Science says colonialism benefits the colonized

Here comes the science!

Excerpts:

The reason it's hard to resolve this question is that we have no controlled experiments comparing otherwise similar places with different sets of legal and economic institutions. In new research, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history?the length of European colonization?on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons. Their question: Are the islands that experienced European colonization for a longer period of time richer today?

...Feyrer and Sacedote's key findings are that the longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40 percent boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births.

By itself, the relationship between longer colonization and higher living standards could arise either because European contact raised living standards or because European explorers colonized the most promising islands first. The authors cleverly reject the latter possibility by noting that the sailing of the day relied on wind, which meant that islands located where wind is weak were "less likely to be discovered, revisited, and colonized by Europeans."

...The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers: the United States, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Japan, Germany, and France. Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States?as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese.


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The truth about the Tet offensive

Well, Tet is in the news again now, since Bush gave that interview. You've seen plenty of spin on this one, and you'll see plenty more. So let me point you to some scholarly counter-spin, courtesy of Peter Braestrup.

Excerpts:

The Tet offensive of 1968 must surely be regarded as one of history's chameleon campaigns. When the North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops assaulted targets throughout the Republic of Vietnam at the end of January 1968, they expected to trigger an uprising of the South Vietnamese people against their government. Despite some spectacular early successes, the attacks failed. The South Vietnamese did not embrace the cause; thousands of sappers, assault troops, and cadres met their deaths before overwhelming allied counterattacks; and the insurgent infrastructure was so decimated at the end of the fighting that no large enemy offensives could be mounted for four years...

Misconception: The offensive was a victory for Hanoi. The press corps, it is now clear, was stunned by the initial Tet attacks, many of which occurred in Saigon. When the allies met some initial reverses, the press reacted by emphasizing the enemy's successes. As the weeks wore on and military intelligence clearly indicated defeat for the insurgents, the press still interpreted the offensive as a "psychological victory" for the Vietcong/ North Vietnamese Army, who "held the initiative," "decide who lives and who dies... which planes land and which ones don't," who were unconcerned with losses, and could "take and hold any area they chose." There was little objective analysis of the many enemy failures or of the severe toll that allied counterblows exacted from the enemy...

Misconception: The characteristic American response was to destroy city districts and villages with overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower... Some reports from Saigon indicated the city was a giant scarred battleground; from the air, however, reporters could see that 95 percent of the city was relatively unharmed...

The effects of these errors of fact and interpretation in the United States were pronounced. The impact appeared less in opinion polls than in the minds of Washington policy-makers. Because the press had ignored earlier cautions expressed by military leaders, the public was "jolted into gloom and foreboding," and a "credibility gap" emerged. In Congress and the bureaucracy, criticism became vocal, reflecting the "disaster" themes portrayed in the press and on TV. The embattled President announced the bombing halt and withdrew from the Presidential campaign.

How could the press err so greatly in its Tet coverage with such impact on the nation? There is no simple answer to the question. Braestrup dismisses the idea that newsmen as a group were ideologically opposed to the war. Rather, the Tet coverage represents the institutional defects or flaws in the gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of news in Vietnam and the United States at the time of the offensive...

SUMMING up the impact of the press, Braestrup argues that the Tet reporting was an extreme case of crisis-journalism. The result was a "portrait of defeat" for the allies because "the special circumstances of Tet impacted to a rare degree on modern American journalism's special susceptibilities and limitations." Braestrup's final chapter is a discussion of how the susceptibilities and limitations are unchanged, with a warning that a similar crisis could repeat the errors of Tet.

I say:

The mainstream media are no more reliable now than they were then. If anything, they've gotten worse. But here's two things that have changed since then: people are less liable to believe what they see on the evening news, and people have alternatives on the Web.

Also, Bush is no Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was a classic bully type who backed down in the end. He jabbed his finger in faces, he blustered, he bluffed, and when Cronkite turned on him, he caved. Bill Clinton is much the same in the clinch, including the finger jabbing. (We saw that when he got Queeged on Fox.) Bush has a very different style, and he doesn't cave to his critics.

I see every modern war as Groundhog Day. We'll keep fighting the Korean War over and over again, at different times and in different places, until we get it right. The key to getting it right? Following through. I think our current president has the stomach to follow through. I can't say the same for most of his critics.

And no talk about trying to prevent a larger war. It can't be done, at least not via containment, diplomacy and "police actions." The next world war has been pending for about 60 years now. Every world war is the unfinished business of the one before it. The sooner you deal with it, the less nasty it will be. The more you try to avoid it, the worse it is when it comes. Neville Chamberlain never grasped that. Truman came close to grasping it, but he couldn't bring himself to make that final leap of logic. MacArthur feared it, and dreamed of banning war, but then he came to his senses.

The coming world war has been delayed far too long. Consequently, it will be very, very bad when it comes. It will probably be nuclear. Pacifism won't prevent it. Diplomacy won't prevent it. Containment and limited war alone won't prevent it. Our best bet for avoiding world war is to cut off aid and trade to the anti-democratic regimes of the world, and let them implode. That's how we won the Cold War - barely. We can greatly improve the chances if we just follow through on whatever Groundhog Day wars arise. It might work, it might not. But nothing else has a chance.

And whatever happens, we can't count on mainstream news to watch our backs.


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North Korea: how it came to this

There are three standard complaints coming from Bush opponents regarding the Kim regime and its nukes. One is that Bush ought to have attacked North Korea instead of Iraq, because North Korea presented more of a threat. Another is that Bush should have tried more diplomacy. The third is that the regime of North Korea has a right to develop nuclear weapons in order to defend itself against its bellicose enemies (such as Bush.)

These assertions contradict each other. They can't all be true. But they can all be false.

Let's take the first one. When G.W. Bush took office, it was very nearly certain that North Korea already had nuclear weapons. They were very close to having them during the crisis of 1994. Bill Clinton, who was occupying the Oval Office at the time, decided to take his lead from Jimmy Carter, a former president whose whose foreign policy had been arguably treasonous. They came up with a negotiated settlement, which the Kim Jong Il government promptly violated with impunity. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming this mess on Clinton's foreign policy. Bill Clinton didn't *have* a foreign policy. I'm blaming it on his *lack* of foreign policy. He outsourced this crucial decision, to a man whom it would be charitable to call a fool.

By the time Bush came into office, attacking North Korea would, in all likelihood, have led directly to a regional nuclear war. Kim didn't yet have the missiles to reach the United States, but he had South Korea and perhaps Japan held hostage. We did not yet have a missile defense. We've just barely got the beginnings of one now, and no thanks to the Bush haters.

How about assassination? Well, that's supposedly illegal or something. I know Bill Clinton recently said on TV that he had tried to assassinate bin Laden. Oliver North (remember him?) got on Clinton's case for violating - or rather claiming to have violated - a bunch of executive orders against that sort of thing. Well, I'll have to take Clinton's side on that one. The executive orders make no sense to me. Does anyone know what the reason was for them in the first place?

(Not that I actually believe the wagging finger when he says he really, really tried to take the bastard out. But the point is, he's right when in implying that he ought to have done so.)

That said, it's not easy to "take out" people like Kim Jong Il. You see, you have to get to him first. And he owns half of an entire country, which he's turned into his own personal fortress. With nukes that work, and missiles that might or might not work.

Is there another option? Diplomacy? Diplomacy means nothing without the credible threat of force to back it up. Diplomacy without credibility is nothing but bluffing followed by capitulation. And the Clinton-Carter act had thrown away our credibility. Also, Clinton's "sunshine" policy, together with an epidemic of Stockholm syndrome, had weakened the resolve of our closest democratic ally in the region.

The only possible use for diplomacy would have been as a delaying tactic, while we worked on BMD and getting our troops safely away from the DMZ. Which is more or less what Dubya did. Meanwhile, Kim was working on his long range missiles, as he was going to do anyway. It was a classic arms race, weapons vs countermeasures. The race is in the final stretch now, with no clear winner.

All in all, this is the best that could have been hoped for from diplomacy post 1994. Diplomacy is not some magic pixie dust that makes all difficulties evaporate if you just sprinkle enough of it. It doesn't work that way. Never did.

Now, about the final complaint. North Korea needs to defend itself? To anyone who's ever actually heard of North Korea, this idea is absurd on its face. First off, what is the North Korea that needs to defend itself? A large piece of real estate in east Asia? How are we supposed to threaten a chunk of the earth's crust? Not even H-bombs will obliterate a geographical feature of that size. Well then, what? The people of North Korea? North Korea is not a democracy. The people living there do not have a stake in this, and it's not them we're concerned with. The population of North Korea are nothing but hostages and slaves for the Kim regime, eating grass to survive because their Great Leader won't let them have proper food. Anyone who tries to escape this socialist paradise, gets dragged home by a wire through her skin.

So just what is this North Korea that is defending itself? Nothing more than Kim Jong Il and his henchmen. A twisted little man with an Eraserhead hairdo and a penchant for mass murder, plus his homies.

Now that we've properly defined our terms, does this man whom we call North Korea have a right to defend himself and hold on to what is in his grasp? Well, in order to have the right to defend oneself and one's possessions, one must first have the right to exist and to possess these possessions. Morally speaking, does Kim Jong Il have these rights? I think not.

By the way, there's a phrase for the sort of thinking that would presume the Kim regime has as much or more right to exist than does a free country such as the United States, Japan or South Korea. It's called moral equivalence. And it's morally indefensible. Just to stress this point, let me give you an excerpt from the Times of London:

The soldiers, who later told family members of the incident, marched the woman, who was about 30, to the mid-point of the bridge. North Korean guards were waiting. They signed papers for receipt of the woman, who kept her dignity until that moment. Then, in front of the Chinese troops, one seized her and another speared her hand ' the soft part between thumb and forefinger ' with the point of a sharpened steel cable, which he twisted into a leash.

'She screamed just like a pig when we kill it at home in the village,' the soldier later told his relative. 'Then they dragged her away.'

Such stories are circulating widely among Chinese on the border, where wild rumours of an American attack on nuclear test sites have spread fears of a Chernobyl-type cloud of radiation and sparked indignation at the North Koreans. 'I've heard it a hundred times over that when we send back a group they stab each one with steel cable, loop it under the collarbone and out again, and yoke them together like animals,' said an army veteran with relatives in service.

I say:

This is the sort of thing the Left are defending. Never mind sleep deprivation at Gitmo. *This* is cruelty. The real thing.

Just how do the Left sleep at night?






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