Reliving the Past
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: September 5, 2009
The president should listen to Joe Biden.
Mr. Biden has been a voice of reason, warning the administration of the
dangers of increasing our military involvement in Afghanistan. President
Obama has not been inclined to heed his advice, which is worse than a shame.
It's tragic.
Watching the American escalation of the war in Afghanistan is like watching
helplessly as someone you love climbs into a car while intoxicated and
drives off toward a busy highway. No good can come of it.
The war, hopelessly botched by the Bush crowd, has now lasted nearly eight
long years, longer than our involvement in World Wars I and II combined.
There is nothing even remotely resembling a light at the end of the tunnel.
The war is going badly and becoming deadlier. July and August were the two
deadliest months for U.S. troops since the American invasion in October
2001.
Nevertheless, with public support for the war dwindling, and with the
military exhausted and stretched to the breaking point physically and
psychologically after so many years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
president is ratcheting the war up instead of winding it down.
He has already ordered an increase of 21,000 troops, which will bring the
American total to 68,000, and will be considering a request for more troops
that is about to come from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of
American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
These will be troops heading into the flames of a no-win situation. We're
fighting on behalf of an incompetent and hopelessly corrupt government in
Afghanistan. If our ultimate goal, as the administration tells us, is a
government that can effectively run the country, protect its own population
and defeat the Taliban, our troops will be fighting and dying in Afghanistan
for many, many years to come.
And they will be fighting and dying in a particularly unforgiving
environment. Afghanistan is a mountainous, mostly rural country with
notoriously difficult, lonely and dangerous roads - a pitch-perfect
environment for terrorists and guerrillas. Linda Bilmes, a professor at
Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has been working with the
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz to document the costs of the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. She told me:
"The cost per troop of keeping the troops in Afghanistan is higher than the
cost in Iraq because of the really difficult overland supply route and the
heavy dependence on airlifting all kinds of supplies. There has been such a
lot of trouble with the security of the supplies, and that, of course,
becomes even more complicated the more troops you put in. So we're
estimating that, on average, the cost per troop in Afghanistan is at least
30 percent higher than it is in Iraq."
The thought of escalating our involvement in Afghanistan reminded me of an
exchange that David Halberstam described in "The Best and the Brightest." It
occurred as plans were being developed for the expansion of U.S. involvement
in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy, who served as national security adviser to
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, showed some of the elaborate and
sophisticated plans to one of his aides. The aide was impressed, but also
concerned.
"The thing that bothers me," he told Bundy, "is that no matter what we do to
them, they live there and we don't, and they know that someday we'll go away
and thus they know they can outlast us."
Bundy replied, "That's a good point."
We've already lost more than 5,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent
a trillion or so dollars. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the more
resentful the local population will become about our presence, and the more
resentful the American public will become about our involvement in a war
that seems to have no end and no upside.
President Obama is being told (as Lyndon Johnson was told about Vietnam)
that more resources will do the trick in Afghanistan - more troops, more
materiel, more money. Even if it were true (I certainly don't believe it),
we don't have those resources to give. It's obscene what we're doing to the
men and women who have volunteered for the armed forces, sending them into
the war zones for three, four and five tours.
The Army, in an effort to improve combat performance under these dreadful
conditions, is planning intensive training for all of its soldiers in how to
be more emotionally resilient. And, of course, a country that is going
through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that
counts its budget deficits by the trillions, has no choice but to lay the
costs of current wars on the unborn backs of future generations.
Lyndon Johnson made the mistake of not listening to the Joe Bidens of his
day. There's a lesson in that for President Obama.
***
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/10-8
Reviewing President Rahm Emanuel's Health Care Speech
by David Sirota
Open Left: September 10, 2009
Not to be too much of a downer, but I found Obama's speech tonight a big
O-bummer. Really, other than his very important reminder that "we're all in
this together," it was disappointing (although that's probably not the right
word, because it implies I expected something more). And remember, while I
have at times been critical of Obama, I've been very supportive of him on
health care...up until tonight. Here's a list of my basic problems:
- Why do Republican presidents and politicians never bash "The Right," but
President Obama uses a joint session speech to bash "The Left?"
- Obama felt the need to tell the country that he's devoted to making sure
the wildly unpopular private insurance industry at the heart of the health
care meltdown remains profitable. He also made sure to forget that Americans
love Medicare and hate private insurance when he went out of his way to
reiterate his support for "market" economics (shocker - this was the line
both parties stood up and gave a thundering round of applause). Awesome.
- Completely unclear why Obama promised to "call out lies," and then
proceeded to embrace the Right's most dishonest narrative about tort reform
being a major vehicle to fix health care (not surprisingly, the "don't
negotiate with legislative terrorists" lesson was reinforced when the GOP
response called Obama's bluff and pushed to work with him on tort reform).
- The wavering on the public option would be hilarious if it wasn't so
serious. Really - his insistence that he supports it but might also support
removing it reminded me of a Saturday Night Live skit parodying wavering and
waffling Democrats. Obviously he just had to listen to pundits insisting he
must abandon the public option, when a huge majority of Americans continue
to support it, and he has a huge legislative majority in Congress. He
obviosuly just HAS to compromise on it because...well...just because - and
he certainly can't use reconciliation like President Bush did
because...well, again, just because. And, of course, those of us who don't
expect him to compromise away an already compromised yet still wildly
popular public option are obviously on the radical fringe regardless of
polling data. Obviously!
- Though he didn't draw a direct equivalence, he implied there was one
between the progressive push for single payer and the ultra-conservative
push to destroy the entire health care system. Sick.
In sum, when you couple this with the speech's fawning praise for lunatics
like John McCain and Chuck Grassley and add to it the news that the White
House is holding closed-door compromise meetings with corporate Democrats
tomorrow, I felt like I was listening to a parsed screed by President Rahm
Emanuel, not a call to arms from the Barack Obama who actually ran for
president. There was lots of passionate talk about the problem, and little
courage to demand a serious solution.
I mean, I seem to remember an election just a few months ago that resulted
in a Democratic president, and huge Democratic majorities in Congress - and
I seem to remember there was a Barack Obama who only a short while ago said
geting those electoral results was the only obstacle to a full-on single
payer health care system, much less a weakened public option. But again, I
guess it's just too bad that after that election, President Emanuel now
rules America.
© 2009 Open Left
David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book is "The Uprising." He
is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the
Progressive States Network-both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at
www.credoaction.com/sirota.
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