SOUP LINES, ANYONE?

first draft

Baghdad, I've come to you
As a broken ship
Hiding my wounds
Under my clothes.

Ilham al-Madfai, "Baghdad." (My translation from Arabic.)

The usual suspects, foreign policy experts whose views are colored by concern about Israel, are dispatching flurries of proposals for the new President about Iraq, a Middle East settlement, and especially about sanctions and war on Iran.

I don’t have the time (and I don’t want ) to discuss their self-serving ideas and the ideas of their allies. But I’d like to note that, once again, these foreign policy entrepreneurs are making the same mistakes they made when they had dispatched the troops to invade Iraq:

One mistake: assuming that they’re smarter than their opponent -- in this case, Iran. (Iran can draw circles around them.)

More seriously, these people aren’t connecting/linking economic/financial issues to foreign policy options. Nouriel Roubini recently wrote:

“[W]ith governments and central banks bringing private sector losses on their balance sheets, fiscal deficits will top $1000 bn for the US in the next two years. The Fed and the Treasury are taking a massive amount of credit risk endangering the long-term solvency of the US government.”

Nouriel Roubini, “How to avoid the horrors of ‘stag-deflation’,” FT.com (Financial Times), Dec. 2, 2008. Emphasis added.)

Soup lines, anyone?