Before I get to the "scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week," three pieces from the Wichita Eagle this morning:

• Rick Plumlee: The Big Question: Was Iraq Worth It?: Front page lead article, does a good job of mapping the costs back to Kansas, including a full page of pictures of 50 dead Kansas soldiers:

  Kansans have sacrificed for Iraq. Their bodies have been broken -- 409 have been injured. And 50 have died.

  Now nearly nine years of war in Iraq is ending for the United States. Only 12,000 troops remain, down from a peak of about 170,000 at the war's height. Virtually all are expected to be gone by the end of the year, except for about 200 attached to the U.S. embassy. The end comes with a high price tag: nearly 4,500 American dead, a bill approaching $1 trillion.

  Was it worth it? No one knows better than those who sacrificed in some way. Their feelings are mixed.

  This is, of course, a most minimal accounting. The tally of soldiers doesn't include the mental stress and fractures. The cash accounting doesn't anticipate future care costs for those soldiers, let alone the interest due on the debts for financing the war without taxes. Neither begins to contemplate the opportunity costs: what could have been done with the money and people had we not squandered it in Iraq. Let alone the political rot: would Bush and the Republicans have won the 2004 election without the war? If not, would the economy have been spared?

  Moreover, the article makes no mention of how the war affected the Iraqi people, as if no Iraqis were killed, none displaced, no property destroyed, no damage to their economy. Nor did the author make any efforts to find pluses to balance off the negatives. All you get is the occasional mother's sentiment that her dead son must have meant to do something good, or the conviction of a "lifer" that her "passion runs so much deeper after going over there."

  And the article draws no conclusion. It's easy to accept ambivalence because history itself is always fraught with trade-offs, but doing so means learning nothing and allowing past mistakes to be reiterated time and again in the future. But this isn't an unanswerable question: even if you factor in every positive you can imagine, it is clear that this war was wrong from the start, a disaster that could never be spun into something worth the price. Failure to acknowledge that lets those who launched it off the hook, and makes it all the more likely that such mistakes will be reiterated in the future.

• Douglas Birch: U.S., Iran Locked in Secret War: The web article has a less provocative title -- "Loss of plane peels back layer in US-Iran spying" -- but the paper title makes the key point: we have locked ourselves into a long-term, self-escalating war with Iran, for no particular reason other than a clash of attitudes. The US feels no compunction about flying spy aircraft anywhere over Iran. Iran, on the other hand, feels that its sovereignty is violated by such flights. (The US would no doubt feel the same if the shoe were on the other foot; thankfully, "American exceptionalism" exempts the US from the notion that etiquette and ethics should bind any two countries equally.)

  Iran has charged the U.S. or its allies with waging a campaign of cyberwarfare and sabotage, and of assassinating some Iranian scientists. The U.S. has accused the Iranian government of helping kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan and plotting to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

  "It's beginning to look like there's a thinly-veiled, increasingly violent, global cloak-and-dagger game afoot," Thomas Donnelly, a former government official and military expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said at a Washington conference.

  The covert operations in play are "much bigger than people appreciate," said Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser under President George W. Bush. "But the U.S. needs to be using everything it can."

  Hadley said that if Iran continues to defy U.N. resolutions and doesn't curb its nuclear ambitions, the quiet conflict "will only get nastier." [ . . . ]

  Iran protested Friday to the United Nations about what it described as "provocative and covert operations" by the U.S. The Tehran government called the flight by the drone a "blatant and unprovoked air violation" that was "tantamount to an act of hostility."

  American officials said Friday that U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Iran played no role in the downing, either by shooting it down or using electronic or cybertechnology to force it from the sky. They contended the drone malfunctioned. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the classified program.

  US-Iranian hostility dates back to the 1979 revolution against the Shah, or more properly back to the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew a democratic Iranian government installed a dictatorship under the Shah. To prevent the CIA from fomenting a countercoup, Iranian students took over the US embassy and held its staff hostage for over a year -- a rather embarrassing moment for the world's great superpower. Ever since then the US has carried a grudge, but what's made it worse has been Israel's decision to target Iran as its great existential threat, beginning in the late 1990s -- way after the revolution, and indeed much after the revolution started showing signs of moderation -- with a series of faulty predictions that Iran would develop nuclear arms "within five years." Israeli pressure stepped up considerably in 2009 when Obama took office and promised to work on a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Since then Obama caved in to Israeli demands, aided by an election (probably fraud-influenced) in Iran that found anti-American rhetoric to be politically convenient. So now, with hard-liners secure in Tehran, Jerusalem, and Washington, we see this "cold war" redux. (If only some journalist had the gumption to decry it as farce instead of tragedy!) Comparisons to the U2 shot down over Russia in 1960 are à propos, but Iran doesn't have the resources (or most likely the desire) to reply by stationing missiles in Cuba. Indeed, Iran's relative vulnerability is what makes this situation so dangerous: if only they did have nuclear weapons Washington's warmongers wouldn't be bragging that "all options are on the table."

• Erica Werner: Obama Makes His Move to the Middle: Original title: "Obama decides high-profile issues ahead of 2012."

  On issues from air pollution to contraception, President Barack Obama has broken sharply with liberal activists and come down on the side of business interests and social conservatives as he moves more to the political middle for his re-election campaign.

  Without a Democratic challenger who might tug him to the left, Obama is free to try to neutralize Republican efforts to tar him as a liberal ideologue by taking steps toward the political center.

  That, of course, is where he's always wanted to be. Werner, like the Republicans, tries to make something of the decision to delay the Canadian shale oil pipeline until after the election as some sort of way of triangulating pro-environment interests, but misses the most important point. Had Obama approved the pipeline, Bill McKibben and company would still be protesting, and not just in some general sense against the oil lobby but specifically against Obama. In many ways Occupy Wall Street works in Obama's favor in that it focuses attention on the banks' ability to manipulate polticians of every stripe, making Obama's own exceedingly modest gestures as reform seem downright reasonable. But the pipeline was too clear cut an issue, and McKibben is so convinced of the utter folly of digging up the world's largest shale oil deposit and converting it to atmospheric carbon dioxide that he was never going to drop the issue, least of all for the convenience of Obama's reëlection campaign -- so the real story here is score one for the protesters.

While we're still on the Eagle, here's Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon this week (more on Gingrich below):

• Mike Konczal: Frank Luntz, Occupy and the Battle for Economic Freedom:

  Last week, Republican strategist and wordsmith Frank Luntz shared his concerns about the Occupy movement with a group of Republican governors in Florida. "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death . . . They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Chris Moody wrote a must-read article on the matter, including the ten dos and don'ts that Luntz suggested to his audience.

  As Seth Ackerman pointed out, there's an entire industry around Democrats and liberals trying to get an edge on Luntz with even more carefully polled wordplay. However, by talking directly about the power of the 1 percent over our lives, the broken political process, burdensome debts, and a collapsed labor market, the Occupy movement has gotten Luntz's attention in a few short months. As Ackerman puts it:

  For twenty or thirty years, Democratic politicians . . . have been paying what must amount to billions of dollars by now to consultants, pollsters, and think tank gurus to tell them how to talk to the public about inequality in some way that might spark sustained public engagement . . . Then the Occupy movement comes along and after two and a half months shifts the national consciousness so palpably that Republican governors are scrambling to ask their Rasputins how capitalism can be defended to their constituents back in Peoria.

  Luntz suggests 10 sets of words, phrases, and concepts to abandon and has some easily defended ones to use instead. "Jobs" and "entrepreneur" are out. "Careers" and "job creators" are in. [ . . . ] Luntz suggests retreating to "economic freedom" as an easily defensible phrase conservatives can use to describe the economic status quo. This is astute, as there's been a long, 30-year conservative project to locate freedom in the laissez-faire marketplace.

  It hasn't always been this way. [ . . . ] Economic freedom as freedom from coercion was once a core part of progressive thought. Economic freedom as economic security was a central part of the New Deal and Roosevelt's four freedoms. And economic freedom as freedom from domination in the workplace is a central aspect of what unionization brings to the country. This was thought of as essential to the lives of the individuals and democracy itself -- as Samuel Gompers said, "Men and women cannot live during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates."

• Paul Krugman: Things That Never Happened in the History of Macroeconomics:

  Via Mark Thoma, David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

  These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

  So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot -- and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker. Warsh is even crueler about this than I would have been; he compares Hayek (or rather the "Hayek" invented by his admirers) to Rosie Ruiz, who claimed to have won the marathon, but actually took the subway to the finish line.

• Paul Krugman: Send in the Clueless: On the Republican presidential race:

  So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless.

  Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He's not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts -- but that doesn't stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn't stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama's "massive defense cuts."

  Mr. Romney's strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn't a stupid man -- but he seems to play one on TV.

  Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party's nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless.

  And that's why the Republican primary has taken the form it has, in which a candidate nobody likes and nobody trusts has faced a series of clueless challengers, each of whom has briefly soared before imploding under the pressure of his or her own cluelessness. Think in particular of Rick Perry, a conservative true believer who seemingly had everything it took to clinch the nomination -- until he opened his mouth.

  As for Newt Gingrich, he seems to be able to weather his insincerity better than Romney while making more of his cluelessness than Perry. (Krugman: "And my sense is that he's also very good at doublethink -- that even when he knows what he's saying isn't true, he manages to believe it while he's saying it.") So he may be not so much what the party faithful desires as the best they can do.

  Also see Krugman's All the G.O.P.'s Gekkos (as in Wall Street's "greed is good" Gordon Gekko), although the only real contender there is Romney:

  The Los Angeles Times recently surveyed the record of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mr. Romney ran from 1984 to 1999. As the report notes, Mr. Romney made a lot of money over those years, both for himself and for his investors. But he did so in ways that often hurt ordinary workers.

  Bain specialized in leveraged buyouts, buying control of companies with borrowed money, pledged against those companies' earnings or assets. The idea was to increase the acquired companies' profits, then resell them. [ . . . ]

  So Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980.

  Now I've just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular? Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That's a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts -- and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both.

  For more on Gingrich, see Alex Pareene: Newt Gingrich Will Babble His Way to the White House:

  What Newt is good at -- and it's the exact thing Romney is awful at -- is defending himself against charges of apostasy. Gingrich has been all over the political spectrum during his career, but when you try to nail him on some sort of offense against conservative orthodoxy, he talks his way out of it. Glenn Beck says Gingrich compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt, lately a "Progressive" villain. Gingrich responds with a history lesson and a defense of very basic public safety regulations that no one would argue with. Beck criticizes Gingrich's support for ethanol subsidies, Gingrich responds with crowd-pleasing nationalism about competitiveness with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and a bit of Obama-bashing.

  When directly confronted with his attack on Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, an attack that almost ended his campaign before it began, Gingrich defended himself by saying that he was right and also he'd vote for Ryan's plan.