US Health Care Reform: Made in…Afghanistan?
Stephen M. Walt, commenting on Obama’s recent AfPak escalation and the incongruity of domestic spending initatives vs expensive foreign military endeavours on the part of the US:
As I’ve said before, Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed with suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned. This position makes no sense, but it is hard to think of a prominent U.S. leader who is making an explicit case for doing somewhat less abroad so that we can afford to build a better future here at home. Debates about foreign policy, grand strategy, and military engagement — including the current debate over Obama’s decision to add another30,000-plus troops in Afghanistan — tend to occur in isolation from a discussion of other priorities, as if there were no tradeoffs between what we do for others and what we are able to do for Americans here at home.
Thankfully, E-Mart has proposed a modest solution to one particularly contentious domestic issue currently mired in the US Senate:
Maybe we can set up an efficient health insurance delivery system in Iraq or Afghanistan and then import it to the States. Call it a part of our COIN strategy, get Petraeus to endorse it and then ship it home under cover of night.
Wow. That’s so crazy, it just might work.
Le sigh.
Who are we fighting and what are we fighting for?
Matthew Hoh, a Marine veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, was rising quickly through our Foreign Service ranks, serving as a Senior Civilian Representative for America in Zabul Province, Afghanistan. Hoh had a bright government career ahead of him until he quit because the Afghan war is bullshit.
A Wicked Man Continues to Spout His Wickedness
Emptywheel (aka Marcy Wheeler) examines Dick Cheney’s latest rantings — on missile defense, on Iraq and Afghanistan, on America’s success in keeping its moral bearings while torturing confessions out of prisoners, on how his administration’s policies kept us safe (except for 9/11 itself, of course, and except for the London bombings, and the Madrid bombings, and the murder of UN ambassador Sergio Vieria de Mello in Iraq….. oh, never mind).
Thomas Friedman Is Unbearable Today
In other words, it’s a typical Friedman column. Today, he tells Pres. Obama what he should say in his Oslo acceptance speech. Long story short, he wants Obama to give a GWB speech. Of course, GWB did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. He did not win the Nobel Peace Prize because his “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” approach to talking up America pretty much alienated the whole planet. So now Friedman wants Obama to take the very global set of ideas and intentions that moved the Nobel Committee to award him the Peace Prize and throw it back in their faces. If eight years of George W. Bush telling Europeans that black was white, war was peace, occupation was liberation, and aggression was peacekeeping didn’t work, what makes Friedman think it’ll be a winning strategy now?
It’s Not Insubordination When the CINC Is Barack Obama
Earlier today, the British paper Telegraph reported on Pres. Obama’s response to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s very public criticism of the approach Obama is taking to Afghanistan:
Peter Galbraith on the Fraudulent Afghan Elections
Galbraith’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post is an important read for anyone wanting to understand why sending more troops to Afghanistan is doomed to failure. Here is a key paragraph:
Afghanistan, Strategy, and Learning From Mistakes
Pres. Obama is considering revamping Afghanistan strategy toward an approach that does not involve sending more troops:
The McChrystal Report on Afghanistan
The big news story today is Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s report on Afghanistan, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he basically gives Pres. Obama an ultimatum: Give me more troops or we lose the war.
Obama Now Says He Will Not Release Detainee Abuse Photos
President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.
The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”
Wow. Those photographs must be truly, shockingly horrendous if Obama and his advisers are so concerned their release would put U.S. soldiers’ lives in danger and threaten our national security:
A couple of points here: First, it isn’t the photos; it is the acts themselves that put US troops in danger. The abuse is widely known among Iraqis, and those inclined to act don’t need photographic evidence as justification.
Second, the White House has a tough argument to make here. The Second Circuit Court has ruled that the Bush claim of an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act was not meant to be an “all purpose damper on global controversy.” Since a controversy already exists, and photos of abuse from Abu Ghraib have previously been released, the current administration is going to have to argue that the new photos are somehow substantially more controversial.
Makes one want to ask: controversial how?
Exactly.
On the other side of the issue, Neptunus Lex thinks this was a “good call“:
Nothing new would have come of this but propaganda for the enemies of civilization. Apparently, the administration has determined that the increased risk to our troops – something he should care about both personally and politically – outweighs the delicious opportunity to further harrow his increasingly irrelevant predecessor.
I’d call that growing in the job.
I, on the other hand, would call it missing the point. How many times has Barack Obama said, both as president and during the campaign, that the previous administration’s use of harsh enhanced interrogation techniques torture has been one of Al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools? It’s the torture that endangers our troops’ lives and makes us less safe, as Gregg Levine wrote in that quote above. It’s the torture that the “enemies of civilization” have been using and will continue to use as propaganda until they know it’s ended and the people responsible are being held accountable. Our “enemies” are not going to see anything when those photos are released that they didn’t already know about, or that, indeed, they haven’t already seen up close and personal. It’s us — the American people — who need to see and fully know what’s been done in our names.
And that “enemies of civilization” concept — what’s that about? Is torture not uncivilized? (Not to mention, illegal.) Is it okay that we perpetrated such unimaginable cruelties against the “enemies of civilization” if we can persuade ourselves that everyone we brutalized was an enemy of civilization? Surely some of them were not uncivilized!
I’ve gotten to know Lex a wee bit as a person, and he’s a decent, smart guy with a cool sense of humor. But on this, he is wrong, wrong, wrong.
When Is Prescription Drug Abuse Okay?
UPDATES I, II, AND III BELOW:
When the prescription drug is Viagra, and the C.I.A. is handing it out to tribal chieftains in Afghanistan:
The Spin To Come
If you want a sneak preview of the kind of spin we can expect to see from the right when Obama puts his Iraq troop withdrawal plans into action, here’s Instapundit:
Truth and Recklessness on Afghanistan
During the debate Thursday evening, Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of “hurting our cause” in Afghanistan with a statement he made in August that “all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”
Family Values
After six years of detention without charge or trial, the families of five lucky Afghan detainees were allowed to see their loved ones. The other 594 are still waiting:
Fun With Maps
Matthew Yglesias has some irresistible snark on that fictional border between Iraq and Pakistan.
Domenico Montanaro explains that McCain “probably meant to say the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as they were talking about Afghanistan and there is no Iraq-Pakistan border. ” Montanaro also passes on the Republican defense to McCain’s many flubs:
Republicans have pointed out Obama telling CBS he’d be dealing with Maliki for the next eight to 10 years. They have snarkily said apparently Obama wants to change the Constitution because the most a president can serve is eight years. If Obama were to serve two terms, that would be about eight-and-a-half years from now. Republicans also point out that it’s been 925 days since Obama has been to Iraq, but McCain has been there eight times.
And he still doesn’t know which countries border Iraq.
Do You Have To Know Geography To Be Good at Foreign Policy?
So far, Barack Obama has not made any faux pas in his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq — but John McCain has:
… In a verbal flub that will spark renewed recollections of his Shiite/Sunni miscue earlier this year while he was visiting the Middle East, he erroneously reconfigured the map of the world.
Asked on ABC about the uptick in violence by Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, he replied: “We have a lot of work to do and I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border.”
Iraq borders several nations, but Pakistan is not among them — looming between the two is Iran. (Pakistan’s neighbors, however, include Afghanistan).
Steve Benen has the video.
More Regrettable Loss of Innocent Life
Once again, scores of civilians are dead because of a U.S. air strike:
Maybe Those Taliban Fighters Should Send a Thank You Note to Pres. Bush
Three days after about 400 Taliban fighters were sprung from Sarposa Prison in Kandahar, eight villages near that city are back under Taliban control.
Alex Thurston has more.
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