The latest Carnival of the Recipes is now available. This week it’s being ably hosted by apparent insomniac Sarahk of Mountaineer Musings. Christmas cookies, cranberry recipes, mulled cider, Pot Stickers for Putzes, and lots of others from some of the best cooks in the blogosphere. Check it out!

Now here’s something I haven’t been reading a lot of from overseas. Razi Azmi writes in the Pakistan Daily Times:

I can definitely live with Bush as US president — or as the world’s sole policeman — for eight years or longer, but would hate to spend even eight days under the Taliban’s theocracy, Saddam’s dictatorship or a regime of Ayatollahs. I have a strong feeling that the vast majority of people everywhere feel the same way

A fellow columnist and friend thinks that I am “soft on Bush”. Considering the degree of President George Bush’s unpopularity in Pakistan and worldwide, it would be an understatement to say that most readers will concur with his view. When Bush is the subject, nothing short of outright denunciation is in order these days. I, therefore, consider it necessary to offer an explanation for my perceived ‘softness’.

Far be it from me — being a staunch believer in secularism — to approve of Bush’s brand of evangelicalism and his penchant for mixing religion with politics. However, for me Bush is a non-issue. Firstly, I am not an American, nor are my readers. Secondly, Bush is not a threat to the world or to democracy and secularism in America, but Al Qaeda and its many affiliates who carry out terrorist attacks in the name of Islam are a clear and present danger. And, finally, the US constitution and civil society are capable of putting religious zealots, not to mention bigots, in their proper place. In any case, those who take the worst possible view of George Bush may relax in the knowledge that on January 21, 2009, he will have passed into oblivion, for the 22nd Amendment to the US constitution (1951) bars presidents from running for a third term.

[…]

George Bush’s military intervention in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq have attracted the most condemnation. However, the former has been an astounding success (above all, from the Afghans’ point of view), while the latter is hardly the debacle many commentators represent it to be. In Afghanistan, an utterly despicable regime has been replaced by an elected president. Schools and roads are being built where the religious police once trod. In Iraq, except for the twenty per cent Sunnis who rode roughshod over the rest of the population under the previous regime, the people are eagerly awaiting the elections due next month.

Many people grieve over the unipolar world and hark back nostalgically to the bipolar world of the Soviet era. They need to be reminded that during the heyday of bipolarism and Cold War, the world came close to a nuclear catastrophe (Cuban Missile Crisis), the Korean and Vietnam wars wrought havoc in the Korean peninsula and Indo-China, there were two Arab-Israeli wars and two wars between India and Pakistan. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, while US meddling led to the overthrow of an elected government in Chile and caused turmoil in many Latin American countries. Angola and Mozambique were torn apart by gruesome civil wars with superpower involvement on all sides, China invaded North Vietnam to “teach it a lesson,” and the Iraq-Iran war led to a million deaths.

Taking advantage of the superpower tensions, Morocco occupied Western Sahara and Indonesia invaded East Timor. The Cold War generated a war between Somalia and Ethiopia. It allowed South Africa to remain in the throes of apartheid and gave Suharto a free hand to kill or incarcerate hundreds of thousands of alleged communists in Indonesia. The Khmer Rouge, who wiped out a fifth of Cambodia’s population, were also a by-product of that era.

The world is now a much safer and a much more democratic place. Thanks to the unipolar world with America as the sole superpower, democracy is advancing while dictatorships are receding. Dictators who roamed with a swagger now scurry for cover. Disenfranchised people now feel empowered, from Afghanistan to Georgia, and from Iraq to Ukraine. Bush’s band of neo-cons is succeeding where his more illustrious predecessors failed; they act where others balked.

Bush is not a threat to any democratic dispensation anywhere in the world. If he has made the world a trifle unsafe for thugs and dictators, he is to be commended. In any case, he will be gone sooner than we think. But terrorism in the name of Islam, which now stalks the world, is an unprecedented development in terms of magnitude, intensity, scope and danger. I can definitely live with Bush as US president — or as the world’s sole policeman — for eight years or longer, but would hate to spend even eight days under the Taliban’s theocracy, Saddam’s dictatorship or a regime of Ayatollahs. I have a strong feeling that the vast majority of people everywhere feel the same way.

Hat tip: ¡No Pasarán!.

People are beginning to acknowledge that while Social Security is a serious long-term problem Medicare (and our whole health care system) is a more serious problem that’s significantly closer at hand. Steve Verdon writes:

Kevin [ed. Drum] has a sort, kinda decent post on the problems of Social Security and the undiscussed problem of Medicare. He is right in that Medicare is much, much bigger problem. Right now, if you believe the research of Gokhale and Smetters, the U.S. faces deficits of about $44 trillion dollars over the next 75 or so years. About $7 trillion is Social Security and the remaining $37 trillion is Medicare. Or Medicare is about 5 times the size of the Social Security problem.

The solution is that we need to bring more market incentives to bear on the problem. Right now Medicare recipients basically have a gigantic subsidy for consuming health care resources. This subsidy basically means that they will consume alot. This in turn drives up the price for everybody else. Throw in the fact that purchasing insurance when you are young, health and have few or no assets is a sucker’s game and you have a recipe for spiralling out of control health care costs.

That’s a good succinct description of half of the problem. It’s not just consumers who are being subsidized: health care providers are receiving enormous subsidies in the form of licensing, patents, and the physicians’ monopoly on prescribing medication. The effect of these subsidies is to artificially constrain supply which also raises costs.

Does anyone have some actual evidence that it’s excess demand that’s causing costs to rise rather than insufficient supply? I, for one, don’t know anybody who goes to the doctor unless they’re sick. Quite the contrary. I know a lot of people who don’t go to the doctor even when they are sick.

I’m far from being a kneejerk believer in government solutions for every earthly ill. But I do believe that government does have a legitimate role. And perhaps the most legitimate case for government action is to offset the negative effects of other government action. And in health care the government has been acting with a vengeance since the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 almost a hundred years ago.

Since the enactment of Medicare almost forty years ago the government has been throwing money at physicians. And physicians have been prudent enough to catch it. Since 1965 doctors’ salaries have risen significantly faster than inflation and faster than the salaries of other professionals (admittedly less rapidly in recent years). It seems to me more than conceivable that a good part of that difference is due to the physicians’ monopoly and barriers to entry i.e. restricting supply.

So if you advocate a market solution for the problems in health care, please remember both the supply and the demand side of the equation. Otherwise you’re not arguing for a market solution at all.

I find myself yet again playing jackal to Wretchard’s lion. In a recent post, Total War, Wretchard writes of the organizational and political challenges of modern warfare:

An interesting article from the Christian Science Monitor highlights some of the challenges of putting ‘more boots on the ground’ in Iraq. It turns to be a little more complicated than ordering more men into the theater. It means creating more units in the first place and structuring them differently.

He quotes Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld:

We’ll be bringing home some troops, we’ll be bringing home some dependents, we’ll be shifting our weight in various parts of the globe. And the emphasis will be not on numbers of things, but on capabilities. And we’ll be looking less to how many troops or how many tanks or how many planes are located in a certain spot and we’ll be focused more on precision, equipment, speed, agility, as opposed to mass and sheer numbers. And that’s going to be a hard thing for people to understand.

Wretchard continues:

The hardest thing to understand was that the old world — and the old military metrics had departed forever. During the First World War large horse cavalry masses were held in reserve for years in the expectation of a role which had already disappeared into history. Each transformational task that Rumsfeld faced had its analogue in the field.

I don’t fault the Administration for not planning for every contingency. I don’t fault the Adminstration for not armoring every vehicle. I don’t fault the Administration for having the wrong force structure for the conflict that we’re in (as Wretchard’s post suggests).

But I do fault the Administration for not trying harder to explain the conflict to the American people. If it’s hard to explain, try harder don’t avoid the subject. Do the spadework. Expend the political capital. Build the political support. That the Administration has not built enough political support for the War on Terror in general and the War in Iraq in particular is obvious. Just open any newspaper.

Perhaps it’s just me but I see an eerie analogy between America’s military actions in the field and the Bush Administration’s conduct of politics. More than a year ago rather than engaging the forces that opposed us, doing the house-to-house searches, taking the casualties, reducing the opposition, and bringing security to Iraq we allowed the oppposition forces to withdraw, dissolve, re-group, and harass our forces and Iraqi civilians ever since. Now we’re taking those forces on, first in Fallujah, then elsewhere.

Rather than making a strong case for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, building a domestic political coalitiion to support these actions, and then going to war the Administration has avoided making the case or building the coalition.

Have our military or Iraqi civilians taken fewer casualties as a result of our strategy there? I’d certainly like to see someone make that case. I’d also like to see someone make the case that failing to build a consensus of support for the Administration’s actions will enhance our ability to engage in a generation-or-more-long struggle against radical Islamist terrorism.

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Marc Schulman of American Future, continuing to blog up a storm, has substantial quotes from the Asia Times on How Iran Would Fight Back
• The Diplomad disagrees with Thomas Friedman on Arab reform initiatives.
• Lynne Kiesling of Knowledge Problem reports on a bold vision for power transmission.
• Happy Birthday, LVB from The Llama Butchers.
• One of my all-time favorite bloggers and sometime correspondents, Lawrence Solum of Legal Theory Blog, comments on natural law, public reason, and the Constitution as they apply to the criticisms launched recently on Justice Clarence Thomas.

That’s the lot.

Here’s what caught my eye this morning:

• The Big Picture evaluates the success of the RIAA. Scroll around on this blog. He’s got a lot of great stuff.
• Somebody’s finally noticing the dog in the manger. Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly compares Real Problems vs. Fake Problems. Steve Verdon responds.
• Econopundit complains about Rahm Emmanuel’s idea that the Democratic Party is the product warranty on government.

  He wasn’t given his safe seat in the 5th District because he’s smart, Steve. He was given it because he’s a loyal soldier.

• Nelson Ascher of EuroPundits comments on Steven Den Beste.
• LaShawn Barber considers the pros and cons of comments and trackbacks.

  My own opinion on this, LaShawn, is that it depends on what your own objectives are. If you want to talk, turn off comments and trackbacks. If you want a conversation—not just a monologue or dialogue but a conversation, turn on comments, turn on trackbacks, answer your email, comment on other peoples’ blogs, and be an active presence in your own comments section. But do what satisfies your own objectives in blogging.

• Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a shocking post on Paying for Kidneys.

  If selling kidneys is immoral, why is it moral to be paid hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour to install donated kidneys?

That’s the lot.

In his most recent post, Shame and Disgrace, Wretchard of Belmont Club uses the recent decision to award Tommy Franks, George Tenet and Paul Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom (or, more accurately, Andrew Sullivan’s criticism of same) as a springboard for evaluating the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I stopped reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog when it became all homogamy—all the time so I’m getting this at second hand. In particular Wretchard writes:

If Gerecht’s analysis is correct, OIF stands within an ace of not only achieving its operational goals, but is on the verge of winning its initial strategic goals.

Frankly, I’d feel a lot more comfortable with such a pronouncement if the Administration were to articulate what the actual goals of the Iraq War were. Back in March, 2003 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described the objectives of the war in Iraq as:

1. “to end the regime of Saddam Hussein by striking with force on a scope and scale that makes clear to Iraqis that he and his regime are finished.”

   Clearly, this objective has been accomplished.

2. “to identify, isolate and eventually eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, production capabilities, and distribution networks.”

   This objective is either moot (if Iraq had no appreciable stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, production capabilities, or distribution networks), a failure (if what WMD, production capabilities, and distribution networks Iraq had have been transferred beyond its borders), or a qualified success (if production capabilities and distribution networks have been removed). We’ll probably never know.

3. “to search for, capture, drive out terrorists who have found safe harbor in Iraq.”

   Since this effort is ongoing the best we can rate this objective is as a qualified success (or a qualified failure). The apparently continuing influx of foreign fighters into Iraq suggests, at least to me, that this will be a primary challenge of any future Iraqi government. Or, said as pointedly as I can, if this isn’t a primary objective of any future Iraqi government, I would characterize the entire operation as a failure.

4. “to collect such intelligence as we can find related to terrorist networks in Iraq and beyond.”

   Once again we’ll probably never know whether this objective has failed or succeeded.

5. “to collect such intelligence as we can find related to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction activity.”

   We’ll probably never know.

6. “to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian relief, food and medicine to the displaced and to the many needy Iraqi citizens.”

   This is a again ongoing and at best a qualified success. My own belief is that this effort (and many of the other objectives) could more easily have been deemed a success had we been willing to confront holdouts, terrorists, and other nogoodniks a year ago.

7. “to secure Iraq’s oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people, and which they will need to develop their country after decades of neglect by the Iraqi regime.”

   Since the oil fields and resources continue to be under sporadic attack and production has not risen to pre-war levels (let alone pre-1991 levels), the best we can rate this objective is as a qualified success.

8. “to help the Iraqi people create the conditions for a rapid transition to a representative self-government that is not a threat to its neighbors and is committed to ensuring the territorial integrity of that country.”

   Are elections on January sufficient to declare this objective a success?

This last objective is what troubles me the most. President Bush has repeatedly stated that any outcome that the Iraqi people produce democratically is acceptable to him. I, on the other hand, believe that we should have articulated some minimally acceptable set of outcomes for Iraqi self-government from the very outset. Can we accept anything less than:

• equal rights for women
• protection of rights for minorities
• freedom of religion
• a permanent end to strong-man government?

I don’t think so. That’s just defining victory down too far.

My wife makes what is probably the most delicious English toffee in the entire world. Every year at Christmas time she makes between 10 and 20 batches of it as gifts for friends, colleagues, and—for those lucky enough to get it—relatives. Lest you think that I’m blinded in this assessment by loyalty to my wife here’s an email we received from some friends (the ones who moved to the island in the Caicos). Our friends were visiting family in Boston so we had their gift of toffee expressed-delivered to them there:

…you two are just the very best. We got back from the Cape today and noticed a box on my brother’s doorstep. As soon as I saw the return address I knew (at least hoped) that it was your incredible toffee. I can’t believe you Fed Exed it to Boston. That was very generous of you and we are very appreciative. I gave my sister-in-law a taste and she agreed that it is to die for.

Now our trip to the States is complete. I have every intention of rationing the toffee to make it last as long as it possibly can. It is going back in my purse so that I can safeguard it with my body……my life, if necessary. No one touches this toffee but me.

So here’s the recipe. My wife’s notes are in italics. But I have a few words of caution. If you think that margarine or any butter substitute is just as good as butter or that chopped peanuts are just as good as pecans, you need to seriously reconsider your values. Or else you’re just not old enough to make this toffee.

My wife’s famous English Toffee

1½ cups finely chopped nuts
I use pecan halves and chop them by hand using a cleaver. Update: Buy in bulk! If you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere where there’s a bulk nut processing plant nearby you can get very fresh nuts.
12 Hershey bars
The 1.55 oz. ones that come in the six pack package. Update: You can buy 36 bar boxes from big-box stores like Costco. Not only is this more economical but you’ll get more unbroken bars this way which are easier to manage.
½ lb. butter
I use Land O�Lakes unsalted butter
½ cup sugar
I use cane sugar. Update: C&H is the brand I use. If you can get their baker’s sugar, it’s the best.
3 Tbsp. water
¼ tsp. salt
I use kosher salt

1. Sprinkle half of the nuts in a 13 x 9 pan (or a pan of similar size).
2. Place 6 of the Hershey bars logo side up over the nuts.
3. Melt the butter in a heavy sauce pan.

   I use a Calphalon sauce pan. Using a heavy pan is essential to prevent the butter from separating in the final stages of cooking

4. Add sugar, water, and salt.
5. STIR CONSTANTLY.
6. Cook over a medium flame until the temperature reaches 300°F on a candy thermometer. The mixture will be light brown. This will take about 20 to 40 minutes.
7. Pour the mixture evenly over the chocolate and the nuts.
8. Place the remaining 6 Hershey bars logo side down on top of the mixture.
9. Sprinkle the remaining nuts on top of the chocolate. You may want to press the top gently with a spatula to set the nuts into the chocolate.
10. Allow to harden overnight. Cut gently with a sharp knife.

Carnival of the Liberated, a weekly sample of the best from Iraqi blogs, is available at Dean’s World. Light posting, daily life, and a bit of a blog war.