The Rant

A SELF-proclaimed British multi-millionaire named Mohammed Islam who was arrested on the Gold Coast with almost $120,000 in cash is under investigation as to whether he has terrorist connections. Queensland police yesterday refused to comment on their investigation into the man, 22, but at this stage there is reportedly no evidence to link him with terrorist activity.

Islam allegedly had $118,000 in $50 notes in a suitcase and a mobile phone concealed in his rectum when he was arrested at a Surfers Paradise bus station on Thursday night.

Give the man a break. Maybe he lost the belt clip for his phone.

from Jihad Watch by Robert Spencer

If Congress just raised the unified credit to $10,000,000 whose left except for the 18 families...just kidding, but the group of the ultrarich is pretty small. There is some real unfairness with the repeal. The replacement tax is caused by the elimination of step-up in basis. This would turn the estate tax into a capital gain tax.

But wait, this only applies if there is a sale. Thus those with the more modest multimillion dollar estates will have to sell assets to facilitate a division of assets, but the mega rich will be able to keep there portfolio holdings, potentially indefinately without being forced to sell anything.

Thus the repeal of the tax doesn't affect virtually everyone, but will hurt the sort of wealthy much more than the mega rich.

April 25, 2006

Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy Expose Stealth Campaign of Super-Wealthy to Repeal Federal Estate Tax Report Identifies 18 Families Behind Multimillion-Dollar Deceptive Lobbying Campaign


WASHINGTON, D.C. – The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according to a report released today by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy at a press conference in Washington, D.C. The report details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax.
It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.
The report profiles the families and their businesses, which include the families behind Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell’s soup, and Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms. Collectively, the list includes the first- and third-largest privately held companies in the United States, the richest family in Alabama and the world’s largest retailer.
These families have sought to keep their activities anonymous by using associations to represent them and by forming a massive coalition of business and trade associations dedicated to pushing for estate tax repeal. The report details the groups they have hidden behind – the trade associations they have used, the lobbyists they have hired, and the anti-estate tax political action committees, 527s and organizations to which they have donated heavily.
In a massive public relations campaign, the families have also misled the country by giving the mistaken impression that the estate tax affects most Americans. In particular, they have used small businesses and family farms as poster children for repeal, saying that the estate tax destroys both of these groups. But just more than one-fourth of one percent of all estates will owe any estate taxes in 2006. And the American Farm Bureau, a member of the anti-estate tax coalition, was unable when asked by The New York Times to cite a single example of a family being forced to sell its farm because of estate tax liability.
“This report exposes one of the biggest con jobs in recent history,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. “This long-running, secretive campaign funded by some of the country’s wealthiest families has relied on deception to bamboozle the public not only about who must pay the estate tax, but about how repealing it will affect the country.”
Said Lee Farris, senior organizer for estate tax policy at UFE, “It’s time for the majority of Americans who support the estate tax to speak out, and not let a handful of wealthy families sway Congress to twist the tax laws for their own benefit. Polls now show that most Americans support this tax and the revenue it yields to pay for vital services, especially given our nation’s huge deficit.”
While they extol the hard work of individual farmers and small businesses, most of the 18 families have been wealthy for generations; only five still include the people who first earned the family fortune. Members of the families are far less likely than most Americans to have paid taxes on their wealth; to a large extent, that wealth lies in assets that have appreciated but, unlike paychecks, have never been taxed.
These super-rich families have spent millions in personal wealth and used their companies’ resources and lobbying power in repeated attempts to influence members of Congress to repeal the tax. They have financed groups who have launched multimillion-dollar attack ads against Republican and Democratic senators alike, including former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Olympia Snow (R-Maine), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Lincoln Chaffee (R-R.I.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.).
The stakes of the campaign are great, not only for the super-wealthy families, but for the public. If the families’ repeal bid succeeds, it will cost the U.S. Treasury a trillion dollars in the first decade – roughly what it would cost to provide health insurance for every uninsured person in the United States.

By Brad DeLong
From Salon.com

Nov. 17, 2006 | "Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed 19th century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his "Essay on Coleridge." "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."

For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the 20th century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nobel Prize winner, founder of the conservative "Chicago School" of economics and advisor to Republicans from Goldwater to Reagan, was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill's prayer. His wits were sharp, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument.

Gen. William Westmoreland, testifying before President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer [Military] Force, denounced the idea of phasing out the draft and putting only volunteers in uniform, saying that he did not want to command "an army of mercenaries." Friedman, a member of the 15-person commission, interrupted him. "General," Friedman asked, "would you rather command an army of slaves?" Westmoreland got angry: "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." And Friedman got rolling: "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries." And he did not stop: " If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general. We are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher." As George Shultz liked to say: "Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there."

Thinking as hard as he could until he got to the root of the issues was his most powerful skill. "Even at 94," wrote "Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt, currently a professor in the same University of Chicago economics department where Friedman taught from 1946 to 1976, "he would teach me something about economics whenever we talked." In Friday's New York Times, Chicago economist Austen Goolsbee quotes from Milton Friedman's Nobel autobiography:


Friedman said that when he arrived [at the University of Chicago] in the 1930s, he encountered a "vibrant intellectual atmosphere of a kind that I had never dreamed existed."

"I have never recovered."

His worldview began with a bedrock belief in people and their ability to make judgments for themselves, and thus an imperative to maximize individual freedom. On top of that was layered a trust in free markets as almost always the best and most magical way of coordinating every conceivable task. On top of that was layered a powerful conviction that a look at the empirical facts -- a comparison, or a "marking to market," of one's beliefs with reality -- would generate the right conclusions. And crowning that was a fear and suspicion of government as an easily captured tool for the enrichment of cynical and selfish interests. Suffusing all was a faith in the power of argument and the primacy of reason. Friedman was an optimist. He was convinced people could be taught the truths of economics, and if people were properly taught, then institutions could be built to protect society as a whole against the corruption and overreach of the government.

And he did fear the government. He was a conservative of the old, libertarian school, from the days before the scolds had captured the levers of power in the conservative movement. He hated any government intrusion into people's private business. And he interpreted "people's private business" extremely widely. He detested the war on drugs, which he saw as a cruel and destructive breeder of crime and violence. He scorned government licensing of professionals -- especially doctors, who heard over and over again about how their incomes were boosted by restrictions on the number of doctors that made Americans sicker. He abhorred deficit spending -- again, he was a conservative from another era. He feared that cynical politicians could pretend that the costs of government were less than they were by pushing the raising of taxes to pay for spending off into the future. He sought to inoculate citizens against such political games of three-card monte. "Remember," he would say, "to spend is to tax."

This did not mean that government had no role to play. He endorsed the enforcement of property rights, adjudication of contract disputes -- the standard and powerful rule-of-law underpinnings of the market -- plus a host of other government interventions when empirical circumstances made them appropriate. Sometime empirical circumstances could win Friedman some unexpected allies. Left-wing Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion tax on cars in central London is an idea straight out of Milton Friedman. Friedman's negative income tax is one of the parents of what is now America's largest anti-poverty program: the earned-income tax credit, which was greatly expanded by Bill Clinton. And, most important, government had a very powerful and necessary role to play in keeping the monetary system working smoothly through proper control of the money stock. If there was always sufficient liquidity in the economy -- enough but not too much -- then you could trust the market system to do its job. If not, you got the Great Depression, or hyperinflation.


Prior to Friedman, the economic giant of the previous generation, John Maynard Keynes, was an equally ferocious debater. The Great Depression had convinced Keynes that central bankers alone could not rescue and stabilize the market economy. In Keynes' view, stronger and more drastic strategic interventions were needed to boost or curb demand directly. Keynes was perhaps the prime influence on U.S. liberals and U.S. economic policy up through the Reagan era; Friedman worked tirelessly to supplant and minimize his influence.

In their "Monetary History of the United States," Friedman and coauthor Anna J. Schwartz argued that the Keynesian reliance on intervention was a misreading of the lessons of the Depression. Friedman did think that government was required to undertake relatively narrow but crucial strategic interventions to stabilize the macroeconomy -- keep production, employment and prices on an even keel. But he believed the Depression might have been rapidly alleviated by skillful monetary management alone. Over the course of 40 years, Friedman's position carried the day, in a few developing economies like Chile that have applied Chicago School theories, and at home. Current Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke now holds Friedman's view, not Keynes', of what kind of strategic interventions in the economy are necessary to provide for maximum production, employment and purchasing power, and stable prices.

Friedman's thought is, I believe, best seen as the fusion of two strong and very American currents: libertarianism and pragmatism. Friedman was a pragmatic libertarian. He believed that -- as an empirical matter -- giving individuals freedom and letting them coordinate their actions by buying and selling on markets would produce the best results. It was not that he thought this was a natural law. He didn't believe that markets always worked best. It was, rather, that he believed that places where markets failed were atypical; that where markets failed there were almost always enormous profit opportunities from entrepreneurial redesign of institutions; and that the market system would create new opportunities for trade that would route around market failures. Most important, his distrust of government told him that government failure was pervasive, and that any expansion of government beyond the classical liberal state would be highly likely to cause more trouble than it could solve.

For right-of-center American libertarians, Milton Friedman was a powerful leader. For left-of-center American liberals, Milton Friedman was an enlightened adversary, and one whose view is now ascendant. We are all the stronger for his work. We will miss him.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Will the Democrats' new control of the House and Senate shake things up that much abroad? They certainly will have plenty of opportunities to alter the present American course of fighting terrorists, the war in Iraq and our overall foreign policy.

For over three years, partisan opponents of the Bush administration have made two arguments against its conduct of the "global war on terror."

First, they've argued, the absence of another Sept. 11-like attack has not been the result of anything our government has done, here or overseas. Remember, after conditions in Iraq began to worsen, they began to say we were in even more jeopardy at home than we were five years ago.

Secondly, Democrats claimed, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act and targeted wiretaps have probably hurt Americans' civil liberties more than they've harmed terrorists.

So there is at last the opportunity to match prior rhetoric with action by stopping the money for these efforts. Then we could at last learn whether Democratic critics were right that much of President Bush's actions to combat terror have been either superfluous or counterproductive.

Likewise, in regard to the war in Iraq, which many Bush critics have compared to Vietnam, we will soon see whether the Democrats have a viable alternative plan.

Right now, there are really only three courses of future action in Iraq, two of which were presented by different factions of the Democratic Party in the months leading up to the midterm elections.

The first choice, the logical response to criticism by some Democrats that the U.S. has had too few troops in Iraq, is to add more - as we did in Vietnam between 1964 and 1969.

The second - and opposite - choice, as proposed by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and Congressman John Murtha, D-Pa., is to bring the soldiers home, or at least redeploy them elsewhere, whether immediately or on a timetable. That way we could wash our hands of the supposed fiasco in Iraq as Democrats once did when they cut off funds to Vietnam in 1974-5.

The third alternative is to try to improve upon the present unpopular course of staying on to train the Iraqi security forces to defend their own autonomy and ultimately take our place - something like what happened in Vietnam between 1971-3.

For all their past anger, the Democrats may opt for this third choice. Sure, Democrats will grumble, issue subpoenas, hold up Bush's nominations to various posts and have their most outspoken threaten flight from Iraq. But now that the elections - and all the campaign posturing - are over, it won't be surprising if the Democrats' bark proves, at least for a while, much worse than their bite.

Indeed, I suspect not all Democrats really believe the party's campaign rhetoric that Iraq is a lost cause, especially given that widely admired generals like John Abizaid, George Casey and David Petraeus (who have fared well when queried by Democratic senators in hearings and on trips to Iraq) still feel they can change tactics to secure the country.

Pulling out will endanger the Kurds, Iraqi reformers, the sanctity of U.S. pledges abroad, and the reputation of the American military for generations. It would be hard to believe Democrats want to someday read, as we do now of Vietnam, that we were close to stabilizing Iraq when the funding to do so was cut off.

Third, based on past democratic unease with the realism associated with former Secretary of State James Baker, now co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, as well as anger over what's happening in Darfur, I'd venture that some Democrats are a little uneasy about renouncing entirely the effort to promote strenuously human rights and democracy abroad. Not all believed Iraq was about oil or Halliburton.

Of course, most Democrats believe Bush is usually wrong - but maybe not always completely wrong. After all, Syria got out of Lebanon, Libya abandoned its weapons of mass destruction, and gulf sheikdoms have been pressured to reform - all of which might just operate in reverse if the U.S. is to abruptly withdraw from Iraq.

In short, despite the election posturing, the Democrats in charge of ensuring a lasting majority are, as of now, somewhat quiet. Can it be that they are seeing that the only choices we have had after Sept. 11 have been mostly either bad or worse - and that, for those in power hoping both to prevent another such attack on our soil and not to "lose Iraq," there aren't any easy solutions?

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

(C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Link

James Baker and the Desert Storm Legacy
Austin Bay Strategy Page

by Austin Bay
November 15, 2006

Iraqis haven't forgotten the aftermath of Desert Storm. With Saddam's troops forced to retreat from Kuwait, Shia Arabs throughout southern Iraq rose up against Saddam's tyranny. Kurds in the north also rebelled. Many Sunnis in Baghdad anticipated the end of Saddam's "Tikiriti" despotism. Numerous Iraqis tell me post-Desert Storm they anticipated liberation. Instead, they got a dose of so-called Realpolitik -- mass murder and a return to dictatorship.

In 1991, Saddam did not fall. His Republican Guards attacked the Shia towns and massacred their inhabitants. At least 50,000 Iraqis were murdered by Saddam's defeated army.

In April 2003, America toppled Saddam. This aftermath promised something better than tyranny and mass murder. Still, many Iraqis doubted America's commitment to sticking with them through the trials of escaping a terrible past and building a better future. Pundits can point to Vietnam and Somalia as American bug-outs (al-Qaeda alludes to both), but the failure to act after Desert Storm -- the failure to act in the face of mass murder -- is by far the most pertinent to Iraqis.

An Iraqi cultural adviser I worked with in 2004 insisted Iraqi doubts about long-haul American commitment were an immense political problem. He was a Shia, and he himself vacillated between pessimism and optimism. During one late-night discussion (we were standing in front of a shower-trailer), the personal anguish of 1991 was particularly evident. But he was upbeat the day he returned from a week-long visit with his brother in southern Iraq. "They think you (America) may stay this time," he told me.

What the translator meant was "stay long enough." America never intended to stay. America's post-9/11 strategy has been to help foster nation-states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted.

In an essay I wrote for the Dec. 9, 2002, issue of The Weekly Standard, I outlined the rough path to that "end state" in Iraq:

"Pity Gen. Tommy Franks or, for that matter, any American military commander tasked with overseeing a post-Saddam Baghdad. For in that amorphous, dicey phase the Pentagon calls 'war termination' ... U.S. and allied forces liberating Iraq will attempt -- more or less simultaneously -- to end combat operations, cork public passions, disarm Iraqi battalions, bury the dead, generate electricity, pump potable water, bring law out of embittering lawlessness, empty jails of political prisoners, pack jails with criminals, turn armed partisans into peaceful citizens, re-arm local cops who were once enemy infantry, shoot terrorists, thwart chiselers, carpetbaggers and black-marketeers, fix sewers, feed refugees, patch potholes and get trash trucks rolling, and accomplish all this under the lidless gaze of Peter Jennings and Al-Jazeera."

In summer 2003, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority weren't prepared to handle the situation that marathon sentence describes. However, by mid-2004 the U.S. military had hammered out a sound security and recovery plan. The campaign plan met guidelines promulgated in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546. This resolution is no top-secret document -- it's on the U.N. website.

"Phased withdrawal" of coalition forces has always been the goal. The issue is a realistic "when."

The Iraqi government confronts extraordinary challenges. Are there rotten Iraqi military units? Yes -- but there are also some very good ones. Do Iran and Syria support terrorists and militias? Yes. The dictators want the world to conclude that democracy is culturally and politically alien to the Middle East. They want the world to conclude, like British and French imperialists did in 1919, that Arabs can't handle democracy.

But despite the public stumbles and bloody learning curve, Maliki's government says otherwise.

Enter the James Baker and Lee Hamilton-led Iraq Study Group (ISG). It's my bet that it will produce nothing original in terms of strategic and operational thinking. It may well produce a set of policy recommendations palatable to Democrats and Republicans -- in other words, consensus political cover that allows the sober and wise to continue to support Iraq's war for freedom and modernity.

James Baker was secretary of state in 1991, when the Iraqi people were consigned to the depredations of their tyrant. Baker needs to remember that, if he -- an old master of Realpolitik -- counsels a policy that leads to anything less than victory.

Many liberals are terrified at the slightest incroachment of government into religion, such as placing a Christmas tree at City Hall, or printing "In God We Trust" on the back of a dollar.

Such liberals should examine the history of Islam. Islam has no tolerance for the idea that church and state should be separate. Islam assumes that the Church and state should be one and that all citizens should be governed by Islamic law, or Sharia.

If Moslems get their way, the separation of church and state will become a thing of the past.

The one thing that can sometimes bring groups in conflict together is their mutual perception of a shared threat. Why is it that liberals remain oblivious of the danger of radical political Islam to their cherished liberal ideals?

Freedom of speech does not exist under Sharia law. Criticizing Mohammad is a death penalty offense. Nor does freedom of religion exist under Sharia law. In fact, infidels are tolerated; allowed to live only as second class citizens if they pay a "poll tax."

Once you convert to Islam, you're freedom of religion ends. Changing your mind to believe in any other kind of religion besides Islam, or atheism, is called Apostasy. The crime of apostasy is a capital offense under Sharia law.

Rights for minorities such as homosexuals are not respected by Islam. Islam has sanctioned the murder of homosexuals and also sanctioned stoning women (but rarely men) for adultery.

Sharia is the ultimate Anti-Liberal set of laws.

So why are liberals so unconcerned? Why do they feel that Bush and Cheney are the problem, not Islam? Perhaps liberals has suffered some damage to their instinct for survival?

It is a complete mystery to me.

Bob Clasen

Monday, November 13, 2006
THE SURRENDER BEGINS

Well .. if the Islamic fascists dared to think last week that the American voters signaled surrender, they can pretty much rest assured that this is the case as we begin the week after.

If anybody thought for a second with Nancy Pelosi sitting there in the Oval Office pledging cooperation with George W. Bush that she was anything other than a Leftist radical, think again. She has already said she's supporting John Murtha for House Majority Leader. Get ready for an interesting two years...the door swings to the left on Capitol Hill.

Sure....Nancy Pelosi is doing everything she can to change her image from San Francisco Moonbat to one of a middle-of-the road moderate Democrat. But people who really know Nancy Pelosi know better. The good news for Republicans over the next two years is that she can't hide who she is. And why are all of these supposedly new moderate members of Congress going to vote for Pelosi as Speaker of the House? Who knows.

So now she's saying she supports Murtha for Majority Leader. This suddenly makes Steny Hoyer look like a conservative. So Pelosi is for Murtha....the same John Murtha that is calling for unconditional surrender to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. This is the same John Murtha that jumped to conclusions, all but accusing our troops of war crimes in Iraq. Yup...that John Murtha.

So don't let the conservative hairdo and attire fool you...Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi is a huge Leftist....as far to the Left as they come in the United States Congress.

Nancy Pelosi will also pass over Jane Harman for the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. Harman, a California Democrat, is accepted as the Democrat's most knowledgeable member of the House on Security and Intelligence issues. There's a problem though. Harman supports the war on Islamic Fascism. Pelosi wants the House Intelligence Committee to be chaired by someone who doesn't support that war. Make sense to you?

And let's not forget the actions of President Bush. The very day after the Democrat victory Bush fires Don Rumsfeld. Should Rumsfeld have gone? Perhaps so .. but could there be a worse day than the day after an election that changes the face of power in Washington? Islamic fascist leaders do not understand the nuances of power in Washington. They see Democrats (1) calling for withdrawal from the battlefield in Iraq; and (2) the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. The day after the Democrats score their victory they get Rumsfeld's resignation. Then within a weak major Democrat players start their withdrawal chant again.

Considering the above, why wouldn't the Islamic terrorists believe that they have scored a major victory, and that America is weakening before their eyes?

by Neal Boortz

Link


Doubling Down in Iraq
Warfare isn't like business.
by William J. Stuntz
11/20/2006, Volume 012, Issue 10

Don't throw good money after bad. When you're in a hole, stop digging. If you've been running in the wrong direction, the first thing to do is, turn around.

These are the kinds of things Americans are hearing and saying about the war in Iraq. It's understandable: Those familiar sayings are often useful. When you gamble and lose, the natural tendency is to double your bet--and when that doesn't work, mortgage everything you have to try to retrieve your losses. But as every undergraduate economics student knows, that strategy is a disaster. Hence the principle of "sunk cost." The fact that I've lost a pile on some enterprise or investment is no reason to lose an even bigger pile. The smart move, economically speaking, is to reassess your decisions on a regular basis. When an investment isn't working, get out. Put your money, your talents, and your energy to better use somewhere else.

All of which seems to apply to Iraq, in spades. A seemingly quick and easy military victory has turned sour. The costs, in blood and treasure, have escalated. Victory looks uncertain and distant. It seems the time has come, if not to cut and run, then surely to cut our losses. If ever the principle of sunk cost applied to warfare, it would seem to apply here.

But that instinct is wrong. Warfare is not like investment banking. At precisely the moment an economist might say to stop throwing good money after bad, a wise military strategist might say to double the bet.

Why might that be so? For one thing, willingness to raise the stakes often wins the game. Why do insurgent gangs, who have vastly smaller resources and manpower than the American soldiers they fight, continue to try to kill those soldiers? The answer is, because they believe they only have to kill a few more, and the soldiers will leave. They need not inflict a military defeat (which would be impossible, given the strength of the American military)--all they need to do is survive until American voters decide to throw in the towel, which might happen at any moment.

The proper response to that calculation is to make emphatically clear that the fight will not end until one side or the other wins, decisively. That kind of battle can only have one ending, as Abraham Lincoln understood. In a speech delivered a month after his reelection, Lincoln carefully surveyed the North's resources and manpower and concluded that the nation's wealth was "unexhausted and, as we believe, inexhaustible." Southern soldiers be gan to desert in droves. Through the long, bloody summer and fall of 1864, the South had hung on only because of the belief that the North might tire of the conflict. But Lincoln did not tire. Instead, he doubled the bet--and won the war.

There is another reason economic logic does not readily apply to the fighting of wars. When running a business, one aims to invest just as much as is necessary to make the sale or manufacture the product--no less, and no more. Profit equals revenue minus cost, so minimizing cost lies at the core of wise business management.

Warfare could not be more different. Send just enough soldiers and guns and tanks to do the job, and you may soon find you have sent too few. The enemy concludes that if it can raise the marginal cost of the conflict just a bit, if casualties are a little higher or the expense a tad greater than you imagined, you'll quit the field. On the other hand, send vastly more soldiers and materiel than required to the battlefield, and the enemy soon decides that the fight is hopeless--that, as Lincoln so elegantly put it, our resources are unexhausted and, as we believe, inexhaustible.

In the world of business, decisions are made at the margin: a little more invested here, a bit less there; everywhere, strive to cut waste, to spend no more than is absolutely necessary. In warfare, waste and excess are productive: They send the message that victory is inevitable, that whatever resources are needed to obtain it will be given to the task. That is the essence of what military historian Russell Weigley called "the American way of war." Overwhelm the enemy--instead of investing just enough, invest far too much. Make sure the other side knows that our capacity to give and take punishment immeasurably exceeds their capacity to absorb and inflict it.

The difficulties the Army has experienced in Iraq are due, in large measure, to the fact that the Defense Department forgot this historical lesson. Donald Rumsfeld tried to run a businesslike war. But warfare is not business; it is not fought at the margin. By striving to do just enough to win, we have done too little. The right strategy is to do too much.

That is especially true of a war like the one in Iraq. Consider these data: Between November 2004 and February 2005, according to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, the number of coalition soldiers in Iraq rose by 18,000. In that time, the number of Iraqi civilians killed fell by two-thirds, and the number of American troops wounded fell by three-fourths. The soldiers were soon pulled out; by the summer of 2005, American and Iraqi casualties rose again. Later that year, the same thing happened again. Between September and November of 2005, another 23,000 soldiers were deployed in Iraq; once again, both Iraqi and American casualties fell. In the early months of 2006, the number of soldiers fell again, and casualties spiraled up.

The picture is clear: More soldiers mean less violence, hence fewer casualties. The larger the manpower investment in the war, the smaller the war's cost, to Iraqis and Americans alike. Iraq is not an unwinnable war: Rather, as the data just cited show, it is a war we have chosen not to win. And the difference between success and failure is not 300,000 more soldiers, as some would have it. One-tenth that number would make a large difference, and has done so in the past. One-sixth would likely prove decisive.

Counterinsurgency warfare is more about protecting than killing--like a nationwide exercise in community policing. And the lesson of the 1990s in American cities is that the best way to reduce the level of criminal violence is to put more cops on the street. The lesson of the past three years in Iraq is the same: If the goal is to cut our losses, the best move is not to pull back, but to dive in--flood the zone, put as many boots as possible on the most violent ground. Do that, and before long, the ground in question will be a good deal less violent.

War is not poker; the stakes in Iraq are much higher than a little money or a few chips. But war's psychology bears some resemblance to a well-played game of cards. The only way Americans lose this war is to fold. That seems likely to be the next move, but it is the last thing we should do. Far better to call and raise. Our cards are better than theirs, if only we have the nerve to play them.

William J. Stuntz is the Henry J. Friendly professor at Harvard Law School.