Monthly Archives: November 2009

This morning I was listening to veteran New Yorker investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, on NPR’s Fresh Air, and Hersh addressed a leaked story that

President Obama has rejected the options for Afghanistan presented by his national security team, and instead is pushing for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government. This follows leaked classified cables from Americas ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, expressing his misgivings about sending in more troops.

I have been very critical of Obama – even after strongly advocating for his election – for his bold words and tepid actions that have done little more than institutionalize the status quo. Instead of change, we’ve seen more of the same. On the Afghanistan, Guantanamo, torture and use of the military, I have also slammed Obama for thinking strictly in political rather than policy terms – a trait characteristic of Democrats to feign military toughness.

I suppose what has bothered me the most about the Obama presidency is not that Obama has gone back on his campaign promises – that is what all politicians do – but that I know Obama knows better. I think he understands the issues, but is simply too much of a political wimp, a crowd pleaser, to stick to his guns.

Now this leak could be your run-of-the-mill Washington false leak (very Clintonesque) to test the waters. But if true, it would amount to an unprecedented change, real change, in how presidents make decisions on the use of our military. As Hersh explains (and I recommend you read the entire transcript),

Well, assuming that [the leak] is accurate, and it’s very early in the process, this could be an amazing – a really important step for the president, because I can tell you that many in your audience and obviously many here in Washington are very concerned about the fact that he delegated so much of the war-making policy to the generals in the field, asking General McChrystal, for example, to write the initial report on what to do in Afghanistan.

There isn’t a general in the Armed Forces asked to do that would say, I can’t win. That’s just what they do. So he put himself into a box, and he was very passive for a long time about it. And that’s why if you would ask me four days ago what I thought, I would have thought he’s going to make a political decision to do something with some token troops because he wants to he doesn’t want to lose more independence. He wants to show he can run a war. He can be a tough guy.

But what Obama’s done, if he has done what it seems he’s done, is if he’s telling the military, you know what? I don’t think it’s going to fly. This is huge because he’s basically saying I’m not going to play politics with the war. I’m not going to do what other president’s have and continue a war and continue fighting a war that I don’t think we can win – just only for the time, until I can find a way out. That’s what I would have guessed three or four days ago, he was going to do. He was going to wait for the political, right political moment when the public was so discouraged about the war, you could actually end it in some way. Instead, he’s saying, I’m going to stand up and be president, take my chances in 2012 on reelection.

He’s really doing – if he’s doing what’s been reported – a pretty noble thing. The problem is – and this is a daunting problem. The problem is I don’t think there’s any way you can stand up the – the Afghan army. The army traditionally has been controlled by Tajiks and Uzbek, from people from Uzbekistan – you know, from those Northern Alliance, we call them, in Afghanistan.

The Pashtuns who would be controlled by this army, theoretically, under the American dream, there’s no way they’re going to view Uzbeki or they’re going to view them as much of an outsider as they would view the Americans. They simply don’t like others in their face.

On a related note, one thing we hardly hear discussed in the debate on troop escalation is the fact that we simply do not have enough troops. On McChrystal’s proposal for 40,000 more troopos, Hersh says, Continue reading →

As Borja has noted, I have recently been quiet on the health care front. In part this is due to suffering from kidney stones this past month and consequently focusing more on Spain’s health care system than the joke of a debate going on back in the States. Needless to say (as I have already written countless times before), I am in favor of a public option – not that I would necessarily contract the public option myself, but a public option would without a doubt drive down costs and make the private alternatives – as is the case in Spain – more affordable and accessible.

For non-Americans the entire notion that somehow Americans could be against universal, affordable health care is mind-boggling. Yet, it is true. Many Americans have this perverse – albeit factually inaccurate – idea that any government sponsored program amounts to communism. Americans tend to ignore the fact that many activities so representative of Americana, that set us apart from the rest of the world, are in fact government-run or publicly sponsored.

A few months ago I had conversations with various friends who had grown up in the United States but were now raising children in Europe, some were Americans others were Spanish. They all mentioned access to public sports as what their children would most miss out on by growing up outside of the U.S. That’s right, good old fashioned American little league baseball, recreational soccer, and the local basketball courts are all public.

Does that mean that our kids are commies because they take the yellow bus to their public elementary school? Are our local high school cheerleaders socialists because their uniforms are paid for by the tax payer? When they put lights up at the public high school’s football stadium are we turning into Communist China?

Ironically, many conservatives argue that the solution is to be found in … you guessed it, government regulation (what they euphemistically call “Tort Reform”). Let’s leave this topic for a separate post, but suffice it to say that the costs associated with malpractice lawsuits only represent about two percent of the total cost of health care and have been stable since the 1980s.

Besides the silly ideological battle from the right, the pharmaceutical and health insurance lobbies have the guys on the left in their pockets, insuring that there will be no real or meaningful reform. This translates once again into the difference between Obama’s bold words and his subsequent blandness. The result will most likely be a public mandate and not a public option. In other words, health care will be like auto-insurance; everyone will be required to buy insurance from … you guessed it, the big winners, the insurance companies.

For the time being, though, I will defer to New York Times columnist Nicolas D. Kristof’s two recent articles on the subject. The first one debunks that myth, popular in the U.S., that we have the best health care system in the world:

The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.

. . . Opponents of reform assert that the wretched statistics in the United States are simply a consequence of unhealthy lifestyles and a diverse population with pockets of poverty. It’s true that America suffers more from obesity than other countries. But McKinsey found that over all, the disease burden in Europe is higher than in the United States, probably because Americans smoke less and because the American population is younger.

Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. Suddenly, a diverse population with pockets of poverty is no longer such a drawback.

The second addresses whether it is better to be spending on health care or Afghanistan:

President Obama and Congress will soon make defining choices about health care and troops for Afghanistan.

These two choices have something in common — each has a bill of around $100 billion per year. So one question is whether we’re better off spending that money blowing up things in Helmand Province or building up things in America.

With a war that has almost no effect whatsoever on keeping us safe at home, I would rather have a normal first world health care system.

Regardless of what many of us think and the vision of our beloved Founding Fathers, it took the United States over a century to become a stable democracy. According to Rory Stewart, in the best of scenarios, Afghanistan can aspire to have the democracy of Pakistan in thirty years. In eight years, American tax payers have already shelled out $220 billion. Only 92 years to go.

In the recent web-exclusive of the Bill Moyers Journal, Glenn Greenwald describes how the U.S. can be defined as a warrior nation, a country that has been at perpetual war for decades now. Presidents, and Obama is now no exception to the rule, become almost obliged to continue the tradition of invasion.

Putting our “There Will Be Blood” war-lust into perspective, Greenwald says,

I think the central problem is a lack of empathy. And my biggest wish is that if Americans– that every American in sort of a national collective exercise would spend just ten minutes thinking about the following question, which is:

Suppose there was a Muslim country that invaded the United States with 150,000 troops, and proceeded to occupy our country for the next eight years: dropped bombs on wedding parties, slaughtered men, women, and children who were innocent. Created prisons in our country, where they arrested American citizens and put us for years without charges. Created an overseas island prison where they shipped some of us to without any recourse whatsoever. And at the same time, were threatening to do that to several other Western countries. How much rage and anger and a desire for vengeance and violence would we feel towards that country that was doing that to us?

I mean, just look at what the singular one-day attack of 9/11, the kind of anger and rage it unleashed. And I think if Americans were to think about how we would react towards other countries, and what we would want to do to them, if they were doing to us what we are now doing to them, I think a lot of light would be shined on what it is that we’re really achieving in terms of our national security.

In a different interview, this one on Fresh Air, Jane Mayer discusses her recent article in the New Yorker on the use of unmanned drones to fight our wars, and points out one of the obvious moral problems with fighting high tech wars far away from home:

You know, right now, I think Congress is really infatuated with this technology. And you can see why, I mean it is a marvel. But the place where people are asking questions are in the human rights community, the international lawyers, the U.N.,. There are a number of sort of political philosophers asking questions, such as, you know, if there’s no – if we can’t feel the impact of the people that we’re killing and we can’t see them, and none of our own people at risk, does this somehow make it easier to just be in a perpetual state of war because there’s no seeming cost to us? These are the kinds of questions that people are asking.

Not to mention, as Mayer writes in her New Yorker piece that

The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there. As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare. The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based. It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel. The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.

The CIA program is not only secret (and arguably committing illegal extrajudicial assassinations) but it is being outsourced to private military contractors and some of the attacks are on targets requested by the Pakistani government. In any event, I definitely recommend Mayer’s article as it attempts to present all of the facts without passing judgment.