Three Thoughtful Comments

1. “the operation was a failure, but the patient has survived, and is somehow becoming healthier by the day”

From Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard:

Saddam is gone, Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the run, the Sunnis are with us, the Shia are turning against their militias, and the Washington Post is suggesting that "Iraq, a country with the world's second largest oil reserves and a strategic linchpin of the Middle East, just might emerge from the last five years of war and turmoil as an American ally, even if its relations with Iran remain warm." In other words, the operation was a failure, but the patient has survived, and is somehow becoming healthier by the day. Seldom has failure appeared quite so good. [Democrats] are caught between a public that would rather not lose a war and a base of Bush-hating, antiwar supporters to whom the idea of giving up on losing would feel like the worst loss of all.

2. “for . . . European governments . . . [t]he notion of moral hazard is . . .alien”

From Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal:

With its July 1976 raid on Entebbe, Israel demonstrated there was an alternative to negotiating with terrorists. [Entebbe offered] the possibility that, eventually, hostage takers would realize they're in a bad business. Instead, business has boomed. In Iraq in 2005, Germany paid $5 million for the freedom of a kidnapped aid worker. The results were predictable. . .-- the 'value' of German kidnap victims has risen in the Middle East. Maybe it's par for the course that European governments should act this way: The notion of moral hazard is . . .alien to them . . . It's a different matter when Israel behaves the same way . . . in the face of terrorism. Israel still defines the standard of democratic courage by which the rest of the free world must, sooner or later, measure itself.

3. “there are severe limits to what we know and can know”

From David Brooks, New York Times:

Saying farewell to the sort of horrible social engineering projects that dominated the 20th century is [major] progress. We can strive to eliminate . . . poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we’re not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be. This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know; that the best political actions are incremental, respectful toward accumulated practice and more attuned to particular circumstances than universal laws.