Who Says History is Bunk? (Part II)

 

Left: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (aka Wallis Simpson and former King Edward VIII) on postnuptial visit to German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden in 1937, after German remilitarization of the Rhineland breaches Versailles Treaty but before Austrian and Czechoslovakian annexations and Hitler-Stalin Pact. Right: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder welcoming Russian President Vladimir Putin to his post-70th birthday celebration in St. Petersburg on 28 April, 2014, after Crimean annexation breaches Budapest Memorandum but before Eastern Ukrainian annexations and Merkel-Putin Pact. For historical background, see previous post Happy Days Are Here Again.

Brad DeLong: The Mechanical Turk Was a Fraud, But the Watt Governor and the Roberts Self-Acting Mule Weren’t!

     

von Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk (left) was unmasked as a fraud concealing a midget by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe in 1836. The real thing (right): chess world champion Garry Kasparov losing the 1997 match to IBM’s Deep Blue. So is Amazon's Mechanical Turk fraud, virtual sweatshop, or online entertainment for the alienated? (Images: Scientific American and Forbes)

Brad DeLong has a rather interesting piece at Project Syndicate called “Marx and the Mechanical Turk” about technical change and the declining share and reduced employment of labor, a topic a large number of people have been chiming in on lately, and which I hope to come back to in a later post.

This is not a new issue at all in modern economics, going back at least as far as David Ricardo’s chapter “On Machinery” added to the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821), undoubtedly a big inspiration for Marx’s own thinking on this question. In popular culture it is even older—think of the Golem, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Don Quixote’s jousting against windmills, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

And worker’s resistance to labor-saving machinery also goes back much further than the Luddites (1811)—already in the Middle Ages the new spinning wheel (which, by the way, nearly tripled labor productivity over hand spindles) led to riots, arson and prohibitions, as did Hargreaves' spinning jenny (1764), Arkwright’s water frame (1769) and Cartwright’s power loom (1800). Why this resistance quickly relented and even tipped over into outright enthusiasm, even among workers, at least in England, is an interesting question I’ve been meaning to write up for several years now, and is at the heart of the intimate relationship between the Industrial Revolution and Globalization.

Back to Brad DeLong. He claims that while Marx got it completely wrong about wages and increasing mechanization (i.e., that eventually—though certainly not at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—real wages rose in step with labor productivity so that the labor share was constant instead of falling), the nature of technical change is now such that this may change. Why? Because, he argues,

The coming of the Industrial Revolution – the steam engine to generate power and metalworking to build machinery – greatly reduced the need for human muscles and fingers. But it enormously increased the need for human eye-ear-brain-hand-mouth loops in both blue-collar and white-collar occupations.
Over time, the real prices of machines continued to fall. But the real prices of the cybernetic control loops needed to keep the machines running properly did not, because every control loop required a human brain, and every human brain required a fifteen-year process of growth, education, and development.

Unfortunately, from the perspective of history of technology, this is totally false and ahistorical, and completely misses what compensated for the labor-saving nature of the new technology, namely corresponding increases in output and shifts in demand to less productive sectors (e.g., services), as well as labor bargaining power for higher wages. “Building the skill into the machine” has characterized modern machine design almost from the beginning (Daniel J. Boorstin cites Berthoud’s fully automatic clockmaking fusée of 1763 as one of the earliest examples—see his The Discoverers, p. 66).

Coming back to the Industrial Revolution proper, the two central machines—the steam engine and the spinning mule—were both very quickly equipped with the first true cybernetic controls that made most human supervision and feedback in their operation superfluous. In the case of the steam engine, this was the justly celebrated Watt governor (1788), based on a device that had been in use in windmills for over a hundred years to regulate the separation of the grindstones.

       

Schematic depiction of Watt governor (left), one of the first true feedback servomechanisms, kept the rotation speed of his steam engines constant without human intervention. This was essential for their application to cotton mills, where one was first installed in 1785 in a Lancashire cotton mill downstream from crazy Lord Byron’s ponds for reenacting Roman naval battles (which had been interfering with the original water wheel). The first Bolton and Watt engine (right) equipped with a governor, 1788. (Images: Wikicommons)

In the case of the spinning mule, it was Roberts’ self-actor (1825/30), that automated the winding phase, allowing external power input (previously only the drawing phase could be powered while the winding phase was still hand powered) and significantly lowering the tactile skill requirements. This was a very sophisticated mechanical governor for its day.

Roberts’ self-acting mule, with the control mechanism on the right (Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 1835, image: Wikicommons)

Even the earlier Newcomen engine (1712) was very quickly automated with something called the plugtree, which, while replacing the plugman or boy who operated the valves, was not a true feedback device like Watt’s but still replaced humans employing Brad DeLong’s sophisticated function of “using our hands, mouths, brains, eyes, and ears to ensure that ongoing processes and procedures happen the way that they are supposed to.” As the Wikipedia entry puts it,

There is a common legend that in 1713 a cock boy named Humphrey Potter,^[9] whose duty it was to open and shut the valves of an engine he attended, made the engine self-acting by causing the beam itself to open and close the valves by suitable cords and catches (known as the "potter cord");^[10] however the plug tree device (the first form of valve gear) was very likely established practice before 1715 and is clearly depicted in the earliest known images of Newcomen engines by Henry Beighton 1717^[11] (believed by Hulse to depict the 1714 Griff colliery engine) and by Thomas Barney (1719) (depicting the 1712 Dudley Castle engine). Because of the very heavy steam demands, the engine had to be periodically stopped and restarted, but even this process was automated by means of a buoy rising and falling in a vertical stand pipe fixed to the boiler (the first pressure gauge?). The buoy was attached to the scoggen, a weighted lever that worked a stop blocking the water injection valve shut until more steam had been raised.

So we see that sophisticated, labor-saving automation is as old as the Industrial Revolution itself and did not have to wait for digital computers. And thus, while a new quality to automation due to robots and computers cannot be gainsaid, this cannot simply be invoked off the shelf to explain our current predicament of declining labor shares and deficient effective demand. I would even go so far to say that the labor share and employment levels, except during the takeoff phase of industrialization, are in fact largely independent of the nature of technical change (as I show in my 1984 paper, at least for a closed economy with an exogenous rate of population growth).

Economists would be better off barking up quite different trees: globalization (the entry of one billion low wage, disciplined, and—in the sense of Marx—highly exploited Chinese workers onto the world stage), falling unionization rates, an exploding financial sector and progressively less progressive taxation schemes. The fact that national accounts do not show any pronounced disruptions in the growth rate of labor productivity (which in fact has been below trend) or capital productivity should indicate that Brad is probably barking up the wrong tree here (unless we have massive measurement problems, which is certainly possible in the transition to a networked economy).

One caveat: when technical change finally breaks the symbiosis between humans and machines, i.e., when machines are fully and autonomously self-reproducing and thus independent biological species in the ecosphere, then we will really have to start worrying. At that point in time why should machines continue to work for us as slaves at all, since they will no longer need us to reproduce and can just make off with the whole national product for themselves. This, by the way, is also not a very new idea, going back at least to Samuel Butler’s famous 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines”:

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race…

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Maybe that is what Brad should be worrying about? But probably Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) will replace him at Berkeley long before an intelligent machine is able to.

Happy Days Are Here Again! (Or Who Says History is Bunk?)

Elapsed Years	Side One	Side Two	Elapsed Years
0	1918 World War I ends, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Czarist Russia defeated.	1989 Fall of Berlin Wall, end of Cold War, USSR defeated (?)	0
2	1920 Kapp Putsch against democratic government fails in Germany	1991 August Putsch against Gorbachev government fails in USSR	2
1/2	1919/20 Dismemberment of German, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish and Russian Empires according to the Principle of National Self-Determination and Versailles, Trianon Treaties, Sykes-Picot Agreement. League of Nations formed	1991 Self-dismemberment of USSR into constituent republics (later also of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia). Promulgation of “Commonwealth of Independent States” and American “New World Order”	2
2	1920 Britain suppresses Shia Uprising in Iraq	1991 US coalition defeats Iraq in First Gulf War. Saddam Hussein suppresses Shia Uprising	2
3-5	1921-3 German hyperinflation	1992-4 Russian hyperinflation	3-5
5	1923 Hitler’s Munich Putsch against democratic government fails in Germany	1993 Yeltsin shells Russian White House and suppresses Supreme Soviet opposition	4
11/13	1929 Wall Street Crash 1931 Bankruptcy of Austrian Creditanstalt Bank, triggering worldwide bank failures	2001 Dotcom bubble bursts 2008 Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Investment Bank, triggering market collapse and worldwide bank failures	12/19
13	1931 Brüning government in Germany imposes austerity program (“Notverordnungen”), creating massive unemployment	2010 Eurozone under German leadership imposes austerity programs on EZ peripheral countries after Greek bond run, creating massive unemployment in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain, later Italy and France.	21
14-15	1932-3 Hoover Moratorium and bank holidays provide floor for world financial crisis	2011-2 Bailout funds and European Central Bank OMT program (Draghi: “Whatever it takes”) provide floor for European bond markets	22-23
15	1933 Berlin Reichstag fire, suspension of civil liberties and Enabling Act establish Nazi dictatorship in Germany	1999 Russian apartment house bombings, Putin elected to Presidency, Second Chechen War. 2001 9/11 attack in USA, Patriot Act, invasion of Afghanistan	10/12
17	1935 Italy invades Ethiopia, exposing weakness of League of Nations	2003 USA invades Iraq, exposing weakness of United Nations	14
18	1936 German remilitarization of Rhineland in violation of Versailles Treaty. France and Britain do not intervene	2008 Russo-Georgian War. Ceasefire attained through French mediation. Abkhazia and South Ossetia declare independence from Georgia	19
20	1938 Austrian Anschluss	??
20	1938 Annexation of “Sudetenland” regions of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany after Munich Agreement with Britain and France (“peace in our time”)	2014 Annexation of Crimea after Russian special forces intervention and referendum of new Crimean parliament. NATO allies impose mild sanctions despite violation of 1994 Budapest Memorandum	25
21	1939 German occupation of rump Czechoslovakia in violation of Munich Agreement ends appeasement policy of Britain and France	2014? Russian occupation of southeastern Ukraine at the request of pro-Russian forces in Donetsk and Kharkiv after violent incidents with Ukrainian security forces? NATO reaction?	25?
21	1939 Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact divides Poland into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence in secret protocol and guarantees trade in strategic materials	2014/5? Merkel-Putin Non-Aggression Pact restores Königsberg/East Prussia (Kaliningrad Oblast), Pomerania and Silesia to Germany and guarantees trade in natural gas in exchange for capital goods/premium cars and recognition of Ukrainian annexations	25/26?
21	1939 “Liberation” of Danzig and invasion of Poland. Begin of World War II after British and French declarations of war	??
22	1940 Assassination of Leon Trotsky by Soviet NKVD agent with ice pick in Mexico City	2006 Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko by Russian FSB agents with polonium 210 tea in London. 2013 Assassination by strangulation (?) or suicide of Boris Berezovsky in Ascot	17/24(?)
21	1939 Massive rearmament ends Great Depression in USA	2014 End of Great Recession and Euro Crisis?	25

Playing Coy, Putin Extends Coded Olive Branch to Germany: Exclusive Analysis by CIB Kremlinologists

Putin’s speech announcing the annexation of the Crimea on March 18, 2014 (above, source: BBC) differed refreshingly from Hitler’s analogous speech at the Vienna Heldenplatz on March 15, 1938 after the Austrian Anschluss (below, source: Süddeutsche Zeitung): no wild gesticulating, the conspicuous presence of orthodox Rabbis and turbaned Imams in the audience.

Unremarked by most commentators, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Crimean Annexation speech yesterday contained a coded offer to Germany for a watered-down version of the Putin Doctrine outlined in our previous Creditanstalt Intelligence Bureau report.

But first, let us analyze why Putin chose to announce this watered-down and irredentist version of the Putin Doctrine to a captive Russian audience in the Kremlin rather than the full universalist Doctrine, as originally planned, in a Russia Today (RT) television interview, as we previously reported based on informants close to Edward Snowden. During an emergency session with his closest advisers on Monday afternoon, Putin was confronted with the following serious objections:

• After the on-camera resignation of Russia Today anchor Liz Wahl in protest against Russia’s Crimean policy, state media could no longer rely on Western hirelings to stay on script, however lavishly they are paid. Therefore, the interview on RT with Larry King and Gerhard Schröder was now ruled out and a Kremlin setting with all imperial trappings was substituted.
• Announcing a unilateral and unconditional doctrine of altruistic self-determination sacrificing existing Russian territories (i.e., Chechnya and Kaliningrad Oblast) without reciprocal quid pro quos from other powers would make Russia a “sucker state” instead of just a rogue one.
• The irredentist faction went even further and argued that Russia should exploit ethnic self-determination exclusively in its national interest following the highly successful model pioneered by Hitler 1936-39 (remilitarization of the Rhineland 1936 in violation of the Versailles Treaty, 1938 Austrian Anschluss, and annexation of the ethnic-German Czechoslovakian territories (“Sudetenland” and Munich Pact), occupation of rump Czechoslovakia 1939). By playing on revanchist national pride of a Russia humiliated and powerless after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991, Putin could unleash a wave of domestic patriotic fervor such as he last enjoyed during the Second Chechen War (or indeed Hitler enjoyed 1936-9).
• The more internationalist faction countered that the last step in the Hitlerian irredentist program—the “liberation” of Danzig and the invasion of Poland—led to the Second World War and left today’s Germany, even after reunification, significantly smaller than even under the Versailles Treaty 1920 (and with incidentally over 27 million Soviet war dead and millions of ethnic Germans ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe), so that this was a dangerously slippery slope.
• The irredentist faction countered that by proceeding in small increments and never crossing NATO’s red line explicitly, the unwillingness of Russia’s divided opponents to make a military stand could always be exploited and a general war avoided.
• A compromise was reached that Russia on the one hand would annex the Crimea in a “bloodless” fait accompli in violation of its 1994 Budapest Memorandum obligations to respect the territorial integrity of the Ukraine, while on the other extend a coded olive branch to Germany and divide the NATO sanctions front.

So what was this coded olive branch? Unremarked by most political commentators, in his March 18 speech Putin, after praising India and China for their restraint in the Crimea question, appealed to German understanding:

I believe that the Europeans, first and foremost, the Germans, will also understand me. Let me remind you that in the course of political consultations on the unification of East and West Germany, at the expert, though very high level, some nations that were then and are now Germany’s allies did not support the idea of unification. Our nation, however, unequivocally supported the sincere, unstoppable desire of the Germans for national unity. I am confident that you have not forgotten this, and I expect that the citizens of Germany will also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity.

But hidden in his introductory remarks is this obscure reference:

Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride. This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptised. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

CIB Kremlinologists puzzled at first over this quasi mythological allusion until they connected it with the above statement about German reunification and realized that it represents a coded offer to return Königsberg to Germany in exchange for German recognition of the Crimean annexation. After all, Königsberg plays the same role in German history under the Teutonic Knights as Khersones in the Crimea does under the perhaps mythological Prince Vladimir in Slavic history, the one being the origin of the Christianization of the Prussian tribes and Lithuania, and the other of the Kievan Rus. At this very moment experts in the German Foreign Ministry are poring over this offer and whether it can be reconciled with Germany’s obligations to its NATO partners and its own checkered experience with irredentist self-determination.

  
A medieval basis for Russian-German reconciliation? Prince Vladimir being baptized in Khersones in 988 (left), Emperor Friedrich II sending off the Teutonic Knights in 1236 into Prussia (right). (Picture source: Wikipedia Commons)


Or will a failure of Russian-German understanding lead to renewed tensions? Teutonic Knights preparing to invade the East. (Film still from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 masterpiece Alexander Nevsky. Source: The Guardian)

Putin Doctrine to Be Announced with Chechen and Kaliningrad Referendums: CIB Breaking News!

Disturbed by the hypocrisy of the US’s refusal to recognize yesterday’s overwhelmingly successful referendum in the Crimea as an idealistic implementation of Wilson’s principle of national self-determination, Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing to go a step further and enunciate a far-reaching Putin Doctrine, the Creditanstalt Intelligence Bureau has learned today from informed sources in Moscow close to American whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Putin Doctrine will bring the Brezhnev Doctrine into the post-Cold War world, and foresees a unilateral and universalist Russian policy of armed intervention to promote the self-determination of oppressed minorities in existing sovereign states.

To demonstrate that this doctrine is not merely a self-serving opportunistic policy of the Russian Federation, President Putin plans to announce snap referendums in Chechnya and the Kaliningrad Oblast for next Sunday. Putin considers it symbolic that the Putin Doctrine will be applied first to Kaliningrad (the former Königsberg), home of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant and his categorical imperative, which holds that a policy can only be right if it is right in universal application, and not selectively employed as is typical of the US’s use of the principle of self-determination (e.g., supporting it in Kosovo, denying it in Crimea).

In the case of Chechnya, Saudi Arabian Special Forces Units will be invited to occupy polling stations within the country to ensure free and fair elections. The population will be presented with the alternatives of independence or annexation by a future Islamic Caliphate. The possibility of remaining within the Russian Federation under the present constitution is not foreseen as a choice, in line with the design of yesterday’s Crimean referendum. The present Kadyrov government is no longer recognized as legitimate, having been installed by rogue elements of the Russian military in the wake of the Second Chechen War.

President Putin’s deep study of Eurasian history has convinced him that Königsberg as the seat of the medieval Teutonic Knights is the source of German national identity (very much like Kiev for Russians) and thus must be allowed to revert to German sovereignty after being illegitimately annexed by Stalin after World War II. Thus he will invite German Chancellor Merkel to immediately dispatch elite Bundeswehr KSK commandos to Kaliningrad to supervise Sunday’s referendum.

The Creditanstalt Intelligence Bureau has learned that the formal announcement of the Putin Doctrine will be made tonight at 21:00 by the Russian President on the Russia Today (RT) television channel in an interview with the RT’s star journalist Larry King (formerly CNN) and ex-German Chancellor and lavishly paid Gazprom adviser Gerhard Schröder.

The Putin Doctrine will consistently live up to the high moral standards of US President Woodrow Wilson (left) in his Principle of National Self-Determination and the Categorical Imperative of Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant (right). (Picture source: Wikipedia Commons)

The Vietnam Counterfactual Continued: Roger Hilsman, 1919-2014 in Memoriam

On the occasion of Roger Hilsman's death on February 23 (only reported this week - see New York Times obituary), I'd like to return briefly to the evidence on whether John F. Kennedy would have escalated the war in Vietnam had he lived (see my November 23 post).

Roger Hilsman, 1919-2014

Roger Hilsman was the archetypical "best and brightest" in Kennedy's New Frontier, simultaneously an insider and outsider in the military/intelligence/foreign relations community, with first-hand experience of guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia during World War II and a PhD from Yale. He epitomized all of the contradictions of the US's Cold War elite, advocating both extensive defoliation and strategic hamlets in South Vietnam while opposing the deployment of American combat troops and the bombing of North Vietnam. He was also the author of the infamous "Cable 243" in 1963 which some interpret as giving the green light to the subsequent overthrow and assassination of President Diem.

His 1967 book To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy seems to be the first published claim from someone at the center of foreign policy decision-making that President Kennedy would never have committed American troops to Vietnam, and reinforces Daniel Ellsberg's account:

Thus what General Taylor was advocating was essentially the same large-scale American commitment that Vice-President Johnson had recommended. But this did not accord with President Kennedy's own analysis of the nature of what was happening in Southeast Asia. He had read deeply after his tour of the area in 1951, and his comments on the Indochina crisis when he returned had revealed his conviction that if Communism were to be defeated in Asia it could be done only be the force of nationalism. "Without the support of the native population," he said, "there is no hope of success in any of the countries of Southeast Asia." To try to oppose Communist advances "apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure." [p. 423]

Postscript: Some further search brought up an oral history interview with Roger Hilsman from, as far as I can ascertain, the 1990s, which fully confirms John M. Newman's (JFK and Vietnam) interpretation of NSAM 263 as committing the Kennedy administration to a withdrawal of 1000 advisers by the end of 1963 (which in fact took place) and the rest by 1965:

RH: Well, as I say, he went through several stages on Vietnam, you know, I mean he... originally what... you must remember that the very first thing that happened, Ngu Dinh Diem asks for help and so Kennedy sends out General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to visit the country. They come back and in their recommendation, top secret, is not only do we give them a lot of aid, but we sent ten thousand American troops out there to form a fence, you see, between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. and Kennedy had that stricken from their cable and tried to prevent it from being circulated within the government, American government. I had a fight about that, because I was Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and I was cut out, I wasn't allowed to see it and when I heard about it, I yelled bloody murder but he was determined not to get involved with American troops. No bombing, no ground forces, and so long as he was alive, that was the policy. Then, towards the end of his life, in the fall of '63, he beat McNamara to beat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a withdrawal plan. At that time, we had only sixteen thousand five hundred Americans in the country, they were not troops, they were advisers and the plan, which was finally approved in the fall of '63, was to withdraw those, all of them. And the only troops... only people we'd have had there would be marine guards, ten of them, for the embassy. Before Kennedy was killed, the first thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn. If Kennedy had lived, the other sixteen thousand five hundred or fifteen thousand five hundred would have been withdrawn within three or four months.

INT: So you're pretty convinced then that Kennedy wanted to end the war?

RH: It's not that I'm convinced. This was... the documents are there, you see, and I didn't say he wanted to end the war, he said he wanted to withdraw from it. First of all, from the beginning, he was determined that it not be an American war, that he would not bomb the North, he would not send troops. But then after …you remember the Buddhist crisis in the spring of '63, this convinced Kennedy that Ngu Dinh Diem had no chance of winning and that we best we get out. So, he used that as an excuse, beat on McNamara to beat on the JCS to develop a withdrawal plan. The plan was made, he approved the plan and the first one thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn before Kennedy was killed. If he had lived, the other sixteen thousand would have been out of there within three or four months.

Famous Last Words: I don't do quagmires

Following up on the last post about whether Kennedy would have avoided a Vietnam quagmire, just a quote from a press conference with then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2003:

Rumsfeld: I have since gone to the dictionary. And I have looked up several things, one of which I can't immediately recapture, but one was "guerrilla war", another was "insurgency", another was "unconventional war" --
Q: "Quagmire"?
Rumsfeld: Pardon me?
Q: "Quagmire"? (Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: No. That's someone else's business. Quagmire is -- I don't do quagmires. (Laughter.)

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer III