The Long View 2004-01-01
The Long View
Another year of John's blog down. In many ways, this is a journey of self-discovery, as well as remembrance. It is painful to read the things John wrote about Iraq in 2003, but if we are honest with ourselves, many of us said or thought the same things at the time. Forgetfulness does us no favors here. It is best to acknowledge our sins and move on.
Since this post in particular is all about predictions, let us see how John did in hindsight.
- Shooting Wars — All wrong. We got in more wars in the Middle East, failed in our occupation of Iraq, and North Korea is still sticking it to everyone with abandon.
- Culture War — Much better. The big swing of American politics over the next ten years was indeed a return to the Culture Wars. John guessed in July of 2002 that Newdow would be overturned at the Supreme Court. Then he modified his guess in October of 2002. He ended up being right, insofar as the Court punted on this one, to my non-legal eye. John also correctly noted that the Republican Party mostly pays lip service to Culture War ideas. He guessed wrong on how gay marriage would end though.
- Election 2004 — John guessed that Howard Dean would face off against W, and lose. This was fairly close to what happened, until Dean self-destructed and Kerry was nominated. Fairly good.
- The Economy — John guessed that the Euro would strain the EU considerably, and that turned out to be very right. However, Gordon Chang is still wrong.
Surmises for 2004
The perfect prediction was made many years ago by a fellow who called himself "The Great Kreskin." He said that, in the future, people would remember that he had once made a prediction. That forecast works a little like how the Ontological Proof of the existence of God is supposed to work; simply to state it is to verify it. Unfortunately, such perfection is far beyond my feeble powers. I will confine myself, therefore, to timid speculation:
Shooting Wars: We are universally assured that the Iraq War is going to be the last of the wars against the Axis of Evil, at least for some time to come. The argument is that the US military is already fully deployed, and its stocks of munitions are depleted. This is less true than is often asserted. If General Shinseki had had his way, of course, an army of half-a-million would have gone to Iraq, which was roughly what happened in the Gulf War. However, Donald Rumsfeld has used Afghanistan and Iraq to demonstrate that such huge deployments are unnecessary to win a conventional war.
They are not necessary for a successful occupation, either, as should be apparent by spring.
That said, of course, no other engagements on the scale of Iraq are in the hopper politically. (Iraq itself had been in the "sooner or later" category since at least 1998.) A type of maneuver for the next few years that seems obvious to me, if not to the Pentagon, might be called "Osiraq Plus." The name refers to the destruction of an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osiraq by the Israelis over 20 years ago. What the world needs now is a way to not just blow up, but briefly seize suspected WMD sites. Locations in Syria are candidates. So are some in Iran, though the partially democratic nature of the political system there makes intervention more problematical. The big issue, however, is nuclear-armed Pakistan. The nominally pro-Western government lives in hourly peril of assassination and overthrow. The next time that happens, it would be irresponsible to simply hope that the nukes are safe and secure.
As for the People's Looney Bin of North Korea, I begin to suspect that it may be closed soon for lack of interest. Would this happen in 2004? I have no idea.
* * *
Culture War The big deal in American history for at least the next ten years will be the segue from the Terror War to the Cultural Reconquista. This is not to say that Americans will simply lose interest in foreign affairs and turn toward domestic ones: quite the opposite, in fact. Transnational progressives have, in recent years, opened many international channels to address what had traditionally been domestic questions. Eventually, they will receive blowback in the form of answers they will not welcome.
All well and good, but what about 2004 in particular?
Over the summer, I said that Newdow, the decision holding that the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional, would be overturned when it comes before the Supreme Court. By the fall I had begun to hedge, however, and now it seems likely to me that the Supreme Court will in fact agree that the words are unconstitutional, at least in a public-school context. Such a decision would be defensible, though hardly inevitable. It would be a blow to the Supreme Court's legitimacy, but the Court has withstood worse embarrassments in the past. The problem this time around will be the presence of the various incarnations of the gay issue. Polygamy; gays in the military; statutory rape: the list is quite extensive. Even when these questions are not on the Court's docket, there is a lively popular awareness that many of them are of the Court's manufacture. History shows that the political system routinely grants constitutional judicial review a great deal of deference. Still, there are limits, as the Court's collapse under the pressure from the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s illustrates. "Under God" could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
The Republican political establishment does not seem to have taken on board just how strongly its social-conservative base feels about these things. Of course they want a constitutional amendment to circumvent the courts on gay marriage, for instance. They want it today rather than tomorrow. The party leadership's dithering is alienating. They forget that theirs is the God & Mammon Party. God is quite capable of staying home on Election Day.
As for the gay thing in general: if it were a stock, you should sell it. Look for the beginning of a move to re-medicalize the whole subject. (I have no information about such a project, but it seems inevitable.)
* * *
The Election of 2004 William Safire has just gone on record to predict an October Surprise, in the form of a terror attack in the US just before the election. I suspect his prediction is just a surmise, so what you read here is a surmise about a surmise.
Would such an attack at that time discredit the Bush Administration? I rather doubt it. People are surprised that there has been no follow-up to 911. With what justice I cannot say, the Administration has received some popular credit for domestic security. Actually, since some people have begun to doubt that the danger persists, another attack might serve simply to persuade them of its reality. The greater danger of discredit, in my opinion, would be posed by an attack early in the year. That would allow time for any mistakes and gaps in the security system to come to light, thus creating an issue that could be used against the Administration in November.
Actually, the danger to the Administration might not be merely political. Suppose the president is assassinated, or gravely injured? Republicans who take delight in highlighting the many follies of the Democratic leadership don't notice how small their national team is. Too many people are running for the Democratic nomination, but five of them (Lieberman, Gephardt, Kerry, Dean, and Clark) are serious candidates. Aside from George W. Bush, the only plausible Republican alternative is John McCain, but the party establishment is quite capable of backing George's brother, Jeb. (Dick Cheney would make a comforting stand-in for the remainder of Bush's term, but he is old, he has a bad heart, and he has been tainted, unjustly in my estimation, by his stint as CEO of Haliburton.)
Barring these grotesque hypothetical disasters, however, I fully expect that race will be Bush versus Dean, and that Bush will win. George Bush often says things badly. Howard Dean says too much he has to unsay.
* * *
The Economy Northcote Parkinson once remarked that economists are equally at ease thinking about a thousand and a million dollars, because they have no personal experience of either sum. That does not quite apply to me, but then I am not an economist, either. I have just two points, mostly about exchange rates.
Regarding the euro, it is contrary to nature for a currency to maintain value indefinitely without a state attached to it. The European Constitutional process has adjourned in confusion. That might be just a temporary setback, were it not that the confusion showed that eastern and southern Europe have no intention of letting the French and Germans run the Union. Particularly the French. Paul Johnson has prophesied that France will break the EU as soon as the Union makes a decision that France regards as contrary to France's interests. He's probably right; if so, the money will fall apart first.
Gordon Chang has suggested that the Chinese economy will collapse around 2006, when its banking system implodes on contact with WTO rules. That's a bit of a stretch. Still, one can't help but notice that the value of the People's Republic's currency is politically distorted, just as the currencies of Japan and the East Asian tigers were before reality set in. Whether or not there is a general collapse, the time for making adjustments grows short.
* * *
Enough predictions have already collected on this site to make it possible to assess their quality. Oh my.
I merely note the piece about the prospects for 2001. The bit in it about "The Big Terrible Thing" happening in Lower Manhattan actually comes from Peggy Noonan. The item for 2003 has at least one plausible line:
The hard part in the Middle East would come after the occupation of Iraq.
However, that is in the context of a discussion of possible follow-on wars. They may occur yet occur, despite what I said above, but they showed no sign of happening last year. The rest of the item was too general to allow of disconfirmation. I did do a single-column column for 2002, by the way, but it appeared only in print, in the January 2002 issue of Business Travel Executive. It contains one of the very few references anywhere to the possibility of a baby-boom starting in that year.
Then there's Reilly's Folly. The section of Spengler's Future that covers the period 1992-2022 is called Imperial Populism. The book itself was written in 1992 and published in 1993. I find some of the prose really cringe-making at this point. I am not bothered that some sentences say things that are clearly wrong; that is only to be expected. The problem is that some don't say anything at all. Others do appear to say something significant, at least at first sight:
Note that this [decay of political institutions] occurs precisely at what seems to be the moment of maximum international security, because internal business need no longer be deferred in the face of a hostile world. In the next period, policies based on this misplaced confidence in the safety of the international system have predictable results.
If 911 is taken to be the Predictable Result, then that was a lucky shot-in-the-dark. However, the text can be read to imply that the Predictable Result would occur no earlier than the second decade of the 21st century. And what did I actually mean when I wrote it? Nothing in particular, or at least nothing more particular than what it says. The text is a medley of comparative historical possibilities.
Events interpret the text. John Cardinal Newman said that, and it's good enough for me.
Copyright © 2004 by John J. Reilly
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