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Cato Daily Dispatch for September 3, 2003

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CBO: U.S. May Have to Cut Number of Troops in Iraq
Utilities' Blame Game over Blackout
Top D.C. Officials Support Public School Choice

CBO: U.S. May Have to Cut Number of Troops in Iraq

"The Bush administration may have to cut U.S. troops in Iraq by more than half to keep enough forces to face other threats, a congressional agency said on Tuesday in a report that fueled calls for more international help for peacekeeping in Iraq," The Associated Press reports.

"The Congressional Budget Office said under current policies, the Pentagon would be able to sustain an occupation force of 38,000 to 64,000 in Iraq long term, down from the existing 150,000 that a number of lawmakers said is not enough to confront the spiraling violence."

According to the Cato Institute's director of foreign policy studies, Christopher Preble, the United States should welcome aid from the United Nations if "it's on our timeline." In "The U.N.'s Role in Post-War Iraq," Preble says: "The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States. His regime is destroyed. The threat, therefore, is eliminated. The Bush administration should remain focused on ending the military occupation and on turning the government of Iraq over to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible. If the member states of the United Nations can help, and if they can do so on our timeline, we should let them. If not, we should tell them to mind their own business."

Utilities' Blame Game over Blackout

"Five electricity organizations involved in the Aug. 14 blackout have sent letters to the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee seeking to implicate one another, to varying degrees, in the cascading failure," according to The New York Times.

"On the eve of the first hearing on the blackout, one executive complained about a 'communications mishmash,' and others said the structure of the industry was inadequate to provide the reliability that the public sought."

In "Outside the Grid," Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren, respectively Cato's director of natural resource studies and editor of Regulation magazine, write about their solutions for reducing the risk of another blackout:

"Market actors must be allowed to discover the most efficient transmission and generation arrangements without politicians imposing some uniform model upon the industry. Neither politicians nor regulators know how to organize industrial sectors or systematically arrange business transactions. If it were otherwise, Cuba and North Korea would be economic powerhouses."

Top D.C. Officials Support Public School Choice

In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams, D.C. Councilman Kevin P. Chavous, and Peggy Cooper Cafritz, president of the D.C. Board of Education, explain why they support $40 million in new education funding in the D.C. appropriations bill before Congress, some of which would go toward public school vouchers:

"Despite steady reform, change cannot occur rapidly enough to provide relief to all public schools. As elected leaders, we cannot tell parents who yearn for an opportunity for their children to delay the same fulfillment we can provide our own children. This is especially so when we have extra assets in our midst: openings in non-public schools."

In "Education Means Emancipation," Education Policy Analyst Casey Lartigue Jr. writes, "Voucher opponents fear the test of allowing citizens to choose for themselves if they want to remain in D.C. public schools. When people complain that the schools will be 'robbed' by children being able to go to private schools, what they are saying is that, given a choice, parents would prefer that their children be educated elsewhere and that they should be forced to remain where they are."

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org