Just War

Apparently the reviews of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech are in and they are pretty good, both from the right and much of the left, at least according to the Christian Science Monitor. You have got to be little suspicious when all the pundits are in agreement, like maybe you are being sold a bill of goods or are witnessing an exercise in self-delusion, especially when guys like Newt Gingrich are on your side.

I've looked over the same speech and I cannot honestly figure out what the fuss is all about. I mean, sure, it could have been worse, it could have been arrogant and self-serving, etc., although in a curious and humble way it is just that. But in truth, beyond that, and beyond the seemingly elegant rhetoric and inspiring phrases, what does it all mean? Not much, to my way of thinking.

Obama spent a lot of time talking about the ideas of a just war in his speech. I could not help but flash back to a speech I heard at the famous anti-Iraq War rally in Chicago several years ago, before he was elected Senator and where I personally first began to part company with this erstwhile hero of the left. And sure enough, this speech is filled with the same earnest lessons as the former, and they are equally irrelevant to the moral and political issues at hand.

It is always the case when people talk about a just war, they talk about World War II and they imagine they have achieved some sort of great insight in the observation that Hitler and the Axis powers could not have been thwarted without armed conflict. Conveniently forgotten or brushed away in the process is the equally valid insight that the defeat of these powers was just about the only good consequence of that war and that not recognizing this truth is a form of intellectual dishonesty of the worst sort.

The tragedy of these conflicts lies in the effect they have upon the combatants and the societies that are involved, in the very necessity of violence and the unintended consequences of the pursuit of justice or redress by violent means. It is indeed an aspect of the human condition that the greatest thinkers have grappled with since the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes and before, but don't kid yourself here because this speech is just lip-service. There is a difference between the idea of a just war - and what we really mean here at bottom is a necessary war - and just plain war. And if you don't get it, well, what can I say?

So after all is said and done, perhaps what one should do is follow the aphorism of Nixon: watch what we do, not what we say. And what we do, and apparently intend to keep on doing, is to maintain the largest military establishment by a geometric order than any other nation on Earth, waste untold wealth in the process, in the service of insuring our national security, which has never been actually threatened certainly since the end of the Cold War, and certainly not by the nations where we have chosen to exercise our power in the most violent and destructive ways imaginable. We also intend to intervene anywhere we feel particularly put out about another nation's policies or actions whether they can change them or not. These wars will be identified as "just" wars because we will be nice about it and we will stop torturing prisoners and so on and so on.

And we will continue to feel really good about ourselves because we have undertaken the thankless task of preserving the world's security for six decades even when the world has been too dumb to figure that out and did not especially want us to define what that security meant and did not recognize the exceptional nature of our history and mission and the happy coincidence that the security of the world precisely equaled our perceived national interest.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Plan

Thanks to Huffington Post we now have a graphic illustration of the strategic plan for Afghanistan.

So what's the problem, guys, lets get behind it and maybe we can win their hearts and minds before they realize they are dead. We're in it to win it!

Afghanistan

There are two really troubling reports out. One, from the New York Times, references a recent speech that Gen. McChrystal gave in London. He set forth in public much of his often leaked program for Afghanistan and generally tore up alternative plans, including those of Joe Biden, for refocusing the war there toward containment of al-Queda.

What's wrong with that? Well, I suppose it is just such a break with any sane tradition of military vs. civilian relationships that it rather boggles the mind. There was a time in this country when military leaders kept their mouths shut and offered advice in private. Nor did they consider it normal to intrude on the making of policy.

Perhaps this is just another sign of the lack of acceptance of Obama's legitimacy on the right. Whatever it is, it is an intolerable situation that can only be remedied by firing this guy, which I thought was the reason he was summoned to Air Force One for a conference with the President.

This, it appears, is not the case, judging from the second NYT piece, where it appears the two had a constructive discussion, blah, blah, blah.

Does anyone care to remark upon the unbelievable sign of disrespect in the photo of the meeting? Obama is dressed in a business suit. McChrystal is wearing some kind of bizarre camouflage outfit, as if he had just come down from the mountains after routing a bunch of Taliban militants. Don't these guys own dress uniforms anymore?

The message of that visual image is obvious and intolerable. It is of a piece with the open speculation in conservative blogs about the desirability of a military coup and the open display of firearms at Obama events. This is very frightening stuff, very frightening indeed, and it is no use pretending it does not matter. There is a segment of the political class and the media that does not accept the plain results of the election, just as they did not accept the results of Clinton's election in 1992, but in this case with a far more violent intent.

I have argued on more than one occasion that in politics it is better to be feared than loved. This adage is truer now than ever. One might start by reasserting civilian control of military policy and that probably means firing and disgracing someone pretty big.

Zelig Speaks

A few years ago, there was a Woody Allen movie in which the main character is a man who is able to take on the characteristics of whatever audience or group he is interacting with, so much so that those people see him to be exactly like them, and, in the movie, he physically becomes them. No doubt the dream of every politician. With respect to President Obama, for some reason, I am always reminded of this film.

As much as Obama and all the new Democrats like Clinton are masters of the politics of appearance and symbol, there is deep down a substantial failing in their political souls. They actually think that they need to do something in the real world, to fix things that are broken, or at least to look as though one were fixing things, or more precisely, the confusion that the appearance of fixing something is equivalent to actually fixing it.

The Republicans are untroubled by this shortcoming, having adopted the purely negative poll of the dialectic, seeking to accomplish nothing at all of any social worth other than the perpetuation of the status quo. They are, however, good at starting wars, mostly for the purpose of clouding people’s perception of reality. They are not very good at winning them, but, of course, in the short run, that is not the point provided the war is small enough not to mobilize a substantial portion of the populace and more particularly the political elite against it, as occurred in the case of Vietnam with disastrous results all around.

In any case, I digress. This week, we were treated to no less than three versions of Obama, each somewhat different, but at heart the same rhetorician who can appear to be all things to all men. In the labor day speech, we saw a reprise of the ardent but tired campaigner rallying what appeared to be a somewhat disinterested base with promises of a fight for real heath care reform. Then we saw what can only be described as the reincarnation of Horatio Alger or the channeling of Bill Bennett talking up the virtues of hard work and discipline, a good old-fashioned pep talk.

But the most impressive and strange performance was the speech to Congress. This was really a bit of a rhetorical sandwich. The first part was devoted to trotting out the usual horror stories about how health insurance screws everybody and the whole health-related segment of the economy is increasing at a rate that is likely to bankrupt the country pretty soon.

OK, fine, but then we get to the payoff, which, of course, is that they are not bad guys, they just want to make a buck - what’s wrong with that? - and that anyway the real problem is that we spend so much time arguing about it that we fail to act. Like, like, like, for example, looking at the experience of the rest of the world and coming to the conclusion that the adoption of a single-payer system that socializes the cost is the only proven successful strategy. Forget that, you left-wing nut-jobs because it isn’t going to happen. Why? Well, it’s just not the American way because for one thing we all love our health insurance if we have it even though we just told you it sucks. Go figure. And anyway, the transition from private to public insurance, which hundreds of thousands of seniors negotiate every day when they become eligible for Medicare without any disruption of service, would, would, well, it would just be chaos, I tell you. Chaos!

The top of the sandwich was a grand display of empty rhetoric, moving rhetoric, to be sure, but empty. Stuff about Kennedy’s dreams and how we can work together and unite for the common good even though we haven’t the slightest idea what that is and in any case, anyone who has observed the events of the past month should realize that the possibility of achieving such unity and social cohesion is just about nil. This part was really the so-called home run. And, by the way, it was not a little disconcerting to see all the talking-heads blather on about this, joined by many of the presumed progressive members of Congress. But more on this topic later.

The meat portion of the speech, or in this case the spam surrounded by rancid lettuce, was this. The plan has morphed from universal health care now, which most people thought was one of the things the campaign was all about, although it turns out that wasn’t it at all, but something called health care reform. This is all about somehow lowering the rate of growth of health care expenditures in relation to the GNP. Wow, who knew? But, it turns out that they knew all along, because you can make a good case that this is really what the Obama campaign was talking about all along.

Anyway, this plan, which will take place four years from now (a new and innovative definition of “now” that we all must be grateful to the President for clarifying) amounts to forcing private insurers to accept clients with pre-existing conditions and to continue coverage even when people get sick. There is no mention of how much this is going to cost people and businesses, since, one supposes, the reason the insurance companies engage in these practices now is that it increases their profits and they will want to raise the price of insurance since now they are going to actually have to disperse benefits, a practice that most Republicans believe to be profoundly un-American and an unwholesome interference with our liberties, or their liberties, I’m not certain which.

In return for these concessions, of course, the insurance companies get 30 million new clients because to make this work on the cheap everyone has to buy a policy that provides minimal coverage. From them. Now that’s a sweet deal.

As for the public option, upon which it seemed until yesterday the progressives were to make a stand, well, this is and always has been a means to an end. Foolishly, some of us thought that yeah, it was a means to an end just as the Trojan Horse was a means to an end, namely, people would realize that it was cheaper and better and more efficient than the private plans, so they would all buy it and that would be universal health care through the back door. Minimally, it would force insurance companies to compete by lowering prices.

But the unnecessary public option we’re talking about is nothing like this. Hence, the willingness to consider other means or dispense with it altogether, because this public option, the possible but not perfect public option, must operate just like the private insurers. It cannot use the power of the government to lower charges or the inherent efficiencies that programs like Medicare provide because that would be unfair to the private insurers. So, yes, given these ground rules, it probably doesn’t matter.

Two things stand out to me as the most appalling aspects of this debate. The one is the peculiar attachment of this administration and the Clinton administration before it to market-based solutions even when no classic free market exists. I could go on for pages proving this thesis, but, for the sake of argument, just take my word for it. There are probably four or five markets that set prices for medical services depending on who is paying and who is negotiating fixed prices, i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, PPOs, corporations, or uninsured people who are not bankrupt. And besides this, people don’t shop around for the best deal on cancer surgery like they buy a new refrigerator. There is no market at all to speak of in the insurance sector.

What’s even more appalling is that progressives often fall for this line of reasoning. And what is more appalling than that is the procession of progressives who dutifully fell in line in the aftermath of the speech. So much for the line in the sand approach on the public option. We all hear what we want to hear, and sometimes the tone of a speech attracts more attention than the substance, but the problem here is that the left of the Democratic Party is not taken seriously because, in the end, they always cave. If, for once, we didn’t cave, it might not happen again. It is not words we want, but deeds, not the appearance of change, but real change. The public option issue, a real, meaningful public option, is as good a start as any.

I thought I had fallen into a wormhole and been transmitted to another reality when I watched the commentaries afterward. Had I heard the same speech? I went off to some liberal blogs and I kind of got the same message. It was only when I went to Open Left and read David Sirota’s piece that I came back to my senses. Thankfully, now that they have had a chance to sleep on it, some bloggers have got it right, and even some politicians seem to have second thoughts. Maybe there is hope.

There are really at least four political parties in this country, the right-wing fundamentalist nuts, the establishment Republicans who pull their strings, the centrist Democrats and the so-called progressive Democrats. In a parliamentary democracy, none of these parties would possess a majority and so they would negotiate their participation in the government in exchange for commitments on political issues or cabinet personnel. The closer we get as progressives to thinking this way, the more we will matter and the less we will be taken for granted. We all want to matter, we all want a seat at the table. We will only matter if we have the courage occasionally to allow ourselves to take a stand, even an unreasonable stand.

Is the progressive movement a mature political force?

Recently there have been some signs of resistance among the progressive caucus in the House, and among some senators, at least on accepting further compromises to the already watered down health care legislation. One would have been more enthused to see this sort of backbone evidenced when the single-payer option mysteriously disappeared from discussion before the debate even began, but, I suppose this is progress of a sort.

As progressives, we’ve come a long way since the aftermath of the 2000 election. We’ve elected some genuinely serious people to the House and the Senate. Largely through the blogosphere, we have a certain influence on the terms of debate for issues of interest. Our support, however, is largely taken for granted. This is the case, I would argue, because it is always assumed that in the end, and usually quite a long way from the end, we will jump on board with whatever compromise is concocted by those with real power.

What we lack as a movement, as much as we would like to deny it, is real conviction and maturity. We need to recognize that sometimes it is necessary to say no even if it means wrecking a compromise solution. What a lot of our adherents seem to think is that having a seat at the table and getting some media attention is equivalent to having real power. The right-wingers spent years in the political wilderness before achieving their aims. We should be prepared to do the same thing if we are serious.

There is a good article out on Salon now by Michael Lind, “Can Obama be Deprogrammed?”. Although I do not always see eye to eye with Lind on all issues, he makes a number of valid points, the principal ones being that Obama is a neoliberal, not a progressive in the sense that we understand the term, and that there is a big and principled difference between the market-driven neoliberal solutions and the kind of New Deal/Democratic Socialist programs that we advocate.

Just because we all want to feel that we haven’t wasted our time and money electing these guys because they seemed to be the best alternatives available does not mean that we have to support legislation that we know is dopey or meaningless. So, to their credit, some of these legislators are waking up. I’m certainly not proposing some kind of sectarian warfare from the left, but, at the risk of creating some controversy here, shouldn’t there be a point where we realize that sometimes having a bad solution is worse than having none at all?

The health care bill, whatever is ultimately adopted, will determine the foundation of health care in America for the next twenty years. Is this foundation to be private sector insurance and the principle that everyone should be forced to buy crappy insurance? Similarly, the climate control bill is just a bad bill that establishes the dubious principle that the best way to transition to green and renewable energy is to establish a market for pollution and then give away credits to all the polluters so that it doesn’t cost them anything anyway.

The problem with neoliberalism, the third way, and all that stuff, is that it is the lobbyist’s dream. This is because it was invented by lobbyists and oligarchs as a way to assuage their collective conscience while still allowing the country to be fleeced. All the neoliberal solutions are very complicated and subject to continuous refinement and tinkering and the insertion of all kinds of exceptions. This isn’t by accident, is it? One of Lind’s points is that at least the New Dealers proposed palliatives that everybody could understand. They established rights and entitlements, bad words nowadays.

Samuel Lubell suggested that in times of political realignment, it is within the majority party that the real issues are fought out, that what happens within the minority party is of little consequence, or merely a reflection of the majority party split. What I want to suggest is that if we are genuinely entering a period when the Democratic Party is set to become the new majority party, we as progressives ought to be aligning ourselves with a winning position that will actually allow us to set and address the real political agenda in this country, that in fact the victory of Obama was an illusory one, representing the reestablishment of the neoliberal, DLC-oriented Democratic agenda, an agenda that has no real constituency in the classic political sense. In any case, we have nothing to lose here. If we are not in a majority position, then the Republicans will return to power and we are all in deep trouble anyway.

A Lesson From Machiavelli: Is it better to be feared than loved?

Thinking about the Obama administration’s performance in office so far, I was reminded of a passage in The Prince about whether it is better, politically, to be feared than loved. Machiavelli’s general conclusion is that it is nice to be loved and nice to be feared and nice to be both loved and feared, but that in a pinch, love is transient, fear endures. In short, faced with a choice, to be feared is preferred.

Obama seems to be addicted to the opposite viewpoint, as does much of his cabinet. We are being constantly reminded that he prefers the light touch in terms of regulation, that the administration prefers to move forward rather than dwelling upon the sins and abuses of the past. Not to mention all the blather about bipartisanship.

Obama has probably already blown his chances for genuine structural and transformative change anyway by not seizing the moment in his first few months in office. If you look at past history, real periods of legislative innovation, for good or ill, have come about in the aftermath of cataclysmic events or major power shifts, FDR’s election in the midst of the great depression, LBJ’s legislative success in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, even the Bush agenda following the WTC attacks. Obama’s opportunity was at the start. The Republicans were on the run. We were mired, and still are, in a deep recession.

I think we have to conclude that all this talk during the campaign was just empty rhetoric and that Obama and his team are not at all interested in the kind of change that most progressives desire. If he were he would not have chosen the mopes and corporate apologists with whom he has surrounded himself. What is really curious, though, is that Obama and his team were so dead-on in framing issues and manipulating public perceptions during the election campaign, and have become so dreadful since.

But even I, pessimist and cynic that I am, was more than a little shocked to see this bit in the Washington Post, “Obama Urges Groups to Stop Attacks”. What is this all about?

"We shouldn't be focusing resources on each other," Obama opined in the call, according to three sources who participated in or listened to the conversation. "We ought to be focused on winning this debate."

Specifically, Obama said he is hoping left-leaning organizations that worked on his behalf in the presidential campaign will now rally support for "advancing legislation" that fulfills his goal of expanding coverage, controlling rising costs and modernizing the health system.

Leaving aside the fact that the only thing keeping this weak-kneed approach to the health care issue alive is the pressure from the left-oriented groups and blogs for some kind of meaningful public option and their willingness to expose the corporate interests that control most of the blue-dog Democrats, since when has the movement toward universal health care become the “goal of expanding coverage, controlling rising costs and modernizing the health system”? This is just so wonky. Does anyone seriously think this is a debate that favors Democratic ideals or that genuinely serves any real public interest? Framed in this fashion, it is a debate Democrats will surely lose.

Congress was designed to protect the interests of the propertied class and to act as a brake upon popular enthusiasm. As an institution, it is generally most responsive to fear. You can see this by people like Kay Hagan in North Carolina already caving before the mere threat of an ad campaign from MoveOn.org.

So there is probably a lesson from The Prince for progressives as well. We need to find a way to be more reliably feared by the people we put in office with our hard work and contributions.

The Roosevelt/Obama Analogy

I saw a piece by Robert Reich on Salon, "What can I do to help Obama?", that is probably fairly typical of one viewpoint about President Obama. Reich, who is usually a pretty perceptive voice, at least on economic issues, divides attitudes on the left toward Obama into two camps, the trusters and the cynics. He suggests that both are wrong, quoting FDR's famous response to a questioner to the effect that he agreed entirely with the person's demands, but that the people must make him do it.

Well, this is all well and good, and it was to a certain extent an effective tactic in the thirties. But things were very different then. For one thing, Roosevelt's guys were in charge of the Congress, which was not so dependent upon the contributions of the then discredited moneyed class, but was actually scared to death of bloody revolution or worse, being voted out of office, a thought that greatly concentrates the mind of most politicians.

For another thing, Roosevelt was able to define the agenda through the skillful use of his own personality and prestige, and also through bringing new people into government, people who had real ideas. Take a look at the Obama braintrust right now and you will see a bunch of guys who were apparatchiks in the Clinton administration, or worse, as in the case of Defense and the military, under Bush.

So, count me as a cynic in this division. The point here is that the Obama team, for all the high hopes it generated during the campaign, has almost nothing to offer in the way of a coherent agenda that really matters to people. From these guys, chosen to satisfy some incoherent urge not to be thought of as a radical, or whatever, expect nothing.

All of the issues continue to be framed in the same way they were going back to the days of Jimmy Carter. For example, the desire to enact any sort of social legislation must be weighed against the stern measure of whether we can afford it. Under Roosevelt and the New Dealers, even going forward to LBJ, at least we talked about rights.

Similarly, the idea that we might even consider dipping into a military budget that is literally ten times greater than any other country's is completely off limits. As is the idea that we might want to withdraw from a series of costly, stupid, immoral, and unsuccessful wars sooner rather than later. Ditto the idea that we might want to think twice about getting in deeper or fighting similar future wars.

I suppose, like myself, the majority of my readers consistently receive e-mails from the Obama team associated with Organizing for America. The gist of these action alerts is to get behind the “grassroots” movement they have defined, to contribute money to support a legislative agenda that is largely toothless and irrelevant. How is this to be done? Why, of course, by contributing money so that the group can continue to send out appeals for additional funds. This is the state to which politics in America has been reduced. And many of the alternative progressive groups are reduced to the same lame tactic.

But the problem here is still the problem the Democrats have had for years. People will not go to the barricades or take to the streets, literally or figuratively, for incremental and ameliorative reforms. They want a tribune, not a mediator.

Into the Quagmire

There are two good reads on the McChrystal appointment and the President’s wholesale plunge into the Afghanistan quagmire, one from Tom Engelhardt at Tom Dispatch and the other by Alexander Cockburn. They both make pretty much the same points that I made in my latest post, Engelhardt more studiously and Cockburn more polemically.

Cockburn is especially strong in comparing the seeming transformation of Obama to the warlike about-faces of JFK and Jimmy Carter. Engelhardt shows exceptional insight into the inevitable outcomes of this sort of escalation, as well as a fine critique of the loyal camp-followers of the mainstream press, who simply love the General.

To quote from the Tom Dispatch article:

“For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in -- psychically, if nothing else -- if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already "Obama's war." With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don't expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: "The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban's reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement's heartland." And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country's intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.”

But here’s the problem. Aside from a few lefties in the blogosphere and several lonely voices in Congress, there is no real peace movement, or anti-imperialist movement, to put it more precisely. Nor is there a serious appreciation of the sheer idiocy and simple-mindedness of the War on Terror consensus. So there is no pressure for Congressmen to resist these disastrous initiatives. Even if there were, I doubt they could be successful at this juncture.

And this is the real problem, and yet another reason to postulate that the American political system is broken, probably beyond repair. We shall continue to dash off on these fool’s errands and adventures, wasting our resources and all the hopes and idealism the nation can muster until we are finally ruined in the process. Right now seems to me a turning point for the administration, and the chances of success are virtually non-existent.

Colonel Kurtz to the Rescue?

Somewhat lost amidst all the furor over the torture pictures – and that furor is absolutely justified – has been the appointment of General McChrystal to the Afghanistan command. This should just be an outrage to everyone concerned given this general’s history.

By all accounts, this guy is a fanatic whose career has been distinguished along the way by efforts to cover-up the Tillman fiasco, over-the-top leadership of the special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who relentlessly hunted down insurgent leaders, employing, to say the least, dubious means in the process, and, according to Seymour Hersh, heading up Dick Cheney’s international assassination squad.

Quite a resume, as they say. But, you have to ask yourself, what the hell is Obama doing promoting this guy? Of course, you have to ask yourself also why the hell he retained Gates and his underlings to manage the Defense Department, and why whenever his administration is confronted with some new or belated revelation of illegal or immoral or monstrous behavior from his predecessor’s regime, we are told that, geez, these guys were bad, you know, but we need to put it all in the past and move on?

There is a school of thought that holds that Obama is playing some multi-dimensional chess game here, that he is many moves ahead of his critics and enemies, etc., etc., etc. This viewpoint is absolute nonsense and wishful thinking. In the long run, all the psychoanalysis of the President’s motives and ambitions is ultimately meaningless. It just obscures reality. Barack Obama is a politician. He is relatively well-meaning and he is certainly intelligent. But, in the end, and lacking a mass movement to the contrary, or, in the case of war, an absolute disaster on the ground, he is going to respond to the strongest institutional pressures.

Unfortunately for the current administration, that pressure comes from the most violent, bloated, corrupt, and incompetent organization in the entire world, the United States military. I can already see my readers raise their hands in horror at this blasphemous remark. But lets look at the history of the world since World War II. I have always thought that a good case could be made for viewing the events of the past sixty years as a study in the degeneration of the American military. We have gone from being the nearest thing to a people’s army, an institution whose members were welcomed everywhere as liberators and which presided over the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, to the present state of almost institutionalized barbarity.

But to return to the main point here, the appointment of McChrystal, and why it is such a bad idea. McChrystal is the virtual poster boy of the new army, the unconventional warrior par excellence. What most people do not want to recognize is that the core principles behind the unconventional warfare doctrines go back to an analysis of the Wehrmacht and SS tactics in the occupied countries during World War II. The whole point of the exercise is the subversion of civil society.

(Here are links to some excellent background pieces on the subject).

It is a constant source of wonderment to the media and apparently to our political leaders, as well as others who apply themselves to not thinking for a living, that it has taken us more than seven years to stabilize and/or rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, and that by all current projections it is likely to take seventy more. But, honestly, that is the whole point of our interventions. They are designed to create failed states. They are premised upon the assumption that the societies subjected to their tactics and policies are inhabited by sub-humans.

There has always been only one plausible justification for intervention in Afghanistan, namely the pursuit of Osama bin-Laden, and even that was doomed from the start. Now we have an opportunity to reassess that commitment. Instead we seem to be lurching toward an even more disastrous course that involves doubling-down on failure by involving Pakistan. Further, we seem determined to put the worst possible man in charge, General McChrystal. For the left, or what is left of it, this might be a good place to draw the line.

Just for additional reading, there was a good piece in Huffington Post by an establishment figure, Graham E. Fuller, who used to be CIA station chief in Kabul. His main premise is that continued military presence by the United States and NATO is destabilizing Pakistan and that we ought simply to withdraw.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

Words worth pondering. Obama has for some reason always had a peculiar attachment to the defense of the Afghan intervention, perhaps to prove that his opposition to the Iraq War did not indicate a reluctance to use force. Of course, the reluctance to use force, especially our particular brand of force, ought, in a sensible state, to be regarded as wisdom, but it is a further indication of the militarization of America that this chestnut seems no longer true.

Surprise

From Jason Rosenbaum at Huffington Post, we learn that it did not take long for the insurers and health care providers to temper their enthusiasm for reducing costs.

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Perhaps they meant to say they were reducing the rate of growth by 1.5%, not the actual growth itself. So that if we assume the rate is 4% per annum, we can knock this down to 3.96% next year and over the course of maybe the next half-century or so, we can get this sucker under control.

And, just as an aside, what the hell is SEIU doing associating with these guys anyway?