Cato Daily Dispatch for December 15, 2003
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Saddam's Captured; Now What?Bush Takes the Offensive on Clean Air Act
North Korea Threatens to Increase Nuclear Capability
Saddam's Captured; Now What?
"Saddam Hussein's arrest symbolizes major progress in wrapping up Iraq's past, but the United States still faces complex challenges in sorting out Iraq's future and winning support from the outside world--both essential to stabilizing the country enough to bring U.S. troops home," The Washington Post reports.
"The insurgency is only part of the problem. Under its own schedule, the Bush administration has less than seven months to bring together in a new democratic government ethnic and religious communities that have been divided for decades. It also has to re-create a country devastated by the world's toughest economic sanctions and three wars during Hussein's 24-year rule."
Even with Hussein's capture, removing him from power has done little to diminish the threats posed by al Qaeda terrorism, Director of Defense Policy Charles V. Peņa writes in the Cato Policy Analysis, "Iraq: The Wrong War," released today.
"The decision to go to war against Iraq could ultimately make prosecuting the war against al Qaeda more difficult," Peņa writes. "The administration's focus on Iraq comes at the expense of focusing attention and resources on al Qaeda. And, the ill will of many friends and allies generated by the war could adversely affect future cooperation needed to dismantle al Qaeda cells around the world."
Bush Takes the Offensive on Clean Air Act
"Convinced that its effort to revamp the Clean Air Act is stalemated in Congress, the Bush administration is pushing the policies, which govern pollution from power plants, through regulation rather than legislation," The New York Times reports.
"This week the Environmental Protection Agency plans to release a pair of proposals that closely track President Bush's proposed amendments to the Clean Air Act, known as the Clear Skies Initiative."
In the Fall 2000 issue of Cato's Regulation magazine "EPA Pats Itself on the Back", Randall Lutter and Richard B. Belzer, respectively, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and regulatory program manager for Washington University's Center for the Study of American Business, write: "EPA greatly overestimated the net benefits of the Clean Air Act amendments. The agency deliberately neglected the cost of complying with a well known, and expensive requirement of the act and ignored its own scientific advisory board's advice to include indirect costs. EPA described its key benefits estimate as a 'central' case, although it is better interpreted as an upper-bound estimate. It is likely that there will be negligible net benefits in 2010. Moreover, EPA's focus on aggregate net benefits obscures the gains that might result from better design and administration of the clean air program."
North Korea Threatens to Increase Nuclear Capability
"North Korea on Monday threatened to increase its nuclear capability if talks with the US were delayed, raising fears that protracted diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis could be giving Pyongyang time to build more bombs," the Financial Times reports.
"Six-party talks about the Korean nuclear issue were widely expected in Beijing this week but the meeting was almost certain to be delayed until the New Year because of disagreement between Washington and Pyongyang about how to settle their dispute."
In "Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Why Military Action Should Not Be Used to Resolve the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," Cato Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes: "Rather than adopting the most dangerous course of action as a first resort, the United States should instead take the opportunity to reduce its threat profile in the region by focusing on multilateral diplomatic efforts that place primary responsibility for resolving the crisis on those regional actors most threatened by the North Korean nuclear program."
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org