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?

Health Care Reform?

This is an interesting piece from McClatchy about the apparent arrangement between some of the major stakeholders in the current health care economy to voluntarily attempt to reduce costs and to presumably pass the savings on to the consumer. Certainly this is a laudable goal, but I don’t see how it can make much of a difference, nor how it can be enforced in any meaningful way. One is reminded here of the rejoinders of the now disgraced John Edwards who poked fun at the other candidates’ health care approaches, noting that those with overwhelming power do not generally give it away, no matter how kindly they are petitioned.

Among the groups behind the pledge are the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, America's Health Insurance Plans, and the Service Employees International Union.

This should tell us something right there. With the exception of SEIU, these are the guys who own the system, and they are the same guys who pretty much own Congress, along with the banks and the energy companies. And note that we are talking about reducing the cost of the growth rate of health care costs, not the actual costs themselves, which will presumably rise at their current unacceptable rates less the proposed reduction of 1.5%.

This is another exercise in marketing, really a preemptive gesture by the major stakeholders to maintain the status quo in terms of how economic and political power is distributed within the system. Right now health care costs account for roughly 15% of GNP, a significantly larger proportion than other industrialized nations. The growth rate is generally thought to be around 4%. The only way to really affect these numbers is to interfere in the market in a very significant way, both in terms of administrative costs and actual reimbursement for services.

What I don’t get is why the mainstream Democrats and the Obama administration and substantial numbers of real people are going along with this. Well, I do actually sort of get it. In the one case, Congressional Democrats, they are owned by the special interests, and in the case of the administration, they are convinced that real, substantive change that alters the balance of power between the oligarchy and the population at large is impossible and probably undesirable. But I still don’t get why the ordinary people buy this stuff.

Look, nobody really complains about Medicare, do they? And what the advocates of single-payer universal health care are really talking about is an extension of that system to the population at large. Nevertheless we cannot seem to get this proposition on the table even as a competitive alternative to private insurance.

Medicare and other universal single-payer systems work because they drastically reduce administrative costs – there is one source of reimbursement to medical providers and one set of rules and entitlements – and because the single-payer has dominant market leverage, so as to be able to virtually dictate reimbursements, far in excess of the savings available through preferred networks that insurance providers typically negotiate. And yet hospitals and doctors and clinics are not refusing Medicare payments, are they?

What I am getting at is that that this whole health care issue is being framed in a manner that is detrimental to the public at large, and really also to the economy as well. It is being discussed as something uniquely American, filled with all the illusions that, for example, people now have the unfettered choice of who provides services and that medical care is not rationed under the current system simply because there are a lot of people who do not have insurance or who have inadequate coverage and so simply do not seek it. Whereas we should be starting out from the premise that medical care is a social cost and that competent medical care is an inherent right for everyone.

Weekend Readings

There were three rather interesting pieces posted at Salon over the weekend, all in one way or another related to the torture issue, which, I confess, has become something of an obsession with me lately, a kind of litmus test of being politically serious in this country.

In one, Glenn Greenwald, contrasts the absurd positions of nut jobs like Charles Krauthammer with the surprisingly forthright rejection of torture by no less a nut job than Ronald Reagan, especially in the matter of the need to prosecute torturers no matter what the circumstances. Of course, in Krauthammer’s view, torture is unacceptable unless there is a ticking time bomb (amazing, isn’t it, how the TV melodrama 24 has penetrated the American psyche?) or if you have captured a high value prisoner whom you need to knock silly in order to reveal the plot that threatens all civilization. Which is to say, torture is always permitted because, in these times, either or both of the above scenarios might be true, and you will never know for sure unless you are willing to do what it takes to find out.

In the second, Norman Kelley takes journalists to task for their reluctance to even use the word torture, preferring the bromides of enhanced interrogation techniques, etc. I especially like his conclusion:

Let's face it: the United States has become a politically depraved society masquerading as a democratic republic. It's easy to cite people like Charles Krauthammer's demented justification for torture, but what else would one expect from someone whose profession is a willing executioner of such a policy. However, average Americans also think it's okay to torture people. Now you have reporters too afraid to call engage in truthful reporting.

This does not bode well for the democratic process. It's Orwellian, which makes the process of self-correction difficult. This kind of mindset may well represent the insidious nazification of American society.

The country may have tried to save its soul by voting for Obama, but it has shown that it has opted to do the devil's work by being so casual about torture, rationalizing it, and refusing to call it by its true name.

Which brings up the subject of Obama’s press conference, especially his statements on torture. There is an inherent contradiction in the apparent recognition that the United States did engage in torture and the reluctance to do anything about it. When I listened to Obama’s answers, I was really uncomfortable. I must be one of a handful of people who find them deeply disturbing. And yes, I went back and read them and on reading rather than hearing they are not that bad. But, for my money, what’s the point of all this hemming and hawing and soul-searching and nuance. In a way, it is just as bad as the journalists Mr. Kelley criticized above.

Why can’t our politicians just answer a simple question simply, that is, yes, water-boarding is torture and yes, it was authorized at a high, if not the highest, level of government. And another problem is that in framing the issue, the President came perilously close to the kind of perception of the world that is implicit in the Krauthammer framing. If you reject torture of these individuals because you could have obtained useful information in other ways, doesn’t that imply that if it is possible to obtain useful information by torture and that if it were not possible to gain that information lawfully and morally, then unlawful and immoral means might be justified? Obama’s response lacks clarity and unnecessarily weakens his case. Once more, the 24 mindset is revealed.

Which brings me to the third article, America’s Necessary Dark Night of the Soul, by Gary Kamiya. Kamiya argues eloquently for the need to have a kind of national blood-letting over the Bush years. I’m not sure that some sort of truth commission will provide that, or whether the sort of blunt recognition of guilt will ever take place, but the Kamiya article does provide a serious start to thinking about it.

The kinds of prosecutions or even truth-telling being suggested on the left are political acts, and sometimes political acts of this nature are necessary, particularly in a democracy. It is not the punishment that matters so much - whether Bush or Cheney or Bybee or Rumsfeld or any of a host of lesser thugs get sent up the river – but the act itself and the shame and disgrace it brings to the figures indicted. I don’t think societies can look forward unless they have pretty squarely faced the past, what happened in the past, and resolved not to let it happen again.