The Candidates' Health Care Plans, Part 1

oldstyleliberal has decided he needs to try to sort out the debate among the Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls concerning health care coverage. The problem: a hefty number of Americans have no health insurance — reportedly, 47 million, or 16 percent of the population — which is considered a bad thing. Coupled with that is the high cost of health care itself and of health insurance premiums. The proposed solutions? Well, they vary with the candidate. More on that in a bit.

First off, though, oldstyleliberal applauds the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation for its online side-by-side analysis of the candidates' similarities and differences on health care proposals, accessible at this web page. oldstyleliberal also salutes the health care archive at Fact Checker, a compendium of the ways in which the candidates' statements about this and other issues are at variance with the facts. When a candidate fibs, Fact Checker hands out to him or her a dubious award it aptly calls the Pinocchio.

Before trying to sort out the tangled politics of health care today, oldstyleliberal would like to point out some of his biases and assumptions going into the process. First of all, he wonders why it is considered necessary for all Americans to have health insurance. Specifically, does a lack of insurance keep the uninsured 47 million from receiving the health services they need? And if they do get some or all of those services and don't have enough money to pay for them out of pocket, how do these services get paid for?

Based on something he read years and years ago in, he believes, Atlantic Monthly, oldstyleliberal is under the impression that those without insurance and without fat pocketbooks do in fact get at least some of the health services they require. When illness or emergency strikes, they go to free clinics or to hospital emergency rooms. If they are in a bad way, they can even be admitted to a hospital, where they can receive treatment or undergo surgery if need be. The cost of all that gets passed along to paying customers in the form of higher bills.

But that system of what amounts to informal "risk pooling" — without benefit of a formal insurance plan to manage and fairly distribute the pooled financial risk, that is — has many drawbacks, not the least of which is the failure of the uninsured to get the preventive care and chronic-disease treatment that would avert the emergency in the first place.

Insurance companies are in the business, first and foremost, of pooling risk. Health insurers receive premiums from those who are covered — along with, usually, contributions from their employers — and they pay out to health care providers some significant portion of the insureds' accrued charges for services rendered. The majority of the insured actually receive fewer dollars in benefits than they pay in premiums each year ... until they get sick, that is.

The minority of the participants in the insurance risk pool who in any given year actually get treated for major illnesses (or for normal but high-cost rites of passage such as pregnancies) are the ones whose benefits-to-premiums ratios are high. Averaged over the entire risk pool, though, the total payouts by the insurance company in any given year are enough less than the total of premiums-plus-employer-contributions to leave a tidy profit for the company.

Most of us who have health insurance coverage depend on employer contributions to defray part of its cost — or, if we're retired, on insurance contributions that are part of our retirement packages. If employer contributions vanished, we might then receive the erstwhile contributions in fatter paychecks instead, but if health insurance was not somehow made mandatory for all of us, many of us would — let's admit it — squander the extra income on necessities like food and luxuries like cell phones and trips to Las Vegas. (That's why many of the current proposals are for "mandatory" programs.)

So the current system works pretty well for all but the 47 million citizens who lack any health coverage whatever. As oldstyleliberal understands the situation, the truly poor and chronically jobless can fall back on Medicaid and, if they're seniors, Medicare (which also covers middle-class retirees). The group without any health coverage at all are, in many cases, those who far enough above the poverty line not to qualify for Medicaid, but they do not have jobs with employers that will pick up "their share" of the tab for health insurance coverage. These uninsured can't afford the steep premiums on their own, so they do without.

Another portion of uninsured Americans have been turned down for coverage because of high risk factors like pre-existing medical conditions. oldstyleliberal does not fully understand why insurers cannot accept those with dicey health conditions into the risk pool, and raise premiums for one and all so as to keep the high costs associated with the new, high-risk members from draining the pool. But that apparently does not make good business sense, presumably because if one company did it, all its low-risk customers would flock to other insurance companies whose premiums remained low.

Furthermore, some "economically uninsured" who lack jobs that provide health coverage are in fact the same people as in the high-risk, poor-health group whom insurers spurn, since the relatively poor tend to have more pre-existing conditions than the well-off among us, who have better access to preventive care.


Now for some of the solutions offered by the presidential candidates.

Democrat Dennis Kucinich proposes a system of the "single-payer" type which at one time oldstyleliberal was in favor of. A single-payer system would basically be like Medicare, but for all citizens, not just those over a certain age. (Medicare and Medicaid would be folded into it.) As oldstyleliberal understands it, the government would run the system, but health-care providers who are eligible for cost reimbursement would remain private. There would be no premiums or employer contributions. Instead, according to this rundown of the Kucinich proposal:

The plan would be financed through a federal payroll tax increase from 1.45 percent to 4.75 percent for both employee and employer; stock transfer tax of 0.25 percent on both buyer and seller; income tax surcharge of 5 percent on annual income between $184,000 and $279,999 and surcharge of 10 percent on annual income of $280,000 or more; and repeal of the 2001 and 2002 Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Such a system would ostensibly cover 100 percent of the population. By making the risk pool as large as possible, it would allow one and all to be insured without excessively nicking the healthy to pay for the sick. It would hold down overall health care costs by blocking unnecessary, or unnecessarily pricey, procedures. There would also be savings, supporters say, due to consolidating the numerous current insurance companies' high overheads into those of one, supposedly efficient single bureaucracy. (The current insurance companies could still offer supplemental coverage, however, to those willing to pay for it privately.)

Critics say such a publicly financed system would fail to live up to its promises to reduce costs, though, because government bureaucracies are inherently wasteful. They also say similar systems tried in countries like Canada do not have consistently good results in terms of improving the quality of health care. Opponents of single-payer systems claim further that eliminating market forces in the health-care industry would make things worse instead of better.

Some critics even say a single-payer system is tantamount to "socialized medicine" in which the government actually tells citizens what health-care providers they can use and what services they can have. oldstyleliberal thinks that charge is completely bogus. Patients would still be able to choose their doctors and hospitals and get the care they feel they need.

Perhaps the biggest liability of single-payer proposals is that they have only a small base of political support. They have been raised and rejected in the past without attracting major support in Congress or among politicians in general. Naturally, the health insurance companies hate the proposals, since they would lose the bulk of their business, so lobbying against such schemes is intense. If somehow Mr. Kucinich managed to become the Democratic nominee and win the general election — and it would take a miracle for that to happen — he would face insurmountable obstacles in getting his proposal enacted.

Meanwhile, not of the other Democratic and Republican candidates, to oldstyleliberal's knowledge, favor a single-payer system. More on their alternatives in the next post in this series.

Checking Back In As a Libertarian

It's been since July 2007 that this blog has been in abeyance — shame on oldstyleliberal!

The 2008 presidential election run-up is leaving oldstyleliberal significantly underwhelmed. He tends to support Democrats, not Republicans, and he finds the present crop of Democratic front-runners less than inspiring. (The Republicans are worse.) Asking himself what the matter could possibly be, he mentions to himself that there is a vast dearth of two desirable characteristics in the present lineup of presidential hopefuls: leadership, and an absence of hypocrisy.

oldstyleliberal defines leadership as the ability to change people's minds by appealing to their reason, thus bringing about a national consensus on issues of importance. But what we are actually getting is a sophisticated version of hypocrisy, in which the candidates' positions on things like the war in Iraq are so mush-mouthed, so qualified, so contorted, they seem to match our own positions without necessarily really doing so.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, wants to have it all ways on the Iraq war, according to this post on The Fact Checker blog at The Washington Post. Although her campaign literature says

Hillary will begin immediate phased withdrawal [from Iraq] with a definite timetable to bring our troops home

her actual position does not actually commit her "to pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq [even] by the end of a second presidential term." The Post adds:

Clinton has made a flat promise that the United States will "get out of Iraq" while she is president. She says she has a plan to "end the war" and "a definite timetable to bring our troops home." On closer examination, it turns out that all these promises are so carefully hedged as to be virtually meaningless. There is no "definite timetable" to bring the troops home or end the war. She has said she "wants" to begin troop withdrawals in the first 60 days of her presidency-but has also talked about leaving a "vastly reduced residual force" in the country for "a limited period of time."

Clinton's pledge to "end the war" contains so much fine print that it is hardly a pledge at all, more a general aspiration. She has described several "vital U.S. national security interests" in that country, including fighting al-Qaeda, protecting the U.S. embassy, training Iraqi troops, protecting the Kurds, and countering the influence of Iran.

Barack Obama is only a little better, this Fact Checker post shows. He supposedly will flatly remove "all combat troops" from Iraq if he becomes president. But he also leaves open sending troops "back into the country to fight al Qaeda and 'stop genocidal violence.' " Per The Post:

It is more difficult to find obvious contradictions in Obama's speeches on Iraq than in the statements of his Democratic rivals. The weakest chink in his rhetorical armor is his claim that he will withdraw all combat troops from Iraq "within 16 months" of taking office — but "continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq." He has acknowledged that these will be "combat missions."

The Obama campaign has tried to square the circle by insisting that Obama will withdraw all 20 combat brigades presently in Iraq. "A different force will be constituted," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, in an e-mail. "This would not be a brigade engaged in sustained combat. Rather, it would be a strike force that could take targeted action against specific al Qaeda assets."

In other words, the vaunted Obama "withdrawal" might not truly get U.S. troops out of harm's way after all.

(One of oldstyleliberal's best friends, also a Democrat, has pointed out to him that none of the candidates' television ads run nationally. They're tailored to Iowa or New Hampshire or wherever, or to individual localities therein, the better to tell the potential voters in the various states and communities what they want to hear. Again, it's the exact opposite of exerting steady, uniform leadership to forge a general consensus among U.S. citizens.)

So oldstyleliberal feels he is up the creek without a paddle when it comes to figuring out who to vote for.

oldstyleliberal realizes that there is one true "peace candidate" in the Democratic field, Dennis Kucinich, but he's a guy who claims to have seen a UFO. Thank you very much, but, no. Few if any of the other major Democratic or Republican aspirants, meanwhile, have a clear, firm commitment to getting out of Iraq.

oldstyleliberal does feel strangely attracted, oddly enough, to the candidacy of Republican Ron Paul, known mainly as a libertarian, whose political positions are summarized here. Paul opposes the Iraq war without ifs, ands, or buts, at least as far as oldstyleliberal can tell. Yet it is hard for oldstyleliberal to admit, even to himself, that he is in sympathy with those libertarian ideological principles of Paul's that don't exactly qualify the man as a liberal.

For example, Paul wants "secure borders and legal immigration," which sounds to oldstyleliberal like code talk for something which goes against true libertarian sentiments. Libertarians want a small governmental footprint, but apparently in Paul's mind that hands-off posture stops at the border with Mexico. Mexicans and others who sneak into this country illegally in search of a better way of life aren't to be considered as free to pursue happiness as anyone who is here legally.

Now, it may well be that the U.S.-Mexico border can and should be secured. (If it can't be secured, it doesn't matter whether it should be secured.) But oldstyleliberal has somehow gotten the idea that the best way to keep Mexicans at home in Mexico would be to stop subsidizing U.S. farms. The U.S. government keeps the price of, say, American corn low in Mexican marketplaces by making up the difference with a price support or a subsidy to American growers. Mexican corn growers, not getting a similar subsidy, can't compete even in their own home market. Mexican farm workers, either out of work or working for peanuts, migrate north, often illegally, looking for more income.

If our government were as small as Ron Paul, as a libertarian, would like it to be, perhaps the U.S. farm subsidies would vanish, Mexican farms could compete on an equal basis, and Mexican agricultural workers would make enough money to keep them at home with their families, where they'd rather be.

Or, take education. Columnist George F. Will has this op-ed piece in this Sunday's Post. It says, "No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the 'soft bigotry of low expectations,' has instead spawned lowered standards." NCLB legislation was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law on January 8, 2002, by President Bush.

Ostensibly intended to force states and their local school systems to show measurably higher results in the education of America's children, NCLB has, according to Will, done just the opposite:

NCLB requires states to identify, by criteria they devise, "persistently dangerous schools." But what state wants that embarrassment? The Post recently reported that last year, of America's approximately 94,000 public schools, the "persistently dangerous" numbered 46. There were none among the 9,000 schools in amazingly tranquil California.


NCLB's crucial provisions concern testing to measure yearly progress toward the goal of "universal proficiency" in math and reading by 2014. This goal is America's version of Soviet grain quotas, solemnly avowed but not seriously constraining. Most states retain the low standards they had before; some have defined proficiency down.

Per Will, a report called "The Proficiency Illusion" from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which studies education reform, claims:

The rationale for standards-based reform was that expectations would become more rigorous and uniform, but states' proficiency tests vary "wildly" in difficulty, "with 'passing scores' ranging from the 6th percentile to the 77th." Indeed, "half of the reported improvement in reading, and 70 percent of the reported improvement in mathematics, appear idiosyncratic to the state test." In some states, tests have become more demanding; but in twice as many states, the tests in at least two grades have become easier.

Again, it looks to oldstyleliberal as if a government program, however well-motivated, has failed to make things better and in some ways made things worse. The states get more money from Uncle Sam if schools and pupils pass standardized tests, so guess what? It's truly amazing how few schools and pupils flunk the state-devised tests. 6th percentile, indeed!

oldstyleliberal has never heard George Will say he is a libertarian, but he proudly owns to being an old-style conservative, which is nearly the same thing. Will regularly lambastes President Bush and his crowd for not being real conservatives who stick like glue to the U.S. Constitution's limits on their powers of office. They prosecute foreign military interventions without getting Congress to declare war. They usurp civil liberties and privacy rights. They run up huge deficits, albeit with congressional approval — Will is just as scathing about Congress's abdication of its own constitutional responsibilities.

Now that Congress is led by oldstyleliberal's own party, the Democrats, he ought to be pleased ... but he's not. The front page headline in today's Post, "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002," leads off an article revealing that Nancy Pelosi, now Speaker of the House, was among the four or eight Democratic and Republican members of Congress briefed in 2002 and 2003 about the means then being used to coerce detainees in the war against terrorism to talk, including the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Pelosi and the others, almost without exception, let out not a peep of protest — even though some of the Democrats who were in on the briefing today roundly excoriate the Bush administration for having sanctioned such tactics of torture. More hypocrisy.

So oldstyleliberal is interested in supporting a candidate who will be absolutely straight with the American people without adding pages and pages of fine print to every pledge. He is interested in supporting a candidate who will say the same things to all the people all the time. He is interested in a candidate who does not substitute firmness of tone and pugnacity of mien for true leadership. He is interested in a candidate who will exert that leadership to bring us together, rather than merely finessing our differences with rhetoric that doesn't really mean what it appears to mean. And oldstyleliberal now believes that the only way a candidate can stop being a mush-mouth today is to stop promising us the world and instead promise to shrink the government's much-too-huge footprint.

Laundry-List Politics, Begone!

In this Sunday's Washington Post, professor of psychology Drew Westen writes, in Dems, You Gotta Have Heart:

The philosopher David Hume had it right: Reason is the slave to the passions, not the other way around. Recognizing the primacy of passion in everything we do has profound implications for politics. Reason is the middle manager in decision making, not the CEO. Policies are nothing but the frontmen for values. You listen to the middleman's "pitch," but you go straight to the top when it's time to choose. You go, in other words, to your emotions — particularly your moral emotions — when you pull a lever in the voting booth.

Yet for the last 40 years virtually every Democratic candidate for president — Bill Clinton is the notable exception here — has solicited popular support based on laundry lists of issues and positions. Their basic assumption: people who take voting seriously "choose candidates by examining their positions on the issues and coolly calculating their relative costs and benefits." This is the "dispassionate vision" of the voter's mind, and Westen says it's dead wrong.

Meanwhile, a raft of successful Republican campaigns have been based on the competing, "passionate vision" of the electoral mentality: "voters are moved by the feelings that candidates and parties elicit in them and are guided by their shared values and goals."

That passionate vision is exactly what drew oldstyleliberal to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the winner of the first presidential race your blogger was old enough to follow. JFK, a Democrat, defeated Richard Nixon primarily because voters tapped into his clear vision, values, and goals, while the future that Nixon would lead us into remained inscrutable (mainly because the perspiring Republican standard bearer appeared ill-at-ease, even mendacious, when caught in the harsh glare of the lights at the historic Kennedy-Nixon TV debate).

So oldstyleliberal, who favors Democrats, passionately hopes the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and the others vying for the Oval Office in 2008 will pay close heed to Westen's insight.

Five Lies from Bush on Iraq War

The lead story in today's Baltimore Sun is Bush urges lawmakers to be patient on Iraq war. It deserves close attention, because it demonstrates the essential dishonesty and cynicism — if not the total delusionality — of this president.

The truth is what the Senate's top Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid is quoted as saying by the Sun: "... the troop escalation has been under way for six months and [in Reid's own words] 'is not working'."

• Lie number one by the president (as quoted directly from the Sun article):

The new troops "just showed up and they're now beginning operations in full, and in Washington you got people saying stop," said Bush, whose remarks about the war drew silence from an otherwise enthusiastic Cleveland audience.

As the article itself says, the troop escalation or "surge" has been at full strength since the last installment of new U.S. fighters arrived "weeks ago." The president's prefixing "weeks ago" with "only" is intentionally deceptive and misleading.

• Lie number two:

[Bush] said Congress should give the commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, "a chance to fully implement his operations" and wait for his progress report in September.

General Petraeus has been taking advantage of the chance to "fully implement operations" for several months. As oldstyleliberal pointed out recently in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq, Petraeus and the military he commands are down to what is essentially a rear-guard mission. According to the Washington Post recently (see that earlier blog post):

For its part, the [U.S.] military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, [a] military intelligence official said [under condition of anonymity], they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

Preparing to "back out as carefully as we can" after "getting it as stable as we can ... in the time available" is a definition, not of victory, but of minimizing our losses. The president is lying to us to suggest that we can still, at this late date, achieve more than that.


• Lie number three by Bush:

In advance of an interim White House report on Iraq, to be released this week, Bush acknowledged that "the Iraqis have got to do more work."

As the Post coverage shows, there is now zero chance, barring a miracle from God, that "doing more work" will produce a breakthrough:

According to several senior officials who agreed to discuss the situation in Iraq only on the condition of anonymity, the political goals that seemed achievable earlier this year remain hostage to the security situation. If the extreme violence were to decline, Iraq's political paralysis might eventually subside. "If they are arguing, accusing, gridlocking," one official said, "none of that would mean the country is falling apart if it was against the backdrop of a stabilizing security situation."

From a military perspective, however, the political stalemate is hampering security. "The security progress we're making is real," said a senior military intelligence official in Baghdad. "But it's only in part of the country, and there's not enough political progress to get us over the line in September."

In other words, the situation is gridlocked. A political stalemate in Iraq feeds the ongoing extreme violence and lack of security. Yet Iraq's political progress "remains hostage to the security situation." It's a classic catch-22. Again, the president is lying to us by suggesting it isn't.

• Lie number four from Bush:

Bush spoke in broad terms about a new strategy, saying he'd be "glad to discuss different options," based on what military commanders tell him. The White House and the Congress "can work together on a way forward" after Petraeus reports in September, he said.

Bush has never, ever been "glad to discuss different options" concerning Iraq. Never, ever.

• Lie number five:

The president warned of the threat posed by al-Qaida in Iraq, describing it repeatedly as part of the organization behind the Sept. 11 attacks, a linkage that anti-terrorism experts say is inaccurate and misleading. ...

"The same people that attacked us on Sept. 11 is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children" in Iraq, Bush said.

As the article itself shows, "al-Qaida in Iraq" — which is the name of the organization — did not even exist at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, it exists as a direct result of the Bush war in Iraq:

The terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in Iraq "are not the same," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University terrorism specialist, who called Bush's statement "inaccurate, if not misleading."

Today's al-Qaida in Iraq fighters "are patently not the same people who attacked us on 9/11," Hoffman wrote [to the Sun] in an e-mail response. U.S. military authorities in Iraq believe al-Qaida in Iraq is made up of 90 percent Iraqis and 10 percent foreign fighters, he said.

Insurgents in Iraq and the al-Qaida cell responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks "are only in the very loosest sense part of the same organization," Hoffman said.

Al-Qaida in Iraq is a Sunni group organized by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who declared allegiance to al-Qaida in 2004. Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June 2006.

If it weren't for our invasion of Iraq, it's doubtful al-Qaida in Iraq would have gotten off the ground.

Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?

The real trouble behind the failed war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal believes, is the neo-cons.

The term, which is short for "neo-conservatives," applies to those whose politics derive from something that happened in the 1960s and '70s. In the later '60s, many on the American Left turned into radical revolutionaries, and near-chaos broke out in the wake of the Vietnam war.

Many former leftists, some of whom were once communists of one stripe or another, then felt "mugged by reality" and shifted their sentiments to an obdurate form of anti-communism. These former liberals called themselves "neo-conservatives."

Later, when the Cold War ended, neo-cons congratulated themselves on a worldview which held that America's first duty is to use any means possible to eliminate unfriendly, anti-democratic regimes around the world.

The Bush Administration has always been neo-con friendly, what with Dick Cheney being the Vice President and Donald Rumsfeld being the original Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld's underlings included the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo-con thinkers.

In the post-Cold War world, the neo-cons saw a need to project American power, military and otherwise, into other arenas. It the post-9/11 world, Wolfowitz and those like him saw an opportunity to do what Wolfowitz had longed to do since the 1980s, when he broke from the official line of the Reagan Administration by denouncing Saddam Hussein at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. Namely, Wolfowitz and his fellow neo-cons wanted to use U.S. military might to topple Saddam Hussein.


Neo-cons are not real conservatives. They are true believers who have become a power elite, while real conservatives believe power elites need to to be held in check by keeping government small.

Neo-cons are quite comfortable with other power elites — particularly money elites. In fact, many neo-cons are in the money elite. This is why a neo-con administration like Bush's is unfailingly pro-big oil, pro-big business, and pro-multinational corporation.

Let us not forget that Dick Cheney, when he wasn't in government, worked for Halliburton Energy Services, a multinational corporation with operations in over 120 countries. Halliburton's middle name is now "energy," but used to be just plain "oil." President George H. W. Bush, the current president's father, once worked for a corporation that is now part of Halliburton, Dresser Industries ... as did George H. W. Bush's father, the former Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, who when he was not in government was a Wall Street executive banker.

So when opponents of the current president and his war in Iraq wonder whether Bush went wrong out of a firm ideological commitment to neo-conservatism or out of personal loyalty to this country's entrenched power-money elites, the class into which he was born and raised, the correct answer is ... both!


We are rapidly approaching a make-or-break moment concerning the immediate future of the war in Iraq, as oldstyleliberal tried to convey in Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq. The recent "surge" in troop strength has failed to turn the tide. Come next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq. Military sources, speaking to the news media on condition of anonymity, are saying things like that until then, "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can."

It's fair to say that that's now the best-case scenario. There's no longer talk of victory of any sort, by any definition, in Iraq.

Fir that reason, real conservatives in Congress have to step up to the plate and break with the neo-con power-money elites. They need to take their rightful place in a veto-proof majority that will require a shift in policy in Iraq on the part of President Bush — specifically, a commitment to an endgame or exit strategy that will marshal our remaining military and diplomatic options in the interest of leaving the country we invaded in as stable a situation as we can manage.

Congress Needs To Impose an Endgame in Iraq

Today's Washington Post has two articles, White House Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains and Bombings Kill at Least 170 in Iraq, that together tell oldstyleliberal that Congress needs to stop shilly-shallying and impose an endgame in Iraq on an unwilling President Bush.

The first article says, in effect, that no one in the know thinks the troop "surge" Bush called for in January is meeting the benchmarks set for it by him and added to by Congress as a condition for paying for it. Though the final report on its success or failure will not be due until September, an interim report due next week will admit only minor progress has been made.

Meanwhile, the optimistic claim that sectarian killings in Iraq were in fact down in June, after a particularly bloody May, is offset by the second article, documenting at least 170 Iraqi deaths in one 18-hour period. The article says 8 U.S. troops died in the same period of less than a day.

In another article, Special Report: Congress's War Over the War, the Post describes the difficulties four U.S. House members and senators, from both sides of the aisle, are having deciding on an appropriate course of action in Iraq. One of them, Rep. Johnny Isakson, a conservative Republican from Georgia loyal to the president, says the most persuasive argument he hears from the war's opponents is, "There needs to be an endgame."

"I agree fully," oldstyleliberal would like to tell Congressman Isakson. "There needs to be an endgame, and the president doesn't have one. That's why Congress has to take the bit in its teeth and impose one."


It seems like all the experts are saying the same thing: the window within which the U.S. will hold much sway at all in Iraq is shutting rapidly, no matter what Washington does. By early next spring, the pressure of ongoing troop rotations will force us to reduce our military footprint in Iraq, willy-nilly.

Many pundits have been calling for some form of "soft partition" in Iraq, with semi-autonomous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd sectors. The Post coverage seems to indicate that kind of thing may be evolving in de facto fashion, anyway.

The Post's informants don't think Iran or any other regional power will absolutely control any of these sectors. Still, they will exert influence that is presently unwelcome in Washington.

This is true in part because Iraq's government and political system are now deadlocked, paralyzed. It might be different if U.S. and Iraqi forces were able to dampen the sectarian violence, country-wide ... but they're not strong enough to do so. What would make them get strong enough? Well, if the Iraqi government got more resolute, then just maybe ... but, alas, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is weak and corrupt. The Iraqi army and security forces, with their sectarian allegiances, are accordingly as much a part of the problem as they are a part of the solution.

In other words, each component of the two-prong solution the president hopes for is blocked by ... the other component. An increase in governmental staunchness is blocked by how ineffectual the Iraqi armed forces currently are, but any improvement there is forestalled by the weakness of the government. It's crazy to expect such a government to command the loyal devotion of its army, no?


Meanwhile, the time window is closing. The hourglass is running out of sand.

Here's the current bottom line, according to the Post coverage:

For its part, the [U.S.] military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, [a] military intelligence official said [under condition of anonymity], they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

The problem there, as oldstyleliberal sees it, is that the "we" spoken of by the military intelligence official includes only the military. It doesn't include the State Department or the diplomats. It doesn't include Washington, really.

That's a recipe for disaster. If the war in Iraq to date has proven anything, it's that nothing good happens unless U.S. military and civilian decision-makers are on the same page, acting in concert, with a common strategy and set of goals. That happened, albeit to a grudging, limited extent, earlier this year when Congress joined with President Bush to sanction the "surge" — and there was, as a result, less sectarian violence in June.

Now Congress has to step up to the plate again. It has to impose, by a veto-proof majority, an endgame that will salvage as much as possible in Iraq before we have to "back out," as the military intelligence official put it. By "as much as possible" is meant just this: some vestige of stability and order in Iraq, some ability for the Iraqi people, with the assistance of their admittedly less-than-disinterested neighbors in the region, to avert a bloodbath when we leave. No more, or less, than that.

Code Red for Liberty?

Today's The Baltimore Sun contains an article, Challenge to NSA spy program is rejected, which makes oldstyleliberal even more paranoid about the way things are going in America today.

A panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, by a 2-1 margin, overruled District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, among others. The plaintiffs alleged the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens is unconstitutional. Judge Taylor found for the plaintiffs, after which the Justice Department appealed the case to the 6th Circuit on grounds that the complainants lacked legal standing:

Justice Department attorney Gregory Garre argued that the plaintiffs, including the [ACLU], had alleged only "speculative" harm done to them, which would be insufficient to grant them standing to sue. The only way the plaintiffs could find out whether they had been the targets of wiretapping, he said, was if they obtained information about the surveillance program — in violation of the "state secrets" privilege.

Talk about a catch-22! If the 6th Circuit ruling stands, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, as NSA's post-9/11 warrantless eavesdropping initiative is called, is deemed legal until someone with standing successfully challenges it in court. To demonstrate standing, however, the challengers first have to show they've been wiretapped ... which can never happen, since that information is protected by the government's "state secrets" privilege.

So the neo-cons in charge win another one. Note that Judges Alice M. Batchelder and Julia Smith Gibbons of the 6th Circuit — the two judges that sided with the government in the NSA case — are both Republican appointees. Anyone see a pattern here?

Impeach Bush, Cheney!

It took President Bush's commutation of "Scooter" Libby's sentence for lying to a grand jury to break this camel's back! oldstyleliberal now thinks the president deserves to be impeached.

So does Vice President Dick Cheney, what with all this bunkum about the Vice Presidency being a fourth branch of government, accountable to no one.
While we're at it, if it is possible to impeach Supreme Court justices, today's "conservative majority" has to go. oldstyleliberal doesn't know which of their decisions this term is the most egregious: the gutting of school desegregation programs under Brown v. Board of Education (see here and here); the gutting of long-settled law prohibiting makers of consumer goods from price-fixing with retailers (see here, with critical article here); the setting of an all-too-short deadline after which employees charging employers with sex discrimination cannot sue (see here); or what. Add to that upholding the partial-birth abortion ban (with which oldstyleliberal happens to agree) and you have a clear picture of a Roberts court that has veered sharply to the right.

Seriously, folks ... what is happening now is truly scary. All the stuff happening abroad: secret prisons, endless detentions without trial. And all the stuff happening at home: warrantless wiretaps, various other kinds of government snooping, the suspension of habeas corpus rights. oldstyleliberal could go on and on, but the list is already familiar to everyone not in a coma since 2001.

oldstyleliberal has made an honest effort during the Bush presidency to be moderate in his criticism, and to seek ways in which we non-conservatives could look on the bright side. No more! All it once it becomes clear to oldstyleliberal that the neo-cons are playing for keeps. The guess here is that the hard right realizes that, come January 2009, they will be swept out of power in the White House, as the Democrats further solidify the hold over Congress they gained in the 2006 elections.

oldstyleliberal will even go so far as to say that these radicals who are running things in the Executive Branch are bent on bringing down the whole edifice of "liberal" policies of the recent (and not so recent) past, while there's still time for them to work their evil intentions. One of the prime beneficiaries, obviously, will be corporate America.

In other words, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has been right about the Bush Administration all along ... and oldstyleliberal hereby takes back everything bad he has ever said about him.

Back to the Nuclear Power Future?

"Fight two big threats with one energy plan," reads the headline of a recent op-ed piece by former National Security Council member Daniel Poneman, published in The Baltimore Sun on May 14, 2007. The column proposes that we in this increasingly "global" world need to create new policy by which to monitor and control a much-needed proliferation of nuclear power generating plants around the planet.

(Since the column at the Sun website will cost money to retrieve after 14 days, check it out at the Forum for International Policy website by clicking on the title or the leadoff hotlink of this post.)

Why are nuclear reactors the way to go today, energy-wise, despite the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the recent past? Two words: global warming.

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades that is projected to continue in the foreseeable future. If the planet's atmosphere and oceans warm too much for too long, sea levels will rise and inundate coastlines as polar icecaps melt. There will be undesirable changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation, possibly with unprecedented floods and droughts. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, reduced summer stream flows, species extinctions, and increases in the ranges of disease vectors, exposing more of us to killer infectious diseases.

In other words, if we allow global warming to go on unchecked, many scientists think we are playing with fire.

Conservatives accuse such "liberal" scientists of inventing the global-warming scare out of shoddy evidence, overplaying it, and/or falsely attributing it to human activity, particularly the burning of carbon-based fuels that spew "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. oldstyleliberal thinks the conservatives are wrong to make light of this threat. He believes global warming needs to be taken seriously — which means we need to find alternatives to carbon-based energy.

Such as, for instance, a reinvigorated nuclear power program, on a global scale.


We also need to get on board with the idea of a "carbon tax." Libertarian-minded Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman recently weighed in on the issue with "Saving the Earth sensibly," a column in which he preferred taxing carbon emissions to "a lot of command-and-control programs that micromanage various industries on the assumption that the government knows best" — an assumption he finds especially ludicrous with respect to environmental protection initiatives.

A carbon tax is is a tax on energy sources which emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since CO₂ is the principal greenhouse-gas culprit in man-made global climate change. It would consist of a levy on the burning of fossil fuels — coal, petroleum products such as gasoline and aviation fuel, and natural gas — in proportion to their carbon content. Since coal has more carbon by weight than petroleum or natural gas, the tax on coal would be higher than than on the other two. Economic forces would then move us away from coal, and to a lesser extent away from oil and gas, toward alternative sources of energy.

Such as, again, nuclear power.


The Poneman article points out the dangers here, the principal one being the proliferation of nuclear arms.

You cannot engage in nuclear power generation without the creation of highly enriched uranium to serve as fuel for the reactors, and later of plutonium that is destined to be separated out of the spent fuel and reprocessed. Both can be diverted into the making of bombs.

The enriched uranium in nuclear fuel is not itself concentrated enough to build a practical nuclear bomb, but the same plants and technology used to enrich uranium for power generation can be used to make the highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb.

Moreover, the plutonium produced in power-generating reactors, if concentrated through reprocessing, can be used for a bomb, or, if a reactor is operated on very short fueling cycles, bomb-grade plutonium can be produced by the reactor itself.

We currently fear North Korea, Iran, and other countries intend to develop a nuclear-weapons capability, under the cover of fostering a "peaceful" nuclear power industry. "How can we preserve the ability of nuclear energy to reduce global warming," asks Poneman, "without sparking a nuclear arms race?"


There are basically two approaches, Poneman indicates: the one he opposes, and the one he proposes.

The one he rejects is to continue to rely on individual governments' unilateral "ability to cut off nuclear fuel services on political grounds, such as human rights abuses or other valid concerns about another government's conduct."

He says that

[U]ranium enrichment and plutonium separation technologies are complex and expensive. So nations that seek nuclear energy but not weapons may opt to buy or lease nuclear fuel rather than building their own plants, just as most have opted to buy or lease (rather than build) their own commercial airliners.

Such "nuclear fuel services" represent a pipeline, not for oil but for nuclear fuel, whose "tap" may at present be cut off by, say, the United States government acting unilaterally. If Iran or North Korea misbehave, turn off the tap. That kind of thing.

Poneman opposes that sort of policy-waging on the grounds that it only forces the more antisocial regimes on the world scene to go it alone. That would be counterproductive. Better, Poneman says, to put the matter in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency: "guarantees could be backed by the [IAEA], which can serve as the supplier of last resort as well as the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred."

The IAEA would thus guarantee that, say, Country X, absent "a material breach of their nonproliferation obligations," would have a reliable supply of nuclear fuel for its civilian reactors. If individual countries such as the U.S. try to cut X off, nuclearly speaking, IAEA would undertake to fill the gap — again, absent "a material breach" of X's "nonproliferation obligations."

Who would serve as "the appropriate authority to judge whether a material breach has occurred"? Again, the IAEA.


Some might react to Poneman's proposal as internationalism run amok. oldstyleliberal thinks it might work ... particularly if the U.S. can sign on the dotted line along with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, China, and other global bigshots. It's destabilizing to keep on with the present order of things, in which, when a country like Iran seems (maybe) bent on diverting civilian nuclear materials/technology into a weapons program, policy wonks in the U.S. start talking about bombing the hell out of the country as a prophylactic gesture.

Better to encourage countries that are truly committed to peaceable nuclear power uses to tap into the global pipeline in full confidence that as long as they stay peaceable, the valve will not be shut off.

Bremer's Defense

This Sunday's edition of The Washington Post had a to-the-point article by L. Paul Bremer, former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, "What We Got Right in Iraq." Bremer has been roundly vilified by opponents of the Iraq war for supposed mistakes he made on his watch, errors in judgment which they claim did as much as anything else to lose the war, by destabilizing Iraq irreparably. Bremer's article summarizes his self-defense.

The two main charges against Bremer have been that he should not have decapitated the ruling Baath political party of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein and that he should not have dissolved the Iraqi army. But Bremer shows that "de-Baathification" was absolutely necessary if Iraq was to have "any chance at a brighter future," and that the army had essentially evaporated away by the time he arrived on the scene.


Not only did the mostly Shiite majority of the army's rank and file decamp in the wake of our successful invasion of their country, they stripped the army's bases and supplies of matériel bare as they did so. There was no army left to reconstitute.

As for "de-Baathification," Bremer says it had to happen for the same reason that Eisenhower's conquering army had to destroy the Nazi party in post-WWII Germany:

Like the Nazi Party, the Baath Party ran all aspects of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi neighborhood had a party cell. Baathists recruited children to spy on their parents, just as the Nazis had. Hussein even required members of his dreaded intelligence services to read "Mein Kampf."

"Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") was the memoir Adolf Hitler wrote in prison before he and his National Socialists — the Nazis — took the reins of power in Germany in the 1930s. In it, he laid out the program (subjugating his own people, exacting retribution against the hated Jews, conquering the rest of Europe) which he would follow if given the chance, along with its ideological basis.

The Nazis were perfect totalitarians. So too, says Bremer, were the Baathists. Accordingly, "the ... policy of removing top Baath officials from government was right and necessary." Otherwise, openly expressed Iraqi fears "that the United States planned to leave unrepentant Baathists in senior government and security positions" would have festered among Iraq's citizens and nipped in the bud any hope of democracy emerging in their country.

In concluding his self-defense, Bremer writes:

No doubt some members of the Baath Party and the old army have joined the insurgency. But they are not fighting because they weren't given a chance to earn a living [under CPA policies]. They're fighting because they want to topple a democratically elected government and reestablish a Baathist dictatorship. The true responsibility for today's bloodshed rests with these people and their al-Qaeda collaborators.

Bremer thus paints a picture of the Iraq war as waged mainly between a coalition of Sunni Muslims — former Baathists and their present al-Qaeda collaborators — and everyone else. The fact that the Baathists and al-Qaeda have different ultimate goals — the former are basically secular; the latter want to spread the rule of Islamic religious law — makes little difference now. Nor does the fact that there were no important links between the two organizations at the time we invaded Iraq, despite what the Bush administration was saying back then.

That view of the matter makes sense to oldstyleliberal. Before we invaded Iraq, Baath rule under Saddam had one redeeming quality: it made for a degree of stability in the region. But when Saddam did a Hitler and annexed Kuwait at the point of a gun, thus upsetting the apple cart, the U.S. and its allies went to war to roll that incursion back and re-institute the status quo ante — which is arguably what Britain, France, and others should have done when Hitler rolled into the Sudetenland.

The downside of allowing Saddam to stay at the helm in Iraq was, per Bremer, the fact that Saddam ruled through "the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services." Substitute "Baath" for "Nazi," "the Iraqi army" for "the Reich's security services," and you get the picture.


It is a picture that oldstyleliberal feels today's American left has been more than a little blind to. As a budding liberal in the 1950s and '60s, oldstyleliberal was imbued with the sense that Nazi-style tyranny was the worst thing that ever happened, bar none. But his liberal contemporaries today have little to say about this indictment from Bremer:

It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old [Iraqi] army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves.

Civilian genocide and mass graves would seem to oldstyleliberal to constitute, if anything could, a call to arms to those of a liberal mentality.


The rhetoric and tactics the Bush administration has used to justify and prolong the Iraq war continue to baffle oldstyleliberal, he readily admits. He feels he has no special grip on the actual facts, either. Will the war be won? Can it be won? What would constitute a win? How will we know when the troops can come home? What is the correct exit strategy? The effective role of regional diplomacy in all this? All these are questions oldstyleliberal can't answer. It seems no one really can.

Yet it seems to oldstyleliberal that Bremer is right. Barring a full-scale roundup of former Baathists in the wake of our 2003 military victory — which would have been impossible, under the circumstances; look how long it took us to find Saddam Hussein — our only strategy was (and is) to work against their ongoing troublemaking. We had to expect it. And we all needed to recognize

• that the Baathist remnant would surely join forces with al-Qaeda at some point
• that their combined attacks on Iraq's majority Shiites would eventually provoke bloody retaliations
• and that this situation could not be quickly or easily dealt with by the fledgling democratic regime in Baghdad, without outside help
  

We should also have figured that military and police power, wielded by us and our invader allies or by Iraqis in their brand new uniforms, could not alone quell the instability. Diplomacy, too, was going to be needed — among all the players in the region, including Iran and Syria. What was Bush thinking in resisting this? Exactly what was Baghdad supposed to do with Iran, Syria, and the other states in the region when left to its own devices, post the eventual U.S. withdrawal? Or did anyone look that far ahead?

But never mind. This is where we are today. Call it what you like — civil war, chaos — we have to find a way to turn the page. We need to pull out all the stops and work for, if nothing else, stability without tyranny in Iraq. That's the overall goal.

If this means our troops must, for now, stay in harm's way there without a firm timetable for coming home, so be it. If it means we have to negotiate multilaterally or one-on-one with despised regimes in the region, fine. If it means we have to be open to reconfiguring Iraq as three semi-autonomous democratic regions, one Kurd, one Sunni, one Shiite, well and good.

oldstyleliberal feels he will be voting in 2008 for the presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican, who best embodies such an approach.

The Pursuit of Sunniness

oldstyleliberal finds he is more and more an old-style conservative.

By that he means he seems to be channeling political columnist George F. Will, whose recent op-ed "The Limits Of Sunniness" in The Washington Post he finds right on point.

Will's topic is sunniness, a defining characteristic of the late conservative president Ronald Reagan. Reagan, writes Will, is psychoanalyzed in John Patrick Diggins's new book, "Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History." Diggins suggests Reagan

... imbibed his mother's form of Christianity, a strand of 19th-century Unitarianism from which Reagan took a foundational belief that he expressed in a 1951 letter: "God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good."

Will expands this notion by likening the Reagan outlook to that of the 19th-century American essayist and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson:

This logic — God is good, therefore so are God-given desires — leads to the Emersonian faith that we please God by pleasing ourselves. Therefore there is no need for the people to discipline their desires. So, no leader needs to suggest that the public has shortcomings and should engage in critical self-examination.

James Madison, our fourth president and father of the U.S. Constitution, knew different, holding that "government's principal function is to resist, modulate and even frustrate the public's unruly passions, which arise from desires." Madison did not mistakenly equate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of sunniness.


Wherein lies the difference? A clue comes from Michael Shermer's "Skeptic" column, "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction," in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American (not yet online at the time of this writing).

Shermer looks at several recent books on the topic of "why happiness can be so elusive in today's world." One of them is Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, by Gregory Berns. Berns, an Emory University psychiatrist, has it that (in Shermer's words):

... the pursuit of pleasure lands us on a never-ending hedonic treadmill that paradoxically leads to misery. "Satisfaction [on the other hand] is an emotion that captures the uniquely human need to impart meaning to one's activities," Berns concludes. "While you might find pleasure by happenstance — winning the lottery, possessing the genes for a sunny temperament, or having the luck not to live in poverty — satisfaction can arise only by the conscious decision to do something. And this makes all the difference in the world, because it is only your own actions for which you may take responsibility and credit."

There is a link between George Will's vaunted Madisonianism and the pursuit of satisfaction rather than sunniness. The liberal agenda today has degenerated into merely pandering to people in their insistence that, if they are not "happy" — if their mood is not "sunny" — it is up to the government to fix things.

The guiding liberal assumption is that there is (to borrow Shermer's phrase) a "multiplicity of wonderfulness" to be enjoyed by one and all, if only the government would unlock the treasure chest. Logic would seem to dictate that a good way to unlock it would be to equalize our income levels. Hence, progressive taxation, which robs the rich to fatten the poor.

But, Shermer notes, studies show that people consistently favor a choice such as earning $50,000 a year, when others make $25,000, to earning $100,000 a year when others receive $250,000. Paradoxically, what people think would make them happy is to have more than others have — even if the absolute amount is less!

Meanwhile, the truth is that increasing yearly income above $20,000 per person doesn't make people any happier in the long term. Sure, an income boost makes us all temporarily giddy. Yet it wears off quickly. Soon we desire another happiness hit.


It's the same with sex, says Shermer:

Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht emphasized this point in The Happiness Myth ... . her deep and thoughtful historical perspective demonstrates just how time- and culture-dependent is all this happiness research. As she writes, "The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense." Take sex. "A century ago, an average man who had not had sex in three years might have felt proud of his health and forbearance, and a woman might have praised herself for health and happiness benefits of ten years of abstinence."

Today we fool ourselves into believing "an array of sex partners adds to the spice of life." Today we have a government which in the name of a "right to privacy" won't deny a woman a legal surgical procedure to end her unwanted pregnancy. The government's "principal function ... to resist, modulate and even frustrate the public's unruly passions, which arise from desires" is lost in history.


oldstyleliberal, an heir to Emersonian thought, used to support legalized abortion. More and more he regrets that. He finds he has become more of a Madisonian.

That makes him a conservative à la George Will. Too bad that today's conservatism has identified itself with Ronald Reagan, and more recently with George W. Bush, who embodies that oxymoron, the "big-government conservative." According to author Diggins, per Will:

... big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. "Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it." Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government -- a dispenser of unending entitlements -- they will get ever larger government.

The difference between big-government conservatives and big-government liberals? The former won't raise your taxes to motor the hedonic treadmill of government entitlements, and the latter will.

Muscular Moderates?

oldstyleliberal thinks the big story of the 2006 elections was the emergence of a "muscular middle" in the Democratic Party, represented by the likes of Senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia ... as well as in the GOP, represented by the re-election as California governor of Arnold Schwarzenegger. "The Middle Muscles In" is how New York Times columnist David Brooks put it. For both parties, "mobilizing the base" à la Karl Rove has suddenly ceased being the order of the day.

The "base," of course, consists of the ideologically extremist activists who dominate each party at primary election time: extremists of the left, for the Democrats; of the right, for Republicans. Because the two parties have long ceased to cover the whole ideological spectrum, as each party once did, each party seemingly has a base and a middle — but no one in opposition to act as an internal counterweight to the extremist base. Until now. Maybe.

"For the most part," Brooks says, "they [the voters] exchanged moderate Republicans for conservative Democrats." Thus, Connecticut returned pro-Iraq War Democrat Joe Lieberman to the U.S. Senate as an independent. He will caucus with the very Democrats who abandoned him and boosted his victor in the Connecticut primary, the antiwar challenger Ned Lamont, in his stead. Were Lieberman to refuse to caucus with his erstwhile party, the Democratic caucus would boast only 50 members, not an absolute majority — and that number only because a second independent, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will also join Democratic voting ranks in the Senate.

For his part, Virginia Senator-Elect Jim Webb, who proudly served in the Reagan Administration as Secretary of the Navy and in Vietnam as a U. S. Marine, opposed the Iraq War. His razor-thin margin over GOP incumbent George Allen is as responsible as anything for putting the Democrats over the top in the next Senate. So the new Democratic surge of moderates is actually as divided as ever over Iraq, right? Lieberman supports the war, Webb doesn't. What are we to make of that? What will the Democratic Party make of it?

And what of all those arch-liberal Democrats who are used to taking charge of their party ... even if in the recent past it has meant losing elections left and right? Where will the heart of the party be found in the next two years, during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election? Where exactly is the heart of the Democratic Party?

Look at it this way. It's pretty clear that the "muscular moderates" who decided this off-year election don't want the government held hostage to the extremists of either party. They thumbed their noses at President Bush because he got in bed with neo-conservative idealists and started the Iraq War. Now the question is: what will the moderates do if people like Webb and Lieberman get into bed with the leftist idealists among the Democrats?

oldstyleliberal doesn't really care whether they and their ilk do so out of personal conviction, or not. Though not arch-liberals themselves, they may still drift left to pander to the arch-liberals because the left controls the party, the party controls the Congress, and they want their share in all the power and glory. Decades ago, a left-leaning Democratic centrist such as John F. Kennedy could point out that he couldn't win the White House without the help of his conservative southern brethren. No longer. The southern conservatives switched parties at about the time of the Reagan Revolution.

So will the hard left overreach and try to assert itself too mightily in coming years, insisting on such immoderate bugaboos as legalized gay marriage and a no-holds-barred defense of unfettered abortion rights? Or will the muscular moderates stand firm and resist such a leftward intra-party dynamic? Stay tuned. It should be interesting.

Basic, Needful Things

National Public Radio's "Prairie Home Companion" storyteller Garrison Keillor has an op-ed column, a recent installment of which was "What really makes our nation strong" in The (Baltimore) Sun. Keillor is a Minnesota liberal, which means his ideological urges are directed toward enabling "just folks" like you and me. It is an approach which resonates strongly indeed with oldstyleliberal.

This particular piece is a scathing characterization of he whom Keillor often calls, euphemistically, the Current Occupant, with all his minions. These people don't understand Americans at all. They don't get it that:

We really are one people at heart. We all believe that when thousands of people are trapped in the Superdome without food or water, it is the duty of government, the federal government if necessary, to come to their rescue and to restore them to the civil mean and not abandon them to fate. Right there is the basis of liberalism.

The People Now In Charge fail to grasp, for example, Americans' workaday "sagas of ferocious parental love vs. stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic, needful things," such as a decent education for their children. Some frustrated parents have "uprooted their families and moved to Minnesota so their children could attend better schools. You couldn't tell if those parents were Republicans or Democrats. They simply were prepared to move mountains so their kids could have a chance. So are we all."


Much as these things needed to be said, and however much Keillor should be applauded for saying them, oldstyleliberal feels the Minnesotan ought to have noticed something else about "basic, needful things." Liberals and conservatives agree that they're what politics is all about, after all. As Keillor says, "that's the mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we had."

The difference is that for liberals, "our kids" is a global, inclusive category; no one's children are excluded. For conservatives, "our kids" means the kids of my family, in this particular community of like-minded individuals who have made similar life choices.

This is because conservatives see "basic, needful things" as not being abundant enough to go around. They need a marketplace to ration access to them. Those who cannot outbid — because they have made "bad life choices" — will simply have to do without.

Keillor's way of putting the same thing, with reference to varied responses to hurricane Katrina: "Conservatives tried to introduce a new idea — it's your fault if you get caught in a storm — and this idea was rejected by nine out of 10 people once they saw the pictures. The issue is whether we care about people who don't get on television."

But maybe the real issue is whether we even care enough about people whose misery does get shown on TV.

At any rate, Garrison Keillor has a tin ear for all "bad life choices" arguments, in whatever guise the may come in. More power to him!

Vicious Cycle of Child Abuse, Neglect

Alvin Poussaint, an African American authority on child psychiatry, says blacks and other Americans need to pay more attention to a festering problem in child-rearing among poorer, often single, black parents. In "Spare the rod, save the child," columnist Clarence Page, who is himself black, gives the sorry details. The column appeared recently in The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.

The immediate problem, per Page, is that "African-American kids are being expelled from preschool at a much higher rate than other racial or ethnic groups ... African-American children are twice as likely to be expelled from preschool programs as white or Latino children, and five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children." Why? Poussaint says it's not racial profiling by school officials that's mostly to blame. Instead, "early anger" among three- and four-year-old black children leads to their misbehavior and expulsion.

That anger in turn often results, quite predictably, from parental abuse and neglect.

We're talking here in part about the 80 percent of black parents who believe that when their kids act up, they ought to "beat the devil out of them," Poussaint says. The psychiatrist goes on: "And research shows the more you beat them, the angrier they get. It is not good discipline."

Just as wrongheaded as outright corporal punishment is "black parents cursing, shaking or slapping their prekindergarten kids or demeaning them with statements like, 'You're no good, just like your father'." Or, the parent will simply neglect to discipline the child in a more appropriate way. Page then adds:

Single parents, usually moms, can easily be overwhelmed by the challenges involved in raising children, especially boys. In the worst cases they pass the consequences of their anger down from one generation to another.

Those consequences can later include social isolation, unruly school behavior and violence. Lacking appreciation at home, kids will often shop for it out on the street.

So childhood abuse/neglect not only breeds — via internalized anger that is always going to find some outlet — street crime, gang violence, drug use, educational failure, entrenched poverty, and other social pathologies. It also produces, eventually, parents who have their own bottled-up anger and who take it out on a new generation of kids: theirs. And the vicious cycle begins again.


This is an insight which oldstyleliberal finds most compelling. Anger breeds anger, via childhood abuse and neglect, with social ills in this country as its unfortunate side effect. We all need to pay attention to this syndrome; race is, after all, the third rail of American politics.

oldstyleliberal is accordingly mindful of the side effect of the side effect, as one might call it: non-black Americans develop a negative impression of black Americans, which turns into a stereotype, which turns into racial profiling and worse.

Thus we all need to be open to possible solutions to this problem. "What," asks Page, "can be done?" He answers that a Yale study "found that preschools that had psychologists and other support for their teachers had a lower expulsion rate. Back at home, communities may need to provide more resources, whether voluntary or through local social service agencies, to help parents cope. We need to help more parents learn about what works best in raising children — before the problems with their families become our problems."

Catamaran Politics

Catamaran: two hulls joined by a frame

The image to the right is a picture of (a military version of) a catamaran. It is from this Wikipedia article, which defines the catamaran as "a type of boat or ship consisting of two hulls joined by a frame."

oldstyleliberal defines "catamaran politics" as a habit of preferring, as it were, the frame to the hulls. Think of the hulls as the ideological right and left wings; it doesn't matter which hull represents which ideological wing. The object of catamaran politics is to keep the ship of state perfectly balanced over the two wings.

President Bill Clinton was a master of catamaran politics — which have also been called "triangulation" and "Third Way liberalism" — especially in his approach to reforming welfare. Political pundit Joe Klein writes of the topic in "Three Cheers for Triangulation: What Lieberman's primary defeat means," in a recent issue of Time magazine:

... [Clinton's] philosophy was both successful and profound. It proposed the achievement of liberal ends through market-oriented conservative means. Welfare reform, which combined a work requirement with significant financial incentives for the working poor, was the best example of how the philosophy might work. Unfortunately, Monica Lewinsky's thong show prevented further successes — and Al Gore and John Kerry foolishly sidled away from the Third Way, toward the [Democratic] party's electorally lethal special-interest groups.

Another name for what I'm calling catamaran politics, says Klein, is "bipartisan moderation — which has the additional advantage [over the extremism of either political wing] of being the highest form of patriotism and the only route to victory in a time of war."

Klein says the defeat of three-term Democratic senator Joe Lieberman in the recent Connecticut primary, at the hands of Ned Lamont, an anti-Iraq War candidate, set off a war of words between Lamont-supporting "blognuts" of the left and Bush administration "wingnuts" of the right. The latter were led by Vice President Dick Cheney, "the nation's wingnut in chief," who "actually said Lieberman's defeat would give aid and comfort to our terrorist 'adversaries and al-Qaeda types'."

The former, repesented by "Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org and therefore, perhaps, the nation's blognut in chief," gloated about Lieberman's loss as the "death of triangulation."

If Pariser is correct, it's bad news, writes Klein:

It was Bush's disastrous decision to go to war — and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources — that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush's feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. [Bush political strategist Karl] Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation's best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal's quasi-wingnut editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, "[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well."

Accordingly, "the essential felony of the Bush White House [is] that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support." Bush spurns catamaran politics at a time when Clintonian deftness is sorely needed.

So, too, does the far left wing of Clinton's own party. Alas and alack.

Tipping Point Against Iraq War?

Heretofore, it has admittedly been difficult for oldstyleliberal to answer the simple question, Should we get out of Iraq? Recent shifts in the attitudes of pundits he respects have brought him to a tipping point, however. He now thinks a "win" in Iraq to be too much to hope for.

"Snake Eyes," a brief article by Hendrik Hertzberg in the August 21, 2006, New Yorker pretty much says it all. Hertzberg compares a recent opinion piece by centrist and former war supporter Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times to the famous on-the-air renunciation of the Vietnam War by Walter Cronkite in 1968. (The Friedman piece may be read for free here.) Friedman writes:

It seemed to me over the last three years that, even with all the Bush team’s missteps, we had to give our Iraqi partners a chance to produce a transitional government, then write a constitution, then hold an election and then, finally, put together their first elected cabinet. But now they have done all of that — and the situation has only worsened ... we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.

Accordingly, says Friedman, "we need to try a last-ditch Bosnia-like peace conference that would bring together all of Iraq’s factions and neighbors ... For such a conference to come about, though, the U.S. would probably need to declare its intention to leave."

And, Hertzberg adds:

In a Washington Post column a day [earlier than Friedman's piece], the relentlessly centrist David S. Broder, citing his colleague Thomas E. Ricks’s new book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” admitted that “the hope for victory is gone” and deplored “the answer from Bush,” which he characterized this way: “Carry on. Do not waver. And do not question the logic of prolonging the agony.”

Broder's opinion piece, "Doubling Two Bad Bets?", chastised the Bush administration for its blind stubbornness in holding out for both the total destruction of Hezbollah by Israeli forces in Lebanon and the eventual U.S. quelling of the sectarian insurgents in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal agrees with Friedman and Broder. As Friedman says, "Since the Bush team never gave us a Plan A for Iraq, it at least owes us a Plan B."

Moral Questions in Israel's Struggle with Hezbollah

As might be intuited from a recent post, The Pan-Islamist Threat, oldstyleliberal tends to side with Israel when it is attacked from within or without by those who loudly say they oppose its very existence. Hezbollah, now attacking Israel from Lebanon, would seem to qualify in that regard. So it is with a great deal of reluctance that oldstyleliberal concludes that the way Israel is presently conducting its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon leaves way too much to be desired, in terms of moral propriety.

The reasoning oldstyleliberal employs to arrive at this sad conclusion is aptly and succinctly presented in this August 4 article by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. The title of the article summarizes its basic perspective: "Fog of War Is No Cover for Causing Civilian Deaths." Though "an honest reckoning of the conduct of Israeli forces in Lebanon is difficult" because "the awful bloodshed and intense emotions of war are not conducive to careful moral reasoning," Roth writes, he takes Israel to task nonetheless for several of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's potentially misleading claims in recent speeches.

First of all, Olmert's statement that "the Israeli military exercises great care to avoid harming Lebanese civilians" is called severely into question, in view of the fact that "Human Rights Watch investigators in Lebanon have recorded an appalling number of incidents in which civilians and civilian objects were hit with no apparent military justification." Roth lists the high civilian death tolls and massive amounts of destruction at Dweir, Marwahin, Beflay, Srifa, "nine square blocks of southern Beirut," and Qana as examples of Israel's insufficient care in safeguarding Lebanese civilians and their living conditions.

Does Hezbollah's "abusive" and "aggressive" intent to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth," or the fact that Hezbollah started these hostilities, justify Israel in sometimes harming civilians, as Olmert seems to claim when he suggests that Israel ought to be "given more latitude"? No, says Roth:

The obligations to respect international humanitarian law, including to refrain from deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and to take all feasible precautions against civilian casualties, persist regardless of the conduct of one's opponent.

Can Israel's less-than-fully-successful attempts to warn civilians to flee the areas that are about to be attacked excuse the subsequent unfortunate deaths of those who have stayed? No, says Roth,

... the failure to heed [a warning] does not create a free-fire zone. If it did, Palestinian militant groups might "warn" all settlers to leave Israeli settlements and then be justified in treating as legitimate targets those who remained.

Does Hezbollah bear the true blame for civilian deaths because it is using the Lebanese civilians as "human shields"? Roth says that Hezbollah has been guilty of violations of "international humanitarian law [that] does prohibit the deliberate use of civilians to shield fighters and military assets, and [that] requires all parties to do everything feasible to station their forces away from civilians." Yet the scale of the civilian carnage in Lebanon well exceeds any level commensurate with Hezbollah's "human shield" violations. When, as has been too often well-documented, Hezbollah troops are nowhere near Israel's chosen strike locations, the "human shield" argument doesn't work.

Nor, says Roth, do the putative misdeeds of the Lebanese government in allowing Hezbollah to continue to operate in south Lebanon prior to this war's outbreak justify the civilian carnage: "A government's misdeeds never justify attacks on its people."

What about the targeting by Israel of Lebanon's infrastructure — is it permissible? No, says Roth,

... international humanitarian law permits attacks on infrastructure only if it is making an effective military contribution, and the military benefits of its destruction outweigh the civilian costs. That case is difficult, if not impossible, to make for the extensive attacks on electrical facilities, bridges and roadways throughout the country.

oldstyleliberal is not sure he agrees here. It is his understanding that Lebanese bridges and roads are being devastated to keep Hebollah from rearming: restocking the rockets it is raining down daily on northern Israel, killing civilians there. Of course, it is an open question whether the strategy is actually succeeding. If it isn't, then the infrastructure attacks are indeed morally suspect.

On the whole, oldstyleliberal thinks Israel needs to clean up its act, if it wants to be seen as taking the moral high road – which it ought to do, to avoid paying for having pursued the opposite course of action somewhere down the road when its chickens come home to roost.

The Pan-Islamist Threat

"Actually, the Middle East Is Our Crisis Too," writes conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in this week's Time. In Gaza, he says, Hamas

... is fighting not to create a 23rd Arab state but, as its charter explains, to recover "an Islamic Waqf." Meaning? Territory claimed under the Islamic precept that "any land the Muslims have conquered by force ... during the times of [Islamic] conquests" more than a millennium ago belongs to Muslims forever because "the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations until the Day of Judgment."

From Lebanon, meanwhile,

Islamist Hizballah — client of Islamist Iran, ally of Islamist Hamas — provokes a war with Israel. Hizballah's motivation has nothing to do with Arab nationalism. Israel withdrew from every square meter of Lebanese territory six years ago. But legal obligation means nothing to Hizballah. Like Hamas and Iran, Hizballah views the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.

Hamas and (as I'll spell it) Hezbollah are, Krauthammer says, part of the movement called pan-Islamism, unlike the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the late Yasser Arafat, which was just a "secular, vaguely socialist and entirely nationalist movement." Even Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pan-Arabist, not pan-Islamic. "The successor Arab rulers [to the pan-Arabists of yore] no longer dream of a single Arab state," writes Krauthammer, "and have grudgingly come to accept a small Jewish state in part of Palestine. Hence the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan signed with Israel."

But pan-Islamism is unwilling to tolerate a Jewish state in its midst. The destruction of Israel, once but a geopolitical goal, has become a tenet of religious duty, in service to a "larger Islamist vision of a cataclysmic showdown with the infidel West as a harbinger of the return of the 12th Imam and the End of Days."

So, as Israel's staunchest ally, we're in for a "struggle against [pan-Islamism that] will be long and painful, and enduringly surreal."


We may be able to take some comfort from the fact that pan-Islamism has, in effect, two rival churches, with two Vaticans and two Popes vying for primacy — like Rome and Avignon in medieval times. The "Iran-Hizballah-Hamas axis" is one of these "churches" (even though Iran and Hezbollah are Shi'ite and Hamas is Sunni). The other "church" of pan-Islamism consists of al-Qaeda and its spawn, now trying to catch back up to the wave pulsed out recently in the Middle East by the activity of the first axis.

Krauthammer asserts:

For all their medieval trappings, these two sources of Islamic fervor now vying for possession of the newly transmuted Arab-Israeli dispute confirm the Bush Administration's view that, after a holiday from history in the 1990s, the global ideological struggles of the 20th century have been rejoined with a change only in the cast. In place of the ersatz Western religions of fascism and communism, radical Islam, bastard child of a real and great religion, has arisen. Led by two rival Vaticans, one in Tehran and the other cavebound on the Afghan-Pakistani border, it raises the banner of a militant religion that will not rest until, as al-Zawahiri pledged, Islam has retaken every piece of Waqf "from Spain to Iraq."

I'm not sure I concur that the Bush administration has the right attitude on all this. My understanding is that the administration is stuck ideologically in a world where states — nations, countries — remain the major players. By Krauthammer's own logic, this will never do.


oldstyleliberal likes the approach outlined in a companion article, "Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism," under the subhead, "By insisting it is, President Bush clouds the real issues, which are how much the U.S. should do for Israel and what it should do to Iran." Lisa Beyer, in her analysis, insists Bush is wrong to lump Hezbollah and Hamas under the umbrella epithet of "global terrorism." Doing so obscures the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas don't threaten us directly ... at least, not yet. We need to keep our powder dry, so to speak, and direct our ammunition only at those who threaten us face-to-face. Otherwise, U.S. power loses credibility abroad, as we stretch ourselves too thin.

Where Krauthammer sees a single pan-Islamist movement with two rival "Vaticans," Beyer maintains that such a view

... implies that Hizballah has the same mind-set and agenda as the global jihadis of al-Qaeda and its imitator groups, but they are not the same. Hizballah's military mission is principally to defend Lebanon from Israeli intrusion and secondarily to destroy the Jewish state. As an Islamist group under Iran's sway, Hizballah would like to see Islamic rule in Lebanon. The global jihadis think much bigger. They are Salafists, radicals who seek to revive the original and, to their minds, pure practice of Islam and establish a caliphate from Spain to Iraq, in all the lands where Islam has ever ruled. The Salafists are Sunni, and Hizballah is Shi'ite, which means their hatred for each other is apt to rival their hatred for the U.S. Al-Qaeda's late leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, used to say Shi'ites were worse than Americans and launched a brutal war on them in Iraq.

We can combine the Krauthammer and Beyer outlooks, which are really not as incompatible as they seem, by noting that the former attitude inspirits us for the long fight ahead while the latter cautions us not just to fight hard, but to fight smart. If there are fissures within pan-Islamism, a smart fight against it would seem to require that we do everything we can diplomatically, politically, economically, and socially to drive a wedge into it — using "soft" power, as the policy wonks say.

If there are moderate and hard-line wings in Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to play our cards so as to support the former at the expense of the latter — holding our noses all the while, perhaps. The moderates have, after all, shown signs in the past of being willing to accept our ally Israel's existence. Per the Beyer article:

"The strategy should be to identify the fissures in a terrorist group and widen those chasms to cause it to explode, to isolate the hard-liners and strengthen the moderates," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. and the author of the new book Inside Terrorism. "The risk of painting all terrorists with one brush is that you miss those signs, and so you miss those opportunities."

It would be downright stupid of us to drive together our various enemies, whether direct or by proxy, when there is now, practically speaking, faint daylight between them:

An additional downside to tossing all terrorists under one heading is that if you treat them the same, address them as one, you may encourage them to see themselves that way. "Bush has really been the great unifier of all the previously divided and often mutually hostile groups we're trying to defeat rather than assemble," says François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. "Waging war in Iraq to combat terrorism has transformed Iraq into a nexus of terrorism it hadn't been before. Justifying the operation in Lebanon by putting Hizballah on the same terrorism shelf as al-Qaeda is getting radical Sunnis to back radical Shi'ites in a way we'd have never imagined."

The current Bush they're-all-terrorists rhetoric hurts our cause by feeding Muslim "paranoia." We need, Beyer suggests, leadership with greater capacity for strategic nuance, since

... there is no one ideology among terrorists. And terrorism isn't even an ideology. It's a tactic. The President would be better off leveling with the American people. The U.S. has interests in the Middle East, such as protecting Israel. Some of them are subtle and require explaining, like resisting Iran's efforts to expand its influence. And many of them have nothing to do with global terrorism.

Well, "nothing to do with global terrorism" puts it a bit too strongly, oldstyleliberal feels. Many of them, it is true, don't threaten us directly. But they still feed into global crosscurrents that could capsize our ship. Krauthammer is right about that.