At the Wall Street Journal which has been rattling a saber for war in the Middle East for some time, Mark Gunzinger and John Stillion suggest that by comparison with recent air campaigns we really aren’t doing much in our war against the Islamic State:

While it is still too early to proclaim the air campaign against Islamic State a failure, it may be instructive to compare it with other campaigns conducted by the U.S. military since the end of the Cold War that were deemed successes. For instance, during the 43-day Desert Storm air campaign against Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991, coalition fighters and bombers flew 48,224 strike sorties. This translates to roughly 1,100 sorties a day. Twelve years later, the 31-day air campaign that helped free Iraq from Saddam’s government averaged more than 800 offensive sorties a day.

By contrast, over the past two months U.S. aircraft and a small number of partner forces have conducted 412 total strikes in Iraq and Syria—an average of seven strikes a day. With Islamic State in control of an area approaching 50,000 square miles, it is easy to see why this level of effort has not had much impact on its operations.

Of course, air operations during Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom were each supported by a massive coalition force on the ground. Thus it may be more appropriate to compare current operations against Islamic State with the 78-day air campaign against Serbian forces and their proxies in 1999, or the 75-day air campaign in Afghanistan that was instrumental in forcing the Taliban out of power in 2001.

Both campaigns relied heavily on partner forces on the ground augmented by a small but significant number of U.S. troops. These air campaigns averaged 138 and 86 strike sorties a day respectively—orders of magnitude greater than the current tempo of operations against Islamic State.

Perhaps the small number of strikes in the air campaign against Islamic State is due to the lack of suitable ground targets. Yet representatives from the Pentagon have characterized forces fighting under Islamic State’s black banner as more of a conventional army than a highly dispersed, irregular force similar to today’s Taliban. Moreover, Islamic State fighters are using captured armored vehicles, artillery, mortars and other implements of modern land warfare to seize and hold terrain. These operations require a considerable amount of movement and resupply that can be detected by airborne surveillance.

This is not a second generation war. We cannot measure our progress on a path to victory by counting sorties or even by tallying how much enemy matériel or how many enemy production facilities we’ve destroyed. They don’t have production facilities, they have plenty of cash with more coming in every day, and they can buy all of the matériel they need.

How would we measure such progress? I’ve already provided one gauge: when more young Muslims are volunteering to fight IS than are volunteering to fight along side it. By that measure victory is very distant indeed.

What other yardsticks could we use? I would suggest:

• When IS starts losing ground.
• When Turkey allows us to use Incirlik Air Base.
• When Turkey starts bombing IS rather than Kurds who are attempting to relieve the town of Kobane.
• When the Iraqi army stands and fights rather than being routed at every encounter.
• When IS withdraws from the Baghdad suburbs rather than pushing into them.
• When there are fewer terrorist incidents in Baghdad.

At this point none of those measures is particularly encouraging. I honestly don’t know what the Obama Administration is talking about when they say that the campaign is going well unless they’re counting inputs rather than outputs, something I would have hoped we would have learned was futile in Viet Nam.

Contrarywise, we might consider actions we could use to determine that IS was winning. The most obvious is if they take Baghdad.

Any other suggestions for how we can tell whether IS is winning or losing?

A second Texas healthcare worker who treated Thomas Eric Duncan, the man who died of Ebola last week in Dallas, has contracted the disease:

DALLAS — A second hospital worker who helped care for Ebola patient Thomas Duncan has tested positive for the disease, prompting local officials to warn Wednesday that more cases are “a real possibility.”

The unidentified health care worker, who was described as a woman who lived alone without pets, reported a fever Tuesday and was immediately isolated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.

At an early morning news conference, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said he could not rule out more cases among 75 other hospital staffers who cared for Duncan and were being monitored by the CDC.

“We are preparing contingencies for more and that is a real possibility,” Jenkins said.

As I pointed out yesterday by the definition of disease outbreak used by both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, this constitutes an outbreak of the disease here in the United States. If you disagree with that assertion, you’re not disagreeing with me. You’re disagreeing with the CDC and WHO and in order to prove your case you need to do two things. First, you must produce a recognized definition of disease outbreak that does not cover the situation in Dallas and, second, you must demonstrate that it does not cover the situation in Dallas and you must do so without resorting to sophistry.

I continue to believe there is no cause for panic but there’s plenty of cause for greater prudence and honesty.

Let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. There are about 5,000 hospitals in the U. S. If we train five people from each hospital in the correct protocols and procedures for treating Ebola, by my (again back-of-the-envelope) estimate it will cost $10,000 per person to train and equip them. Preparing the hospitals to isolate and treat the disease will probably cost (given the costs in healthcare) another $50,000 per hospital. That’s (5,000 X 5 X 10,000) + (5,000 X 50,000) or $500 million dollars. Let’s say a round billion. Remember, we still haven’t treated anybody yet.

I’ve seen widely varying estimates of daily ICU costs, anything from $1,000 a day to $20,000 a day. $1,000 a day is obviously not credible—the average doc earns more than that. Arguendo, let’s use the $10,000 a day figure and let’s use ICU costs as a gauge for treating an Ebola patient. The accounts I’ve read suggest that treating an Ebola patient takes from 2 to 4 weeks. Let’s use 30 days as a good, round number. 30 X 10000 = $300,000. That means that treating the two patients we already have will cost more than a half million. As you can see, the costs mount rapidly with more cases.

My point here is that because of the outrageously high cost of healthcare in the United States we have powerful incentives to avoid treating Ebola patients here and should be willing to go to substantial lengths to avoid it and hold the outbreak to its epicenter in West Africa. I don’t think that means we need to ban all travel to and from West Africa but it does mean we need to do more than wishful thinking and jollying people along.

Jamsheed and Carol Choksy say that the financiers and supporters of the Islamic State should be “held accountable” for their actions:

Only the Muslim nations that ignited jihadism can now defuse it, working with moderate Iraqis and Syrians who are directly affected by it. There’s no need to defer to the feigned fury of the governments Biden rightly criticized. They are abettors, so let’s instead thrust them to the forefront of the confrontation against Islamic extremism.

These are bold words. Since the most active “abettors” of the Islamic State, e.g. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, are also at least notionally our staunchest Muslim allies in the region, I wonder about the mechanics of how they might be held to account.

Also, how do you account for the deaths of thousands of innocents? What is the appropriate penalty?

I don’t believe that the atrocities of the Islamic State are inherent to Islam any more than Torquemada was inherent to Christianity. I do believe that these outbreaks of barbaric cruelty perpetrated by Muslims in the name of their religion will continue until more young Muslims volunteer to fight the Islamic State than volunteer to join it. That’s the real challenge for Muslims and where the real accounting should be.

I see that Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control is walking back his cocksure remarks of Sunday:

DALLAS — As a 26-year-old Dallas nurse lay infected in the same hospital where she treated a dying Ebola patient last week, government officials on Monday said the first transmission of the disease in the United States had revealed systemic failures in preparation that must “substantially” change in coming days.

“We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control, because even a single infection is unacceptable,” Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a news conference.

Frieden did not detail precisely how the extensive, government-issued safety protocols in place at many facilities might need to change or in what ways hospitals need to ramp up training for front-line doctors or nurses.

At least that’s hewing closer to the known facts. I continue to wonder how he plans to implement a protocol that’s 100% effective, especially considering that we already have at least 100,000 deaths per year in the United States as a consequence of infections picked up in hospitals. The reports of casual violations of ordinary sanitation precautions in hospitals are legion.

The World Health Organization’s definition of a disease outbreak is “the occurrence of cases of disease in excess of what would normally be expected in a defined community, geographical area or season.” Despite what I suspect will be strenuous efforts to deny it single case in Dallas constitutes an outbreak of Ebola here in the United States and I strongly suspect that investigation will determine that it was preventable by something less than heroic measures.

As every twelve step program emphasizes the first step on the way to recovery is recognizing you have a problem.

You might want to take a look at Cliff Asness’s non-apology for warning about the risks in the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing:

When you go out of your way to warn of a risk and after a suitable period that risk has not come to bear, at least where everyone, including you, expected it, you should admit some error, and I do. But there is a still a big difference between pointing out a risk and making a forecast (hence the half admission!). A big reason this risk hasn’t come to fruition is, while not as dangerous so far as we thought, it appears QE was only mostly useless. To the extent even that is only mostly true, where effects did show up, it actually caused rather a lot of inflation, but inflation that went straight into the pockets of those who needed it least and whom Paul wouldn’t swerve his car to avoid. That is, it inflated financial assets, benefited the rich, and enhanced inequality.

It’s worth reading if only for Mr. Asness’s citation of “an honest Paul Krugman” as an example of a counter-factual.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m a Keynesian in the sense that I believe that Keynes’s prescription was right in theory. However, as fellow St. Louisan Yogi Berra wisely noted in theory there is no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is. The reality is that politicians will never allow a Keynesian response fast enough or efficient enough to accomplish the putative policy goals. Somehow money will always be diverted to allies, contributors, and pet projects regardless of the economic implications.

I also feel that I should point out one of the gravest defects of the policy of quantitative easing: it tended to crowd out other policy responses. Sixty-four months have passed since the beginning of the recovery and it’s still phlegmatic and inadequate to bring people back to work who’ve been out-of-work for now more than five years. That’s nothing to crow about.

There’s something that happened last week that I wanted to remark on before it disappeared down the memory hole. Last week when being interviewed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the following:

Citing a colleague, Nadella began: “‘All HR systems are long-term efficient, short-term inefficient.’ And I thought that phrase just captured it. Which is, it’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith the system would actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that I think that might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma, it will come back. Because somebody’s going to know, that’s the kind of person that I want to trust; that’s the kind of person I want to really give more responsibility to.”

As you might imagine feminists immediately began jumping all over him for the statement which he later characterized as an error. He was correct: saying it was an error. I think it was a Kinsleyite gaffe, accidentally saying what he genuinely believed. I think his core beliefs include a belief in karma, the proposition that your actions in this like may be punished or rewarded both in this life and your subsequent reincarnations and what you experience in this life reflects what you did in prior lives as well as in this one.

I want to make three observations about that. First, I see nothing in the statement that would lead me to believe that his views are limited to women. I think he probably believes that karma applies to men and women alike.

Second, I think the remark brings into sharp relief a reality that too many would deny. There really are cultural differences in the world. Differences are not merely superficial. People believe different things. They have differing relative values. Do not interpret the actions of foreign leaders as having the same motivations as those of American politicians (a fundamental error made by American politicians). The guys who run ISIS are not simply appealing to the voters. They are pursuing salvation not electoral victory and failing to take that seriously is a grave error.

Finally, what are the implications of the man who runs America’s largest software company’s believing in karma? If I were a Microsoft shareholder I’d be thinking long and hard about that.

Speaking of corporate statism, there’s a kernel of truth in Mark Perry and Michael Saltsman’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in opposition to the claim that executive pay is too high:

Consider Yum Brands , the parent company of well-known fast-food brands like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC. The compensation of the company’s five-member executive team has been a point of contention for the Service Employees International Union-backed fast food protests that have occurred periodically over the past two years. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission put the total pay package for the company’s executive team at $30.7 million.

That might seem like a lot of wealth the company could “share.” But like many service-industry employers, Yum Brands has a lot of people to share it with. The company’s 2013 annual report indicates that it employs 539,000 people, 86% of whom work part-time. If the executive team were able to redistribute 25% of their salaries, incentive pay and stock options to these part-timers, the net impact on hourly pay would be just over a penny-per-hour raise before taxes.

Even if the executive team took a 100% pay cut and distributed the money equally to the company’s 463,000 part-timers, hourly wages would only rise by five cents.

The point is not that CEOs deserve more money, or less. If an executive is underperforming, the corporation’s board can and should adjust his pay appropriately or terminate his employment. And if the CEO is making the shareholders rich, the board might increase his compensation. But neither voters nor policy makers should make poorly informed decisions about redistributive public policies based on a faulty understanding of how much executives are paid and why entry-level employees aren’t paid more.

Rather than looking at Yum Foods I wish they’d considered Ford and GM where executive pay has risen even as hourly employees’ wages have stagnated, the number of hourly employees has plummeted, and sales, earnings, and market share have declined. Harnessing executive pay to stock value is questionable in a bull market and it’s even more so when price to earnings ratios are as out of whack as they are today.

The basic question is what sort of reform will result in Dr. Perry’s desired outcome? It won’t be top managers who sit on each other’s boards of directors voting to trim their own pay. And it won’t be the representatives of funds that hold so much of the outstanding stock today voting against valuing a rising stock price above all else. That may be what Carl Icahn is complaining about when he kvetches to Apple’s top management that Apple should be buying back its stock.

Peter Berkowitz has lurched uncontrollably into the reality that whatever the participants call themselves the contours of American politics have changed tremendously over the last half century. Progressives aren’t liberals; they’re a sort of crabbed compromise among technocrats, left wing authoritarians, and crony capitalists:

Liberalism, most people would agree, stands for the state’s responsibility to actively improve the social, economic, and political quality of citizens’ lives. In a more fundamental sense liberalism also denotes certain qualities of mind and character, among them tolerance, generosity, the capacity to engage civilly competing opinions, and a determination to base politics on reason rather than physical force or arbitrary authority.

[…]

Foer appreciates that in recent decades liberalism has taken a wrong turn, but he does not accurately identify the nature of that turn.

“Over the last 25 years, liberalism has lost its good name and its sway over politics,” reads a 2006 statement by TNR editors, with which he introduces outstanding essays of the 2000s. “But it’s liberalism’s loss of imagination that is most disheartening.” More disheartening, actually, is the preaching of hatred under the guise of liberalism. More disheartening still is Foer’s decision to highlight TNR essays from the previous decade that do just that as if they carry forward liberalism’s noblest traditions.

It’s no accident that independents are the fast-growing segment of American politics.

Today’s conservatives aren’t the Barry Goldwater-style libertarian-tinged individualists, either, but a devil’s brew of corporate statism and social conservatism.

The Chicago Tribune has endorsed Bruce Rauner, Republican challenger for the office of governor of Illinois:

You don’t see it in satellite photos, or from the Mississippi River gazing east. But Illinois has shrunk. If you’ve lived here for a while, you sense it: A place that for two centuries has been a muscular engine — a whole state of big shoulders, employed and building economic productivity — has petered toward the bottom of one national ranking after another. No garrulous political sweet talk can convince you that, on its present trajectory, desultory Illinois will, or even can, revive the growth that made it great.

The result is the sorry Illinois litany that troubles and embarrasses us all: Some $200 billion in taxpayers’ public debts. Including $100 billion in unfunded pension obligations. Even now, more billions in unpaid bills. Nation’s weakest public retirement system. Nation’s worst credit rating. And, five long years after the June 2009 end of the Great Recession, one of the worst job creation records in America.

Gov. Pat Quinn has had six years to lead the people of Illinois out of this morass. He has tried. He stalled legislators’ pay until they passed state retirement reforms. He signed several pension fixes into law. He closed several costly state facilities.

But despite Quinn’s efforts, the nearly 13 million citizens of this state remain mired in a slow-mo economy that grows too few jobs — an intolerable status quo unlike the robust Illinois they remember.

At this point Rauner is garnering the most newspaper endorsements. To date Gov. Quinn’s re-election campaign strategy appears to be class warfare: “But Rauner is rich!” What I think Quinn needs to do is to energize Cook County voters. I don’t honestly see how he’ll be re-elected with a 20% turnout or lower in Cook County. Chicago’s turnout for the primaries was just 16%.