That didn't take long

Former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford has been making noises about challenging Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D.NY). Now Gawker reports that Ford has not paid income tax in New York, but has continued to file in the Volunteer State (the volunteering in question being for the Confederacy), which does not tax income.

New Yorkers have a history of electing senators with tenuous ties to the state (Bobby Kennedy, Hillary Clinton), but especially in these parlous times, one suspects that voters in the Empire State would cavil at someone who has not been willing to pay the state's taxes.

What do you think?

Is Danny Boy the most beautiful song in the English lanaguage?

A gift, cont'd

A couple of days ago, I posted about Anthem Health's outrageous rise in premiums for non-group subscribers. Robert Reich weighed in on the issue on TPM Cafe. Here's part of what he has to say:

Anthem's argument[that it was forced to raise premiums because so many people dropped coverage due to the recession] is even more questionable when you consider that Anthem has been among the most aggressive opponents of the health-care bills passed by the House and Senate. If Anthem were sincere about why it's raising its rates, it would be embracing the legislation. The Senate and House bills would add tens of millions of Americans to insurance pools - thereby spreading the costs over more people and avoiding the very problem Anthem says is now forcing it to raise its rates so much.

Yep.

When we drag insurers, kicking and screaming, to accept reform, I predict they'll find that they were wrong--that, in fact, their bottom lines are fatter with more subscribers. But it's not the number of policyholders that concerns them--it's the threat of limits to their ability to gouge those whose interests they are supposed to serve.

Reich goes on: "Obama says he's open to any new ideas from Republicans for how to control health care costs and expand coverage. The problem is Republicans don't want to play this game. They don't care about controlling costs or expanding coverage. They care only about taking back the House and/or the Senate next November. And they believe a means toward attaining this goal is to prevent Obama from achieving a victory on health care." He then argues for passing the Senate bill in the House and using the reconciliation process to make the resulting enactment better.

I think Obama knows full well what the GOPhers are up to. As for passing the Senate bill in the House, there is tremendous resistance to that on a lot of fronts. Maybe the path Reich (and others) have suggested will ultimately work, maybe not. What we hope for--and must demand of our representatives--from the February 25th health-care summit is some breaking of the logjam.

Reaching out

Many liberal media outlets and public figures have spent the last six or nine months deriding and ridiculing the Tea Party movement. That is a mistake, one that may be extremely costly to President Obama and his Democratic allies.

Democrats and their allies should be reaching out to Tea Party voters. We should be asking for their votes and contesting any allegiance that they may feel for the GOP. Failing to do so is not only bad politics; it bespeaks an unwarranted arrogance toward a substantial segment of our fellow Americans.

True, many of the Tea Party's most vocal supporters are irredeemable extremists, racists and anarchists of the Right. But it is wrong to view the entire movement--if it can be called that--in that fashion.

From all that I have seen and read, it seems clear to me that a great many Tea Party supporters are motivated mainly by anger. That may not be much fun for us Democrats, coming so soon after we finally regained the White House and a solid congressional majority, but we should acknowledge that their anger is real and justified.

People are hurting. They have lost jobs, homes and farms. They saw a President who campaigned on a promise of change, but whose treasury secretary was at the heart of the big-bank bailout. They saw that those banks did not even get their wrists slapped, and were soon back to paying immense bonuses, while foreclosures continue and good people lose long-term jobs. They did not hear of real reform.

Of course, much of the Tea Party lexicon comes out of the Republican playbook of fear and ignorance. The obstructionism of the GOP plays well with the anger and negativity that suffuses the Tea Party movment. But that is not a reason for Democrats to ignore those angry Americans; instead, it should be a reason to go out to them, to make our case.

At bottom, it is about respect. Those who simply write off all Tea Partiers as unreconstructed racists and fools--and many Democrats and their allies do essentially that--are arrogantly dismissing a subtial number of our fellow citizens. Instead, we should be speaking to them, finding out about their freas and motivations, and showing why Democrats, not Republicans, will best represent them.

The fact is that many of those who are most afraid of health care reform can benefit from it. We can dismiss them as fools who can't see the truth, or ask why we have not made the case that convinces them. The fact is that many of those who rail about using government funds to stimulate the economy have and will benefit from the economic stimulus. We can write them off as right-wing ideologues too ignorant to see their own interests, or try to show them why they--and the nation--are being well served by the stimulus package. The fact is that Tea Partiers who rail against huge banks and big business forget--if they ever knew--that Republicans are the traditional allies of those whom the Partiers excoriate. We can scratch our heads over this confusion and ignorance, or we can push the Democratic congress to enact real financial reform to make the case that we, not the GOPhers deserve support from the disaffected.

Can Democrats win over most Tea Partiers? Probably not. Can I prove that forty percent, or even a third of them will even consider the Democratic argument? No, although I suspect that a lot more of them would prove receptive than is generally believed. But on some level, it does not matter. For the greatest benefit of reaching out to Tea Party voters may well be that it will involve Democrats with more Americans, and force us to listen to our fellow citizens, even those with whom we seem to have little in common. That should be a basic premise for any party that calls itself Democratic. Unfortunately, we seem to be backsliding toward the bad old days when we were, all too often, liberal elitists.

A gift

Think the folks at Anthem Blue Cross of California want health care reform to pass this year? They're acting like it. Anthem announced that rates for non-group subscribers will rise by almost 40 percent this year. The NYT profiles a policyholder whose monthly premiums have risen from $151 per month to $1,192, about eight times as much, since 1998.

And this story could hardly have been better-timed to help reform, with the President's health care summit only a couple of weeks away.

The question, and the challenge, is whether Democrats will make effective use of this development. Will enough Americans be convinced that this is the future of health care for all of us if reform is not enacted to force Republicans to back down from obstructing all meaningful change? The early signs are good, with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking the company to justify its new charges. But Democrats have a history of failing to keep the pressure on. Now is the time to learn from the past: Keep pushing this story; make sure that all Americans understand what is going on. Tell them to write to their Senators and Congressmen.

And this story is not just PR. Anthem explains its rates by pointing out that the recession has caused many policyholders to drop coverage, leaving the burden on the sicker group that has remained with the company. That is exactly what economists have predicted if coverage is not mandated. So Anthem is a textbook example of what we are headed for without meaningful reform.

How come?

How come Republicans never acknowledge that the lion's share of stimulus funds, not to mention virtually all public works projects, goes to private businesses? How come Republicans, the apostles of private enterprise and government subsidies for same, pay no mind to the contracts given to such companies to carry out public projects?

And how come Democrats don't point this out?

(TONE is not wholly in favor of this approach. We believe that the WPA should be re-established, with the original name: Works Progress Administration, and the same goals. But that's not very likely.)

Better late than never

After spending a lot of time on the sidelines in his first year in office, President Obama has finally emerged as the leader we hoped he would be. In the latest episode of the National Smackdown Tour, Mr. Obama has invited Republican leaders to a televised discussion of health care on February 25th.

This being the kind of offer you can't refuse, Republicans have accepted.

Will this be as entertaining as the President's evisceration of Republican House members? I hope so, but now that they know what they're up against, the GOPhers will perhaps be able to throw up obfuscation and sloganeering, not to mention a fog of disinformation. Still, it doesn't pay to bet against the tall guy from Illinois.

While the President's performances have been heartening these past couple of weeks, we have to worry that he is still having to do all the heavy lifting. Where are the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate? Well-nigh invisible. Mr. Obama may, indeed, be Superman, but he needs some support.

The freedom of impending retirement

Chris Dodd (D.Ct.) announces that he will introduce a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

I guess the freedom of knowing that you're not going to have to raise campaign funds any more can work wonders.

This is something that Democrats should get behind, strongly. Make the GOPhers stand up for corporate giving! The difference between Republican office-holders and the tea partiers over this could be instructive; it could be a powerful wedge issue for Democrats. Of course, to use it, many Dems would have to get over their addiction to support from corporate interests.

Amazing what a little leadership will do

Since the State of the Union, President Obama has been on a tear, showing the leadership that Democrats (and sensible people all over) have been hoping for. Unlike his Congressional colleagues, but that's a story for another posting.

And it's paying off already. You can see a new attitude in the press, typified by this piece in Time, by Joe Klein.

If Democrats can keep this up--and the President can't do it alone--the falsities and fatuousness of Republican obstructionism will at last be widely known.

Dr. Minyard, please call the Wolfman

If you read this blog, you probably read talkingpointsmemo.com, and you've likely seen this. But it's too good to pass up. From the New Orleans Parish race for coroner. (Yes, they vote for ghoul in New Orleans. What can I say?) Something is wrong with the thingy to embed video in the blog, but watch it here.

Fearless prediction

Scott Brown will prove not ready for prime time.

Bonus prediction: That will not prevent some pundits (and perhaps GOP insiders) from proposing him as a presidential candidate in 2012.

Giant among midgets

Did you see President Obama with the Republican House Members on Friday? Reminded me of nothing so much as Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Seeing some of the highlights, you could almost--almost--feel sorry for the GOPhers, having to contend with a man as intelligent and well-prepared as the President, and in a venue where they could not dominate the debate by talking over their opponent or shouting him down.

Think we'll see Mr. Obama meeting with Senate Republicans next?

If you're asking yourself whether there are congressional Democrats who can also dominate the opposition, I think there are. Barney Frank (my congressman) comes to mind. Alan Grayson, the Freshman from Florida who noted that the Republican health-care plan was "die sooner"is another, although he doesn't show a lot of intellectual heft. In the Senate, there's Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed (both of RI) and, of course, rookie-of-the-year Al Franken. But don't we miss Ted Kennedy?

Organizing for America distributed this video from yesterday's confab/confrontation. It's a bit more than 2/3 the length of the entire event.

Party of no

No surprise, but worth no-ting:

According to the NYTimes:

One day after the president upbraided Congress in his State of the Union address for excessive partisanship, Senate Republicans voted en masse against a plan to require that new spending not add to the deficit (it passed anyway as all 60 members of the Democratic caucus hung together). And some Republicans peremptorily dismissed Mr. Obama’s main job-creating proposal, expressing no interest in using $30 billion in bank bailout money for business tax credits.

When will the American people realize that the GOP is not just the Party of No, but the Party of No Policy, not to mention the Party of Hypocrisy?

Achilles heel

As you've probably seen, ad nauseum, by now, when President Obama attacked the Supreme Court's recent campaign-finance ruling, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head and seemed to mouth the words "Not true." (Some commentators thought he said more.)

Some people have compared Alito to Joe Wilson (R.Whacko), who called Obama a liar during a speech earlier this year. But give the Justice a pass: he had just been dissed, from about 12 feet away, by the most powerful man in the world, and dozens of millions of people around the world were watching.

The President's ire was understandable on a number of levels. As a constitutional-law expert (he taught the subject), he is aware of how the majority reached out for a case that would give it the opportunity to reach a decision that was (a) not required; (b) far broader than necessary to reach the issues raised; and (c) unnecessarily overturned 100 years of understanding about the nature of campaign-finance laws. From a political perspective, logic suggests that the decision will heavily favor Republicans. So it's not surprising that Obama was ticked.

In his address, the President raised a sore point about the decision: it seems to open the door to foreign money flooding into US elections. Although Justice Kennedy's decision said that the court would reserve a decision on foreign money to another day, in truth under his decision there is no way to keep contributions from other nations out.

The fact is, there is no clear way to define a foreign corporation for purposes of the Supreme Court's decision. If a corporation is organized in another country, but owned by Americans, is it an American company? If a corporation--like CITGO--is organized here, but owned by people from another country (in CITGO's case, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela), is it a US corporation? What about a US subsidiary of a foreign company? The financial world treats a public corporation as being effectively owned by anyone with a bloc of 15-20% of the outstanding stock (unless someone else controls as much or more). So, if a foreign person or company owns 20% of a large, otherwise American company, can that controlling foreign company direct the subsidiary's money to US campaigns?

That is the Achilles heel of the decision. There is widespread, indeed, I think general agreement that we should not let foreign contributions affect the selection of our leaders. And this is a question that the Supreme Court will have to confront. Indeed, the best chance for getting the court to re-think last weeks' ruling is for a state or, better, Congress to pass a law defining and restricting contributions by corporations that are defined as foreign. When confronted with having to decide what a foreign corporation is, the justices may realize how wrong-headed they're ruling was.

Button your lip

Last night, Cong. Bill Pascrell (D.NJ) was on the CBS Evening News, telling Katie Couric that he doubts the President can deliver on all the promises he was to make in his State of the Union address.

I have some advice for Cong. Pascrell and the rest of the Democrats who can't wait to tell tales out of school: SHUT UP!

Do you think you would have seen a Republican dissing George W.'s proposals on the day of the State of the Union, or after?

Democrats don't have to adopt Republican policies or principles to accept the fact that party discipline has given the GOPhers a big edge these past few decades. Keep the debate inside, and button your lip when someone sticks a mike or a camera in your face.

Showing the White Flag

We Democrats commonly complain that, whatever we do, Republicans accuse us of being weak on security. Thus, although President Obama has launched many more strikes at the Taliban in Pakistan than the Bush administration, the GOPhers still claim that he is not strong enough in fighting terrorism.

There is merit in this complaint--the shameless Republicans, unfettered by any attachment to mere truth, engage in demagogy whenever it will benefit what they see as their political interest. What we Democrats ignore, however, is that we are their enablers. The truth is that, although we are not weak on security, we are weak on so many issues that our posture gives Republicans credibility even when they lie outrageously.

Case in point: Republicans tried to distract attention from the disaster area that the economy became on George Bush's watch by raising the volume on their constant wail about the deficit and the need to cut taxes. They found allies in some anti-government tea partiers--people who don't believe government can do anything. Some feckless 'Democrats' got scared and started talking about the need to rein in the deficit. Fourteen months after the Republicans were vanquished with their tails between their legs, that view has become the conventional wisdom.

Now is exactly the wrong time to worry about the deficit. The economy has just started--maybe--to recover from Bush's disaster. Unemployment is high and stubbornly resistant to improvement. Big banks are paying huge bonuses, but not lending. As Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz (two Nobel laureates) and other economists have convincingly argued, what we need now is another big stimulus package, replacing the absence of private demand with public demand.

Yet we are now told that President Obama is going to call for freezing the non-defense part of the budget for three years. WHAT IS HE THINKING? That is a recipe for economic stagnation and political disaster. It plays into the Republicans' hands. Remember, the GOP has no interest in economic recovery; continued distress will play into Republican hands this fall and in 2012.

What the President should do tomorrow night is to stand in the well of the House and give the Republicans (and their Democratic enablers) hell. He should tell them some home truths about where we are and how the only path out of our distress is muscular government spending, because private enterprise is cowering in the bunkers. He needs to say that while the deficit is a real problem, in the present crisis it has to take a back seat to repairing the economy. In short, he needs to stand his ground--or what should be his ground.

Since Vietnam, Democrats have, unfortunately, become all too practiced at showing the white flag when opposed by tough and outwardly confident Republicans. Democrats cut and ran after Walter Mondale told the truth about taxes and got skunked in 1984--even though they knew he was right. Think of the Republican Lite years of the Clinton administration. What did Bill Clinton stand tough on, except when he, himself, was under attack? Think of how Democrats knuckled under to Bush's demand for unconstitutional powers in the so-called War on Terror. Even now, where is the prominent Democrat willing to stand up and say that dangerous terrorists must be released, because the Bush administration so traduced our Constitution that we cannot hold them?

One thing about Republicans: they don't act this way. They show matchless effrontery in maintaining their refrain about cutting taxes. That would be incredibly stupid and self-destructive as national policy, but at least the Republicans are consistent. They don't bend, they don't show fear. And as a result, they get credit for consistency, if nothing else.

We need to learn from our enemies. In Esther Forbes' wonderful Johnny Tremain, the patriot James Otis says on the eve of the American Revolution that Americans must fight for "the right to stand up." We won that right. It's past time for Democrats to exercise it.

Saying it all

Jusstice Stephens, dissenting, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission last week:

It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom the Constitution was established.

Now, are there any questions?

The war on ignorance

Winston Churchill frequently asserted that if Hitler prevailed, the world would descend into a new dark age. Growing up in the aftermath of WWII, it seemed clear that--at least if we avoided nuclear war--civilization would advance. Seeing the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's and '70's, the War on Poverty--not a success, but a step forward--the first astronauts, landings on the moon, victories over polio and childhood leukemia and the advent of the computer age, I never lost that belief.

Surely I did not believe, until well into middle age, that a central struggle of my life would be a war against ignorance. That, however, is what we face now and for the foreseeable future.

For what, after all, are al Qaeda, the Taliban and other fundamentalist Islamic sects that want to drag Muslims back to an age that would have seemed retrograde to the Moors of medieval Spain? And let us not pretend that the West is any less besieged by ignorance. Those who would treat evolution and creationism as equals, who dispute overwhelming evidence of humanity's contribution to climate change, who deny the Holocaust--they, too, are apostles of ignorance. Such people are perfectly entitled to their beliefs, so long as they do not try to force them on others. But saying that does not change their stance as those who exalt some given truth over evidence, who deny that humans can, through thought and effort, learn great truths, and who in so doing reject one of the great qualities of our species.

Like all wars that may justifiably be called just, this struggle has been forced on us. The consequences of defeat are terrible to contemplate.

What needs to be said

You may have seen House Republicans braying that the recent report suggesting that women don't need regular mammograms before age 50 is the beginning of health-care rationing.

It's the old Republican dodge: never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

What the Democrats need is someone--it would be nice if it were President Obama, but he can't the the only spokesman for truth, justice and liberty--to sand up and say, "You talk about rationing? I'll show you rationing. Herb Green died a lingering, painful death because his insurance company delayed covering his bladder cancer. Joe and Mollie White's daughter, Susie, died at age 2, because they couldn't afford medical insurance. Rationing? We already have rationing. It's carried out by health insurance companies."

Why don't we hear things like that?

Waarrms the cockles of me heart

Never thought I'd live to see this: The Ku Klux Klan is going to picket the Ole Miss/LSU football game this Saturday.

It's not the 1960's any more. Turns out--we weren't watching--that the university has had several black student-body presidents.

The true nature of the man

CBS' Sunday Morning featured a commentary by James Gordon Meek, of the NY Daily News. He happened to be at Arlington National Ceremony on Veterans' Day, when President Obama visited the graves of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meek's observations and experience give us a good picture of the man who occupies the Oval Office. It's well worth reading.

Terror Trials in the US

A great friend of TONE, The LighthouseKeeper, asked my opinion of the decision to try the leading terror suspects at Guantanamo in federal court in New York City. What follows is a slightly edited version of my response:

Seems to me that if I were a potential juror I'd offer the view that were I the judge, I'd probably dismiss the case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the guy who was waterboarded 183 times) for prosecutorial (i.e., government) misconduct. But as a juror I think I'd be able to judge guilt or innocence. One of the problems the defense will have is that the guy freely admitted, indeed apparently boasted or his role in 9/11. That's 2800 killings.

I do have some question about whether these guys should be tried as criminals. I don't do criminal law, but it seems to me that we don't have a good dividing line between war and crime. The British did not execute American rebels, and in those few instances on the frontier when rebels (and their families) were massacred, we consider that behavior criminal. The North did not execute Confederate rebels, apart from spies and the like. We did not--as least as a matter of government policy--execute Aguinaldo's rebels or the Moros in the Phillipines. Or captured Indians. So, when does an act of war deserve to be treated as such and not as crime? I think there ought to be a principled dividing line, and I don't know that there is.

I have no doubt that the people to be tried believe that they are in a political/religious/military (put those in whatever order you choose) struggled against us. How should we repond?

Being against capital punishment, I would have a hard time bringing in a death sentence. On the other hand, as I told a federal judge who was at a conference I attended recently, these are the kind of cases that might cause me to question my premises.

As for trying these people in the civilian system, I'm all for it. Again, it's not clear to me--although it may be in the law--where the dividing line between civil and military courts lies, but I lean toward the civilian. Especially for an act like 9/11 that was perpetrated in the US, not in a zone of military operations or occupation. I think expressions of fear about terrorist attacks on the US as a result are overdrawn and not worthy of us. We're in a fight that we didn't choose; would that all fights were those we don't choose. But we cannot cower.

Oy, gevalt!

Two Republican county chairmen in South Carolina write to the local paper that Sen. Jim DeMint (R, Dixie) in his opposition to earmarks is like "the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves."

That clang you hear is their tin ears banging together.

I haven't run into that one as part of the stereotypical view of Jews, and it seems to me that at least its more favorable--if no more accurate--than the more common canards thrown around by anti-Semites and the insensitive. Coming from a couple of political leaders, though, it's mighty dumb!

At least one source ascribes the thought to Ben Franklin, who while a wise man, was not Jewish. (My office is about a block from Old South Meetinghouse, which was across the street from where Ben was born, and in which he was christened that very day in 1706.

A note to readers

I just posted a lengthy piece on Afghanistan, entitled (perhaps confusingly) "The real lesson of Vietnam." Unfortunately, it was so long that it took me a week to produce, although the reader may well wonder why. Blogger assigns dates to posts as of the first saving of a draft, so this piece appears dated October 11, rather than today. Sorry about that. In any event, feel free to take a look at let me know what you think.

Thank you.

A victory for common sense and straight dealing

A Massachusetts Land Court judge has reaffirmed his decision last spring that lenders could not sell foreclosed properties where they couldn't show who owns the mortgage.

The case has sent shivers through the Bay State's real estate and banking communities, and has had ripples nationwide. (Some federal bankruptcy judges have made similar, and even more favorable, decisions that kept homeowners from losing their properties to foreclosure.)

The problem arises out of the razzle-dazzle of the housing bubble, where mortgages were sliced and diced, packaged, sold and re-sold. In the process, such old-fashioned concepts as ownership (not to mention honest dealing) were conveniently ignored. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, the people who thought to profit from the financial manipulations that led to the bubble are weeping, wailing and gnashing their teeth.

Interestingly, the story linked to above focuses on the difficulties the judge's ruling poses to re-selling, rehabilitating and recycling properties already foreclosed on for new use. That may well be the immediate effect, but upstream the decision will reduce the number of foreclosures and, likely, to increase lenders' willingness to restructure loans.

Gee, I wonder why he doesn't go there

I hear that Mississippi Republicans are angry that President Obama will not be visiting their state when he goes to survey the recovery from Hurricane Katrina in a short visit to New Orleans.

Hmm, now why wouldn't he want to go to a state that gave him the smallest percentage of the vote of any of the states last year?

Is this the message they wanted to send?

Walking by the Kenneth Cole shop on Newbury Street in Boston I noticed a fabric panel that is the only window decoration. Repeated in shades of gray and black is the message, "You'll be on a video camera more than 20 times today. Are you dressed for it?"

Is that really what they want to say? Maybe not. My first answer to the question was, "Guess I better buy a hoodie and a ski mask."

A worthy goal

Here's a thought: The most important challenge in peacemaking might not be the Middle East, but the conflict between India and Pakistan.

The real lesson of Vietnam

The conventional wisdom--indeed, the virtually unchallenged view--is that the US lost the Vietnam war. Permit me to differ: In grand strategic terms, the United States achieved its goal in Vietnam.

Dubious? If you think about it, what was the reason for the United States to get involved in Southeast Asia? It was more than denying South Vietnam to the Communists. The object was to keep South and Southeast Asia from being dominated by forces hostile to American interests--at the time, that meant Communists.

That goal may seem outmoded, even quaint today, but at the time it made good sense. The idea of an aggressive Communist movement that sought to control Southeast Asia was not just the currency of American ideologues. It was espoused by Communists themselves. Though largely forgotten, in the 1960's, Mao and his acolytes preached an aggressive form of Communism that sought to march across the Southeast Asian littoral, jump the straits of Malacca and control the Indonesian archipelago.

Could that have happened? In September 1965, there was an attempted pro-Communist coup in Indonesia. The army reacted with an anti-Communist offensive that essentially wiped out the Communist Party of Indonesia (and killed perhaps 200,000 Indonesian Chinese). At the time, I was a college junior, and was taking a course on the politics of Southeast Asia with Prof. Donald Hindley, whose specialty was the Communist Party of Indonesia. (His work on the subject--which quickly became of mainly historical interest in the early fall of 1965, is still available on Amazon.) Hindley, an Australian, was no particular friend of US involvement in Vietnam, but he declared that if American forces had not been involved there, the Indonesian army would have sided with the plotters--in essence, that the island nation would have been dominated by the Communists.

The ideal of an international Communist movement that would in its terms liberate the people of South and Southeast Asia remained current following the setback in Indonesia. For one thing the idea of an international movement appealed to a set of allies who would have been far less involved had the struggle involved only over Vietnam. In the 1960s, there were skirmishes along the Indian-Chinese border, and movements in Burma, Thailand and the Philippines that were anti-American (or, in their terms, anti-imperialist) and pro-Communist. (The Philippines had fought a Communist insurrection in the 1950's; it continued at a lower level into the next decade.)

Ultimately, as we know, Communist forces prevailed throughout Indochina: South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In large part, that was due to forces over which the United States had little control, principally the failure of the South Vietnamese to erect a regime that could offer a sufficient counterweight to the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies. Yet the end of the Vietnamese War in 1975 was the end of armed conflict in Southeast Asia for thirty years, until the Islamist violence of the Twenty-First Century. Communism never expanded further.

What happened? There is no simple explanation; the Communist attempt to undermine the Thai establishment faced substantial cultural and economic obstacles. The slogan, "Peace, land and bread" that worked so well in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had little appeal to the Thais, who had all three. Similarly, Burmese--beset by their own problems--never took up the Communist cause in great numbers, and Chinese attitudes toward ethnic rebels in the north of Burma did not help the Communist causes.

But one factor was time: the Communist regimes of 1975 were not the same as the ones that had preached world revolution in 1965 and 1966. Nixon's trip to China signaled and intensified that nation's move into the world community. By the time that Nixon's plane touched down in Beijing, the stresses of China's alliance with North Vietnam had exacerbated traditional frictions and suspicions between the two peoples. The burden of ten years of war against the Americans, following shortly after almost a decade of combat against the French had sapped North Vietnam's appetite for conquest. Conflicts among Indochinese Communists also surfaced; it was the Vietnamese that overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. And the failures of the Communist model were becoming more apparent.

That is the true lesson of Vietnam: Things change. The passage of time leads to situational change, and such change justifies, or even demands, reassessment of the situation.

Changes over time are not always favorable. The South Vietnamese government's inability to become more efficient and responsive contributed mightily to its collapse. The failure to acknowledge that led to the death and wounding of thousands of Americans. At the same time, as suggested above, larger shifts worked in favor of America's larger interests.

The point is, it is vital to recognize and acknowledge that time does bring changes.

And that is one of the prime failures of American policy in Afghanistan. The war being fought now is not the war that we entered eight years ago. Then, we were supporting an apparently beleaguered Northern Alliance against a Taliban that dominated all but a small corner of the country and provided a unique safe base for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Now we support a corrupt narco-state that battles a movement based at least as much on tribal loyalty, selfish interest and opposition to the corruption in Kabul as upon Islam. Al Qaeda has several other safe areas in which to organize and train, and its main base is universally acknowledged to be in Pakistan.

(We should also note that the first Afghan campaign did not involve American combat troops on the ground, but special forces operatives and air support for the Northern Alliance; the collapse of the Taliban did not result from an American invasion, but from mainly homegrown opposition.)

True, the Taliban remains a brutal movement, but not more so than the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, the Janjaweed in Darfur or any number of other movements that seek victory through untamed violence and terror. If we don't send combat troops in against those agents of death, why do we continue to battle in Afghanistan?

Perhaps the best answer to that question is that we need to continue fighting the Taliban, because it is spearheading an assault on the Pakistani state, and we cannot afford to have that nuclear-armed power become a fundamentalist Islamic nation. (There is little danger that Pakistan would actually fall to the Taliban and its armies, but it could disintegrate to the point that the security of its nuclear weapons and facilities would be seriously compromised.) There is also the fact that, having made a commitment to the people of Afghanistan--at least the ones who actively or nominally support us--we cannot abandon our role in the nation without substantial damage to our position around the world.

But if we know what we are fighting against in Afghanistan, what are we fighting for? The Times had an article about Joe Biden's change of heart over the war in which he recognizes how matters have shifted. An enthusiastic supporter in 2001, he has come to realize that the government in Kabul has lost most of its claim to our support. Tom Friedman, who still has not acknowledged his error over Iraq, nonetheless gets it just right on the hollowness of the Afghan regime, and the impossibility of succeeding there if the government does not reverse course at once:

I am not sure Washington fully understands just how much the Taliban-led insurgency is increasingly an insurrection against the behavior of the Karzai government — not against the religion or civilization of its international partners. And too many Afghan people now blame us for installing and maintaining this government.

(We should also be aware of the danger that we are failing in Afghanistan because we do not recognize that the Afghan people do not have our standards and may not want to be governed by them. What to us is simple corruption may be tribal loyalty to those involved. Narcotics trafficking--increasingly seen as a menace in the country, as more Afghans become addicted--is based on the need to survive in a harsh agricultural environment. A centralized army is not congruent with Afghans' tradition of dispersed fighting forces. And parliamentary democracy is not necessarily a comfortable fit in Central Asia.)

Yet we should also recognize that the changes time has brought have not all been in one direction. Unlike 2001--and due in large measure to the incompetence of the Bush administration, Pakistan is now a central front, perhaps the central front, in the war against the Taliban-al Qaeda alliance; there are many more al Qaeda operatives in that country than there are in Afghanistan. So far as al Qaeda is concerned, it need not rely on Afghanistan or Pakistan for a secure base, as Somalia and Yemen also provide opportunities for the network to operate with little or no interference.

At the same time, the appeal of al Qaeda shows signs of weakening among Muslims, all too many of whom have been its victims. Any campaign based on suicide bombing consumes its adherents and is bound to fail. More important, moderate Muslims are finding their voices to oppose the extremism of al Qaeda and its ilk. This is entirely expectable; militant fundamentalist movements typically have a limited life. The war on the West that made bin Laden and his disciples world figures is proving an insufficient attraction to make their extreme strand of Sunni Islam dominant, and so more and more of the movement's energies are aimed at their fellow adherents.

What, then should we do in the theater named Pak-Af (or Af-Pak)? I could easily pontificate (see above), but I do not pretend to have the answers. Well, I do pretend to have the answers, but I am sufficiently aware of the limitations of my knowledge not to post them here. However, it is clear that on the military and political fronts we need major changes in the Afghan government, and that without them sending additional troops will be useless if not actually harmful. Americans tend to prescribe the changes that should be made in the Afghan government (rooting out corruption is high on the list), but we should consider whether we are taking a realistic view of the way that Afghans view government and the state. Trying to build a western-style democracy may be almost as much of an invasion as sending in troops. We should consider whether we cannot induce reform that Afghans will find familiar and comfortable. Rebuilding the nation's infrastructure is also vital, as well as a fine means to "win the hearts and minds" of the Afghan people. Or at least to convince them to support our friends by giving them jobs and thus a stake in the government. Here again, the use of foreign contractors may well the counter-productive. Wherever possible, Afghans should be employed in the building of their nation.

Above all, modesty and honest are called for. We must understand and acknowledge that we cannot "save" Afghanistan. We should admit that we pursue our interests in Afghanistan, and that those interests may not always be seen as the same as those of the Afghan people. We should declare that our goal is to prevent our enemies from having free rein to attack us. Above all, we should make it clear that we have no interest in permanent bases in or permanent occupation of Afghanistan, but rather that we look forward to the day when that nation can stand on its own. If we do that, we have a good chance to join the growing tide of anti-extremist Muslims to contain and neutralize those who want to harm us. That is all we can hope for.

What planet does he live on?

A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a huge cross that stands on federal land in the Mojave Desert. Most of the justices seem to have concentrated on the somewhat abstruse question of an attempt to transfer the land on which the cross is located in order to avoid the effect of a court decision declaring the monument to violate the First Amendment. But not Antonin Scalia. He went right after the question of whether putting up a religious symbol on federal property violates the Constitution's ban on establishing religion. When a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Foundation suggested that Jewish veterans would not wish to be honored by a cross, the Oracle of the Right observed, "The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead."

Huh? Or, perhaps, "Duh, uh." Or even, as we used to say in my family, "What does that have to do with the price of hog bristle in Ethiopia?"

Yes, Mr. Justice, the cross is the most common symbol in cemeteries in the United States. Most Americans are at least nominally Christian. That was true when the First Amendment was written; indeed, it was more true then, when there were far fewer Jews and virtually no Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Confucianists, Baha'is or other adherents of minority religions than there are today. But that did not stop the Founding Fathers from stating that the federal government shall not establish religion. What part of that did you miss, Mr. Justice?

Obama the unifier

His critics--having nothing constructive to offer--criticize the award of the Nobel Peace Price to President Obama, but those who say he has not done enough to warrant the honor fail to note that he has, after less than a year in the Oval Office, succeeded in unifying widely disparate groups. The American Right and the Taliban, for instance. How many people could do that?

As Jim Farley said of an earlier Democratic President, "We love him for the enemies he has made."

The view from Paris, II

That's Notre Dame, my favorite church, in the background, from the Square R. Viviani--where the modernist sculpture and front right resides.

You don't have to be Catholic--or even Christian, to love Notre Dame.

Memo to General McChrystal

Last week, General Stanley McChrystal, our top officer in Afghanistan, was quoted as saying that he could not support a scaled-down American effort that would focus on hunting down al Qaeda operatives with missiles and special forces troops.

Memo to General McChrystal: When the President, the Commander-in-Chief, says: "Jump," your only response is, "Yes, sir. How high?"

George W. Bush greatly overstated the commander-in-chief's responsibilities and authority, but we do have civilian control over the military and that ought to mean that serving officers make their views known freely to the President and the Secretary of Defense, but that they not speak their personal views about military issues to the public at large. Indeed, even their communications with Congress concerning defense policy should be heavily circumscribed.

There has been a regrettable tendency for high-ranking officers to speak out on matters that should be kept in the chain of command. Testimony before Congress, interviews and speeches such as General McChrystal's last week have become means for commanders to influence defense policy. That may sometimes be seen as a victory for democracy, but it is inimical to a rational command structure and, by undercutting presidential authority, gives the military more power than it should have. That may be a hard argument for liberals to support after eight years of George W. Bush, but it the problem there was not the command structure but the American people's choice (well, the Supreme Court's choice in 2000) for President.

If President Obama decides--as he should--to cut back or at least not increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, General McChrystal's option is to resign. Then, once he is a civilian, he can criticize the administration to his heart's content. I hope that's one of the messages that the President delivered to the General when the two of them met on Air Force One on Thursday.

The view from Walter Cronkite

My lovely and courageous daughter Hillary favored me with Walter Cronkite's informal autobiography, A Reporter's Life for my birthday, and I brought it along on our trip. It's a lot of fun if at times ahistorical: Cronkite expresses astonishment that Hitler trusted Stalin in the Nazi-Soviet pact (why is it not the German-Soviet pact or the Nazi-Communist pact?) of 1939, which allowed Germany room to start WWII, when it was Stalin who was the trusting one, right up until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941; Cronkite also suggests that the US breaking of the Japanese code provided advance warning of the Pearl Harbor attack--my reading suggests that the Japanese maintained almost complete radio silence about the mission and that American intelligence, though believing an attack on American possessions to be likely in early December 1941, had no firm data showing a raid on the Hawaiian Islands.

These lapses notwithstanding, many of Cronkite's insights cast light on details of our national life from the 1940's forward.

"Cut short as it was, the Kennedy administration left little that was noteworthy for the history books, but his charm, his style--personal and political--and his rhetoric captured the hearts and the imaginations of a generation of Americans to a degree unmatched by any other occupant of the White House in this century [the book came out in 1996], and I'm not forgetting the great popularity of the Roosevelts, Franklin and Theodore."

To which I would add that the great achievement of Kennedy was to build on the growing frustration that followed the passivity of Americans after WWII to inspire great things like the Peace Corps, capitalize on and advance the Civil Rights movement, and lead to the cultural phenomenon that was the '60's. Kennedy's inspiration permitted not only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also set the stage for something that was not, as far as I know, thought of during this life: Lyndon Johnson's tragically short War on Poverty. Although that effort was the idea of LBJ, without the acceptance of activist government that his predecessor advanced, the attempt to eradicate poverty would never have got started. And even in our time, Barack Obama profited from the memory of those of us who remember JFK; many times when canvassing, I told voters that Obama reminded me of no political leader since Kennedy, to be met with a nod or knowing smile.

Another interesting observation:

"Dwight Eisenhower expressed to me his total frustration in dealing with the government bureaucracy. He was appalled that his direct orders had a way of disappearing into thin air without action ever being taken."

This comment is surprising, because it exactly confirms what Harry Truman said during the transition from his administration to Eisenhower's: "Poor Ike. He's going to sit here and issue orders, and then wonder why nothing happens."

More from an American in Paris (for too short a time) later.

The view from Paris

The lovely Diane and I are in Paris for the next week, so here's the view:

As I have my notebook (from which I write this), I'm getting my news from the States, so my world view may be more from home than here. But Paris is still a great place to be.

Confusion? What confusion?

A standard meme in the MSM is that Americans are confused over the health care debate. Another is that support for the public option has weakened. Uhm, no. A CBS News/NYTimes poll asked,

Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan--something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and over get--that would compete with private health insurance plans?

Those in favor: 65%
Opposed 26%

And, those figures have not changed much since July, and even in June (when the "debate" was just getting underway), were not all that different.

So, maybe the confusion is over why the media is saying that support for a public option has weakened, and over why "Medicare for all" is not on the table.

Oh, and maybe people are also wondering why the MSM is not reporting the feelings of the American people.

When they talk about sportsmanship

and about how you play the game being the most important thing, this is what they mean.

America unsafe!

Incredible but true department: There's a shortage of bullets in the go0d, old, US of A! How can Congress be wasting time on small issues like healthcare and climate change when there aren't enough bullets to put in our guns? Where's their sense of priorities?

Years ago, my brother suggested that we control the size of the magazines in guns: no law-abiding citizen needs more than 4 bullets. And the comedian Chris Rock has a great routine about how we should make the cost of bullets prohibitive.

What does "lose" mean?

General McChrystal is warning that without more troops, we could lose the war in Afghanistan.

Many acute observers have observed that no one seems to know what victory in Afghanistan would look like, but has anyone defined defeat in that war? Clearly, the present NATO forces--even much reduced forces--can prevent the Taliban from establishing a regime in Kabul. Indeed, western forces can deny the enemy control over any of Afghanistan's major cities. What, then, would it take for the Taliban to win and for us to lose?

The most likely outcome in Afghanistan is probably no "outcome" at all--that is, a prolonged standoff. Frustrating (and potentially expensive) as that might be, it might not be a bad result. If history is a guide, the wave of Muslim fundamentalism will crest (indeed, may already have crested) and then recede. Then will the extremism of al Qaeda and its ilk weaken and its natural opposition, moderate Islam, regain authority. If the west exercises sagacity, and is able to edge Afghans along toward a government that has some relationship with its people beyond treating them as cattle and victims, those developments might lead, in the long run, to a return to the kind of nation that Afghanistan was before the convulsions of the past thirty years.

Culture shift?

From today's NYT:

“There is so much talk of primarying Chuck Grassley now,” a well-known conservative, Bill Salier, said on an Iowa radio show. The senator’s seniority means “absolutely bupkis if what you do with that power is work with Max Baucus to try to advance socialized medicine.”

Bupkis? Bupkis from an Iowa conservative? Why do I think that Mr. Salier doesn't know that bupkis is Yiddish for nothing?

Or maybe this is 21st Century America. After all, you can get a bagel (though not a good bagel) in all corners of the country.

Why I love Joe Biden

Yeah, he's often a loose canon, but I love Joe Biden, because he always speaks from the heart and with less calculation than any politician I've seen in a long time. Here's his take on the GOPhers strategy for 2010, as he related it to a fundraiser in Arizona:

It's not that Republicans are bad guys. This is just the bet they've made. They're going to put their chips on movement in the 35 seats in the House that have been traditionally Republican districts and trying to take them back.

If they take them back, this the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do. This is their one shot. If they don't break the back of our effort in this upcoming election, you're going to see the things we said we're for happen.

OK, troops, you have your marching orders.

(By the way, I love that he uses the President's first name. He's done it before so I don't think the White House has been all over him to always say "the President." It's great to see the person in the Oval Office be humanized, even just a little bit.)

Random thought

I was in the "natural food" section of our local supermarket, where I noticed a lot of "gluten-free" foods.

What I need--and what I think would sell better--would be a line of "glutton-free" foods.

Update

The answer to our question is 7. Seven Republicans crossed over to vote for the resolution rebuking Joe Wilson (R-CSA) for heckling President Obama last week. They included Bob Inglis, a fellow South Carolinian, Joseph Cao of Louisiana and Walter Jones of North Carolina.

What's more surprising is the list of Democrats who voted no, which included Bill Delahunt (MA), Dennis Kucinich (OH) and Jim McDermott (WA), pillars of liberalism. And five Democrats, including my own Barney Frank and Elliot Engel of New York voted present. Obviously, the division over the resolution was more complicated in the House than it appeared in the media.

Incredible

House Democrats will introduce a "resolution of disapproval," citing Joe Wilson (R-CSA) for calling President Obama a liar during the President's speech last week. (Such a resolution would be less serious than formal censure.)

Astoundingly--at least I think it will astound anyone who has read at all about the history of the House and Senate--this has become a partisan issue. Wilson has said he won't apologize to the House, in the well of the House, as is traditional when a member transgresses the customs of the body. Apparently, the Republican leadership thinks it can win points by approving of his boorishness.

Then again, why should we be surprised?

It will be interesting to see if any Republicans break ranks on this one, taking the decorum of the body to be more important than partisanship.

Who are we for?

There's no problem telling what we're against in Afghanistan, but what are we for? There was a long time when we might have said the Afghan government, perhaps more as an expression of a developing Afghan polity than the specific regime, so it might have been better to express it as support for the constitution. But that time has passed. So, what is there left for us to support? I don't see it. If you can think of something, please let me know.

Public be damned

Dahlia Lithwick on the argument about limits on corporate political speech before the Supreme Court yesterday.

Am I the only one who thinks that the right-wing justices want to reverse the 2008 election?

Cat blogging

My friend the Lighthousekeeper, reminds me that we haven't done cat blogging for a long time. So, here's Miah with Feather, her favorite toy.

(c) Jonathan J. Margolis, 2009, all rights reservcd.

The moral imperative

In his speech tonight, will the President change the terms of the debate by making the case that healthcare is a moral issue, not an economic one?

Now you tell us

Sheryl Gay Stolberg in today's NYT:

While the month of August clearly knocked the White House back on its heels, as Congressional town hall-style meeting exposed Americans' unease with an overhaul, the uproar does not seem to have greatly altered public opinion or substantially weakened Democrats' resolve.

Funny, that's not what we've been hearing for the last month.

More socialism!

Some pretty subversive stuff:

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

Socialism!

From President' Obama's speech to schoolchildren this morning:

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Subversive, right?

The President's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said that the Right's attack on the speech was part of "the silly season." Mild ridicule isn't going to work with these people and, more important, it isn't going to work with the mainstream media, which follows the false grail of "balance," and acts as conduits and enablers for Fox and its allies.

It's time for Mr. Obama and his people to take on the dissemblers on the Right, to call them out for the liars and hypocrites that they are, and to drive a wedge between the wingnuts and the "respectable" members of the Republican Party for whom politics is only about power and not at all about what is good for the country.

The Afghan mess

In 2001, when the vast majority of Americans supported a war in Afghanistan, I had my doubts. Unlike most US citizens, I knew a little of Afghan history--not enough to speak with any authority, but enough to know that Afghanistan had been a graveyard of armies and the end of many colonial ambitions. Aside from the Soviet failure in the 1980's, I had read of the First Afghan War, in which a British army occupied Kabul but was forced to retreat to India; only about forty men made it back to a British garrison. I was, therefore, gratified when the Taliban regime collapsed with hardly a push from western forces, to seeming jubilation among most Afghans. From what I saw early on, Hamid Karzai seemed like an inspired choice to lead the nation; in this view I was undoubtedly influenced by his having living in the US for some years and having a number of siblings--one of whom had an Afghan restaurant that I had visited several times--also in the US. And word of other members of the Afghan intelligentsia and political class returning from the west seemed to open a window of hope.

Last year, I agreed with Barack Obama when he argued that Iraq was a war of choice and Afghanistan a war of necessity. Afghanistan, after all, was where al Qaeda had based in 2001, and its agents were still centered close to the Afghan-Pakistan border.

But things had changed by then, and they have changed more since, and the changes have not been good.

Indeed, just now we are faced with what, to us liberals, is an almost unimaginable situation: from present indications, the unnecessary, imperialistic war in Iraq is likely to have a better outcome than the justified conflict in Afghanistan.

What happened? Principally, we lost the battle of time. As is widely known, due to Bush's bungling and incompetence, we let bin Laden and his minions escape from a trap at Tora Bora, to escape to Pakistan. The US was then unwilling or unable to get the Pakistanis to round up the remnants of al Qaeda before they could reorganize, and remnants of their Taliban allies were allowed to obtain safe haven across the virtually invisible border. To the apparent surprise of American officials--and those in the Afghan government, apparently--the Taliban did not accept their defeat or even marginalization, but started a new struggle to return to power. For a long time, American and Afghan officials compounded their errors by all but ignoring the new insurgency.

The Taliban could not have revived their threat had the Afghan government showed minimal competence. It would have helped had the Bush administration kept its focus on Afghanistan and supplied copious amounts of development aid and attention to the development of an effective civil society. None of that happened, of course. Hundreds of billions of dollars went to Iraq and relatively little to Afghanistan. The early promise of 2001-02 faded. The Afghan regime failed to develop into an effective government; instead it descended into factionalism (not surprising given the country's intense tribalism) and corruption. Karzai, whom I had described as a treasure, turned out to be weak in developing a modern system and, although he may not be personally corrupt, increasingly tolerant of corruption among those around him.

So we have come to the point where the Taliban are resurgent and the US-backed government in Kabul an ineffective representative of tribal factions who are mainly motivated by profit and personal advantage. The last straw was the presidential election, in which rampant corruption overshadowed all else; although Karzai was expected to lead the first round, the wholesale vote stealing has robbed him of any legitimacy among those who do not support him (and probably among many who do). (A vision of what might have been came in some of the lower-ranked candidates--members of the political and educational elite--who stood for real reform and whose candidacies were motivated by patriotism rather than individual interest.)

Where to go from here? Tom Friedman says that General McChrystal's new plan for Afghanistan

involves additional troops to create something that does not now exist there — a reasonably noncorrupt Afghan state that will serve its people and partner with America in keeping Afghanistan free of drug lords, warlords, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His plan calls for clearing areas of Taliban control, holding those areas and then building effective local, district and provincial governments — along with a bigger army, real courts, police and public services.

If Friedman is right, the general is calling for the United States to replace the Afghan government in a substantial portion of the country--the portion in which the Taliban is strongest. Perhaps that would work, but it sounds like old-fashioned colonialism to me, and it didn't work in Afghanistan even when colonialism was in fashion. (Friedman does not subscribe to McChrystal's plan; he properly notes that it is such a substantial change in direction that it deserves a thorough debate.)

On the other side of the Times editorial page, Nicholas Kristoff describes "The Afghanistan (sic) Abyss." He relates the concerns of a group of American security and intelligence professionals with experience in Afghanistan (one the former CIA station chief in Kabul) who believe that we are heading for disaster. As these experts say, in a statement,

Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem. The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

Kristoff's sources have much the better of the argument. Their logic not only accords with normal human experience, but particularly with Afghan experience.

Kristoff suggests not a precipitous withdrawal, but a lighter footprint: "[T]raining the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban."

Such a change in policy would encounter ferocious resistance from the American right, even though George Will has said that we should simply withdraw from Afghanistan. The Republicans would undoubtedly smell blood in a chance to paint Obama as a wimp. It would require real political courage for the President to choose a course that would give the GOPhers such an opportunity.

Let's take a moment to think about what would happen if the US were to pull back in Afghanistan. We can keep the Taliban from controlling Kabul and the other major cities. We can give the Afghans a chance to build their own nation, free from Islamic radicalism. (Afghans traditionally followed moderate forms of their religion.) Our commitment, at a much lower level than it is now, would have to be long, and the eventual outcome highly uncertain; there is a high probability that the Afghans cannot, and perhaps do not want, what we consider an effective civil society.

On the other hand, what if we were to win in Afghanistan--whatever "winning" means? Would we eliminate the threat from al Qaeda that led us into the country to being with? No. Bin Laden and his cohorts have ong since moved on, and their movement has metastasized. In other words, we cannot achieve our original war aim. Is there, then, another goal that justifies a massive further investment of our blood and treasure? If you see one, let me know, because I don't.

(I'm going to stop here, even though I have hardly mentioned the threat and problem of Pakistan, which poses a much greater danger, and perhaps a greater challenge, than Afghanistan.)

Like a bad movie

You-Can't-Make-This-Stuff-Up Dept.

From Kevin Drum: "When the fire chief of Jericho, Arkansas, finally got fed up and went to court a few days ago to challenge his second traffic ticket in as many days, the town's entire 7-man police force showed up for the hearing. And then shot him."

The AP story that was the basis for Drum's post has this delicious quote: "You can't even get them to answer a call because normally they're writing tickets." What makes the statement even better is that it does not come from some disgruntled civilian, but from the chief investigator of the county sheriff's department.

You'll be glad to know that the town's entire police force has been fired and the local judge has resigned. But they're still looking for the receipts from all tickets that were written.

Follow me!

We've added a Follower gadget. Just go down to the bottom of the page and hit the Follower button!

What are we doing?

The Times reports on blatant fraud in the Afghan election--a district where no one voted, but almost 24,000 votes were delivered (literally) for Hamid Karzai. CBS says that the Taliban is taking a significant part of American reconstruction aid, through an office that they run in Kabul itself.

So, why are we in Afghanistan? Allegedly, to prevent the Taliban, who pose no threat to the US and have never posed a threat to the US, from taking over the country. Because the Taliban are allies and protectors of al Qaeda. But with Somalia still lacking any semblance of government, and Yemen in danger of falling apart completely, and Pakistan sheltering the terrorist network's leadership, how important is Afghanistan? More to the point, how much longer can we ask our servicemen and women to risk death and disfigurement on behalf of a regime that can't or won't see beyond the hand held out for a bribe?

Why not maintain just enough troops and planes in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban from a complete victory while we wait to see if the Afghans can build some semblance of a state?

Hard to believe

World War II started 70 years ago today, when Germany invaded Poland.

How much things have changed since then, and how little.

Blowing his own horn

A group of very nice letters about Ted Kennedy in today's Times, one of them by a person very close to my heart.

Fall

Today is the first day of meteorological fall.

Downer.