Ann Althouse:

The number of Americans who have died in the Iraq war…

… has now surpassed the number who died in the 9/11 attacks.

ADDED: A key question — with an unknowable answer — is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?

Leaving aside the curious “path of fighting back” construction (against whom were we “fighting back” in Iraq), we can probably estimate the “unknowable answer” here by projecting forward based on the total number of Americans killed in Iraq-sponsored terrorist attacks from 1991-2002: Zero. To be generous, a handful of American soldiers might have died trying to enforce the no-fly zones had there been no invasion.

Via Scott Lemieux.

Major Kelley Thibodeau, spokeswoman for the task force of American military personnel based in nearby in Djibouti explains: “Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia. The Americans don’t go forward with the Ethiopians. They are training Ethiopians in Ethiopia.”

Seriously? Here’s how this is supposed to work. Major Kelley is talking to her superior officer: “What should I say if reporters ask about our involvement.” Colonel so-and-so replies, “officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia.” Major Kelley, when asked about this by a reporter, either replies “we haven’t put anybody in Somalia” or else refuses to answer the question or somehow evades it. Whatever she does, she can’t just repeat “officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia.” That gives the whole game away! She might as well just say “we’ve secretly put people in Somalia” at this point.

The second half of today’s WaPo coverage of the Somalia-Ethiopia war does a good job of calling into question the premises of US policy in the Horn of Africa. We note that Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia “along with the United States, has accused the [Islamic Courts] movement of harboring terrorists” but this is “an allegation it has denied.” Neither Ethiopia nor the United States is prepared to provide names of any terrorists who are being harbored. Meanwhile, “Opposition groups inside Ethiopia say that Meles, an increasingly authoritarian leader, has shrewdly played up the terrorism charges to win U.S. support.” We’re going along with this because “based in part on intelligence out of Ethiopia, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi E. Frazer has asserted that the Islamic movement is now under the control of an al-Qaeda cell, a claim that regional analysts believe is exaggerated.”

Emphasis added. In other words, we’re backing Ethiopia’s war against Somalia because intelligence provided by the Ethiopian government suggests we should back Ethiopia. But what else would the intelligence say? The US government’s conflict with the Islamic Courts began because “the United States financed warlords in Somalia who described themselves as an ‘anti-terrorism coalition’ but who mostly terrorized local Somalis, who came to despise them.” This “anti-terrorism coalition” was nothing other than the exact same warlords who ruined the country in the 1990s renaming themselves for the post-9/11 era.

I’d really like to see the DC-based media get on top of these questions. Can someone ask Tony Snow or George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice or Steven Hadley to name the terrorists the Islamic Courts are harboring? To explain what we’ve tried to do to secure their custody short of backing a full-scale Ethiopian invasion of Somalia?

UPDATE: Okay. Below the fold you’ll find the State Department’s counterterrorism country report on Somalia. I think you’ll find the lack of menace here striking:

Read more

One upside to America’s rather sketchy and underdeveloped welfare state is that when we consider what sorts of things we’d like to do, we can easily look around the world for examples of different approaches to these issues. Isaac Chotiner and Paul Krugman, for example, note that Tony Blair’s targeted anti-poverty initiatives have been very successful in the UK. At the same time, Britain has a health care system that’s not very well regarded compared to other European examples, so we can look elsewhere for models for that.

Jonathan Cohn, similarly, takes a fairly comprehensive look at the successful Danish economic model, which has generated a GDP per capita close to American levels with much less structural inequality. The basic shape of things here is to combine US-style flexible labor market rules with a series of measures designed to make labor market fluctuation much more tolerable — health care and child care services that will always be there come what may, extremely generous short-term unemployment insurance, and very aggressive high-quality retraining and placement services.

UPDATE: Note that Denmark, like Iceland, rates higher on the Heritage Economic Freedom Index, through the Scandinavian combination of massive welfare states and relatively light regulation. The thing to say in response to this is that the Scandinavian countries are really little and it might not work as well in a big country, but I don’t understand what the causal mechanism for non-scalability is supposed to be. I’ll happily grant that it’s politically easier to put a Scandinavian-style system together in a small, homogeneous country, but that’s different from saying it wouldn’t work on the merits.