For one reason or another, about every four months my family tears into each other about politics. Being one of only two vocally "liberal" members of the fam, it puts me in the somewhat enviable position of getting to take almost them all end. Considering it's election season, the theme of the most reason debate, by and large, has been domestic policy. My cousin Doug's definition of a conservative platform is first, followed by my response.
DISCLAIMER:
I went on far longer than I had planned with this, and I almost feel guilty posting it on the website. But then I would feel stupid for writing it all in the first place if I didn’t post it. So here it is! Just beware, it’s long…
Ask and ye shall receive, Michael. I was going to let Jeffrey and Thomas speak for me, but since you called me out, I gotta sound off. They articulated some of my feelings on some of the issues, but I’ll elaborate a little further – perhaps provide you with a more concrete political “platform.” Although, I must warn you, the platform is based on IDEOLOGY (I could not disagree more with your statement that
“ideology has very little to do with anything”). This ideology – the set of beliefs in certain principles that are eternal (inalienable, if you will) – guides everything true conservatives say and do, no matter the circumstance, no matter how much times have changed. And if people would rely on these true principles, many of our country’s problems would be alleviated, if not completely eradicated.
To give one example, the solution to the so-called healthcare crisis (which is almost as big a hoax as the global warming hoax – oh wait, it’s now been changed to global “climate change” now, since the whole warming thing has started to cool down – no matter what the temperature is, we can blame it on climate change! which can’t possibly be caused by anything other than humans) is not UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE provided by the government.
When Senator Clinton as First Lady advocated universal healthcare coverage for all Americans, 560 economists wrote her husband to plead with him to put a stop to her
madness. They argued, based on eternal free market principles, that “price controls produce shortages, black markets, and reduced quality.” So government instituted price controls don’t “control” the true cost of goods at all. People end up paying in other ways.
The answer to the “crisis” is not more government regulation, but more privatization. The healthcare system needs to be opened up to market forces. Healthcare services would be based on market prices,and healthcare providers would compete for patients. “Compete” is the key word here; “competition,” the eternal principle. With private health insurance, private medical practice, and private healthcare establishments, competition would drive costs down and enhance the
quality of the healthcare, and would provide patients with a CHOICE between a much wider range of services depending on their needs and the quality of service required for that need.
In order to afford healthcare, a person will have to work for it, just as a person has to work for food and shelter, just as a person has to work to make a car payment, just as a person has to work if he wants to go the movies on the weekend. Thank God we live in a country where we can work where we want to work, be what we want to be, and earn what we want to earn. Of course there are exceptions! People get laid off, people are disabled, etc. And there’s nothing wrong with providing subsidies for the people in these circumstances. But the vast majority has the choice to make of themselves whatever they want to be.
This is a far cry from the liberal idea that everyone is a “victim” – of racism or sexism or whatever other – ism there is out there – and that salvation lies in the government. The truth is, no matter the circumstance, whether others have been blessed with more money, better connections, a better home environment, or even better looks, a person can succeed through hard work, perseverance, and education.
Which brings me to my next point: Education! And the solution for the problem with the education system is the same solution to the problem with the healthcare system:
EDUCATION – Take the government out!
Before the mid 1800s, elementary and secondary education was largely parent financed. Today, taxpayers spend more than $6,000 a year per student, more than virtually any other country, including Japan. With what result? Poor test scores, high dropout rates, kids incapable of filling out employment applications… The private sector ought to assume this responsibility. Vouchers are a great way to take
us in that direction. Let schools compete for students, increasing the quality of the teachers and paying them what they deserve, and giving parents a choice as to where they will send their children.
And sure, some schools and teachers will be better than others (as they are now), but an individual’s level of effort, dedication, curiosity, and willingness to grow will determine what they learn.
I’m going on way longer than I initially planned. Let me just finish with a
couple more platform items (I’ll try and be brief).
TAX CUTS – As JFK once said, after signing off on across-the-board tax cuts in the 60’s, “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low — and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.” We pay an obscene amount of taxes in this country. The mere thought of the government taking more of that money to spend on more inane programs and useless committees makes me ill. A government that’s too big to function without resorting to extortion is a government that’s too big. Period.
The argument that the Bush tax cuts unfairly benefit the rich is ridiculous. First of all, it’s insulting and presumptuous to think that anyone’s entitled to that money but the individual who EARNED it! That aside, the statistics show that the top 1 percent of taxpayers – those making more than $364,000 annually – pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes! Any across-the-board tax cut would, by definition, “unfairly” benefit the rich.
In order to cut the deficit, shrink the government! In order to increase revenue, decrease taxes!
SHRINKING THE GOVERNMENT - Less than 2 percent of Americans are farmers, yet the Department of Agriculture continues to add more and more bureaucrats. And what in tarnation does the Department of Commerce do?! Do we need the Small Business Administration? Amtrak? The Tennessee Valley Authority????
Before 1950, the government largely stayed out of the housing business, thank goodness. Now we have housing projects in all of our major cities, and don’t just speak for the City of Los Angeles, when I say that they have become sewers of crime and drugs. Why? When everybody owns something, NOBODY owns it (a principle I learned while living in the former Soviet Union). Without ownership, who’s going to take the responsibility of upkeep and repairs? The government is an absentee landlord and really couldn’t care less about what happens in these projects.
The private sector can build housing more cheaply, with an INCENTIVE to maintain the property and screen tenants.
On top of getting rid of ridiculous government programs, we can shrink the government by ending welfare, entitlements, and other special privileges.
Welfare for the poor works out to a national average of $12,000 to $13,000 a year per recipient. That’s almost as much as Frannie and I made COMBINED last year! So why
even get a job when the government shields you from financial responsibility? As detrimental as welfare is for the economy and hard-working citizens’ pocket books, it’s probably more detrimental to the recipient in the long run. Do we not remember the saying, “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime?”
And don’t get me started on Social Security! The average recipient has put in fifteen cents for every dollar he or she takes out! How much more inefficient and unfair can it get?
Conservatives would simply like people take control of their own destiny and earn whatever life they want to live. Let the government worry about policing the streets, enforcing the law, and keeping its citizens safe from foreign enemies.
WAR ON TERRORISM – Al Qaida has been significantly weakened, Sadaam Hussein is gone, there’s a democracy in Iraq! and the surge is working. A withdrawal in Iraq would create a staging ground for al-Qaida, increase the influence of Iran over Iraq, and result in “the biggest civil war we’ve ever seen,” according to former Secretary of State Jim Baker of the Baker-Hamilton Report.
The criticism President Bush gets for going to war in Iraq is unfair, and seems to be a product of the culture’s hateful obsession with the man, as opposed to something
founded on reason. All 16 intelligence agencies felt with "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs (there’s far more dissent among credible scientists about global warning than there was among American intelligence analysts about Iraq). And just because we didn’t find them when we got there, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist and doesn’t mean they still don’t exist! It just means we didn’t find them. Perhaps it’s because we let the bureaucracy take its sweet time in debating whether or not Sadaam had the things, giving him ample time to hide them away in a cave somewhere. Even if they never did exist (even though the intelligence claims otherwise), who’s to say we’re not safer now thanks to the fact that Bush wasn’t afraid to take the war to the enemy, rather than wait for another September 11?
And while I don’t much care for John McCain, I’m happy to hear that he will not risk everything our soldiers have fought and died for by pulling out early.
If you want to hear more on global warming, abortion, illegal immigration, etc., let me know.
Before this starts the, I might as well warn everyone that it's as comprehensive as I could be, in other words LONG.
Dearest Douglas,
Unfortunately, the last couple of weeks have seen my Internet availability reduced to almost nil. The only spot left for me in town is the astronomically expensive DSL Internet Club, which I can afford to use for about an hour a week. I apologize for being so late in getting back to you and lacking the same amount of data that you have in your post. If I generalize or overstate, call me out. I'll try to find better data to make more concrete claims, although that may still happen at a lackadaisical pace. Honestly, I won't be surprised if this is the death knell of our small domestic debate club. We've had a pretty good run though.
You make me very wary of trying to talk about things that you derisively call "hoaxes," but I guess it's worth a shot anyway. If it's worth anything, you've made me really think through some of these issues before offering a response. In fact, my answer about education was almost six pages long before getting scrapped and wrenched into its current version. Thanks. What I don't appreciate though, is that hashing out all of these policy issues alone here in Kazakhstan has given me some very intense nightmares. I keep arguing with all of you in my dreams, but everyone just ignores me. And I kept getting more and more frustrated, shouting at the top of my lungs, only to notice that everyone else is more concerned with dinner (Hank barbequed some brachiosaur version of ribs). Well, here's to hoping that they weren't entirely portentous.
EDUCATION AND HEALTH CARE
I've been every which way but sideways over this issue, and have really found myself in a deadlock. It seems that I'm confronted with a fact that I entirely dislike but nonetheless have to accept: private schools are better. There's an overwhelming amount of hard and cursory evidence to consider. Take the enrollment rates at my alma mater, for example. At Yale, there was one kid from the entire state of Wyoming; one from either Dakotas; one from Nebraska; and one kid from each of a whole swath of Midwestern states. The only reason most of these kids got in is through an affirmative action program of sorts: Yale prides itself on having a student body that represents each and every state in the country (this is also there for more nefarious reasons as well, to help keep a cap on the number of New York City Jews coming into the University). So, where does the most significant group of Yale freshman come from? Private New England boarding schools. While there's only one kid from the state of Wyoming (one of maybe 2000 graduating seniors), there were 27 kids coming from Philips Exeter Academy (which had only a couple hundred graduating seniors). There were a couple dozen from Philips Andover, a couple dozen from Deerfield, a couple dozen from St. Paul's.
While these students were all undoubtedly qualified to go to Yale (true, these are some of the best high schools in the entire world; and honestly speaking, they were all much more "competitive" applicants than I was), it's not necessarily true to say that they were CONSIDERABLY more qualified than the thousands of students who weren't admitted. More importantly, it is very easy to imagine thousands of other students who would be just as qualified as they were, given the opportunity to attend such an elite prep school. There's nothing innately different in these students from the rest of those graduating seniors who are trying to attend elite universities. With one exception: nearly all of these students come from very wealthy families. Each of this small number of New England boarding schools is VERY expensive, upwards of $30,000 a year with a generally weak system of financial aid.
We can look at this in a more concrete way as well. There is, already in fact, a vibrant, largely private education system already existing in the United States - our colleges and universities. While our "public," universities are subsidized considerably; the average cost of a year at a state university is still around $10,000 (my data is a little old for this, is could be higher). As we all know, attending university is very expensive, but there is no doubt to it's value. According to Fareed Zakaria, in his new book "The Post-America World":
"The United States' universities are the finest in the world, making up 8 of the top ten and 37 of the top fifty, according to a prominent ranking produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A few years the National Science Foundation put out a scary and much-discussed statistic. In 2004, the group said, 950,000 engineers graduated from China and India, while 70,000 graduated from the United States. But those numbers are wildly off the mark. If you exclude the car mechanics and repairmen - who are all counted as engineers in Chinese and Indian statistics - the numbers look quite different. Per capita, it turns out, the United States trains more engineers than either or the Asian giants."
For those able to enroll in these universities, there really isn't a better available system of higher education in the entire world. And, even more encouraging, there are now more people enrolled in American universities than there are in high schools; according to my World Book Encyclopedia, as of 2001, there are 14.9 million high school students to 15.3 million university students. Unfortunately, the data becomes a little more murky when you look at exactly who these students are:
"But America's hidden secret is that most of these engineers are immigrants. Foreign students account for almost 50 percent of all science researchers in the country. In 2006 they received 40 percent of all PhDs. By 2010, 75 percent of all science PhDs in this country will be awarded to foreign students. When these graduates settle in the country, they create economic opportunity. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. The potential for a new burst of American productivity depends not on our education system or R&D spending, but on our immigration policies. If these people are allowed and encouraged to stay, then innovation will happen here. If they leave, they'll take it with them."
The problem with our current university system is access. Getting into a top university is very difficult (and becoming more so every year) and paying for that school when you get there is often too expensive for most middle-class families. Here, competition is not benefiting the American students, and driving costs down, because the demand to get into a school will only to continue to grow, if not accelerate with increased international pressure. There has also been much discussion about the competition between the very universities in the US. To attract the most promising students, many universities have been shelling out shovelfuls of money to offer their students world-class facilities. Yale has basically renovated the entire city of New Haven over the last fifteen years, and has such lofty expansion plans for the next decade that it'll hardly be recognizable when I finally go back. Financing these massive projects have forced Yale to steadily raise tuition rates. Last time I checked, the cost of a year at Yale passed $45,000. Here, once again, competition is not helping with cost.
In fact, for all of the hullabaloo about education in Japan, their system of education is not particularly inclusive either. Like in the United States, it is very important for a Japanese student to attend a renowned university. But in order to matriculate to one of the country's best universities it's almost mandatory that the student graduate from a private prep school as well. Because it is so expensive to get a student simply enrolled in a University, many families just don't put the same effort in for their daughters as they would for their sons. Japan has strict gender roles, and women are not expected to be the breadwinners of their families. Not surprisingly, boys outnumber girls at the university level 2 to 1, a statistic that would be entirely unacceptable in the US. (That's not to say that the majority of girls in Japan go entirely uneducated, most just tend to wind up in the less competitive, and less expensive, system of Japanese junior colleges)
Yes, Japanese students do very well on tests, particularly in math in science. Unfortunately, these numbers aren't entirely trustworthy, because they mask the differences in curriculum between Japan and America. To get into a prep school, you have to pass entrance exams. From a much younger age than in the United States, Japanese teachers, students and parents take testing incredibly seriously. Just like we have the variety of College Board products for the SATs, Japan has their own specialized industry dedicated to passing these exams. It's not surprising that they whip our butts on standardized tests; their system of education provides much more incentive and support to do well on standardized tests than ours.
(Sorry Mom and Bri) I think if we're really serious about having more globally competitive test results - and I'm not sure if we are - we would continue to push for top to bottom education standards as well as a more nationalized curriculum. This comes at a great cost for the overall development of our students though. Parents in Japan (as well as throughout the former USSR, whose rigid nationalized curriculum make No Child Left Behind look like hippy school), constantly complain about how their focus on testing leaves little room for the development of creative and critical thinking skills. Art and music classes, creative writing, and lengthy class discussion are all counter-productive if your goal is to see students reproduce knowledge for a test.
Adding more private schools might also help increase test scores, especially if private schools begin requiring entrance exams. But I'm not sure if the overall quality of the US education system will become better. As some schools would attract better students and teachers, they'd also become more expensive and exclusive. Many schools may in fact get worse; especially when you consider the positive effect a single teacher can have on an entire department (look at Ms. Panozzo). And which schools would be hit hardest? Underperforming urban schools, which are already strapped for funding because of the inane system that funds them (property taxes; which means that white suburban schools are almost always much better funded than their urban counterparts), and need our attention most. The absolute last thing these schools need is more incentive for teachers and students to run off to somewhere else.
Doug, you're right to say that competition tends to lower costs (although when supply is not very elastic, as is the case with education, and demand is only increasing, it becomes very difficult to curtail prices), but you forget to mention that privatization never lowers costs equally. In fact, market-based economic systems create a wide variety of primarily highly exclusive, high-end products and mass consumed low-end products. There are literally millions of examples here: Burberry vs. Wal-mart; Miso vs. Chili's; Bentley vs. Kia; Apple vs. Dell. The prices and fortunes of these high end products, catering to the wealthy, generally increase (or at least that's what my Newsweek tells me -- economic turmoil aside, the vast majority of "luxury" brands worldwide have shown healthy growth), while there is constantly downward pressure on the latter. Not surprisingly there is a vast difference in quality between these two types of products, as one stakes its fortunes on being the best available, while the other on being the least expensive. If you completely privatize education, the market will do as it always does, decisively separating the best and most exclusive from that available to everyone else
In the end, the problem with US education is actually very similar to the problem with health care. For those able to go to the best universities, or see the best doctors, there is no comparison anywhere else in the world. The challenge, I believe, is to make these things more accessible. As far as education goes, we need to continue make sure that more American students to enroll in universities and do whatever it takes to be sure that: a) middle-class families can continue to afford to send their kids to college and b) ensure that college graduates aren't drowning in debt. Considering that most state universities are subsidized by state taxes, I guess we all know where at least some of this revenue will have to come from. At the high school level, this is more challenging (but keep in mind that most everyone in the US without a college degree is already basically on 5th street, and that there is already considerable incentive for many students to achieve at the high school level: admission to an exceptional university), and unfortunately I'm not very well read on the subject. Newsweek published a special awhile back, focusing on the differences between the US and many other education systems around the world, but I didn't get a chance to read it. If you're interested, it's here. (insert Newsweek website).
That said, I know for a fact that I’ll be sending my kids to private schools. Like I already said, they’re simply, empirically better. I’ll still happily pay my taxes in support of public school funding, but I’m not willing to bet my children’s future on the often-uneven quality of public education.
TAXES AND SPENDING
But here's where the fun stops. Our national budget is in a serious state of crisis, with a deficit of $407 billion dollars for the last fiscal year (pop quiz, which two presidents have run the highest deficits in American history? If you guessed Bush Jr. and Reagan, you'd be right, but not too happy about "conservative" fiscal policy). Everyone seems to be in a tiff over the oncoming "recession," but nobody seems willing to recognize that a key contributor, the nosediving value of the dollar, is directly related to maintaining a balanced budget. There is constant talk of reducing the size of the government - Bush made a truly laudable effort by trimming 18 billion dollars, a WHOPPING .6 percent of government spending, while continuing to exclude the cost of the war in Iraq from his budgetary projections - but all of it is a little more than bulls****. The fact of the matter is that for a variety of reasons, most of them relating to selfishness, vested interests, entitlement and short-sightedness, it is almost impossible right now to reign in government spending. The only way we will balance the budget in the foreseeable future is to raise taxes. (Although as we become forced to continually to raise taxes to pay for all the fat in our government, we'll become a lot more encouraged to trim said fat)
The good news is that the Bush tax cuts are not permanent and that they will definitely expire with the current Democratic congress (knock on wood). Fairness aside (for now), the tax cuts were the single largest contributor to the current deficit. You can see the numbers at the Center for Budgetary Policy's website. Actually, when you look at the burden that each citizen has to repaying the current deficit, the Bush tax cuts will actually cost most US citizen's money in the long term, excluding, of course, that often-alluded to upper quintile. There's also almost no evidence of the benefit of tax cuts, or these ridiculous economic stimulus packages ($500, yipee!), for the overall economy. The CBP website has some good data on this as well.
Ever since income tax has existed in the United States, it has been progressive tax system; i.e. the wealthiest Americans are taxed more and pay a much larger percentage of the country’s overall tax revenue. Nonetheless, the last couple of decades have seen a considerable "flattening," of taxes. From a high of almost 70% in the 1970s, the upper quintile now pays around 35% of their income in taxes, while the middle quintiles pay a little over 20%. But if you keep in mind that wealthier tax payers have a much higher percentage of deductibles, and that social security is capped (meaning that income for social security is taxed only up to a fixed point, in other words - and I wished I had the exact numbers - only the first 50,000 dollars of your income, for example, is subject to FICA, everything after that is untaxed), these numbers in reality are much closer together.
But why tax the wealthier more? A lot of it simply has to do with because we can. Because people simply require a certain amount of money to live in on, its ethically less disagreeable to take a bigger portion of a rich man’s salary than starve a poor man by taking too much of his. Smaller amounts of money have a greater impact on poorer people as well. $1000 means a lot less to someone who makes $150,000 a year than it does to someone who only makes $18,000. I also personally believe that the individual accumulation of wealth is bad for the overall health of the country. As my dad often reminds me, there’s “never been such a gap between rich a poor without starting a revolution” (Dad’s political outlook is a little whacky and a lot apocalyptic). Money breed’s corruption, and it tends to discourage democratic principles: case and point, modern Russia. Money’s also a source of class discontent (just look at me!). I also disagree with the idea that high taxes on the wealthy discourage people from being successful. There will always be people who will do whatever it takes to live better than those around them – ibankers don’t do it for the warm, fuzzy feeling that crunching numbers gives them – even if that distinction is next to nothing. Solzhenitsyn taught me that.
Going further, we should reinstate the estate tax. People should have to earn their keep in life. I’m absolutely flabbergasted that there are actually people who sympathize with those social leeches whose goal in life is to sit around and wait for their trust fund to mature. A strong estate tax would be a good measure against the Paris Hiltons of the world.
While the cost of welfare is under control - the Clinton welfare reforms of the 90s made it much more difficult to stay on public assistance for more than 5 years – there are some serious landmines on the horizon. As the baby boomers retire en masse, we simply won’t be able to raise taxes fast enough to meet their financial needs. Peter G Peterson, from the Blackstone financial group, estimates that the costs of Social Security and Medicare will reach 44 trillion dollars when the baby boomers retire. That happens to be three times our current national GDP, and would require at least doubling taxes to pay for it. Not only will the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare have to be raised, it will also be necessary to eliminate benefits for the majority of Americans who are financially stable at retirement. Love or it hate, social security will have to start to resemble our national welfare policy much more if it’s not going to hamstring our economy.
THE ENVIRONMENT AND FOREIGN POLICY
Well, I’m probably wasting my breathe on this one, because even discussing environmentally sound public policy depends first on admitting that we have a seriously unhealthy relationship to carbon-based fuels in the United States. But here goes nothing. 70 billion tons a day, that’s the most important number to think about. Globally, we put 70 billion tons of carbon waste into the air every single day, and the United States is by far the worst contributor to this problem. You can see it every major US city: that disgusting brown haze that hanging over everything. We know for a fact that there is a direct correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the overall temperature of the planet. We have been able to observe this with of 600,000 years worth of data from glacial core drills in the artic. Right now, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is TWICE as high as it has ever been (as far as 600,000 years of data shows) and it continues to climb at an ever-accelerating rate. I don’t know where you’re getting your “cooling period” idea from, because all of the hottest years ever recorded have come in the last decade. Every summer, it’s becoming a common occurrence to see record-breaking heat waves and temperature highs around the globe. We can see the greatest effect at the poles. Not a single person can seriously argue that the Northern polar ice cap, and every major body of ice in the world for that matter, isn’t shrinking; Russia created an international relations mess last year by trying to claim the a huge portion of the land in the artic for resource exploitation. There’s literally a gold mine of corroborating evidence for the general environmental changes occurring because of global warming: higher frequency of tornados and wildfires, increased ocean temperatures (especially on the surface) creating stronger storms (floods, severe storms and fires have shown a drastic increase in insurance claims over the last decade), increased water demands around the world; changing Ph balance throughout our oceans (thanks to carbon absorption); a dramatic decrease in global permafrost; changing lengths of the seasons.
Even if you roll your eyes at the environmental data, keep in mind that a sizeable number of foreign conflicts that the Unite States has been involved in since Vietnam have directly concerned our access to oil. Also the bulk of our current relations problems stem from rogue countries with serious petrodollars backing them: Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Russia. Being able to reduce the amount of our imported oil to zero, or at least the oil we import from the Middle East, greatly simplifies our national security situation. Perhaps unbelievably, it is actually possible for the United States to accomplish this; keep in mind that the largest supplier of oil to the US is still America herself. Brazil, with a population of 175 million people, has been able stop importing oil by converting sugar cane into ethanol, and many other countries are moving in that direction. Coupled with the fact that oil prices will reach $200 a barrel by 2010 (over $10 a gallon at the pump), a statistic proposed by both the head OPEC financial minister and a leading analyst at Goldman Sachs, there is overwhelming incentive for the United States to become independent from foreign oil.
For us, we’d need to seriously focus on the fuel-efficiency rating of most of our cars. While hopefully going up soon (last time I heard, even Mr. Big-time Texas Oil himself supporting this kind of legislation), the minimum FER in the US is 24 mpg; in Japan, on the other hand, its 47; most of Europe is in the 40s and will end up passing Japan soon into the 50s; and in China, even, it’s 36. Yup, there are many brands of American cars that can’t be sold in China because they aren’t efficient enough. Considering how desperate many American automakers have become these days, making cars that we can actually sell in China would be sound global strategy. We’d also need to start exploring something like coal-to-gas as a supplementary source (the US is to coal what Saudia Arabia is to crude). Corn to ethanol is not a good idea for a couple of reasons. First, it requires just about as much petroleum to make corn into ethanol as it you save by using it. And second, with food costs going up around the world, it seems much more responsible to grow food for people to actually eat instead of put into our gas tanks.
The market for creating more energy efficient products and renewable sources of energy is ripe for tapping as well. Iceland leads the world in geothermal energy, and is becoming a hub for all sorts of energy-intensive industries because its energy costs are so low. We have an abundance of wind and sun throughout the US, and many American communities have already shown the ability to run entire power grids on renewables alone. We already have the technology, crudely called carbon-capture-and-sequestration, to create coal power plants with almost no emissions. Everywhere you turn these days companies are developing more environmentally friendly household products and even houses themselves that are completely carbon independent. Efficient products may sense for the consumer as well; simply replacing your light bulbs to fluorescents (or even better LCDs), can save hundreds of dollars a year. The same goes for installing electronic thermostats, properly winterizing your home, and buying a hybrid car.
Confronting global climate change is a telling part of American foreign policy over the next century. Fareed Zakaria’s book, which I quoted from above, is much less about American education policy as it is about the rapidly transforming world and America’s new role in it. As he is quick to point out, “To bring [rapidly developing countries] into this world [of peaceful democracies and mutual prosperity], the United States needs to make its own commitment to this system clear. So far, America has been able to have it both ways. It is the global rule-maker but doesn’t always play by the rules. And forget about standards created by others.” America is one of the only countries to still not sign the Kyoto treaties for carbon emissions. It’s the one of the only countries that refuses to participate in the international court system at the Hague. It’s one of the few countries to still use the death penalty. It’s one of the few countries to employ a global system of secret prisons and accept that fact that people are tortured, or “harshly interrogated,” there. It’s one of only three countries that doesn’t use the metric system. It conducts unilateral military occupations foreign countries.
As Americans, it’s imperative that we become better global citizens ourselves to encourage the emerging world to do the same. While the surge has decreased the amount of violence in Iraq, this transition has less to do with an increased number of troops as it does better policies for community building. For the first time in this war, American troops have shown a real commitment to developing relationships with all Iraqi people. The same is true for the overall decrease in terrorist activity recently. Lebanon, Saudia Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have all made admirable strides to stop both the ideology and funding that supports terrorism, while the rest of the rest of the world has become better capable of identifying threats and reacting quickly to then (two instances: the failed bombing in London and the French solution to a recent airjacking). The King of Saud is currently building a massive university complex to combat the overall influence of Wahhabiists (spelling) on the system of Saudi higher education. The fact of the matter is that conventional military might, what America excels at, is becoming less and less relevant. The world is safer, more prosperous, and friendlier to human rights now that it has ever been. Every day, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty. Countries the world over are having truly unbelievable amounts of economic growth. And America is more than capable of leading this new world peacefully, but it has to make a commitment to being an example instead of an exception.
MISC, OR MORE ECONOMIC STICKING POINTS
Yes Doug, public housing is crap. That doesn't mean that cities should altogether abandon planning (zoning laws) and regulation (Giuliani’s - I think that's misspelled - heavy fines for broken windows and abandoned buildings). Sound development policy does actually make a world of difference: compare Houston to Manhattan. If anything, the money spent on public housing could at least be used to help low-income families buy, own and care for their own properties.
Speaking of government-funded building projects that lead to nowhere, $250 billion for a wall between the US and Mexico? Do we have a Mongolian problem all of the sudden? Look, only two things are going to affect the amount of people coming into this country, a booming Mexican economy or a tanking American one (luckily both are happening RIGHT NOW!). That money could be much better spent on improving border patrols and coming up with a legitimate guest worker program. It should be easy from for Mexican workers to migrate to and fro - part of the reason that people simply stay here is that its almost impossible to go back after illegally crossing, have limits in place for the amount of time that worker could stay, and strict enforcement and punishment for violating these laws for employers (perhaps the biggest loop hole in the whole deal; if the fines were high enough to make hiring an illegal unprofitable we'd see much less incentive for bringing them over). Regardless, we have 15 million illegals in US right now, many who've been living here for decades, we'll probably need to start consider extending citizenship to a considerable number of them sometime soon.
I know that this is a pet cause, but why in the world do we still have farm subsidies? Or why do we still have such intense tariffs on imported foods? Most of that money goes to either large international companies or encouraging farms to grow corn for biofuel (see above), which is criminally stupid when we're currently facing global food shortages. Food markets all around the world need to be opened up. A fair agricultural trade policy with Africa would create more economic stimulus in a year than decades of direct aid.
I'm absolutely embarrassed that congress refuses to finish free trade agreements with Columbia and is actually hinting that they might eff with NAFTA. If China is proof of anything, free trade benefits everyone; it makes life in developed countries far less expensive while lifting less developed countries out of poverty (which in turn actually encourages things like personal liberties and democratic institutions much better than any “regime change” every could). I find it strange that right now, when there is so much economic prosperity everywhere around the world, that America wouldn't be doing everything to it can to dip into every single available pie. Forcing China to appreciate its currency (another vacuous protectionist idea) is a dumb too. In the end it hurts us far more than it helps us. If China's currency actually floated, the American economy would drop from 1st to 20th in the world rankings of per capita GDP. We need to be much more concerned with the value of our own currency than the value of other countries'.
***
Last but not least, since it is a custom to toast a vanquished foe (or at least Tom Hanks tells me so in Charlie Wilson's War - a solid 3, the completely superfluous nudity and Russia bating do a lot to help hold the whole thing together), I'd like to raise a glass to Hilary Clinton: it must suck having everyone hate you so much...
Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone for reading. And a big thank you to everyone who put in so much effort to generate such thought out, eloquent responses. I'm sorry this post was such a monster (5377 words; it did take almost a week to get together). Ideological issues aside (and I stand my ground when I say that ideology is nothing but mere trifles, Dr. Zhivago is a really good at emphasizing this), I love you all so incredibly much, and miss you all terribly (that, if anything, is why I don't mind putting so much effort into this). This was a lot of fun, especially when we avoided being p****s to one another, and hopefully we'll get a chance to do it again soon. In person even.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget to vote…
…Democrat.
Friday, June 6, 2008
A Little Spare Time from Work
I'm literaly months behind the ball on this one. But since I was in a feverish writing mood this weekend, I thought that it was more than about time to finally wrap up my response to Robert Strauss's diatribe but young Peace Corps volunteers. First, is the poop sandwich of an article that he wrote, second is mine. My views don't reflect the Peace Corps' blah blah blah.
Too Many Innocents Abroad
by Robert L Strauss
Published: January 9, 2008
The New York Times
THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps’ country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.
However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.
This wasn’t the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it’s much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.
The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.
The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.
In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad’s backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma’s cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.
For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.
Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.
This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.
The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.
Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.
For all of Mr. Strauss’ article’s rhetorical merits – he does present a convincing, albeit limited argument, his article contains one glaring flaw: sheer ignorance. Mr. Strauss has absolutely no understanding of the Peace Corps and has especially no understanding of the individual volunteer experience. How this can be the case with a former country director is entirely beyond me. Then again, Mr. Strauss’ general tone doesn’t exactly convey a willingness to be completely involved in the lives of the volunteers that he oversaw. Peace Corps Volunteers are much more than “fussy innocents with nothing more than a liberal arts degree.” Mr. Strauss’ blatant unwillingness to acknowledge this shows incredible disrespect to the thousands of men and women who have sacrificed two years of their lives in hopes of spreading peace and friendship through the underdeveloped world. Seriously, who the hell has the gall to piss on Peace Corps Volunteers?
In general, Mr. Strauss’ intentions are good; he wishes to improve the effectiveness of the Peace Corps. He plans to accomplish this by encouraging the recruitment of older volunteers while at the same time decreasing the number of younger volunteers in the field. Older volunteers, those holy grails of the baby boomer generation, are a largely untapped resource; one that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter has already proposed catering towards. By 2010, the Peace Corps hopes that 15% of each recruiting class will be comprised of “more experienced” volunteers. But unlike Mr. Strauss’ proposal, the Peace Corps plans to do this while doubling the number of current volunteers in the field. Mr. Strauss’ proposed reforms would hobble the Peace Corps. The voicing of his opinion only demonstrates public ignorance towards the daily workings of the Peace Corps and its overall goals as an organization.
In relation to the strength of the myth that Peace Corps holds within the general American consciousness, actual knowledge of Peace Corps service in America is shockingly limited. This is the result of few processes. Few Americans have never heard of the Peace Corps, yet at the same time, the number of returned volunteers is very small, barely 190,000 over a span of 40 years. In and of itself, this is a recipe for substantial myth making. The majority of Americans still believe that Peace Corps volunteers are doing the exact same thing that the highly publicized first groups of volunteers were doing in the sixties. This is clearly evinced by the overwhelming number of volunteers who, during the first few months of service, are overwhelmed because “they never imagined the Peace Corps to be like this” (The Europe, Mediterranean, and Asia region, generally the most developed group countries to still host Peace Corps Volunteers, has the highest attrition rate in the Peace Corps for this very reason). Furthermore, the vast majority of “work” within the Peace Corps is very unglamorous. Few people care to hear about how a volunteer went to work everyday, did they job as well as they could, even if that entailed killing a lot of time, and then went right back home. Outside of only a handful of “flash” projects existing in each country, most volunteer work is just that: showing up, trying hard, building connections with coworkers.
But even if the number of volunteers was greatly increased – into the millions that John F Kennedy imagined by this time when he originally signed the Peace Corps act, and the nature of their service was better disseminated, this would not do much to alleviate the general problem. Peace Corps service is, for better or worse, a highly individualized experience, varying not only between decades, service fields and regions, but also differing incredibly from volunteer to volunteer serving in the same country and field at the exact same time. In general, living standards and economic resources throughout the developing world vary wildly from one town to the next. It shouldn’t be surprising then that living in the developing world for an extended period of time would yield a myriad of contrasting, and often contradictory, experiences.
To risk the danger of skirting generalization, here’s a rough description of life in the 21st century Peace Corps in a highly developed country like Kazakhstan. While life here is certainly less comfortable than the traditional Western standard, the living conditions are far from unmanageable. The majority of volunteers have access to relatively normal amenities, and when they don’t it is usually the more result of Peace Corps’ expectation that volunteers live modestly within their communities than actual lacking infrastructure. That’s not to say that many volunteers face intense physical hardship, after all the weather here often touches negative 40 degrees below zero, but the number of those that do is dwindling rapidly as this country quickly modernizes.
Professionally, Peace Corps volunteers aren’t exactly the pioneers they once were as much as they are now professional consultants. In the Peace Corps’ largest field of service in Kazakhstan, education, a volunteer’s main duty is to increase the teaching capacity of local teachers. Most prominently, volunteers do this simply through exposure. Considering that, for many Kazakhstanis, meeting a volunteer might be the first time they’ve ever seen an American, having a native English speaker in the classroom, and having to interact with this native speaker on a daily basis, is immensely beneficial for local teachers. The effect on an individual volunteer on a classroom is universal. It’s obvious, when meeting a local teacher, whether they’ve worked with a volunteer before or not; they speak English substantially better than anyone else around them. Beyond simple exposure, Peace Corps volunteers typically offer methodological approaches that local teachers have never been exposed to. Particularly in former Soviet countries, education systems throughout the developing world often rely on outdated models of education that can be easily improved with the elimination of a few bad habits. Peace Corps volunteers also have access to resources that their local counterparts don’t, such as teaching materials, technological fluency, and grants.
The Peace Corps is unique, among all service organizations in the United States, in the length of time that all volunteers are required to serve in the field. Cut any way, 27 months is a very long time to sacrifice for almost no material return. But it’s vital to the overall success of service that volunteers remain in country for this long, because, as Mr. Strauss so perfunctorily points out, volunteers aren’t especially good at their jobs upon arrival. Why anyone would assume otherwise, even when three intensive months of training are factored in, is absolutely ludicrous. Even with a substantial background in their field, which the majority of volunteers don’t even have, Peace Corps volunteers are confronted from day one with immense language and cultural challenges. Most volunteers report that they don’t feel comfortable in their job, or particularly effective, until nearly a year into their service.
What’s even more ludicrous on Mr. Strauss’ part, though, is his neglect of the fact that volunteers rapidly improve both their abilities to do their jobs and their understanding of the language and (once unfamiliar) culture around them. Although Mr. Strauss condemns the Peace Corps’ focus on integration when determining a volunteer’s effectiveness during service, integration is in fact the key factor in determining a volunteer’s effectiveness. At the end of service, volunteers possess a unique, hard-earned expertise on the community they live in, having experienced from both the out and inside. Unfortunately, spending time, meeting locals, making friends, reflecting on the surrounding situation is the only route to obtain this kind of knowledge. Hopefully, the volunteer acquired this expertise with enough time left in their service to create substantial, lasting benefits before they have to leave.
The truth of it all is that individually, the majority Peace Corps volunteers do not have incredible impacts on their communities. Even the best stories of service in Peace Corps lore - a woman who started a credit union that eventually transformed an entire community or a young man that taught a community to plant watermelon and become the biggest watermelon producer in the region, illustrate change that was started by the volunteer, but took decades to fully develop. In my opinion, truly great volunteers create a significant impact on only a handful of people, but this effect transforms them (and eventually the people around them) for the rest of their lives. For English teachers, it may be sending a student to America or encouraging a counterpart to use only English in the classroom. Taken case by case, this may not seem like much. But there are over 5,000 volunteers serving around the world right now, and enough of these small pools of change add up to something truly significant over time.
The greatest of an idea is often the result of its simplicity, and in this regard, the Peace Corps is not unique. While it is true that cost of living is increasing globally, and the American economy is significantly slowing down, the Peace Corps remains a remarkably inexpensive organization to manage. All told, Peace Corps uses less than one percent of the overall foreign policy budget for the State Department. Considering that all volunteers live with host families for a significant portion of service, and that many volunteers stay with families throughout, it’s very inexpensive to keep a volunteer in the field. All told, I make around 350 dollars month, and as a volunteer in Kazakhstan I’m one of the best paid volunteers in the world. While it is important to increase volunteer accountability and have more specific project plans and goals as the Peace Corps grows into the 21st century, the Peace Corps’ three underlying goals – supplying manpower, increasing exposure of America and American values, and making Americans more aware of the rest of the world – are eternal.
But perhaps most importantly, Strauss completely ignores the effect that Peace Corps service has on a young person; how service can transform them and create a more responsible, publicly active individual. Returned volunteers constantly talk about the forging of values, growth of character, public awareness, and development of survival skills that only the Peace Corps offers. If we are to continue using the Peace Corps as not only a tool for international development, but also for the further strengthening of America after service, it makes only sense to continue to send as many young people abroad as possible.
Too Many Innocents Abroad
by Robert L Strauss
Published: January 9, 2008
The New York Times
THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps’ country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.
However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.
This wasn’t the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it’s much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.
The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.
The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.
In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad’s backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma’s cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.
For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.
Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.
This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.
The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.
Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.
For all of Mr. Strauss’ article’s rhetorical merits – he does present a convincing, albeit limited argument, his article contains one glaring flaw: sheer ignorance. Mr. Strauss has absolutely no understanding of the Peace Corps and has especially no understanding of the individual volunteer experience. How this can be the case with a former country director is entirely beyond me. Then again, Mr. Strauss’ general tone doesn’t exactly convey a willingness to be completely involved in the lives of the volunteers that he oversaw. Peace Corps Volunteers are much more than “fussy innocents with nothing more than a liberal arts degree.” Mr. Strauss’ blatant unwillingness to acknowledge this shows incredible disrespect to the thousands of men and women who have sacrificed two years of their lives in hopes of spreading peace and friendship through the underdeveloped world. Seriously, who the hell has the gall to piss on Peace Corps Volunteers?
In general, Mr. Strauss’ intentions are good; he wishes to improve the effectiveness of the Peace Corps. He plans to accomplish this by encouraging the recruitment of older volunteers while at the same time decreasing the number of younger volunteers in the field. Older volunteers, those holy grails of the baby boomer generation, are a largely untapped resource; one that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter has already proposed catering towards. By 2010, the Peace Corps hopes that 15% of each recruiting class will be comprised of “more experienced” volunteers. But unlike Mr. Strauss’ proposal, the Peace Corps plans to do this while doubling the number of current volunteers in the field. Mr. Strauss’ proposed reforms would hobble the Peace Corps. The voicing of his opinion only demonstrates public ignorance towards the daily workings of the Peace Corps and its overall goals as an organization.
In relation to the strength of the myth that Peace Corps holds within the general American consciousness, actual knowledge of Peace Corps service in America is shockingly limited. This is the result of few processes. Few Americans have never heard of the Peace Corps, yet at the same time, the number of returned volunteers is very small, barely 190,000 over a span of 40 years. In and of itself, this is a recipe for substantial myth making. The majority of Americans still believe that Peace Corps volunteers are doing the exact same thing that the highly publicized first groups of volunteers were doing in the sixties. This is clearly evinced by the overwhelming number of volunteers who, during the first few months of service, are overwhelmed because “they never imagined the Peace Corps to be like this” (The Europe, Mediterranean, and Asia region, generally the most developed group countries to still host Peace Corps Volunteers, has the highest attrition rate in the Peace Corps for this very reason). Furthermore, the vast majority of “work” within the Peace Corps is very unglamorous. Few people care to hear about how a volunteer went to work everyday, did they job as well as they could, even if that entailed killing a lot of time, and then went right back home. Outside of only a handful of “flash” projects existing in each country, most volunteer work is just that: showing up, trying hard, building connections with coworkers.
But even if the number of volunteers was greatly increased – into the millions that John F Kennedy imagined by this time when he originally signed the Peace Corps act, and the nature of their service was better disseminated, this would not do much to alleviate the general problem. Peace Corps service is, for better or worse, a highly individualized experience, varying not only between decades, service fields and regions, but also differing incredibly from volunteer to volunteer serving in the same country and field at the exact same time. In general, living standards and economic resources throughout the developing world vary wildly from one town to the next. It shouldn’t be surprising then that living in the developing world for an extended period of time would yield a myriad of contrasting, and often contradictory, experiences.
To risk the danger of skirting generalization, here’s a rough description of life in the 21st century Peace Corps in a highly developed country like Kazakhstan. While life here is certainly less comfortable than the traditional Western standard, the living conditions are far from unmanageable. The majority of volunteers have access to relatively normal amenities, and when they don’t it is usually the more result of Peace Corps’ expectation that volunteers live modestly within their communities than actual lacking infrastructure. That’s not to say that many volunteers face intense physical hardship, after all the weather here often touches negative 40 degrees below zero, but the number of those that do is dwindling rapidly as this country quickly modernizes.
Professionally, Peace Corps volunteers aren’t exactly the pioneers they once were as much as they are now professional consultants. In the Peace Corps’ largest field of service in Kazakhstan, education, a volunteer’s main duty is to increase the teaching capacity of local teachers. Most prominently, volunteers do this simply through exposure. Considering that, for many Kazakhstanis, meeting a volunteer might be the first time they’ve ever seen an American, having a native English speaker in the classroom, and having to interact with this native speaker on a daily basis, is immensely beneficial for local teachers. The effect on an individual volunteer on a classroom is universal. It’s obvious, when meeting a local teacher, whether they’ve worked with a volunteer before or not; they speak English substantially better than anyone else around them. Beyond simple exposure, Peace Corps volunteers typically offer methodological approaches that local teachers have never been exposed to. Particularly in former Soviet countries, education systems throughout the developing world often rely on outdated models of education that can be easily improved with the elimination of a few bad habits. Peace Corps volunteers also have access to resources that their local counterparts don’t, such as teaching materials, technological fluency, and grants.
The Peace Corps is unique, among all service organizations in the United States, in the length of time that all volunteers are required to serve in the field. Cut any way, 27 months is a very long time to sacrifice for almost no material return. But it’s vital to the overall success of service that volunteers remain in country for this long, because, as Mr. Strauss so perfunctorily points out, volunteers aren’t especially good at their jobs upon arrival. Why anyone would assume otherwise, even when three intensive months of training are factored in, is absolutely ludicrous. Even with a substantial background in their field, which the majority of volunteers don’t even have, Peace Corps volunteers are confronted from day one with immense language and cultural challenges. Most volunteers report that they don’t feel comfortable in their job, or particularly effective, until nearly a year into their service.
What’s even more ludicrous on Mr. Strauss’ part, though, is his neglect of the fact that volunteers rapidly improve both their abilities to do their jobs and their understanding of the language and (once unfamiliar) culture around them. Although Mr. Strauss condemns the Peace Corps’ focus on integration when determining a volunteer’s effectiveness during service, integration is in fact the key factor in determining a volunteer’s effectiveness. At the end of service, volunteers possess a unique, hard-earned expertise on the community they live in, having experienced from both the out and inside. Unfortunately, spending time, meeting locals, making friends, reflecting on the surrounding situation is the only route to obtain this kind of knowledge. Hopefully, the volunteer acquired this expertise with enough time left in their service to create substantial, lasting benefits before they have to leave.
The truth of it all is that individually, the majority Peace Corps volunteers do not have incredible impacts on their communities. Even the best stories of service in Peace Corps lore - a woman who started a credit union that eventually transformed an entire community or a young man that taught a community to plant watermelon and become the biggest watermelon producer in the region, illustrate change that was started by the volunteer, but took decades to fully develop. In my opinion, truly great volunteers create a significant impact on only a handful of people, but this effect transforms them (and eventually the people around them) for the rest of their lives. For English teachers, it may be sending a student to America or encouraging a counterpart to use only English in the classroom. Taken case by case, this may not seem like much. But there are over 5,000 volunteers serving around the world right now, and enough of these small pools of change add up to something truly significant over time.
The greatest of an idea is often the result of its simplicity, and in this regard, the Peace Corps is not unique. While it is true that cost of living is increasing globally, and the American economy is significantly slowing down, the Peace Corps remains a remarkably inexpensive organization to manage. All told, Peace Corps uses less than one percent of the overall foreign policy budget for the State Department. Considering that all volunteers live with host families for a significant portion of service, and that many volunteers stay with families throughout, it’s very inexpensive to keep a volunteer in the field. All told, I make around 350 dollars month, and as a volunteer in Kazakhstan I’m one of the best paid volunteers in the world. While it is important to increase volunteer accountability and have more specific project plans and goals as the Peace Corps grows into the 21st century, the Peace Corps’ three underlying goals – supplying manpower, increasing exposure of America and American values, and making Americans more aware of the rest of the world – are eternal.
But perhaps most importantly, Strauss completely ignores the effect that Peace Corps service has on a young person; how service can transform them and create a more responsible, publicly active individual. Returned volunteers constantly talk about the forging of values, growth of character, public awareness, and development of survival skills that only the Peace Corps offers. If we are to continue using the Peace Corps as not only a tool for international development, but also for the further strengthening of America after service, it makes only sense to continue to send as many young people abroad as possible.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Some Commentary
Fred Kaplan has a bit to say about Peter Galbraith's article, which is the last part of the series of articles posted earlier. Without a doubt, there isn't any "serious" solution towards ending the Iraq war that is more thought out than Galbraith's. Kaplan simply enters the conversation by pointing out the moral ramifications of this solution, how preventing mass murder is our last (and perhaps only) accomplishable goal over there. That makes me a sad panda.
Defeat Without Disaster
The least bad plan for leaving Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007, at 2:45 PM ET
Peter Galbraith's article in the current New York Review of Books, "Iraq: The Way to Go," is one of the most bracing essays written on the subject lately—a provocative but logical case for a U.S. withdrawal (though not a total withdrawal) that still manages to achieve a few of the war's original goals.
I don't agree with every plank of Galbraith's proposal (more on that later), but anyone seeking a solution to this disaster needs at least to contend with his arguments.
Back in the spring of 2004, when Galbraith first proposed splitting Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic enclaves, I criticized the idea. He did have a point. "Iraq" was an artifice from its outset, the product of a scheme to widen the British Empire in the wake of the First World War. When the American-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, it also imploded the artifice of a unified Iraqi nation, and there was no way to put the monster back together. It would be better, Galbraith argued, to let the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds govern themselves in autonomous regions, with a central authority doing little more than equitably distributing oil revenue.
At the time, and a few times since, I expressed serious problems with Galbraith's plan. First, Iraq's ethnic divisions were not clear-cut geographically: Many cities, notably Baghdad and Kirkuk, had mixed populations. Where should the ethno-regional lines be drawn? Second, since the central authority would be weak by design, it wouldn't have the power to make, much less enforce, decisions on divvying up revenue. Third, the plan would have the effect of creating three "weak states," which would likely spawn civil wars and possibly a regional conflagration, as the neighbors felt tempted or compelled to fill the power vacuums.
My objections remain, but the context has changed. Amputation seems a terrible idea when one's limbs are still flexing. It's a bit more palatable when the alternative is death, and, in Iraq, the gangrene is spreading.
"The Iraq war is lost," Galbraith starkly declares in his new article. "Defeat," he continues, "is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place."
He has now abandoned his plan for a partitioned federation, regarding the southern two-thirds of Iraq—the areas dominated by Shiite and Sunni Arabs—as hopeless. Instead, he calls for withdrawing U.S. troops from those areas and redeploying some of them to the northern sector, in order to protect the Kurds.
Galbraith has long been a consultant to the Kurds and, long before that, a passionate advocate for their cause. Still, an objective case can be made that the United States has a moral and strategic interest in Kurdish independence. Redeploying troops to the Kurdistan region accomplishes four goals, Galbraith argues. It "secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western." It deters "a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war." It "provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories." And it limits "Iran's increasing domination."
All of these goals are worth pursuing; they are worth some sacrifice; finally, unlike other goals of this war, they are achievable.
And yet, the plan leaves out one thing—the people in the rest of Iraq.
Galbraith no longer describes Iraq as consisting of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Rather, he calls it "a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part."
At one point in his article, he writes that his redeployment plan "discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies." Fine, but if we're talking morality, have we incurred any such debt to the Shiites—who were also oppressed by Saddam and whom the United States (specifically, President Bush's father) abandoned in the endgame of the first Gulf War? Do we, for that matter, owe anything to the non-Baathist Sunni Arabs—who are also residents of this country that we destroyed without rebuilding?
Galbraith's plan reflects a blindness—or perhaps indifference—toward the plight of those still trapped in the crossfire. "We need to recognize … that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country," he writes. "In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw."
He is probably right on both counts, but in those parts—by which he means the Arab parts—there are still millions of people who once called (or still do call) themselves Iraqis. And for them, can we really "accomplish nothing"? Before we withdraw from the Arab parts, can we at least try to limit the sectarian bloodbath that—even Galbraith acknowledges—will likely follow?
Galbraith's own analysis points to one possible approach. Back when he advocated a tripartite federation, he noted (correctly) that Iraq was already moving in that direction—only violently. Now, more each day, sectarian militias are ethnically cleansing neighborhoods, even whole towns, where Shiites and Sunnis once casually mixed.
Before they withdraw, U.S. troops could try to help minorities relocate into areas where their ethnic brethren are in the majority—providing the means of transportation and, to the extent possible, safe passage. Iraqi troops and police may be very keen to assist, if not lead the way, in this mission—at least if Shiite forces are called on to help Shiites, Sunni forces to help Sunnis.
It's extremely discomfiting to abet ethnic segregation—but less so when the alternative might open the gates to mass murder.
Defeat Without Disaster
The least bad plan for leaving Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007, at 2:45 PM ET
Peter Galbraith's article in the current New York Review of Books, "Iraq: The Way to Go," is one of the most bracing essays written on the subject lately—a provocative but logical case for a U.S. withdrawal (though not a total withdrawal) that still manages to achieve a few of the war's original goals.
I don't agree with every plank of Galbraith's proposal (more on that later), but anyone seeking a solution to this disaster needs at least to contend with his arguments.
Back in the spring of 2004, when Galbraith first proposed splitting Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic enclaves, I criticized the idea. He did have a point. "Iraq" was an artifice from its outset, the product of a scheme to widen the British Empire in the wake of the First World War. When the American-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, it also imploded the artifice of a unified Iraqi nation, and there was no way to put the monster back together. It would be better, Galbraith argued, to let the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds govern themselves in autonomous regions, with a central authority doing little more than equitably distributing oil revenue.
At the time, and a few times since, I expressed serious problems with Galbraith's plan. First, Iraq's ethnic divisions were not clear-cut geographically: Many cities, notably Baghdad and Kirkuk, had mixed populations. Where should the ethno-regional lines be drawn? Second, since the central authority would be weak by design, it wouldn't have the power to make, much less enforce, decisions on divvying up revenue. Third, the plan would have the effect of creating three "weak states," which would likely spawn civil wars and possibly a regional conflagration, as the neighbors felt tempted or compelled to fill the power vacuums.
My objections remain, but the context has changed. Amputation seems a terrible idea when one's limbs are still flexing. It's a bit more palatable when the alternative is death, and, in Iraq, the gangrene is spreading.
"The Iraq war is lost," Galbraith starkly declares in his new article. "Defeat," he continues, "is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place."
He has now abandoned his plan for a partitioned federation, regarding the southern two-thirds of Iraq—the areas dominated by Shiite and Sunni Arabs—as hopeless. Instead, he calls for withdrawing U.S. troops from those areas and redeploying some of them to the northern sector, in order to protect the Kurds.
Galbraith has long been a consultant to the Kurds and, long before that, a passionate advocate for their cause. Still, an objective case can be made that the United States has a moral and strategic interest in Kurdish independence. Redeploying troops to the Kurdistan region accomplishes four goals, Galbraith argues. It "secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western." It deters "a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war." It "provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories." And it limits "Iran's increasing domination."
All of these goals are worth pursuing; they are worth some sacrifice; finally, unlike other goals of this war, they are achievable.
And yet, the plan leaves out one thing—the people in the rest of Iraq.
Galbraith no longer describes Iraq as consisting of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Rather, he calls it "a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part."
At one point in his article, he writes that his redeployment plan "discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies." Fine, but if we're talking morality, have we incurred any such debt to the Shiites—who were also oppressed by Saddam and whom the United States (specifically, President Bush's father) abandoned in the endgame of the first Gulf War? Do we, for that matter, owe anything to the non-Baathist Sunni Arabs—who are also residents of this country that we destroyed without rebuilding?
Galbraith's plan reflects a blindness—or perhaps indifference—toward the plight of those still trapped in the crossfire. "We need to recognize … that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country," he writes. "In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw."
He is probably right on both counts, but in those parts—by which he means the Arab parts—there are still millions of people who once called (or still do call) themselves Iraqis. And for them, can we really "accomplish nothing"? Before we withdraw from the Arab parts, can we at least try to limit the sectarian bloodbath that—even Galbraith acknowledges—will likely follow?
Galbraith's own analysis points to one possible approach. Back when he advocated a tripartite federation, he noted (correctly) that Iraq was already moving in that direction—only violently. Now, more each day, sectarian militias are ethnically cleansing neighborhoods, even whole towns, where Shiites and Sunnis once casually mixed.
Before they withdraw, U.S. troops could try to help minorities relocate into areas where their ethnic brethren are in the majority—providing the means of transportation and, to the extent possible, safe passage. Iraqi troops and police may be very keen to assist, if not lead the way, in this mission—at least if Shiite forces are called on to help Shiites, Sunni forces to help Sunnis.
It's extremely discomfiting to abet ethnic segregation—but less so when the alternative might open the gates to mass murder.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
The Rotting Corpse
What follows is a review of the "benchmark report" and NIE analysis about the current state of affairs in Iraq. Hint: it's not going well. The last article is another realistic assessment of Iraq as well as some reasonable exit solutions. Unfortunately, all of this - at least in the short-term - is speculative, considering there is no possible way to force this issue through the current Congress.
You Call That Progress?
The outrageous White House report on Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007, at 5:47 PM ET
The White House report released today, on how far Iraq has progressed toward 18 political and military benchmarks, is a sham.
According to the report, which was required by Congress, progress has been "satisfactory" on eight of the benchmarks, "unsatisfactory" on another eight, and mixed on two. At his press conference this morning, President Bush, seeing the glass half full, pronounced the report "a cause for optimism"—and for staying on course.
Yet a close look at the 25-page report reveals a far more dismal picture and a deliberately distorted assessment. The eight instances of "satisfactory" progress are not at all satisfactory by any reasonable measure—or, in some cases, they indicate a purely procedural advance. The eight "unsatisfactory" categories concern the central issues of Iraqi politics—the disputes that must be resolved if Iraq is to be a viable state and if the U.S. mission is to have the slightest chance of success.
Here are the benchmarks at which, even the White House acknowledges, the Iraqi government has not made satisfactory progress:
• Legislation on de-Baathification reform
• Legislation to ensure equitable distribution of oil revenue without regard to sect or ethnicity
• Setting up provincial elections
• Establishing a strong militia-disarmament program
• Allowing Iraqi commanders to pursue militias without political interference
• Ensuring that the Iraqi army and police enforce the law evenhandedly
• Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces capable of operating independently (here, the number has actually gone down)
• Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of Iraqi security forces
The status of former Baathists, distribution of oil revenue, local elections, disarming militias, sectarianism within the police, the legitimacy of the national army—these are the main issues grinding the parliament to a standstill, aggravating ethnic conflict, and forcing millions of Iraqis to flee the country. These are the issues that the Iraqi political leaders are supposed to be resolving while American troops fight and die to make Baghdad secure.
Yet the White House is admitting that the Iraqis have made no real progress on any of these fronts.
In its legislation requiring this report, Congress stated, "The United States strategy in Iraq, hereafter, shall be conditioned on the Iraqi government meeting [these 18] benchmarks." Yet even on the eight benchmarks that it admits are not met, the White House report explicitly denies the need to change strategy.
The report's account of the eight supposedly successful benchmarks is, on inspection, no less dismaying.
Take Benchmark No. 1: "Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review." The report admits that Iraq's "political blocs still need to reach an accommodation on these difficult political issues." (The report neglects to point out that many of the Sunni blocs are boycotting the parliament.) And yet it declares that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because the constitutional review is "now underway."
Or Benchmark No. 9: "Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations." The report admits, "Manning levels for deploying units continues to be of concern." The report doesn't explain what this means—namely, that Iraq's brigades have only 50 percent to 75 percent of their soldiers. And yet it concludes that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because it "has provided" the brigades.
Then there's Benchmark No. 12: "Ensuring that … the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation." The report admits this task "remains a significant challenge" in "some parts of Baghdad." However, it claims "satisfactory progress" because U.S. commanders report "overall satisfaction with their ability to target any and all extremist groups" and because U.S. diplomats, in their talks with Iraqi officials, "continue to stress the importance" of the topic.
The good mark for Benchmark No. 17 is particularly dubious: "Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis." The report admits that the Iraqi government has spent only 22 percent of its capital budget, that "it remains unclear" whether the oil ministry has "made any real effort" to spend its share of the funds, that it's hard to track the budget, and that the effects of new spending are felt "unevenly." Still, it claims "satisfactory progress" because some of the revenue is dribbling into the economy.
The other four "satisfactory" grades concern purely procedural matters. They assess legislation on "procedures to form semi-autonomous regions" (not on whether the regions have been formed); "establishing … political, media, economic, and service committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan" (not whether their support has been effective); "establishing … joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad" (not whether they're effective, either); and "ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected" (not in Iraqi society).
The report card was rigged from the outset by how the White House defined "satisfactory."
The legislation required the president to submit a report "declaring, in his judgment, whether satisfactory progress toward meeting these benchmarks is, or is not, being achieved."
The White House report states, "In order to make this judgment … we … asked the following question: As measured from a January 2007 baseline, do we assess that present trend data demonstrates a positive trajectory, which is tracking toward satisfactory accomplishment in the near term? If the answer is yes, we have provided a 'Satisfactory' assessment; if the answer is no, the assessment is 'Unsatisfactory.' " (All italics added.)
Subtle but pernicious wordplay is going on here. "Satisfactory progress" toward a benchmark is very different from "a positive trajectory … toward satisfactory accomplishment." The congressional language requires a satisfactory degree of progress. The White House interpretation allows high marks for the slightest bit of progress—the "positive trajectory" could be an angstrom, as long as it's "tracking toward" the goal; the degree of progress doesn't need to be addressed.
Yet even by this extraordinarily lenient standard, the White House authors could not bring themselves to give a passing grade to the Iraqi government on half of the benchmarks—and the most important benchmarks, at that.
This is no academic matter. As President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have said many times, the point of the surge and its strategy is to make Baghdad secure, so that Iraq's political leaders have the "breathing room" to resolve their disputes. Yet if they are incapable of resolving their disputes—if they have made no measurable progress on the major issues and if the Iraqi military hasn't advanced much either—then the surge may be a hopeless cause. Certainly, members of Congress are right to question the strategy, and Bush is deceptive in dismissing their challenges out of hand.
Read It and Weep
Even Bush's intelligence report says the war in Iraq is making us less safe at home.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, at 6:15 PM ET
The National Intelligence Estimate that was released today—titled "The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland"—amounts to a devastating critique of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, Iran, and the terrorist threat itself.
Its main point is that the threat—after having greatly receded over the past five years—is back in full force. Al-Qaida has "protected or regenerated key elements" of its ability to attack the United States. It has a "safe haven" in Pakistan. Its "top leadership" and "operational lieutenants" are intact. It is cooperating more with "regional terrorist groups."
As a result, the report concludes, "the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years" and is, even now, "in a heightened threat environment."
This is bad enough news for President Bush, who has tried to bank support for his policies on the claim that the terrorist threat has diminished.
Worse news still is the report's further observation—never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless—that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.
The report—the unclassified version of a consensus product by the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community—also notes that the threat will grow still larger if we appear to threaten Iran.
One major reason for al-Qaida's resurgence, according to the report, is its "association with" al-Qaida in Iraq. (Note, by the way, that these two organizations are said to be "associated" or "affiliated" with each other; contrary to what Bush has said in recent speeches, they are not the same entity.) This affiliation "helps al-Qaida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks." (Italics added.)
Al-Qaida in Iraq—or AQI, as the report identifies it—is not merely al-Qaida's "most visible and capable affiliate." More significant, it is "the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland." (Italics added.)
Let's put together the syllogism: Al-Qaida is more inclined to attack the United States because of its affiliation with AQI; AQI is the only affiliate that wants to attack the United States; therefore, if there were no AQI, the danger of an attack would be far less severe, if it existed at all.
Let's add one more link to the logical chain (which the NIE leaves out but which is self-evident): If there were no U.S. occupation of Iraq, there would be no AQI. (Certainly the organization didn't exist until well into the occupation. It has gained a foothold in Iraq—energizing "the broader Sunni extremist community"—by playing off their anti-American sentiments.)
Many times, President Bush has said that we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here. It is an absurd argument in many ways. But the NIE reveals that the opposite is the case—that because we're fighting them in Iraq, we are more likely to face them here.
Does this mean that we should stop fighting AQI or negotiate some separate peace? No, the organization's presence in Iraq—however exaggerated by some officials—is genuinely dangerous, and there is no negotiating with any al-Qaida affiliate in any event.
But it does mean we should do more to co-opt the Sunnis—even some of the Sunni extremists—that serve as AQI's base of support. (We have started to do just that, with some success, in Anbar province.)
And it also means—for yet one more reason, beyond the many others—that we should start to get out of Iraq. (The question, as always, remains how to do so without unleashing catastrophic chaos. One reasonable inference of the NIE is that we should seek a regional resolution of the crisis as a matter of great urgency to the security not only of the Middle East but also of the United States.)
It's worth recalling that, back in the spring of 2003, as the war was getting under way, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense (and one of the war's outspoken architects), told Vanity Fair that one reason to invade Iraq was to allow U.S. troops to leave Saudi Arabia. The presence of "infidel" soldiers on holy soil had been "a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida," Wolfowitz said. (Osama Bin Laden had publicly cited their presence as a rationale for the attack on the World Trade Center.) Yet the troops couldn't safely leave Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq. Hence, Saddam had to be removed first. (Though Wolfowitz didn't say so, another element of the plan was to relocate the U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia to the new, presumably pro-Western Iraq.)
Now, in a horrible irony, the troops in Iraq have become no less "a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida." (Some of Wolfowitz's erstwhile comrades insist he never wanted an occupation; perhaps he didn't grasp that occupations often follow the forced toppling of a government, especially when the entire social structure collapses as a result.)
Some hawks and neocons want to deepen the involvement and attack Iran—either simply to destroy its bourgeoning nuclear program or (in a more fantasy-drenched scenario) to overthrow its unfriendly regime, too.
The NIE warns against this adventurism in only the most slightly veiled terms. While discussing other threats besides al-Qaida, the report states that Lebanon's Hezbollah—which, till now, has confined its attacks to targets outside the United States—"may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland … if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran." (Italics added.)
This amounts to a direct warning to the White House: Don't attack Iran, the entire U.S. intelligence community is saying—and, if you do, you should expect to get hit back.
The Iraq war is lost
Bush and his band of backers won't admit that -- but their strategy is already defined by the specter of American defeat.
By Peter Galbraith
www.salon.com
Jul. 18, 2007
On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now achieved: With the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq's 18 provinces.
In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein; it is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.
Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgment that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in "Ripley's Believe it or Not."
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security advisor, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, al-Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds -- approximately 6 million people, or some 20 percent of Iraq's population -- to chart their own course.
On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaida.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by, it does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies -- usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last.
The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S. weapons to fight al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an enemy, and the United States appears now to be in the business of arming both the Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.
Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to have enhanced his standing with the public.
Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional training, would take over security.
The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until 2003. These steps include enacting an oil-revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections, leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising the ban on public-sector employment of former Baathists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era public service); and providing for a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by law, linked U.S. strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable, while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but, more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example, both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq's leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule, Baathists executed six of them. On Aug. 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Muqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.
Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor, Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces" and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. Embassy was required in order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.
Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad, and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one-quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009, and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the United States and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79 percent of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: The Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted, but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for a more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. Embassy stopped the U.N. from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the United States insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.
With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the Parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish nongovernmental organizations, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a "No" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as "satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99 percent of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98 percent voted for an independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq's being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their long-standing oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the president nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."
Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign the blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In the Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the Clinton-Lugar axis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This "blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to 15 years of military failure.)
Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaida would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the rooftop of the still-unfinished largest embassy in the world. Bush feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he explained:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al-Qaida terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.
But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaida, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.
Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the United States to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: It secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's gains.
In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, Bush never discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaida victory. Bush's reticence is understandable, since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region, persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary -- that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics. (At the same time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with particularly lethal roadside bombs.)
***
On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our Iraq strategy to our vital interests." On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military, and growing antiwar sentiment at home "make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame." Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.
Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:
Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis ... In this context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved, but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government is still just a hopeful plan for the future.
Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and overt attack from the neoconservatives.
Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting al-Qaida, preserving Kurdistan's democracy and limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.
You Call That Progress?
The outrageous White House report on Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007, at 5:47 PM ET
The White House report released today, on how far Iraq has progressed toward 18 political and military benchmarks, is a sham.
According to the report, which was required by Congress, progress has been "satisfactory" on eight of the benchmarks, "unsatisfactory" on another eight, and mixed on two. At his press conference this morning, President Bush, seeing the glass half full, pronounced the report "a cause for optimism"—and for staying on course.
Yet a close look at the 25-page report reveals a far more dismal picture and a deliberately distorted assessment. The eight instances of "satisfactory" progress are not at all satisfactory by any reasonable measure—or, in some cases, they indicate a purely procedural advance. The eight "unsatisfactory" categories concern the central issues of Iraqi politics—the disputes that must be resolved if Iraq is to be a viable state and if the U.S. mission is to have the slightest chance of success.
Here are the benchmarks at which, even the White House acknowledges, the Iraqi government has not made satisfactory progress:
• Legislation on de-Baathification reform
• Legislation to ensure equitable distribution of oil revenue without regard to sect or ethnicity
• Setting up provincial elections
• Establishing a strong militia-disarmament program
• Allowing Iraqi commanders to pursue militias without political interference
• Ensuring that the Iraqi army and police enforce the law evenhandedly
• Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces capable of operating independently (here, the number has actually gone down)
• Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of Iraqi security forces
The status of former Baathists, distribution of oil revenue, local elections, disarming militias, sectarianism within the police, the legitimacy of the national army—these are the main issues grinding the parliament to a standstill, aggravating ethnic conflict, and forcing millions of Iraqis to flee the country. These are the issues that the Iraqi political leaders are supposed to be resolving while American troops fight and die to make Baghdad secure.
Yet the White House is admitting that the Iraqis have made no real progress on any of these fronts.
In its legislation requiring this report, Congress stated, "The United States strategy in Iraq, hereafter, shall be conditioned on the Iraqi government meeting [these 18] benchmarks." Yet even on the eight benchmarks that it admits are not met, the White House report explicitly denies the need to change strategy.
The report's account of the eight supposedly successful benchmarks is, on inspection, no less dismaying.
Take Benchmark No. 1: "Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review." The report admits that Iraq's "political blocs still need to reach an accommodation on these difficult political issues." (The report neglects to point out that many of the Sunni blocs are boycotting the parliament.) And yet it declares that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because the constitutional review is "now underway."
Or Benchmark No. 9: "Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations." The report admits, "Manning levels for deploying units continues to be of concern." The report doesn't explain what this means—namely, that Iraq's brigades have only 50 percent to 75 percent of their soldiers. And yet it concludes that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because it "has provided" the brigades.
Then there's Benchmark No. 12: "Ensuring that … the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation." The report admits this task "remains a significant challenge" in "some parts of Baghdad." However, it claims "satisfactory progress" because U.S. commanders report "overall satisfaction with their ability to target any and all extremist groups" and because U.S. diplomats, in their talks with Iraqi officials, "continue to stress the importance" of the topic.
The good mark for Benchmark No. 17 is particularly dubious: "Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis." The report admits that the Iraqi government has spent only 22 percent of its capital budget, that "it remains unclear" whether the oil ministry has "made any real effort" to spend its share of the funds, that it's hard to track the budget, and that the effects of new spending are felt "unevenly." Still, it claims "satisfactory progress" because some of the revenue is dribbling into the economy.
The other four "satisfactory" grades concern purely procedural matters. They assess legislation on "procedures to form semi-autonomous regions" (not on whether the regions have been formed); "establishing … political, media, economic, and service committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan" (not whether their support has been effective); "establishing … joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad" (not whether they're effective, either); and "ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected" (not in Iraqi society).
The report card was rigged from the outset by how the White House defined "satisfactory."
The legislation required the president to submit a report "declaring, in his judgment, whether satisfactory progress toward meeting these benchmarks is, or is not, being achieved."
The White House report states, "In order to make this judgment … we … asked the following question: As measured from a January 2007 baseline, do we assess that present trend data demonstrates a positive trajectory, which is tracking toward satisfactory accomplishment in the near term? If the answer is yes, we have provided a 'Satisfactory' assessment; if the answer is no, the assessment is 'Unsatisfactory.' " (All italics added.)
Subtle but pernicious wordplay is going on here. "Satisfactory progress" toward a benchmark is very different from "a positive trajectory … toward satisfactory accomplishment." The congressional language requires a satisfactory degree of progress. The White House interpretation allows high marks for the slightest bit of progress—the "positive trajectory" could be an angstrom, as long as it's "tracking toward" the goal; the degree of progress doesn't need to be addressed.
Yet even by this extraordinarily lenient standard, the White House authors could not bring themselves to give a passing grade to the Iraqi government on half of the benchmarks—and the most important benchmarks, at that.
This is no academic matter. As President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have said many times, the point of the surge and its strategy is to make Baghdad secure, so that Iraq's political leaders have the "breathing room" to resolve their disputes. Yet if they are incapable of resolving their disputes—if they have made no measurable progress on the major issues and if the Iraqi military hasn't advanced much either—then the surge may be a hopeless cause. Certainly, members of Congress are right to question the strategy, and Bush is deceptive in dismissing their challenges out of hand.
Read It and Weep
Even Bush's intelligence report says the war in Iraq is making us less safe at home.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, at 6:15 PM ET
The National Intelligence Estimate that was released today—titled "The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland"—amounts to a devastating critique of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, Iran, and the terrorist threat itself.
Its main point is that the threat—after having greatly receded over the past five years—is back in full force. Al-Qaida has "protected or regenerated key elements" of its ability to attack the United States. It has a "safe haven" in Pakistan. Its "top leadership" and "operational lieutenants" are intact. It is cooperating more with "regional terrorist groups."
As a result, the report concludes, "the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years" and is, even now, "in a heightened threat environment."
This is bad enough news for President Bush, who has tried to bank support for his policies on the claim that the terrorist threat has diminished.
Worse news still is the report's further observation—never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless—that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.
The report—the unclassified version of a consensus product by the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community—also notes that the threat will grow still larger if we appear to threaten Iran.
One major reason for al-Qaida's resurgence, according to the report, is its "association with" al-Qaida in Iraq. (Note, by the way, that these two organizations are said to be "associated" or "affiliated" with each other; contrary to what Bush has said in recent speeches, they are not the same entity.) This affiliation "helps al-Qaida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks." (Italics added.)
Al-Qaida in Iraq—or AQI, as the report identifies it—is not merely al-Qaida's "most visible and capable affiliate." More significant, it is "the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland." (Italics added.)
Let's put together the syllogism: Al-Qaida is more inclined to attack the United States because of its affiliation with AQI; AQI is the only affiliate that wants to attack the United States; therefore, if there were no AQI, the danger of an attack would be far less severe, if it existed at all.
Let's add one more link to the logical chain (which the NIE leaves out but which is self-evident): If there were no U.S. occupation of Iraq, there would be no AQI. (Certainly the organization didn't exist until well into the occupation. It has gained a foothold in Iraq—energizing "the broader Sunni extremist community"—by playing off their anti-American sentiments.)
Many times, President Bush has said that we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here. It is an absurd argument in many ways. But the NIE reveals that the opposite is the case—that because we're fighting them in Iraq, we are more likely to face them here.
Does this mean that we should stop fighting AQI or negotiate some separate peace? No, the organization's presence in Iraq—however exaggerated by some officials—is genuinely dangerous, and there is no negotiating with any al-Qaida affiliate in any event.
But it does mean we should do more to co-opt the Sunnis—even some of the Sunni extremists—that serve as AQI's base of support. (We have started to do just that, with some success, in Anbar province.)
And it also means—for yet one more reason, beyond the many others—that we should start to get out of Iraq. (The question, as always, remains how to do so without unleashing catastrophic chaos. One reasonable inference of the NIE is that we should seek a regional resolution of the crisis as a matter of great urgency to the security not only of the Middle East but also of the United States.)
It's worth recalling that, back in the spring of 2003, as the war was getting under way, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense (and one of the war's outspoken architects), told Vanity Fair that one reason to invade Iraq was to allow U.S. troops to leave Saudi Arabia. The presence of "infidel" soldiers on holy soil had been "a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida," Wolfowitz said. (Osama Bin Laden had publicly cited their presence as a rationale for the attack on the World Trade Center.) Yet the troops couldn't safely leave Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq. Hence, Saddam had to be removed first. (Though Wolfowitz didn't say so, another element of the plan was to relocate the U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia to the new, presumably pro-Western Iraq.)
Now, in a horrible irony, the troops in Iraq have become no less "a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida." (Some of Wolfowitz's erstwhile comrades insist he never wanted an occupation; perhaps he didn't grasp that occupations often follow the forced toppling of a government, especially when the entire social structure collapses as a result.)
Some hawks and neocons want to deepen the involvement and attack Iran—either simply to destroy its bourgeoning nuclear program or (in a more fantasy-drenched scenario) to overthrow its unfriendly regime, too.
The NIE warns against this adventurism in only the most slightly veiled terms. While discussing other threats besides al-Qaida, the report states that Lebanon's Hezbollah—which, till now, has confined its attacks to targets outside the United States—"may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland … if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran." (Italics added.)
This amounts to a direct warning to the White House: Don't attack Iran, the entire U.S. intelligence community is saying—and, if you do, you should expect to get hit back.
The Iraq war is lost
Bush and his band of backers won't admit that -- but their strategy is already defined by the specter of American defeat.
By Peter Galbraith
www.salon.com
Jul. 18, 2007
On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now achieved: With the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq's 18 provinces.
In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein; it is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.
Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgment that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in "Ripley's Believe it or Not."
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security advisor, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, al-Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds -- approximately 6 million people, or some 20 percent of Iraq's population -- to chart their own course.
On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaida.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by, it does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies -- usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last.
The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S. weapons to fight al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an enemy, and the United States appears now to be in the business of arming both the Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.
Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to have enhanced his standing with the public.
Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional training, would take over security.
The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until 2003. These steps include enacting an oil-revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections, leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising the ban on public-sector employment of former Baathists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era public service); and providing for a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by law, linked U.S. strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable, while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but, more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example, both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq's leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule, Baathists executed six of them. On Aug. 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Muqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.
Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor, Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces" and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. Embassy was required in order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.
Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad, and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one-quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009, and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the United States and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79 percent of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: The Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted, but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for a more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. Embassy stopped the U.N. from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the United States insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.
With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the Parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish nongovernmental organizations, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a "No" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as "satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99 percent of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98 percent voted for an independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq's being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their long-standing oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the president nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."
Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign the blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In the Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the Clinton-Lugar axis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This "blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to 15 years of military failure.)
Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaida would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the rooftop of the still-unfinished largest embassy in the world. Bush feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he explained:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al-Qaida terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.
But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaida, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.
Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the United States to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: It secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's gains.
In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, Bush never discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaida victory. Bush's reticence is understandable, since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region, persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary -- that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics. (At the same time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with particularly lethal roadside bombs.)
***
On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our Iraq strategy to our vital interests." On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military, and growing antiwar sentiment at home "make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame." Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.
Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:
Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis ... In this context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved, but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government is still just a hopeful plan for the future.
Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and overt attack from the neoconservatives.
Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting al-Qaida, preserving Kurdistan's democracy and limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The Manipulator
I know that this topic has been more than beaten to death, but Halberstam's piece has a least a little value because of the thoroughness with which it addresses the historical issues. If you must, just skim the Bush parts (you won't learn anything new there anyway). If anything, it's at least a damn solid piece of writing.
Enjoy.
The History Boys
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman—unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated—while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
by David Halberstam
www.vanityfair.com
August 2007
We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.
We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them.
Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.
I am deeply suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel—not only because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he says it—that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification. Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.
He is infinitely more comfortable with the cowboy persona he has adopted, the Texas transplant who has learned to speak the down-home vernacular. "Country boy," as Johnny Cash once sang, "I wish I was you, and you were me." Bush's accent, not always there in public appearances when he was younger, tends to thicken these days, the final g's consistently dropped so that doing becomes doin', going becomes goin', and making, makin'. In this lexicon al-Qaeda becomes "the folks" who did 9/11. Unfortunately, it is not just the speech that got dumbed down—so also were the ideas at play. The president's world, unlike the one we live in, is dangerously simple, full of traps, not just for him but, sadly, for us as well.
When David Frum, a presidential speechwriter, presented Bush with the phrase "axis of evil," to characterize North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, it was meant to recall the Axis powers of World War II. Frum was much praised, for it is a fine phrase, perfect for Madison Avenue. Of course, the problem is that it doesn't really track. This new Axis turned out to contain, apparently much to our surprise, two countries, Iraq and Iran, that were sworn enemies, and if you moved against Iraq, you ended up de-stabilizing it and involuntarily strengthening Iran, the far more dangerous country in the region. While "axis of evil" was intended to serve as a sort of historical banner, embodying the highest moral vision imaginable, it ended up only helping to weaken us.
Despite his recent conversion to history, the president probably still believes, deep down, as do many of his admirers, that the righteous, religious vision he brings to geopolitics is a source of strength—almost as if the less he knows about the issues the better and the truer his decision-making will be. Around any president, all the time, are men and women with different agendas, who compete for his time and attention with messy, conflicting versions of events and complicated facts that seem all too often to contradict one another. With their hard-won experience the people from the State Department and the C.I.A. and even, on occasion, the armed forces tend to be cautious and short on certitude. They are the kind of people whose advice his father often took, but who in the son's view use their knowledge and experience merely to limit a president's ability to act. How much easier and cleaner to make decisions in consultation with a higher authority.
Therefore, when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.
There was, I thought, one member of the first President Bush's team who had a real sense of history, a man of intellectual superiority and enormous common sense. (Naturally, he did not make it onto the Bush Two team.) That was Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's national-security adviser. Scowcroft was so close to the senior Bush that they collaborated on Bush's 1998 presidential memoir, A World Transformed. Scowcroft struck me as a lineal descendant of Truman's secretary of state George Catlett Marshall, arguably the most extraordinary of the postwar architects of American foreign policy. Marshall was a formidable figure, much praised for his awesome sense of duty and not enough, I think, for his intellect. If he lacked the self-evident brilliance of George Kennan (the author of Truman's Communist-containment policy), he had a remarkable ability to shed light on the present by extrapolating from the the past.
Like Marshall, I think, Scowcroft has a sense of history in his bones, even if his are smaller lessons, learned piece by piece over a longer period of time. His is perhaps a more pragmatic and less dazzling mind, but he saw all the dangers of the 2003 move into Iraq, argued against the invasion, and for his troubles was dismissed as chairman of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
I. The Truman Analogy
Recently, Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter-day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them.
I've been living with Truman on and off for the last five years, while I was writing a book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [to be published in September by Hyperion], and I've been thinking a lot about the differences between Truman and Bush and their respective wars, Korea and Iraq. Yes, like Bush, Truman was embattled, and, yes, his popularity had plummeted at the end of his presidency, and, yes, he governed during an increasingly unpopular war. But the similarities end there.
Even before Truman sent troops to Korea, in 1950, the national political mood was toxic. The Republicans had lost five presidential elections in a row, and Truman was under fierce partisan assault from the Republican far right, which felt marginalized even within its own party. It seized on the dubious issue of Communist subversion—especially with regard to China—as a way of getting even. (Knowing how ideological both Bush and Cheney are, it is easy to envision them as harsh critics of Truman at that moment.)
Truman had inherited General Douglas MacArthur, "an untouchable," in Dwight Eisenhower's shrewd estimate, a man who was by then as much myth and legend as he was flesh and blood. The mastermind of America's victory in the Pacific, MacArthur was unquestionably talented, but also vainglorious, highly political, and partisan. Truman had twice invited him to come home from Japan, where, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, he was supervising the reconstruction, to meet with him and address a joint session of Congress. Twice MacArthur turned him down, although a presidential invitation is really an order. MacArthur was saving his homecoming, it was clear, for a more dramatic moment, one that might just have been connected to a presidential run. He not only looked down on Truman personally, he never really accepted the primacy of the president in the constitutional hierarchy. For a president trying to govern during an extremely difficult moment in international politics, it was a monstrous political equation.
Truman had been forced into the Korean War in 1950 when the Chinese authorized the North Koreans to cross the 38th parallel and attack South Korea. But MacArthur did not accept the president's vision of a limited war in Korea, and argued instead for a larger one with the Chinese. Truman wanted none of that. He might have been the last American president who did not graduate from college, but he was quite possibly our best-read modern president. History was always with him. With MacArthur pushing for a wider war with China, Truman liked to quote Napoleon, writing about his disastrous Russian adventure: "I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."
In time, MacArthur made an all-out frontal challenge to Truman, criticizing him to the press, almost daring the president to get rid of him. Knowing that the general had title to the flag and to the emotions of the country, while he himself merely had title to the Constitution, Truman nonetheless fired him. It was a grave constitutional crisis—nothing less than the concept of civilian control of the military was at stake. If there was an irony to this, it was that MacArthur and his journalistic boosters, such as Time-magazine owner Henry Luce, always saw Truman as the little man and MacArthur as the big man. ("MacArthur," wrote Time at the moment of the firing, "was the personification of the big man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership.… Truman was almost a professional little man.") But it was Truman's decision to meet MacArthur's challenge, even though he surely knew he would be the short-term loser, that has elevated his presidential stock.
George W. Bush's relationship with his military commander was precisely the opposite. He dealt with the ever so malleable General Tommy Franks, a man, Presidential Medal of Freedom or no, who is still having a difficult time explaining to his peers in the military how Iraq happened, and how he agreed to so large a military undertaking with so small a force. It was the president, not the military or the public, who wanted the Iraq war, and Bush used the extra leverage granted him by 9/11 to get it. His people skillfully manipulated the intelligence in order to make the war seem necessary, and they snookered the military on force levels and the American public on the cost of it all. The key operative in all this was clearly Vice President Cheney, supremely arrogant, the most skilled of bureaucrats, seemingly the toughest tough guy of them all, but eventually revealed as a man who knew nothing of the country he wanted to invade and what that invasion might provoke.
II. The New Red-Baiting
If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era, it is not Truman but the Republican far right. This can be seen clearly from one of his history lessons, a speech the president gave on a visit to Riga, Latvia, in May 2005, when, in order to justify the Iraq intervention, he cited Yalta, the 1945 summit at which Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met. Hailing Latvian freedom, Bush took a side shot at Roosevelt (and, whether he meant to or not, at Churchill, supposedly his great hero) and the Yalta accords, which effectively ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Yalta, he said, "followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
This is some statement. Yalta is connected first to the Munich Agreement of 1938 (in which the Western democracies, at their most vulnerable and well behind the curve of military preparedness, ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler), then, in the same breath, Bush blends in seamlessly (and sleazily) the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the temporary and cynical agreement between the Soviets and Nazis allowing the Germans to invade Poland and the Soviets to move into the Baltic nations. And from Molotov-Ribbentrop we jump ahead to Yalta itself, where, Bush implies, the two great leaders of the West casually sat by and gave away vast parts of Europe to the Soviet Union.
After some 60 years Yalta has largely slipped from our political vocabulary, but for a time it was one of the great buzzwords in American politics, the first shot across the bow by the Republican right in their long, venomous, immensely destructive assault upon Roosevelt (albeit posthumously), Truman, and the Democratic Party as soft on Communism—just as today's White House attacks Democrats and other critics for being soft on terrorism, less patriotic, defeatists, underminers of the true strength of our country. Crucial to the right's exploitation of Yalta was the idea of a tired, sick, and left-leaning Roosevelt having given away too much and betraying the people of Eastern Europe, who, as a result, had to live under the brutal Soviet thumb—a distortion of history that resonated greatly with the many Eastern European ethnic groups in America, whose people, blue-collar workers, most of them, had voted solidly Democratic.
The right got away with it, because, of all the fronts in the Second World War, the one least known in this country—our interest tends to disappear for those battles in which we did not participate—is ironically the most important: the Eastern Front, where the battle between the Germans and Russians took place and where, essentially, the outcome of the war was decided. It began with a classic act of hubris—Hitler's invasion of Russia, in June 1941, three years before we landed our troops in Normandy. Some three million German troops were involved in the attack, and in the early months the penetrations were quick and decisive. Minsk was quickly taken, the Germans crossed the Dnieper by July 10, and Smolensk fell shortly after. Some 700,000 men of the Red Army, its leadership already devastated by the madness of Stalin's purges, were captured by mid-September 1941. The Russian troops fell back and moved as much of their industry back east as they could. Then, slowly, the Russian lines stiffened, and the Germans, their supply lines too far extended, faltered as winter came on. The turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in late August 1942. It proved to be the most brutal battle of the war, with as many as two million combatants on both sides killed and wounded, but in the end the Russians held the city and captured what remained of the German Army there.
In early 1943, the Red Army was on the offensive, the Germans in full retreat. By the middle of 1944, the Russians had 120 divisions driving west, some 2.3 million troops against an increasingly exhausted German Army of 800,000. By mid-July 1944, as the Allies were still trying to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, the Red Army was at the old Polish-Russian border. By the time of Yalta, they were closing in on Berlin. A month earlier, in January 1945, Churchill had acknowledged the inability of the West to limit the Soviet reach into much of Eastern and Central Europe. "Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for Poland either."
Yalta reflected not a sellout but a fait accompli.
President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it's just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this. One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.
The president tends to drop off in his history lessons after World War II, especially when we get to Vietnam and things get a bit murkier. Had he made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies' recruiting for them. And still, today, our inability to concentrate such "shock and awe" on precisely whom we would like—causing what is now called collateral killing—creates a growing resentment among civilians, who may decide that whatever values we bring are not in the end worth it, because we have also brought too much killing and destruction to their country. The French fought in Vietnam before us, and when a French patrol went through a village, the Vietminh would on occasion kill a single French soldier, knowing that the French in a fury would retaliate by wiping out half the village—in effect, the Vietminh were baiting the trap for collateral killing.
III. The Perils of Empire
You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time—with his five military deferments—that he needed to be part of that nobility.
Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies—the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about—appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.
The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years.
I have my own sense that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around him—most particularly the vice president—simply misunderstood what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms. Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on that country's military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.
At the time of the collapse of Communism, I thought there was far too much talk in America about how we had won the Cold War, rather than about how the Soviet Union, whose economy never worked, simply had imploded. I was never that comfortable with the idea that we as a nation had won, or that it was a personal victory for Ronald Reagan. To the degree that there was credit to be handed out, I thought it should go to those people in the satellite nations who had never lost faith in the cause of freedom and had endured year after year in difficult times under the Soviet thumb. If any Americans deserved credit, I thought it should be Truman and his advisers—Marshall, Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Chip Bohlen—all of them harshly attacked at one time or another by the Republican right for being soft on Communism. (The right tried particularly hard to block Eisenhower's nomination of Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow, in 1953, because he had been at Yalta.)
After the Soviet Union fell, we were at once more powerful and, curiously, less so, because our military might was less applicable against the new, very different kind of threat that now existed in the world. Yet we stayed with the norms of the Cold War long after any genuine threat from it had receded, in no small part because our domestic politics were still keyed to it. At the same time, the checks and balances imposed on us by the Cold War were gone, the restraints fewer, and the temptations to misuse our power greater. What we neglected to consider was a warning from those who had gone before us—that there was, at moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.
David Halberstam was a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Best and the Brightest and The Fifties. He was killed in a car accident on April 23.
Enjoy.
The History Boys
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman—unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated—while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
by David Halberstam
www.vanityfair.com
August 2007
We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.
We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them.
Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.
I am deeply suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel—not only because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he says it—that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification. Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.
He is infinitely more comfortable with the cowboy persona he has adopted, the Texas transplant who has learned to speak the down-home vernacular. "Country boy," as Johnny Cash once sang, "I wish I was you, and you were me." Bush's accent, not always there in public appearances when he was younger, tends to thicken these days, the final g's consistently dropped so that doing becomes doin', going becomes goin', and making, makin'. In this lexicon al-Qaeda becomes "the folks" who did 9/11. Unfortunately, it is not just the speech that got dumbed down—so also were the ideas at play. The president's world, unlike the one we live in, is dangerously simple, full of traps, not just for him but, sadly, for us as well.
When David Frum, a presidential speechwriter, presented Bush with the phrase "axis of evil," to characterize North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, it was meant to recall the Axis powers of World War II. Frum was much praised, for it is a fine phrase, perfect for Madison Avenue. Of course, the problem is that it doesn't really track. This new Axis turned out to contain, apparently much to our surprise, two countries, Iraq and Iran, that were sworn enemies, and if you moved against Iraq, you ended up de-stabilizing it and involuntarily strengthening Iran, the far more dangerous country in the region. While "axis of evil" was intended to serve as a sort of historical banner, embodying the highest moral vision imaginable, it ended up only helping to weaken us.
Despite his recent conversion to history, the president probably still believes, deep down, as do many of his admirers, that the righteous, religious vision he brings to geopolitics is a source of strength—almost as if the less he knows about the issues the better and the truer his decision-making will be. Around any president, all the time, are men and women with different agendas, who compete for his time and attention with messy, conflicting versions of events and complicated facts that seem all too often to contradict one another. With their hard-won experience the people from the State Department and the C.I.A. and even, on occasion, the armed forces tend to be cautious and short on certitude. They are the kind of people whose advice his father often took, but who in the son's view use their knowledge and experience merely to limit a president's ability to act. How much easier and cleaner to make decisions in consultation with a higher authority.
Therefore, when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.
There was, I thought, one member of the first President Bush's team who had a real sense of history, a man of intellectual superiority and enormous common sense. (Naturally, he did not make it onto the Bush Two team.) That was Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's national-security adviser. Scowcroft was so close to the senior Bush that they collaborated on Bush's 1998 presidential memoir, A World Transformed. Scowcroft struck me as a lineal descendant of Truman's secretary of state George Catlett Marshall, arguably the most extraordinary of the postwar architects of American foreign policy. Marshall was a formidable figure, much praised for his awesome sense of duty and not enough, I think, for his intellect. If he lacked the self-evident brilliance of George Kennan (the author of Truman's Communist-containment policy), he had a remarkable ability to shed light on the present by extrapolating from the the past.
Like Marshall, I think, Scowcroft has a sense of history in his bones, even if his are smaller lessons, learned piece by piece over a longer period of time. His is perhaps a more pragmatic and less dazzling mind, but he saw all the dangers of the 2003 move into Iraq, argued against the invasion, and for his troubles was dismissed as chairman of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
I. The Truman Analogy
Recently, Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter-day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them.
I've been living with Truman on and off for the last five years, while I was writing a book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [to be published in September by Hyperion], and I've been thinking a lot about the differences between Truman and Bush and their respective wars, Korea and Iraq. Yes, like Bush, Truman was embattled, and, yes, his popularity had plummeted at the end of his presidency, and, yes, he governed during an increasingly unpopular war. But the similarities end there.
Even before Truman sent troops to Korea, in 1950, the national political mood was toxic. The Republicans had lost five presidential elections in a row, and Truman was under fierce partisan assault from the Republican far right, which felt marginalized even within its own party. It seized on the dubious issue of Communist subversion—especially with regard to China—as a way of getting even. (Knowing how ideological both Bush and Cheney are, it is easy to envision them as harsh critics of Truman at that moment.)
Truman had inherited General Douglas MacArthur, "an untouchable," in Dwight Eisenhower's shrewd estimate, a man who was by then as much myth and legend as he was flesh and blood. The mastermind of America's victory in the Pacific, MacArthur was unquestionably talented, but also vainglorious, highly political, and partisan. Truman had twice invited him to come home from Japan, where, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, he was supervising the reconstruction, to meet with him and address a joint session of Congress. Twice MacArthur turned him down, although a presidential invitation is really an order. MacArthur was saving his homecoming, it was clear, for a more dramatic moment, one that might just have been connected to a presidential run. He not only looked down on Truman personally, he never really accepted the primacy of the president in the constitutional hierarchy. For a president trying to govern during an extremely difficult moment in international politics, it was a monstrous political equation.
Truman had been forced into the Korean War in 1950 when the Chinese authorized the North Koreans to cross the 38th parallel and attack South Korea. But MacArthur did not accept the president's vision of a limited war in Korea, and argued instead for a larger one with the Chinese. Truman wanted none of that. He might have been the last American president who did not graduate from college, but he was quite possibly our best-read modern president. History was always with him. With MacArthur pushing for a wider war with China, Truman liked to quote Napoleon, writing about his disastrous Russian adventure: "I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."
In time, MacArthur made an all-out frontal challenge to Truman, criticizing him to the press, almost daring the president to get rid of him. Knowing that the general had title to the flag and to the emotions of the country, while he himself merely had title to the Constitution, Truman nonetheless fired him. It was a grave constitutional crisis—nothing less than the concept of civilian control of the military was at stake. If there was an irony to this, it was that MacArthur and his journalistic boosters, such as Time-magazine owner Henry Luce, always saw Truman as the little man and MacArthur as the big man. ("MacArthur," wrote Time at the moment of the firing, "was the personification of the big man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership.… Truman was almost a professional little man.") But it was Truman's decision to meet MacArthur's challenge, even though he surely knew he would be the short-term loser, that has elevated his presidential stock.
George W. Bush's relationship with his military commander was precisely the opposite. He dealt with the ever so malleable General Tommy Franks, a man, Presidential Medal of Freedom or no, who is still having a difficult time explaining to his peers in the military how Iraq happened, and how he agreed to so large a military undertaking with so small a force. It was the president, not the military or the public, who wanted the Iraq war, and Bush used the extra leverage granted him by 9/11 to get it. His people skillfully manipulated the intelligence in order to make the war seem necessary, and they snookered the military on force levels and the American public on the cost of it all. The key operative in all this was clearly Vice President Cheney, supremely arrogant, the most skilled of bureaucrats, seemingly the toughest tough guy of them all, but eventually revealed as a man who knew nothing of the country he wanted to invade and what that invasion might provoke.
II. The New Red-Baiting
If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era, it is not Truman but the Republican far right. This can be seen clearly from one of his history lessons, a speech the president gave on a visit to Riga, Latvia, in May 2005, when, in order to justify the Iraq intervention, he cited Yalta, the 1945 summit at which Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met. Hailing Latvian freedom, Bush took a side shot at Roosevelt (and, whether he meant to or not, at Churchill, supposedly his great hero) and the Yalta accords, which effectively ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Yalta, he said, "followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
This is some statement. Yalta is connected first to the Munich Agreement of 1938 (in which the Western democracies, at their most vulnerable and well behind the curve of military preparedness, ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler), then, in the same breath, Bush blends in seamlessly (and sleazily) the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the temporary and cynical agreement between the Soviets and Nazis allowing the Germans to invade Poland and the Soviets to move into the Baltic nations. And from Molotov-Ribbentrop we jump ahead to Yalta itself, where, Bush implies, the two great leaders of the West casually sat by and gave away vast parts of Europe to the Soviet Union.
After some 60 years Yalta has largely slipped from our political vocabulary, but for a time it was one of the great buzzwords in American politics, the first shot across the bow by the Republican right in their long, venomous, immensely destructive assault upon Roosevelt (albeit posthumously), Truman, and the Democratic Party as soft on Communism—just as today's White House attacks Democrats and other critics for being soft on terrorism, less patriotic, defeatists, underminers of the true strength of our country. Crucial to the right's exploitation of Yalta was the idea of a tired, sick, and left-leaning Roosevelt having given away too much and betraying the people of Eastern Europe, who, as a result, had to live under the brutal Soviet thumb—a distortion of history that resonated greatly with the many Eastern European ethnic groups in America, whose people, blue-collar workers, most of them, had voted solidly Democratic.
The right got away with it, because, of all the fronts in the Second World War, the one least known in this country—our interest tends to disappear for those battles in which we did not participate—is ironically the most important: the Eastern Front, where the battle between the Germans and Russians took place and where, essentially, the outcome of the war was decided. It began with a classic act of hubris—Hitler's invasion of Russia, in June 1941, three years before we landed our troops in Normandy. Some three million German troops were involved in the attack, and in the early months the penetrations were quick and decisive. Minsk was quickly taken, the Germans crossed the Dnieper by July 10, and Smolensk fell shortly after. Some 700,000 men of the Red Army, its leadership already devastated by the madness of Stalin's purges, were captured by mid-September 1941. The Russian troops fell back and moved as much of their industry back east as they could. Then, slowly, the Russian lines stiffened, and the Germans, their supply lines too far extended, faltered as winter came on. The turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in late August 1942. It proved to be the most brutal battle of the war, with as many as two million combatants on both sides killed and wounded, but in the end the Russians held the city and captured what remained of the German Army there.
In early 1943, the Red Army was on the offensive, the Germans in full retreat. By the middle of 1944, the Russians had 120 divisions driving west, some 2.3 million troops against an increasingly exhausted German Army of 800,000. By mid-July 1944, as the Allies were still trying to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, the Red Army was at the old Polish-Russian border. By the time of Yalta, they were closing in on Berlin. A month earlier, in January 1945, Churchill had acknowledged the inability of the West to limit the Soviet reach into much of Eastern and Central Europe. "Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for Poland either."
Yalta reflected not a sellout but a fait accompli.
President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it's just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this. One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.
The president tends to drop off in his history lessons after World War II, especially when we get to Vietnam and things get a bit murkier. Had he made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies' recruiting for them. And still, today, our inability to concentrate such "shock and awe" on precisely whom we would like—causing what is now called collateral killing—creates a growing resentment among civilians, who may decide that whatever values we bring are not in the end worth it, because we have also brought too much killing and destruction to their country. The French fought in Vietnam before us, and when a French patrol went through a village, the Vietminh would on occasion kill a single French soldier, knowing that the French in a fury would retaliate by wiping out half the village—in effect, the Vietminh were baiting the trap for collateral killing.
III. The Perils of Empire
You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time—with his five military deferments—that he needed to be part of that nobility.
Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies—the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about—appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.
The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years.
I have my own sense that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around him—most particularly the vice president—simply misunderstood what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms. Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on that country's military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.
At the time of the collapse of Communism, I thought there was far too much talk in America about how we had won the Cold War, rather than about how the Soviet Union, whose economy never worked, simply had imploded. I was never that comfortable with the idea that we as a nation had won, or that it was a personal victory for Ronald Reagan. To the degree that there was credit to be handed out, I thought it should go to those people in the satellite nations who had never lost faith in the cause of freedom and had endured year after year in difficult times under the Soviet thumb. If any Americans deserved credit, I thought it should be Truman and his advisers—Marshall, Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Chip Bohlen—all of them harshly attacked at one time or another by the Republican right for being soft on Communism. (The right tried particularly hard to block Eisenhower's nomination of Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow, in 1953, because he had been at Yalta.)
After the Soviet Union fell, we were at once more powerful and, curiously, less so, because our military might was less applicable against the new, very different kind of threat that now existed in the world. Yet we stayed with the norms of the Cold War long after any genuine threat from it had receded, in no small part because our domestic politics were still keyed to it. At the same time, the checks and balances imposed on us by the Cold War were gone, the restraints fewer, and the temptations to misuse our power greater. What we neglected to consider was a warning from those who had gone before us—that there was, at moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.
David Halberstam was a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Best and the Brightest and The Fifties. He was killed in a car accident on April 23.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Whoa
You can't help but be reminded of Arthur Clarke's third law of prediction: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Science is amazing.
Animal Farm
The recombination of man and beast.
By William Saletan
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007, at 6:31 PM ET
Slate Magazine
If you've been laughing at those Neanderthal presidential candidates who still don't believe in evolution, it's time to sober up. Every serious scientist knows we evolved from animals. The question now is whether to put our DNA and theirs back together.
We've been putting baboon hearts, pig valves, and other animal parts in people for decades. We've derived stem cells by inserting human genomes in rabbit eggs. We've made mice with human prostate glands. We've made sheep with nearly half-human livers. This week, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences reported (PDF) that scientists have created "thousands of examples of transgenic animals" carrying human DNA. According to the report, "the introduction of human gene sequences into mouse cells in vitro is a technique now practiced in virtually every biomedical research institution across the world."
Why have we done this? To save lives. If you can't get a human heart valve, a pig valve will do. If you can't get human eggs to clone embryos for stem-cell research, rabbit eggs will do. If you can't use people as guinea pigs in gruesome but necessary experiments on human tissues, guinea pigs will do. All you have to do is put—or grow—the human tissues in the guinea pigs. You're free to inflict any disease or drug on a human system, as long as that human system lives in an animal.
In stem-cell research, moreover, human cells are the therapy. Under FDA rules, you have to test them in animals before you test them in people. That means implanting them to see how they change the animals. Meanwhile, we're using hamster cells to make a human protein to treat anemia (PDF). We're using mice to make humanized antibodies that produce cancer drugs. We've grown human kidney tissue in rats.
So far, our mixtures are modest. To make humanized animals really creepy, you'd have to do several things. You'd increase the ratio of human to animal DNA. You'd transplant human cells that spread throughout the body. You'd do it early in embryonic development, so the human cells would shape the animals' architecture, not just blend in. You'd grow the embryos to maturity. And you'd start messing with the brain.
We're doing all of those things.
According to the British academy's report, "researchers have constructed ever more ambitious transgenic animals"—some with an entire human chromosome—and it's "likely that the process of engineering ever larger amounts of human DNA into mice will continue." Four months ago in Nature, biologists outlined several ways to pursue this, starting with "genetic modifications to humanize the host strain further." We're transplanting pluripotent stem cells, which proliferate and grow many kinds of human tissue. We're doing it early in mouse embryogenesis, and we're implanting the resulting embryos in "foster mice" so they can develop.
We're not doing these things because they're creepy. We're doing them because they're logical. The more you humanize animals, the better they serve their purpose as lab models of humanity. That's what's scary about species mixing. It's not some crazy Frankenstein project. It's the future of medicine.
Now comes the brain.
Neurological disorders affect 1 billion people and kill nearly 7 million per year. To study these disorders, we're doing to brain tissue what we've done to liver and kidney tissue: We're replicating it in animals. We've made humanized mice with Alzheimer's symptoms. We've put human neural stem cells in monkey brains. We've put human stem cells in the brains of fetal mice and grown them into adult mice with human neurons. According to the British academy, it's now standard practice to test human neural stem cells by assessing whether they "integrate appropriately into mouse or rat brain."
Last month, ethicists from Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin detailed a proposal by a Stanford scientist to substitute human brain stem cells for dying neurons in fetal mice. "The result would be a mouse brain, the neurons of which were mainly human in origin," they reported. The payoff, if the fetuses survived, would be "a laboratory animal that could be used for experiments on living, in vivo, human neurons." Imagine that: a humanoid brain network you can treat like a lab animal, because it is a lab animal.
The Stanford experiment wouldn't actually produce a human brain. Most brain cells aren't neurons, and the experiment called for inserting human cells after the mice had constructed their brain architecture. But last year in Developmental Biology, researchers proposed to insert human stem cells in mice before this architectural stage. The resulting "mouse/human chimeras," they argued, "would be of considerable value for the modeling of human development and disease in live animals."
When Stanford's ethicists first heard the proposal for humanized mouse brains, they were grossed out. But after thinking it over, they tentatively endorsed the idea and decided that it might not be bad to endow mice with "some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities." The British academy and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have likewise refused to permanently restrict the humanization of animals.
If you want permanent restrictions, your best bet is the senator who tried to impose them two years ago. He's the same presidential candidate now leading the charge against evolution: Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas. He thinks we're separate from other animals, "unique in the created order." Too bad that isn't true of the past—or the future.
Comments available at Slate Magazine's Fray.
Science is amazing.
Animal Farm
The recombination of man and beast.
By William Saletan
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007, at 6:31 PM ET
Slate Magazine
If you've been laughing at those Neanderthal presidential candidates who still don't believe in evolution, it's time to sober up. Every serious scientist knows we evolved from animals. The question now is whether to put our DNA and theirs back together.
We've been putting baboon hearts, pig valves, and other animal parts in people for decades. We've derived stem cells by inserting human genomes in rabbit eggs. We've made mice with human prostate glands. We've made sheep with nearly half-human livers. This week, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences reported (PDF) that scientists have created "thousands of examples of transgenic animals" carrying human DNA. According to the report, "the introduction of human gene sequences into mouse cells in vitro is a technique now practiced in virtually every biomedical research institution across the world."
Why have we done this? To save lives. If you can't get a human heart valve, a pig valve will do. If you can't get human eggs to clone embryos for stem-cell research, rabbit eggs will do. If you can't use people as guinea pigs in gruesome but necessary experiments on human tissues, guinea pigs will do. All you have to do is put—or grow—the human tissues in the guinea pigs. You're free to inflict any disease or drug on a human system, as long as that human system lives in an animal.
In stem-cell research, moreover, human cells are the therapy. Under FDA rules, you have to test them in animals before you test them in people. That means implanting them to see how they change the animals. Meanwhile, we're using hamster cells to make a human protein to treat anemia (PDF). We're using mice to make humanized antibodies that produce cancer drugs. We've grown human kidney tissue in rats.
So far, our mixtures are modest. To make humanized animals really creepy, you'd have to do several things. You'd increase the ratio of human to animal DNA. You'd transplant human cells that spread throughout the body. You'd do it early in embryonic development, so the human cells would shape the animals' architecture, not just blend in. You'd grow the embryos to maturity. And you'd start messing with the brain.
We're doing all of those things.
According to the British academy's report, "researchers have constructed ever more ambitious transgenic animals"—some with an entire human chromosome—and it's "likely that the process of engineering ever larger amounts of human DNA into mice will continue." Four months ago in Nature, biologists outlined several ways to pursue this, starting with "genetic modifications to humanize the host strain further." We're transplanting pluripotent stem cells, which proliferate and grow many kinds of human tissue. We're doing it early in mouse embryogenesis, and we're implanting the resulting embryos in "foster mice" so they can develop.
We're not doing these things because they're creepy. We're doing them because they're logical. The more you humanize animals, the better they serve their purpose as lab models of humanity. That's what's scary about species mixing. It's not some crazy Frankenstein project. It's the future of medicine.
Now comes the brain.
Neurological disorders affect 1 billion people and kill nearly 7 million per year. To study these disorders, we're doing to brain tissue what we've done to liver and kidney tissue: We're replicating it in animals. We've made humanized mice with Alzheimer's symptoms. We've put human neural stem cells in monkey brains. We've put human stem cells in the brains of fetal mice and grown them into adult mice with human neurons. According to the British academy, it's now standard practice to test human neural stem cells by assessing whether they "integrate appropriately into mouse or rat brain."
Last month, ethicists from Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin detailed a proposal by a Stanford scientist to substitute human brain stem cells for dying neurons in fetal mice. "The result would be a mouse brain, the neurons of which were mainly human in origin," they reported. The payoff, if the fetuses survived, would be "a laboratory animal that could be used for experiments on living, in vivo, human neurons." Imagine that: a humanoid brain network you can treat like a lab animal, because it is a lab animal.
The Stanford experiment wouldn't actually produce a human brain. Most brain cells aren't neurons, and the experiment called for inserting human cells after the mice had constructed their brain architecture. But last year in Developmental Biology, researchers proposed to insert human stem cells in mice before this architectural stage. The resulting "mouse/human chimeras," they argued, "would be of considerable value for the modeling of human development and disease in live animals."
When Stanford's ethicists first heard the proposal for humanized mouse brains, they were grossed out. But after thinking it over, they tentatively endorsed the idea and decided that it might not be bad to endow mice with "some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities." The British academy and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have likewise refused to permanently restrict the humanization of animals.
If you want permanent restrictions, your best bet is the senator who tried to impose them two years ago. He's the same presidential candidate now leading the charge against evolution: Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas. He thinks we're separate from other animals, "unique in the created order." Too bad that isn't true of the past—or the future.
Comments available at Slate Magazine's Fray.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Hey! A Debate!
First of all, read Rich's article on Hostel II (disclosure: love it, love it, love it, love it, love it), and then start going through the comments at the bottom. Obviously, I've commented as the Professor, i.e. that guy that talks to much for his own good.
Ready? Set? GO!
Ready? Set? GO!
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