The Gambler Revisited

Here’s an idea. Perhaps writing off sunk costs and doing something else is not the same thing as giving up and accepting that you’ve failed, shamefully. Sometimes it’s real wisdom. Kenny Rogers sang about that. You know, about knowing when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, when to walk away, and when to run.

That was back in November 1978, about the time of the Jonestown mass suicide, back when Jimmy Carter was president, talking about our national malaise or whatever. And that song came out about the time Dianne Feinstein succeeded the murdered George Moscone as San Francisco’s first woman mayor. She was the one who discovered his body, and Harvey Milk’s body. Bad things happen. But as the song goes, when you’re out of aces, you think about what to do next. Sometimes you understand what is lost is indeed lost – it’s not coming back – and you move on to the next thing.

The Kenny Rogers song riffed on that bit of folk wisdom – don’t be a jerk and double-down on your bet when you don’t have the cards, as what you lost isn’t coming back. There’s bluster and hope against all odds, and then there’s reality. Walking away – or even running away – is sometimes damned smart. And no one called Kenny Rogers a cheese-eating French surrender-monkey. Hell, it was a Country and Western song.

But as we learned in the long national shouting match about getting out of Vietnam, none of us are Kenny Rogers. We have a problem with sunk costs.

To be precise, there is Sunk Costs Theory:

In economics and business decision-making, sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs which have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Sunk costs are sometimes contrasted with prospective costs which are future costs that may be incurred or changed if an action is taken.

In traditional microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to an investment decision. Traditional economics proposes that an economic actor does not let sunk costs influence one’s decisions, because doing so would not be rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits.

But no one is very good at rationally assessing a decision exclusively on its own merits, so we get the Sunk Cost Dilemma:

A sunk cost dilemma is a dilemma of having to choose between continuing a project of uncertain prospects already involving considerable sunk costs, or discontinuing the project. Given this choice between the certain loss of the sunk costs when stopping the project versus possible – even if unlikely – long-term profitability when going on, policy makers tend to favor uncertain success over certain loss. As long as the project is neither completed nor stopped, the dilemma will keep presenting itself.

The classic example of that is the Concorde, the Anglo-French supersonic jetliner. Both governments knew from before the first test flight that there was no way that aircraft would ever turn a profit, and in fact, it never did. But they build a fleet of them anyway, and Air France and British Airways ran scheduled service for decades. This wasn’t so much hope that they would one day turn a profit as a sunk costs thing – each government had poured billions into the project, and if they said, no, let’s not do this after all, all that money would have been spent for nothing. But of course it was. So the terrible accident in Paris in July 2000, the only crash, was, oddly enough, a relief. Sure, it was caused by debris on the runway, not any problem with the Concorde, but it provided an out. By 2003 they were all gone from the skies.

But while economists and the game theory wonks cite the Concorde as an example of the sunk cost dilemma, those of us who were around in the late sixties and early seventies remember all the arguments that we should stay in Vietnam and fight on, even if the war no longer made any geopolitical sense and no one could define what winning would look like – there would be no way to tell if we won. But over and over again you hear that, well, maybe the war had been a mistake, but if we stopped and decided to do something else instead, all our brave soldiers would have died for nothing. And of course we couldn’t dishonor our dead soldiers.

The counterargument was obvious. So, you want more of our guys to die pointlessly, in honor of the fifty-five thousand who already have. Then the shouting began.

John Kerry, then a decorated officer, famously testified to congress in 1971 and asked the obvious question about winding down that war:

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.”

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

That didn’t go over well. He should have pulled out a guitar and ripped into a rousing version of that Kenny Rogers song. But of course that song hadn’t been written yet. It would be another seven years before the rest of the country finally got it. Dealing with sunk costs is difficult.

But, yes, as long as the project is neither completed nor stopped, the dilemma will keep presenting itself:

President Barack Obama summoned his war council to the White House Situation Room on Wednesday for an intense, three-hour discussion that exposed emerging fault lines over Afghanistan – with military commanders pressing for more troops and other key officials expressing skepticism.

There was no discussion of specific troop levels during the meeting in the West Wing basement, according to a senior administration official. But the talks underscored the divisions throughout Obama’s inner circle that must be navigated in the coming weeks, the official said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special Afghan and Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke – send in tens of thousands of more troops, now – and Rahm Emanuel and General James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser – not so fast, there, as we need to think about this.

And there was the context:

The meeting, the second of at least five Obama has planned as he reviews his Afghanistan strategy, comes after Obama received a critical assessment of the war effort from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the man he put in charge of the Afghan war earlier this year. McChrystal declared that the U.S. would fail to meet its objectives of causing irreparable damage to Taliban militants and their al-Qaida allies if the administration did not significantly increase American forces.

But he didn’t say we could win or anything, just that we could lose. That’s classic sunk costs thinking. But there were other ways of thinking:

One alternative to McChrystal’s call for additional troops for a counterinsurgency is to use Special Forces and unmanned drone aircraft for tactical strikes on the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership, a move that would require much more U.S. action in Pakistan but fewer troops.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates “has clearly been a strong proponent of counterinsurgency” organized by McChrystal, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said earlier Wednesday. “But he wants to have a thorough discussion with the president and the rest of the national security team” about whether that remains the best strategy for crushing the militant forces.

Vice President Joe Biden, who joined the discussions in the White House basement, also favors a high-tech approach to target al-Qaida, the official said.

Obama asked the group to meet with him twice more the next week. There’s a lot to think about. And key Democrats in Congress have begun grumbling, and public support for the war has fallen though the floor, more than half of us now say the conflict is not worth it. What’s the point? And John McCain is saying send in everything we’ve got – the entire region would be destabilized if we don’t. And Eric Cantor, the House Republican, says that Obama is endangering our troops in Afghanistan by even having a meeting – “As long as they are delaying, that puts in jeopardy, I believe, our men and women.”

But we’ve been in Afghanistan since late 2001, looking for Osama bin Laden, or something. It was never quite clear, and we kind of forgot the guy, and somehow, now the Taliban, who once ran the place, have taken control of more than half the country. We’ve been there eight years. Now what?

We could get out. The Soviets did, and the world didn’t end. And in the New Yorker, Steve Coll explains how they did that:

In Afghanistan, after an initial and failed attempt to use special forces more aggressively to hit Islamist guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the Soviets began to pull back into Afghanistan’s major cities and to “Afghan-ize” their military operations. As they prepared to withdraw, Soviet troops moved away from direct combat, particularly in the countryside, and instead concentrated on training and equipping the Afghan forces. They also provided supplies and expertise the Afghans lacked—air power, for example, and SCUD missiles. As I described in a previous post, this military strategy worked pretty well, and the Soviet city-fortresses withstood heavy assaults from the U.S.-financed mujahidin even after Soviet troops left the country; they left only a thousand or two military and intelligence advisers behind.

His previous post is here if you want the details. But they didn’t meet their objectives of course.

And that led Andrew Sullivan to ask this question – “How did the US get into a situation that destroyed the last global empire?”

But he admits he knows why:

That was where al Qaeda was based when 19 men with not even a single bomb were able to murder thousands in America. We went there to prevent another. I supported it fanatically. But all these years later, I can’t help wondering if it was a giant trap. If someone had told me that the US would occupy Afghanistan for eight years and launch a huge counter-terrorism operation across the globe and still not have captured Osama bin Laden, and watched as al Qaeda built a new base in liberated Iraq (since cornered at enormous expense) and Pakistan (still very much alive), and elsewhere around the globe, I would have been incredulous. Yes, I know that al Qaeda is weaker than it once was – partly because of the dedication of Western intelligence, partly by military power, partly by their own record of murdering Muslims – but the costs and benefits seem increasingly out of whack.

And he knows the sunk costs:

Afghanistan, like Iran, presents an excruciating set of choices, which is why I find the caution and deliberation of the current administration a welcome change of pace (although, to be fair, Bush was fast moving in this direction in his second term). But any review must include the basic question: are we engaging in a rational deployment of resources? Did 9/11 psychologically mold us to over-estimate the real toll of terrorism on the West’s actual interests? If terrorism claims a minuscule number of Western lives in comparison with, say, smoking, have we been conned into a global war that could actually cripple the West rather than protect it? Or would a self-interested retreat provoke a more dangerous attack in due course?

See Kenny Rogers, above, on knowing when to walk away, and when to run. Perhaps Sullivan is humming that tune:

I don’t know the answer to this question. But I do believe it needs to be asked. Or we will have learned very little from the war we so righteously began and have waged at such expense, as the West’s fiscal footing gives way underneath.

And in Slate, Fred Kaplan is a bit more thorough, reminding us that when Obama agreed to send 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan six months ago, he said this – “We will not blindly stay the course,” and we “will not, and cannot, provide a blank check.” Kaplan says that’s precisely the dilemma:

His rethinking of the whole business now may stem, in part, from a realization that a blind journey and a blank check are exactly what loom before him.

As senator, presidential candidate, and commander in chief, Obama has always stressed that his aims in Afghanistan were “limited” – not the ambitious and impractical vision of turning the place into a Western-style democracy (or, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates derided the notion, “a central Asian Valhalla”) but rather a hard-core campaign of disrupting and defeating the Taliban and preventing al-Qaida from using the country as a “safe haven” for global terrorism once again.

It may be (I don’t know for sure, and I doubt anyone on the outside has any great insight on the matter) that Obama has only recently come to understand that, according to classic counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, his “limited aims” cannot be accomplished by limited means; that simply chasing insurgents from one hillside or valley to another isn’t going to turn the tide; that COIN, if it has much chance of success, requires an ambitious agenda of nation-building, a strategy – and enough troops and resources – to protect the Afghan people so that their government can supply justice and basic services, which will in turn inculcate popular loyalty to the government and thus dry up support for the insurgents.

In short, if you want to do this right, even his “limited aims” – get the bad guys and establish some stability – might take far more than half a million troops, and several decades. Is that worth the cost? And does it recover any of the sunk costs, what has already been spent?

Kaplan argues there are two choices here:

First, is Afghan President Hamid Karzai likely to rally the support of his own people, especially given the massive fraud in the recent election? (If he doesn’t rally this support, counterinsurgency is doomed to fail; this, the top U.S. military leaders acknowledge.)

Second, given the vast amount of blood, treasure, and time that a COIN campaign requires under the best of circumstances, are the prospective benefits worth the cost?

He says there’s another way to ask that first question:

Assuming Karzai is re-elected (all the ballots, including the phony ones, have not yet been counted), is there any way that the United States and NATO can prod him to take steps that might broaden his legitimacy and regain the Afghan people’s trust?

He suggests benchmarks might do the trick, and you can follow him on that. It might work. But he says there is a more basic question to consider, which Obama may actually be considering. Is this war worth fighting at all? The “most common rationale for war” seems to be the need to destroy all traces of those who launched the attacks of September 2001. But, citing Stephen Biddle, Kaplan says that may be wrong-headed:

As top generals concede, al-Qaida no longer has a presence in Afghanistan, and other unstable countries (Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan, among others) could offer Osama Bin Laden more secure “safe havens.” We could send troops to those places, too, but, as Biddle notes, “we would run out of brigades long before bin Laden runs out of prospective sanctuaries.”

There are of course serious concerns:

The one plausible nightmare scenario that could threaten US interests, he says, concerns the stability not so much of Afghanistan but of its neighbors, especially Pakistan. If the United States withdrew, and the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan, al-Qaida – whose fighters are currently perched along the Af-Pak border in the frontier territories – would have much more freedom of movement, a much larger base of training, supplying, and staging for cross-border operations, which could threaten, and eventually topple, the secular government of Pakistan and thus hand over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to Islamist terrorists.

Even this danger, Biddle says, “should not be exaggerated.” The connection between “U.S. withdraws” and “al-Qaida captures Pakistan and its nukes” is hardly certain; there are many in-between points along this line, each with its own set of probabilities. Finally, even if Western troops did help stabilize Afghanistan, Pakistan may fall apart anyway.

So nothing is certain, not that it matters:

Several columnists, hawkish analysts, and military officers have put out the word that Obama has two choices: go all the way in or get out. The motive here is to get Obama to go all the way in, since it’s extremely unlikely that he’ll withdraw completely.

Kaplan suggest that’s nonsense, and “it may be that a more modest goal can be accomplished, though less efficiently, by some option in between.” But obviously you first have to escape the sunk costs dilemma.

That’s not helped by a chattering class that “treats foreign policy like a theater of machismo” – or so says Gene Lyons in Is Obama Man or Mouse?

…it’s in Afghanistan where the Obama administration has to decide whether it can summon the political courage to reverse the primal error of the Bush administration’s vaunted “war on terror.”

It’s simply not possible to make war on an abstract noun. Having panicked after 9/11, Bush/Cheney magnified al-Qaida, a band of stateless fanatics capable of mass murder, but not of warfare, into an existential threat as grave as the Soviet Union.

Failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, they attacked Iraq instead. That left U.S. and NATO troops underequipped and overexposed in remotest Afghanistan, previously a synonym for the end of the earth – a land of 40,000 remote mountainous villages, extreme poverty, near-universal illiteracy, religious zealotry and endemic tribal warfare.

And this odd place is where you have to be a man, not a mouse:

Afghans don’t merely hate occupying foreigners; they see large numbers of their “countrymen” – Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara, Turkmen, Baluch, Pashtun – as foreigners, too. If Iraq would divide itself into three countries, Afghanistan might become eight or ten.

Unlike the relatively educated, urbanized Iraqis, moreover, most rural Afghans have nothing to lose but their honor. They see the Kabul government – quite accurately – as a nest of smugglers and thieves. They’re historically as difficult to seduce as to subdue; bribery works best.

Can ”nation-building” work there? Stanley McChrystal wants to give it a try. Lyons says it’s doubtful. And there is the cost.

Lyons wants to look at it this way, that the real stakes aren’t strategic, they’re political:

Terrorists can’t defeat the United States; the United States can only defeat itself. So long as the United States has a large, costly military presence in Afghanistan, however, it’s harder to blame future terrorist attacks on Obama.

Whoever leaked McChrystal’s report wanted him reminded of that publicly. It’s political blackmail and should be disregarded.

So it seems everyone is stuck in the sunk costs dilemma. And the only way out is if everyone starts singing that Kenny Rogers gambler song. But these days half of America would stone the guy for singing such things.

Deciding Who Should Be In Charge

In the 2008 primaries, when all was said and done, you could say the Republicans simply settled for John McCain as their candidate, by default. Giuliani was a bust – beyond his 9/11 shtick there was nothing there, and he was from New York City, which would never play that well in the south, along with being in his third marriage after two messy divorces, and one of his former wives being a cousin. The evangelical right really didn’t want to have to deal with that. Romney was too slick for the base, what with that perfect hair and his dazzling-technocrat portfolio. Sure he was a Mormon, which disturbed a few on the Christian right, but that wasn’t that big a deal. He just seemed like a city guy who’d be fine lunching at the Waldorf or something. He wasn’t one of them.

The affable Mike Huckabee came close, but perhaps he did his Gomer Pyle routine once too often. You never knew when you were supposed to take him seriously, or when he was just being goofy. That was kind of lovable, but he confused the party. Homespun irony can backfire. The actor Fred Thompson gave it a go, but campaigning seemed to bore him, so of course he bored the party.

So McCain ended up being the last man standing. He would have to do. But the lack of enthusiasm for him was rather obvious. Of course it was then that the Republican strategy became clear. It was run away from Bush, the man who tanked the economy and couldn’t wrap up his two wars, and hammer Obama non-stop. Just don’t say much about the old fighter pilot, who had by then developed a habit of getting confused on key points here and there. A negative campaign was inevitable. What else could you do?

What kept the presidential election from being a complete blow-out, not the solid but respectable defeat that it turned out to be, was McCain’s decision to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Everyone knew she had neither the knowledge nor experience, or even the temperament, for national office. But that didn’t matter. She had her fierce feral cunning, and her heart was in the right place – she was the attack dog who would rip into anyone who didn’t sufficiently respect the rural, resentful, white, evangelical folks, all of whom of course felt that the far-too-smart fancy-pants east coast educated fools who thought they were better than all of us common-folk real Americans needed to be slapped down, or something like that.

The enthusiasm was back. Had Sarah Palin known what she was talking about, or even what the issues were, she’d have been formidable. McCain might have won. But Tina Fey took care of her. And what is now the opposition party was left with a real vacuum. There was no one in charge. And now all their protestations that Obama is ruining the country and they should once again be in charge, before we all die, or turn into socialist slaves, or Canadians or something, keeps bumping up against the same problem. There’s still no one in charge on that side. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck do their ranting and rabble-rousing, but neither is interested, even in the slightest, in running for office. They’re good at what they do, and well paid for it – each has found his calling. Fox News’ Sean Hannity has been toying with the idea of running for president, but even he seems to know that’s not very reasonable. Governing isn’t the same as sputtering in righteous anger. He knows people would figure that out in a heartbeat.

So now what?

That’s easy. As of Tuesday, September 29, 2009, Palin is making her move:

Less than three months after resigning as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, the onetime vice presidential candidate, has completed her memoir.

HarperCollins Publishers, which signed a multi-million dollar deal with Ms. Palin in May, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had moved up the publication date from the spring of 2010 to Nov. 17 of this year.

The book will be titled “Going Rogue: An American Life”; the publisher has announced a first-print run of 1.5 million copies. Ms. Palin worked with a collaborator, Lynn Vincent, the editor of World, an evangelical magazine.

So check out the San Diego based World – “Today’s News, Christian Views.” Lynn Vincent produced the four-hundred pages. Sarah Palin isn’t big on details. But Sarah Palin has made her move.

Slate’s John Dickerson is rather amused by the title, Going Rogue. That was his catch phrase, and he didn’t use it as a compliment. On his Facebook page Dickerson added this – “Thought about making a joke that Sarah Palin’s memoir in France would be called Going Roquefort but figured it was too cheesy.”

But this is no joke. Politico surveyed the Republican base – they’re all still crazy about Sarah Palin. Of all the characters from 2008, she’s the one they want running things. As far as they’re concerned, she should be the next president.

Andrew Sullivan comments:

I think she perfectly represents a form of protest cultural politics that has no [place to go]. And what’s fascinating about the various quotes from local GOP machers [sic] is that none of them refers in any way to policy. She is not supported because of what she allegedly believes, or what she says she’ll do. She is supported because she shares an identity, real or imagined, with white, angry alienated conservatives. She is identity politics personified.

Sullivan has been referring to her as their hood ornament.

But she has the book coming out, and of that, the strangest of Republicans, Rick Santorum, says this – “She has a gift for prose. Hopefully that comes across.” And yes, he misuses that word, hopefully. It’s actually an adverb. But then he might be unwittingly correct. The new book could be full of hope – what Santorum’s words actually mean. At least it’s full of ambition. People often confuse the two. Think about it.

But Sullivan’s comment, that Palin obviously has no interest in actually governing – she did walk away from her job as Alaska’s governor – is what limits her appeal, beyond the base. Keep saying that government is bad, and that actual governing is tedious and stupid, and then flamboyantly just up and quit doing it, and people will assume you might not be the right one for that other job, governing things on the highest level of all. It’s funny how that works.

No, you want someone who does want to govern, and who can lay out just what they want to do and why. That’s why there’s been a lot of buzz about Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz. She knows exactly what should be done, in detail, which is to continue what her father did – be strong and ruthless, insult your allies and dismiss your enemies, or the other way around, and break any law you must to keep us safe. Specifically, or perhaps symbolically, this means being nasty – others may call it torture, but we have to do it, and if we have to do it, then it’s really not torture anyway. That’s her best example of how she would lead, and it’s getting more and more notice. Maybe she’s the one, not the oddball Sarah Palin.

In American Prospect, Adam Serwer sees this kind of emblematic argument as reprehensible:

For the GOP, torture is no longer a “necessary evil.” It is a rally cry, a “values” issue like same-sex marriage or abortion. They don’t “grudgingly” support torture, they applaud it. They celebrate it. Liz Cheney’s unequivocal support for torture methods gleaned from communist China has people begging her to run for office.

And yes, Andrew Sullivan has more to say on this:

The psychological underpinnings of Liz Cheney’s absurd proposition that, for example, “waterboarding isn’t torture” – a phrase that trips off her tongue as if it were a consensus, rather than an extreme outlier – are pretty obvious. Her father is a war criminal, a man whose incompetence is only matched by his paranoia. Since it is understandably, forgivably hard for her to accept that a person she loves and reveres is actually a torturer, she has to double down on the proposition that it’s obvious he isn’t a torturer, axiomatic that every torture session gave us actionable intelligence in ways ethical interrogation never could, indisputable that every single threat is a ticking time bomb mandating the use of any means to extract intelligence from any handy victim. Even to have a debate on this is mind-blowing for someone who still thinks of herself as someone who supports human rights, and of her father as a moral man.

There is, moreover, virtue in all this. It is something to be proud of. Because it is only by embracing positive pride in torture that she can keep the nightmare of reality at bay.

Sullivan goes on to argue that she is “conflating private loyalty with civic responsibility.”

And then he adds this:

While I’m at it, the next time Liz Cheney simply states that “waterboarding isn’t torture,” will someone please ask her to follow through? She needs to take a trip to Cambodia, visit their Museum of Torture, and request that the waterboard be removed from the exhibit. It is, after all, a mere enhancement of interrogation. And television hosts are constrained from asking her such a blunt question because it appears unseemly to attack a daughter for the sins of the father.

And so the corruption spreads.

But not to worry – she hasn’t announced for office, yet.

And there are other issues, like fiscal restraint. Obama has none, what with his stimulus package and his healthcare reform plans and all the rest. That’s a big issue for conservatives, and they are still shamed that their own George Bush drove us close to bankruptcy, what with two wars on the credit card and drug benefits for seniors and all the rest. They could use a leader on that issue.

But Conor Friedersdorf argues that they’ve trapped themselves there:

Unfortunately, the conservative movement’s impulse is to afford military leaders too much deference. Take its stance on our nuclear arsenal. After the military presented a plan to reduce it, President Obama signaled his displeasure by demanding more ambitious cuts. “Obama knows more about weapons requirements than the military now?” conservative blogger Dan Riehl wrote, echoing many on the right. “I think it’s time to start ringing the alarm bells with this guy, folks.” Conservatives respond quite differently when domestic-affairs bureaucrats claim special knowledge. Expertise in education, or welfare spending, or environmental stewardship is afforded some respect. Deference is tempered, however, by the understanding that people aren’t very good at judging the relative importance of their own work, and that every institution is reflexively opposed to shrinking itself. Should our nuclear arsenal shrink? I haven’t any idea, but a better counterargument is required than “the military knows best.”

Yep, show fiscal restraint, except when the military wants something, or even when they don’t. Just throw money that way.

Again, Sullivan comments:

It seems to me to be an inherent part of conservatism properly understood to constantly evaluate means and ends, to ensure that a country is not over-extended, to maintain a viable fiscal balance for the foreseeable future, with some cushion for an emergency. Assessing whether a country’s military commitments exceed its fiscal grasp would be an obvious part of that equation. But, of course, among today’s loony rightists, it isn’t.

You will never hear a neocon talk about the expense of empire or the burden of imperial debt. The neoconservative outlook focuses on the internal nature of foreign regimes, but it refuses to look at the internal financial collapse of contemporary America.

So you see where that leads:

Neocons favor more defense spending, period. I do not recall a single recent instance in which they did not want to project military power, regardless of its expense. There have been no conservative worries about the cost of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as they fulminate against big government spending. To ask the question of why American tax-payers are still financing the defense of Germany, for example, is to commit heresy (I exclude Ron Paul from all this, of course).

And yet if we know one thing from history it is that empires crumble from a function of mounting debt, often caused by unnecessary or hubristic wars. If today’s astounding debt – created in large part by Republican tax cuts, war, failure to rein in entitlements or regulate the financial industry sufficiently – does not wake them up, what will?

The answer to that is nothing. It’s a dead issue, even if, as Steve Coll explains in the New Yorker, the costs in Afghanistan could be endless:

To try to take and control the entire land mass of Afghanistan in the present climate might require as many as five hundred thousand troops, police, and militia, some military specialists believe; in any event, it would take more troops than are currently available, even if Obama goes all in… The revival of an urban-dominated “ink spot” strategy for the defense of a weak Afghan state may be the best of a series of bad military choices…

Even if an ink-spot campaign is successful, the Taliban will still own sizable chunks of the Afghan countryside for years. Their forces will be able to move fairly freely at night and in the mountains, as they do now; they will be able to carry out ambushes on the roads; they will attempt to penetrate city defenses to undertake spectacular car bombings and raids; and they will continue to move back and forth across the border with Pakistan, resourced by leadership and financing networks located there. Perhaps, in time, if the proposed McChrystal strategy succeeded, and a archipelago of relative peace and normalcy were established, and the factionalism within the current Kabul government subsided, and Afghan forces grew and improved, and at least some local Taliban opponents were converted into quiescent local powers, the Afghan state would then be able to push out gradually into the countryside, widening its ink spots.

Those are a lot of ifs.

A military man, Andrew Bacevich, suggests it might be better to try classic containment:

When confronting the Soviet threat, the United States and its allies erected robust defenses, such as NATO, and cooperated in denying the communist bloc anything that could make Soviet computers faster, Soviet submarines quieter or Soviet missiles more accurate. Containing the threat posed by jihad should follow a similar strategy. Robust defenses are key – not mechanized units patrolling the Iron Curtain, but well-funded government agencies securing borders, controlling access to airports and seaports, and ensuring the integrity of electronic networks that have become essential to our way of life. As during the Cold War, a strategy of containment should include comprehensive export controls and the monitoring of international financial transactions. Without money and access to weapons, the jihadist threat shrinks to insignificance: All that remains is hatred.

And here Sullivan agrees:

It seems to me that pre-emptive war is an option that should be kept in a small box in a glass cage that should be broken only in the direst emergencies. The one recent example of it, Iraq, has been a catastrophe that has not yet reached a conclusion. Very few foreign policy initiatives did more to destroy American power than that open wound still sucking in money and lives and attention. Containment, a policy that, in contrast, has had huge success in the past and was once backed by a bipartisan majority remains under-rated.

But it might work:

I suspect that containing Islamism is far more effective than giving it oxygen by attempting to defeat it in its own lands, where its popularity is sinking anyway under the weight of its own brutality and nihilism.

We didn’t invade the Soviet Union to destroy communism. We were self-confident enough to let it destroy itself, while never relenting on exposing its moral bankruptcy, political poison and economic failure. In Iran today, there exists a more vibrant and empowered popular opposition than ever existed in the Soviet heartland. And yet we remain fixated on military options and stay unmoved by the possibility of a nuclear stand-off in the Middle East between Israel and Iran.

But somehow that too is off the table:

The right has abandoned its previous support for deterrence, the benefits of mutually assured destruction, the maintenance of a moral high ground, and the slow power of containment. It’s time conservatives looked at these options again.

But that would be bucking the military, our heroes. And if there are no emerging Republican leaders, with Palin too flighty and Liz Cheney too nasty, then, in the absence of leaders, you know what comes next. And it actually comes from a Newsmax columnist, John Perry, making the logical leap:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it won’t. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. …

But Perry does advocate it:

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin Teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

No Republican leadership? No problem:

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

See Digby at Hullabaloo:

Yes. Nine months in, it’s obvious that the only choice Real Americans have is to stage a coup. The lessons they’ve learned from recent presidencies is that impeachment is no sure thing and that unless you can get close enough to steal elections, you might get stuck with someone you didn’t vote for. So they’re dreaming of more tried and true methods. That whole democracy thing is very inconvenient. (And just the thought of “skilled, military trained, nation builders” bending the government to their will clearly sends one big thrill up these fellows’ legs. Oh baby.)

Well, if Sarah and Liz won’t do, and Hannity is having second thoughts, let the generals run things. And living under an unelected military government would be fine, as the majority obviously made a mistake, and to protect our democracy, their choice should be removed. You work out the logic, such as it is.

And that’s what the 2008 Republican primaries led to. No one was right for them, in all the senses of that word. And there’s no one good choice now. So let the generals take over the country.

Or, conversely, let’s have a strong functioning opposition party. Some of us actually miss having tough Republicans around. After all, it’s no fun shadow-boxing eccentric people in clown suits.