Here's what I thought you'd like to hear about today:

1. Incentives Count - Even for Terrorists
2. Harvard Professor Calls for More Civilian Deaths in Lebanon - But what is a Civilian?
3. Calling the War by It's Real Name - Santorum calls it what it is

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Incentives Count

That's one of the principals of management and economics that I've learned over the years. If you pay for a behavior, you'll get more of it. If you charge a fee or a tax it or fine for an activity, you'll get less of it. This shouldn't cause any surprise to anyone.

I'm a salesman. In my line of work, sales commissions drive sales. Remove the commissions and the sales would stop. Raise the fine for speeding in a residential area and you can reduce speeding. You may not eliminate it, but it will be less of a problem. These are all examples of incentives at work in the marketplace and in life.

Let's extend the concept group behavior, such as health insurance. When it was paid 100% by employers, as it was for many in the 70's and 80's, people asked for more care. When it costs patients nothing, we asked for more of it. Health care costs went up, causing many to cut the benefit programs, and require co-pays or high deductables to try to control the phenomenom. But it's still a bargain to get health care, so people continue to ask for more of it, and costs continue to rise.

I frequently read about some pilot program that purports to solve a social problem by reducing the cost of something for a narrow group of people. If the program is successful, more people will want to join it, until it's no longer for a narrow population, and suddenly it's too expensive to continue. The Medicare prescription drug program was passed with an estimate that it would cost $5 billion, but many say it doesn't include enough people or provide enough of a subsidy. It will eventually costs $50 billion if the subsidies drive more purchases than would otherwise happen.

I talk about this because there are many who seem determined to ignore the importance of incentives, both positive and negative, in human behavior. Consider Hezbollah's battle with Israel. They staged a raid across the internationally recognized border, and captured two Israeli soldiers and killed some others. They then started indescriminant rocket attacks on Israeli cities, raining down random death and destruction on the population of the cities. Would they have done that if they had known that Israel would respond with an intensive bombing campaign on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon? Surely the Israeli response would be a disincentive the the Hezbollah activities. The only rational explanation is that they did not expect Israel to respond so forcefully. As Kim Priestap on Wizbang noticed, that's exactly what Hezbollah has acknowledged:

Hezbollah Surprised by Israel's Response

A Hezbollah leader said today in an interview with the Associated Press that it was surprised by the strength of Israel's response:

A senior Hezbollah official said Tuesday the guerrilla group did not expect Israel to react so strongly to its capture of two Israeli soldiers.

Mahmoud Komati, deputy chief of Hezbollah's political arm, also told The Associated Press in an interview that his group will not lay down arms.

"The truth is _ let me say this clearly _ we didn't even expect (this) response.... that (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us," said Komati.

He said Hezbollah had expected "the usual, limited response" from Israel to the July 12 cross-border raid, in which three Israelis were killed.

In the past, he said, Israeli responses to Hezbollah actions included sending commandos into Lebanon to seize Hezbollah officials or briefly targeting specific Hezbollah strongholds.

He said the Shiite group had anticipated there would be negotiations on exchanging the Israeli soldiers for three Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, with Germany acting as a mediator as it did before.

Hezbollah's surprise at Israel's response proves once and for all that Israel's use of restraint, which the international community has demanded every time Israel was attacked, has prevented peace from flourishing in the region. Rather than creating peace, it actually encouraged the terrorists to continue their car bombings, homicide bombings, and rocket attacks because they knew they would not be severely punished. So, whenever Arafat's PLO fired rockets into Israel, dispatched homocide bombers into crowded Israeli marketplaces or on busses, the international community insisted on peace negotiations, giving the terrorists and their actions legitimacy. It's a shame really. If Israel had not been restrained all these years and had been free to respond quickly and fully, the terrorists may not have reached the level of dominance that they have today.

It is clear that the wrong incentives were in place, at least in the minds of the terrorists. Some have said that severe responses like those of the current bombing operation, encourage terrorists to hate Israel, and those who hate become terrorists. This seems logical, but it runs counter to the incentive argument. If you make the cost of terrorism higher, there should be less of it. But the idea persists, especially among the left. Here's an example of that viewpoint discovered by Powerline Blog last week. Paul Mirengoff wrote:

Today on television, the reliably-disingenuous Lawrence Korb, of John Podesta's left-wing think tank, tried to explain why Israel should have only one more week in which to fight. For one thing, Korb argued, if the war goes beyond one more week, Hezbollah will gain recruits in reaction to the continued destruction of Lebanon. For another, countries like Saudi Arabia, which have not denounced Israel, will face pressure from the Arab street.

But Korb has no evidence or sound basis for arguing that the destruction Israel would inflict after one more week, as compared to the destruction it already will have inflicted by that point, will produce an appreciable number of new Hezbollah members. Nor does he take into account the recruiting possibilities associated with a less than fully successful Israeli response, which could easily (and, I would argue, accurately) be portrayed as a victory for Hezbollah. If one is truly worried about Hezbollah recruiting, one should worry most about the scenario Korb effectively calls for -- large scale Israeli infliction of damage in an unsuccessful military campaign.

I'm not sure what TV show Korb was on where he advocated that point of view, but I did find this relatively current talk that Lawrence Korb gave at the Center for American Progress, John Podesta's think tank on July 20. In this talk, Korb sets forth his reasons for a rapid but controlled withdrawal from Iraq. I'm going to play two of his reasons:

1. It will result in more recruits to terrorism
2. A timetable for withdrawal will incent the Iraqis to take control of their own situation

He also cites the case of Steven Green, the accused rapist and murderer I spoke of last week in relation to the quality of US military recruiting. This clip focuses on the two reasons I just spoke of.

Play clip.

Korb sounds like he threw those last two reasons in to provide an after the fact justification for his desire to simply leave Iraq. He has a right to that opinion, and to the opinion that the longer we stay in Iraq the more terrorists we will recruit. I now return to my incentive theory of human nature. Do you think there will be more terrorists if we pack up and leave Iraq or if we stay? If we leave, there will be celebration in the ranks of the terrorists. They will broadcast far and wide their victory over the fearful Americans who turn and run in the face of difficulties. I would submit that such an outcome will provide far more incentive to terrorist recruitment than if we stay and raise the cost of terrorism. If we stay we will continue to hunt down and destroy them. The current plan is to gradually turn over the operation of the war to the Iraqi military. The Iraqis will continue to hunt down the terrorists and kill them. At some point, when they become strong enough, we will begin our draw down of forces. But to cut and run would incent terrorism, not the reverse.

Korb's second point is that a timetable for departure will help the Iraqi's focus their minds. But it ignores the fact that the terrorist will know that if they just hunker down and outlast our timetable, they will have won. Korb is just wrong. If incentives have any effect on human behavior, his ideas will result in disaster.

The fact is that the current violence is primarily Sunni on Shia, and out withdrawal will not slow down that battle, since the attacks on US soldiers is declining at a rather rapid pace.

Harvard Professor Calls for More Civilian Deaths in Lebanon

I realize that that heading is somewhat alarmist, but it is an accurate description of what Alan Dershowitz said Monday on Bill Bennett's Morning in America radio show. TownHall.com now publishes several of the Salem Radio talk show excerpts as podcasts, including Hugh Hewitt, Bill Bennett, Michael Medved and Dennis Prager. There is lots of great material there, and this conversation betweeen Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz is one of the best.

Context is key. While Dershowitz does in fact call for more civilian deaths in Lebanon, you have to listen to the whole segment, or at least this excerpt I'm going to play, to get the real meaning. It has to do with how you define a civilian in this conflict. Dershowitz argues that there is a continuum of military to civilian, that it is not an absolute, and that labels can be misleading. Especially with an enemy that has for years, provided free home remodelling assistance to Lebanese civilians in return for allowing Hezbollah to store rockets in the extra rooms they built for their civilian collaborators. But I am getting ahead of myself. Listen to this clip of Professor Dershowitz and Bill Bennett from Monday morning.

Play clip.

Calling the War by it's Real Name

Rick Santorum, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania is in the fight of his life to retain his Senate seat this fall. He is behind in the polls behind the likely Democratic opponent, Bob Casey. He is one of the most conservative members in the Senate, and it would be a shame if he lost. He recently spoke at the National Press Club, and C-SPAN provided the audio in a podcast as their Podcast of the Week. Listen to this introduction, and then I'll have a comment.

Play clip.

Why do you suppose the announcer felt compelled to tell his C-SPAN audience that they should not think any applause came from the members of the news media? Did he really feel that there was no way anyone in the press could possibly think that Santorum's words were worth applauding? Jerk. Anyway, here is part of the speech where he talks about what to call the War on Terror. National Review online has the transcript. He thinks we have named the war incorrectly. Listen to this clip.

Play clip.

That's not the first time I've heard complaints about the name War on Terror. But it is an articulate description of the enemy. He then goes into a discussion of the leaking of classified information in a time of war, and some of the legal aspects of surveillance, including the Patriot Act, which he was in favor of extending. Then, he talks about the importance of speaking clearly about our enemy. This is good stuff.

Play clip.

He is not the best speechmaker, but he did a better job there than many others in explaining why we can't get distracted by political correctness. Of course, this set the crazies at Al Jazera (motto: "I've never met a terrorist I didn't like") into a frenzy. As Lorrie Bird writes on the Wizbang Politics site:

Santorum's Campaign Must Be Loving This One

This opinion piece at Al-Jazeerah couldn't have been any better for Santorum if it had been written by the campaign itself. This one might even get blamed on Karl Rove.

By associating the words "Fascism" with the Islam is to instill fear and by not acknowledging that a political agenda is not the same thing as a belief system, Senator Santorum invoked the oldest and the strongest kind of human fear -- fear of the unknown. Zionist and the pro-Israel lobby continue to instill fear in Americans by escalating unsubstantiated threats against them and fabricating a vast web of lies to justify their actions against Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. By instilling fear of orange and red alerts we Americans have witnessed increased government intrusion into our daily lives and the erosion of our basic rights and freedoms.

Don't ask Santorum to "apologize," folks. Vote Democratic.

I think writers must get extra points among the Al-Jazeerah audience for using the word "Zionist."

Amazing stuff there.