Laurie Mylroie on Richard Clarke

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Readers of this blog know of my high regard for Laurie Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, and author of “The War Against America” (HarperCollins, 2001). Her views are noted in two of my previous posts on the Richard Clarke affair, here and here.
In this Opinion Journal op-ed, Ms. Mylroie takes Mr. Clarke to the woodshed for his refusal to acknowledge clear signs of Iraqi support and involvement in terrorism against the United States:

Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of “Ramzi Yousef.” But who was “Ramzi Yousef”?

As she does persuasively in her book, Ms. Mylroie sets forth a strong factual basis for the position that Ms. Yousef uses a false identify and that, whoever he really is, he has close connections with Iraq’s security services under Saddam Hussein. She then concludes by bringing home why these issues are important:

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim’s file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef’s. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a “legend” for one of its terrorist agents.
The debate over Yousef’s identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed’s identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait’s liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef’s “uncle,” and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef’s “brothers.”
A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that “it’s obvious” that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given “legends,” on the basis of Kuwait’s files, while Iraq occupied the country.
When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us “against all enemies.” Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.

Profiles of the Fallujah victims

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This NY Times article profiles the four victims of the Fallujah mob earlier this week in Iraq.
One can only hope that the blogger of questionable judgment described in this post reads the article and repents. Hat tip to the fine folks at Southern Appeal for calling out this appalling post.

Enterprise status for public universities

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Skip over at The Sports Economist posts this interesting story about how the scandal involving the University of Colorado football team is emboldening the economist-president of the University to push the University’s Board of Regents and the Colorado State Legislature to grant the University “enterprise status,” which would make it a semiprivate institution with more independence over financial matters such as raising money and setting tuition rates.
Skip comments insightfully on this development as follows:

This issue is not unique to Colorado. The University of Virginia is a well known example where state funding has become a small percentage of operating expenditure. Clemson has the same problem. The issue is not just “managing finances,” but having the freedom to make autonomous decisions on numerous margins which affect the university. Given the dry well in public funding, schools want to be released from regulatory constraints on what they do. Increasingly, good state universities are obtaining a more private character. Schools that do not move in this direction will surely suffer in the national competition for quality students and faculty.

This is a development in public school financing that we Texans should be watching closely. Public financing of universities in Texas has long been a controversial issue, with the University of Texas and Texas A&M University long enjoying an absurdly and unjustifiable favored financing status over all other public universities in Texas. As a result, leaders of Texas public universities in areas of great fund-raising potential (three examples would be the University of Houston, North Texas State University, and Texas Tech University) would be well-advised to follow the “enterprise status” initiative at the University of Colorado. It may well be a way for those universities to break out of the politically imposed financial limitations that have constrained their overall advancement for many years.

Bull market for oil prices?

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That’s the case made in this article.
On the other hand, many folks in the Houston business community are asking themselves: “How many times have I heard THAT before?”

Legislating stereotypes

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This NY Times article reports on author David Horowitz‘s efforts is spearheading a campaign to end what he calls discrimination against conservative faculty and students in America’s universities. Mr. Horowitz has written an “academic bill of rights” that asks universities, among other things, to include both conservative and liberal viewpoints in their selection of campus speakers and syllabuses for courses and to choose faculty members “with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.”
This strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. First, can you imagine the difficulty that universities would have in defining what are “conservative” and “liberal” viewpoints? For example, my various viewpoints are regularly categorized as either conservative or liberal to the point that it is virtually impossible for me to determine with any degree of reasonable precision what constitutes a conservative or liberal viewpoint.
Similarly, Mr. Horowitz’s latter recommendation sounds good in theory (“fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives”), but attempting to enforce such a guideline fails miserably in reality. Any speaker or teacher with good judgment who desires to persuade will necessarily incude different perspectives to his or her position. On the other hand, a speaker or teacher who does not have such good judgment may not. Should a university attempt to control the free flow of ideas within its community simply because the advocate of a certain position does not possess good judgment? Sometimes, even people who possess poor judgment have very good ideas.
Mr. Horowitz would be much better served in his efforts to begin an endowment program at various universities that would attract professors who would teach and perform research along the lines that he desires to promote. That would be putting his money where his mouth currently is. His “academic bill of rights” smacks of attempting to legislate good judgment, which is usually an abysmal failure.

Well, we like the name “Minute Maid Park” better than that other name

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Giants fans are not happy about the new name for what was formerly known as Pac Bell Park.

“The Raccoon” resurfaces

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B2Day reports that former Compaq CFO Jeff Clarke, who gained the nickname “the Raccoon” for his tireless promotion of the Hewlett Packard-Compaq merger, has been named CFO at the troubled software company, Computer Associates.

No need to fret over OPEC

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Economist and writer Edward Lotterman publishes this insightful op-ed in which he makes the case that OPEC’s threats of curtailing oil production do not merit much hand-wringing. He points out the following:

Ignoring inflation, world crude prices and U.S. domestic gasoline prices are at or near record levels. Fuel prices are becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. Some forecasters worry higher energy prices will stunt U.S. economic growth. Others fear it will fuel inflation, leading the Fed to constrict the money supply earlier than it might otherwise.
Such concerns are understandable, and, to some immediate extent, justified. But much dramatic hand-ringing is highly overdone.
OPEC has great pricing power in the short run, particularly when world demand or political uncertainty are high. In the longer run however, it is a paper tiger. Over any time horizon longer than a couple of years, OPEC needs oil customers more than oil consumers need OPEC. We need to be sure that short-term pinches, such as the current one, do not seduce us into longer-term policies that will prove to be self-destructive.

After discussing the concept of elasticity of demand, Mr. Lotterman keys in on the key consideration regarding demand for oil:

[I]f demand is inelastic and you raise prices, you raise the total dollar value of your sales. If elastic, raising prices cuts such total revenue. The demand for oil is very inelastic in the short run, but much more elastic in the long run.

And then Mr. Lotterman concludes brilliantly:

OPEC economists are well aware of consumer behavior. They also know that they control less than half of global crude output and that every time they act to hold short-term prices above the mid-$20-per-barrel range, they lose market share to non-OPEC members and to natural gas ? and such losses often are permanent.
No one studies elasticities of demand for oil more than OPEC. Its leaders know that in the very short term ? i.e., a few weeks or months ? a 10 percent price hike may cut their sales only 1 percent or less. But in the long term, price hikes cut OPEC member nation revenues.
If OPEC had any real long-term pricing power, the value of member-nation oil reserves would grow. They have not. If Saudi Arabia, for example, has sold a billion barrels of its reserves to someone else in 1974 or 1981 and put that money into U.S. Treasury bonds, they would have much more money today than the value of the same billion barrels at 2004 prices.
Alarmists always retort, “Yes, but it is different now; this time they really have us over a barrel.” They are mistaken. As technology matures and alternative sources of energy come into play, the importance of oil will fade.
A century from now, there will still be billions of barrels of crude lying unpumped beneath the sands of the Middle East just as there still are large quantities of copper in Montana and Arizona. Like such copper, the oil simply won’t be worth pumping because no one will be willing to pay much for it.
Nor should we worry unduly about maintaining dutifully friendly regimes in the Middle East or even Venezuela.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran have little going for themselves beside oil. Cutting off shipments to punish the United States or other industrialized countries would damage their own interests much more than those of anyone else.
Oil is an extremely fungible product. What matters is global supply and global demand. Blocking flows between any two particular countries or sets of countries is meaningless except in the very short run. Don’t lose any sleep over this issue.

Not only should we not lose any sleep over this issue, our demagogue antenna should spring to life immediately whenever we hear a politician attempt to make this an issue in this political season.