experimental treatments, fine, we can model that feature on France's system, which allows private insurance. If we think that Britain spends too little on certain types of treatment, fine, we can spend more. And so on. If Canada's system has problems, why not look to see how they can be improved or fixed, rather than simply shuttering the whole project?

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