The numbers in that paragraph make no sense. They say it's 8 times less efficient (3c v. 23c) but will collect 80x the revenue for the same cost?

Second, I suspect this is applees to oranges. The collection rates now are for larger delinquencies, whic of course are cheaper to collect. Furthermore, I suspect that they aren't taking into account the compromises they give (i.e., we'll settle for half). Turning it over to a private collection agency, for the small stuff, with compromise authority, will naturally lead to lower collections.

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Spanky, we invaded the country. We sent a lot of people over to look for WMD and WMD programs. This is what they concluded.

Here is NPR (I know -- they're ideologically biased too):

• Operation Desert Fox ::: 1998
  Cooperation ends between Iraq and inspectors when the country demands the lifting of the U.N. oil embargo. UNSCOM and the IAEA pull their staffs out of Iraq in anticipation of a US-led air raid on Iraqi military targets. The four-day military offensive known as Operation Desert Fox begins on December 16, 1998. According to a U.S. military Web site, the mission of Desert Fox was "to strike military and security targets in Iraq that contribute to Iraq's ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction." The operation is considered a success, largely finishing off what was left of Iraq' s WMD infrastructure.

If David Kay said that Iraq's WMD infrastructure was effectively addressed by Desert Fox, would you accept the proposition as non-absurd?

And is there any other claim that Ricks has made that seems facially absurd to you, or is your accusation that he's biased based solely on your disagreement on this point?

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Sure: The bombing hurt the infrastructure but it is virtually impossible that the bombing took out all the WMDs. Actually missiles, not bombing. Of course the administration is biased, but have they confirmed this? As Sagan said, extraordinary claims take extraordinary evidence. Unless the evidence is conclusive I just don't buy it. This allegation, is just too perfect for the Clinton does everything right and Bush does everything wrong crowd.

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Aaaaaaaah!!! Aaaaaaah!!!! Aaaaaaah!!!!

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And now appear to be losing the peace, as the Taliban gains power while we are occupied elsewhere. Biggest missed opportunity of the Bush Admin, IMHO.




I don't think anyone thought we needed a lot of troops to conquer Iraq. The issue was how many troops we needed to occupy Iraq in order to avoid chaos, civil war, and the quagmire we are in today.

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I was asked if he ever did anything right. I was pointing out the right things he did. I never said he did everything right.

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OK. But Ricks didn't say that "the bombing took out all the WMD." The transcript again:

• HH: There are a number of very fascinating passages in Fiasco, which is why everyone should read this, and I want to get to them serially, Thomas Ricks. First, I want to get to the WMD question. Any doubt in your mind that George W. Bush and his team and the Pentagon career believed there were WMD there when the war began?
  
  TR: No doubt whatsoever. I think they drank their Kool-Aid, and talked themselves into it, on the basis of no evidence. But yeah, they believed it.
  
  HH: When you write that Operation Desert Fox was tremendously successful, you're concluding that those WMD were there in 1998? Or did Clinton drink the Kool-Aid as well?
  
  TR: Yeah, there were WMD facilities in '98, and they were taken out pretty effectively by those raids. The most effective aspect of the Desert Fox raids, though, which we didn't recognize at the time, it's very difficult to pull out, was the psychological effect. The message sent to Iraqi weapons scientists was Uncle Sam is not going to let Saddam Hussein have this stuff. And their hard work of seven years, after the '91 war, was taken out. It was destroyed.
  
  HH: Can it really be said to be, "drinking the Kool-Aid", as you just said, to conclude that that which had been destroyed in 1998 would immediately be begun to be rebuilt, even as Saddam had begun to rebuild after 1991. Or would it have been prudent, post-9/11, to conclude that Saddam then, as Saddam now, is Saddam always?
  
  TR: Well, that would, but it would be untethered from the realities of Iraq, which was that the country was becoming increasingly poor, weaker, had a less strong military, and that in fact, the '98 Desert Fox raids had almost toppled Saddam Hussein.

BTW, the fact that Hugh Hewitt (!) is telling people to read Fiasco suggests that what Ricks says can't be dismissed as ideologically biased.

No, you're wrong. Desert Fox involved both bombing and cruise missiles.

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And you responded by pointing out one thing that he got, at best, half-right (Afghanistan) and another where he got it completely wrong. Taking Saddam out of power was the easy part and the debate about troops needed never centered on that.

If I the easier half of the questions right but blow all of the harder half, I fail the test.

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Has David Kay ever said that? Here is one quote from him "On January 23, 2004, David Kay resigned stating that Iraq did not have WMD and that "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them."

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That is easy to say with hindisght now. But the invasion was accomplished very quickly, efficienty, and with minimum loss of US Soldiers. But that is all beside the original point.

Absolute statements make me sckeptical. And I was pointing out that the guy made absolute statements about Rumsfield and Franks which makes me doubt his credibility.

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What difference would the mindset of the scientist matter? If Sadaam is ordering them to do it don't you think they would?

so poor countries can't build weapons program, even if driven by a dictator. cool. just solved the whole North Korea problem.

It's just impossible. Why even try?
 

I am a fiscal conservative. But of all the things the government spends money on, my personal safety is at the top of the list. North Korea is developing the technology to kill me and is just crazy enough to use it. I would like our government to focus resources on doing something about that problem. SDI probably isn't even one percent of the annual federal budget (that would be 20 billion dollars per year). I think funding should be increased.

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You stated this: (1) Bitch, please. Clinton is the one who destroyed the WMD programs.

I was arguing against that.

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I stand corrected

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I think what he said is that a variety of different things, including sanctions, inspections and airstrikes, culminating in Desert Fox, essentially took care of Iraq's facilities. The allegation is not that the bombing destroyed every chem-capable artillery shell.

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Note that I referred to "programs," not weapons. Sorry if "destroyed" was the wrong word. After an awful lot of work, my understanding is that David Kay concluded that when Clinton left office, Iraq no longer had WMD programs. Of course, we may not ever know for sure, because documents were destroyed and people have died, etc. But it appears that containment worked.

So I gather that you're no longer suggesting that what I quoted Ricks as saying is absurd. Because you said something like that, but you now seem to have backed away.

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I don't think we really know what happened to the WMDs. We can guess. We also can't know how effective Operation Desert Fox was and I am sckeptical of anyone that says they know.

If you will notice, when you asked for reasons for my sceptcism of Ricks I focused on his sweeping generalizations and his use of anonymous sources. In addition, you kind of alluded to this, but when it was popular to be pro-pentagon he was, and when it wasn't, he wasn't. I just think he is a sloppy reporter, he draws too many conclusions from insufficient evidence and then states such conclusions like they are irrefutable facts. Common problem with modern reporters and in my opinino, very annoying.

There is something wrong with her numbers. But even if you figure the 80x ratio is wrong, the 8x ration is pretty bad.

The first paragraph specifically says that the comparisons are apples to apples, for the same work.

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Perhaps we will never "really" know, whatever that means, but you seem to be suggesting that in the absence of perfect information there's no use in trying at all. Are you angling for DoD job? It's very Republican of you.

Why are you so confident that airport screeners are doing a good job, but so suspicious that David Kay learned anything with all the time and resources invested in figuring out what happened with the WMD?

In other words, you don't like Ricks, but don't specifically dispute anything I quoted him as saying.

• For less than that fee, the IRS could hire staff who would bring in about eight times as much revenue as the private collection agencies are projected to, according to former IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti. In testimony before the House of Representatives, Everson freely admitted that hiring more staff is far more efficient than privatization. But inadequate appropriations for the IRS, he claims, have made it impossible to hire new staff.

source

1) That may be. But I still suspect that the estimate is based not on marginal enforcement, but on average enforcement. This is marginal enforcement.

2) Apparently it's not IRS's fault, but rather Congress's.

1) OK. If it's twice as costly to outsource, it's still a waste of taxpayer dollars.

2) I don't doubt that for a second. The IRS would surely rather hire more people. But the politicians like the outsourcing, because the availability of government contracts led to increased campaign donations and lobbying opportunities. It's loot-and-pillage Republicanism.

Maybe, but so what?

Because if you don't tell us what the marginal cost of collecting those additional tax dollars is, how can we meaningingfully determine how bad a deal the goverment has been forced to cut?

23% is better than most credit collection services charge.

If the IRS can get it down to 3%, why haven't they all been hired by the debt collectors?

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The current adminnistration wouldn't hire me to clean their toilets.

I fly a lot, and I always think, if I were going to try to hijack this plane, how could I do it (hello guys at DHS - I am sure your spider software picked that one up). Seems to me, with the current screening, it would be really difficult.

If the administration doesn't know what happened to the WMDs (and they have the entire resources of the US government at their disposal and are occupying the country) I doubt a lone reporter could figure it out - possible but unlikely.

I'm just guessing, but because the government gets to make the rules (hi Hank!), I'll bet the IRS can whack you for not paying your taxes in ways that private debt collectors can only fantasize about.

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I would have thought this was clear well before this point in the conversation, but I don't think Ricks is doing anything more than relating what his sources in the military accept as true. I don't believe that he's pretending to have done reporting on where the WMD went.

Although I suspect that some at teh IRS also fantasize about the ways that some private debt collectors can whack you. But fair point otherwise.

The 3% is the marginal cost of keeping the additional collections work in-house which the IRS is now going to contract out. That's the basis for comparing the cost of contracting this work.

I doubt the same debt collectors would not be as efficient in a private operation, and a fair amount of the percentage cost is going to the private firms' profit margins.

You got that right.

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The point of the conversation was that you averred that Clinton, through Operation Desert Fox, either wiped out, or seriously damaged Saddam Hussein's WMD program (so that is where they "went"). You used Rick to support your argument. I doubt Operation Desert Fox did what you say it did, but I don't think either of us can know for sure, and I don't think Ricks allegations back up your assertions. That is the argument. Is it not?

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No.

(1) The Clinton thing was more or less an aside. I've now clarified it, and put it to you that when Clinton left office, Iraq had no WMD programs and no WMD that we know of, and so containment was working. If you want to argue about that, go nuts. But that argument doesn't depend on Ricks. You'll have to explain that David Kay is all wet, and that magical fairies made all the evidence disappear and flew all the WMD to Syria.

(2) I offered Ricks as a cite for the proposition that surviving Iraqi WMD programs were effectively done in by Operation Desert Fox. This appears to be the consensus view of the United States government, and in particular of the military and the CIA. You dispute this, apparently without any evidence but rather on the proposition that we don't have perfect information and Ricks hasn't done any original reporting.

eta: And because you don't care for him.

No?

cite, please
 

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1) I stated what we were arguing about. You have started new subjects that have been beaten to death before. We don't know if Iraq had WMDs when Bush entered office. We know the Clinton administration thought Saddam had them when they left office. If Ricks claims he knows how effective Operation Desert Fox was, or what happened to the WMDs, he is being disengenuous. But we have beaten that to death.

2) As far as Operation Desert Fox and David Kay I already gave you a quote from David Kay. On January 23, 2004, David Kay resigned stating that Iraq did not have WMD and that "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them." As far as I know David Kay never said that Operation Desert Fox eliminated a lot of them or that he said that the WMDs were gone when Bush II entered office. He just said they were gone when our soldiers got there. In fact, one time in an interview with National Public Radio, he said Iraq had been working on weaponizing ricin up until Operation Iraqi Freedom. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion...0209/9john.htm

Other comments by Kay: Kay told National Public Radio that Saddam "had a large number of WMD program-related activities," repeating the awkward phrase used in Kay's interim report last October and repeated in President Bush's State of the Union address. "So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas." Later, he said that Iraq began retooling its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001 but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya.

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In other words, because Clinton thought x in 2000, Ricks is lying if he says something different in 2006 on the basis of additional information. We have beaten this to death. You have yet to prove that you know anything about the subject.

We weren't sure that containment was working before the war, although some of us were sufficiently sure of it that we would not have gone to war to find out. Now we know it was.

He told Congress in October 2003 -- which is to say, fairly early in his work, and while he was still working for the administration -- that:

• "We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers."
  
  "Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced - if not entirely destroyed - during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections. "
  
  "Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material. However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program."

This is pretty damning stuff, and supports what Ricks says. My recollection is that Kay got much more blunt, and stopped trying to spin everything as supporting the Admininstration's claims, once he left government service.

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Help me.

We believed he once had tons of chemical weapons- correct?

We asked him to prove he had destroyed it- he would not or could not prove it- correct?

How could "containment make you feel safe?

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There are no perfect solutions. Containment carried risks. To understand where the WMD were, we would have had to invade and occupy the country, and that had its costs, too. And we still don't have perfect information.

eta: Knowing what we now know about Saddam's capabilities, is it not crystal clear that more Americans and Iraqis have died than would have died had we continued a strategy of containment?

As I said to you the other day, who gave a shit about chemical weapons? Lumping the chemical in with the biological and nuclear was a useful way of making him sound more menacing, but chemical weapons are difficult enough to use in a military context, and they weren't a threat to the U.S.

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No he is being disengenuous because no one knows what happend to the WMDS, no one knows if they were still there when Bush entered office, and no one knows how effective Operation Desert Fox was.


Some of us??? Like your opinion matters. And how could you guys be so sure when Clinton wasn't sure. And we don't know if Saddam disposed of them when he realized Bush was serious. But in the end we just don't know.


Are these really that damning. We couldn't find BW mobile labs. Tell me something I don't know. Desert Storm, Fox, UN Sanctions and UN inspections reduced their ability to produce CWs. So it took all four of those things (not just Desert Fox) to prevent them from being able to produce anymore (that is not eliminate just produce more) CWs (that is not WMDs just CWs.). After 98 Saddam gave up trying to build a bomb but still held on to the technology in case later they decided to fire up the program again.

Doesn't seem that damning to me. Doesn't seem to back up your Washington Post reporter. And BTW - all my quotes by him were after he left the administration.

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I think there are a bunch of kurds and Shites and WW1 soldiers and Iranian soldiers that would argue with you here- cept they're all dead:( But maybe you can cite a blog that says it's not so bad?

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Here's one for you:
Yglesias thinks that Iran having nukes is no big deal.

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I actually agree with most of this. However, I don't think any of the WMDs (not just chemical) were a threat to the US in a conventional sense. They were a threat to the neighbors but he was never going to deliver a WMD to the US without inlisting the aid of some terrorist group. Sure the Taliban did it, but that was before we were really paying attention. I think the WMD threat was to the neighbors and to the internal population. But of course, I would have supported the invasion without the WMDs so my opinion isn't very pertinent to this conversation.