The Emperor Has No Brains, Part Trois

"The president alleged that some of the accusations by detainees were made by 'people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth.'"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usattacksiraqbush


Exsqueeze me? Did our President just say that?

The Emperor Has No Brains, Part Deux

"Bush, whose opinion poll ratings have fallen in recent weeks, also reaffirmed his confidence that insurgents would be beaten in Iraq, despite the mounting death toll in the country."

I'm sure insurgents will be beaten--in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo. The world needs more beatings. But the problem with the mounting death toll is that most of it is Iraqi, which means we're going to have fewer of them to administer beatings to. Better step up the pace of arrests, George! Gotta get 'em into your prisons before you can whup 'em!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usattacksiraqbush

The Emperor Has No Brains

Gee, I didn't know we were keeping Amnesty International in dog pens on Guantanamo as well. I bet those nasty human rights campaigners hate apple pie and baseball, too:

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday dismissed a human rights report as "absurd" for its harsh criticism of U.S. treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the allegations were made by prisoners "who hate America."
"It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world," Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

http://news.yahoo.com/
s/ap/20050531/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_8

The whole thing reads more like a Saturday Night Live skit than a news conference held by a President. Would someone care to explain to me how it's possible that we won't all meet up in the third circle of hell for electing this ninny in the first place?

Optimism in the Face of Idiocy

On the one hand, the House recognizes that we are into something in the desert that needs some accountability. On the other hand, WART wins votes--so they pile on the weapons systems. Might they be thinking that the only way to get OUT of Iraq is to go FURTHER down the road?
Ugh. George Galloway might be a pompous windbag, but I'd trade any 12 of the democrat reps for one like him. WHERE ARE OUR LEADERS?:

"For the first time since the war in Iraq began twenty-six months ago, the House of Representatives debated the need for US troops to exit Iraq. The modest amendment, introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California last Thursday evening, called on President Bush to develop a plan for the withdrawal of US forces. With virtually no prior notice or lobbying, 123 Democrats and 5 Republicans voted for Woolsey's amendment. But with no support from either the Democratic or Republican leadership, and thus no chance of passing, no major US newspaper felt obligated to cover the unprecedented proceedings.

Instead, the House added $49 billion more for the Iraqi occupation--on top of the $82 billion recently appropriated--as part of the $491 billion 2006 National Defense Authorization Act. The massive defense bill establishes a new fleet of nuclear submarines, provides millions for new aircrafts and ships, adds $100 million for a missile defense system and expands research for bunker-busting bombs. All of this the House could easily support. But not a non-binding call for a withdrawal plan."

http://www.thenation.com/
blogs/outrage?bid=13&pid=2946

War on Terror Sucks

I am one of that small group of ninnies who associate with the Left in general but who decided to support the war in Iraq for all them humanitarian reasons and for a general hatred of fascist police states. It was a Faustian bargain with the Bushies and as we all know it hasn't turned out all too well thus far. At least in Iraq, however, there is some hope that down the line, some years from now, some of the hopes might be realized, though whether it was ever worth the suffering will be hard to say.

The war on terror, though, is a lemon through and through. Guantanamo is an outright outrage. Extraordinary rendition is despicable. Abu Graib is a monstrosity whose stain wont soon fade and ought to be investigated all the way up the chain of command. And as Amnesty International reports today, the war on terror has simply become a war on human rights. This is ugly shit.

Sham Democracy and Iranian Factions

Thedon (entry below) has clued us onto a sharp, informative blog run by Sharam Kholdi, a political scientist and self-described “Secular Canuck-Iranic”. Khlodi here has a good recap of the current shift in the Iranian government’s policy, a moment when Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, asked the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, to over-turn a ban imposed by his Guardian Council:

On 23 May, upon the recommendation of the Parliament’s Speaker, Ayatollah Khamenei ordered the Council of Guardians to review the candidacy of two candidates that had been rejected by the Guardians. He, in effect, ordered the Guardians to accept them. One of these two candidates is a former member of President Khatami’s cabinet, the pro-reform candidate, Dr. Moin. Moin, during his campaign had indicated that his platform rejects the concept of “Sovereign’s Decree”. The question of “Sovereign’s Decree”, and the reformists’ opposition has been a controversial issue during the Khatami’s mandate. It has exposed deep differences between the rival conservative/fundamentalist factions and the reformist factions of the regime.

The divisions and factions within the Iranian regime are a factor that political analysis should carefully address. Kholdi, in this entry, seems to imply that the Parliament’s Speaker (Gholam Ali Hadad Adel) was able to convince the Ayatollah Khamenei that the Guardian Council (and the Ayatollah himself?) had erred in barring reformist Presidential candidates by appealing to concerns for the regime’s legitimacy, both foreign and domestic. The lengths this regime will go to maintain their rather unique sham democracy for the sake of tattered legitimacy are often pathetic and self-defeating:

I concede that the conceptualisation of the concept of "Sovereign's Decree" is still to be discussed in the literature by the Shiite juris-theologians. However, in order to understand the present situation, I think we should pay attention to the way the Parliament's Speaker made his request, the way the Supreme Leader decreed it, and the way the Guardian Council accepted it.
The Parliament's Speaker made his request based upon "expediency/exigency", that is, he implied that the regime's legitimacy would be questioned domestically and internationally, if there is a low voter-turnout as a result of Moin's disqualification.

In responding to the Parliament's Speaker, the Supreme Leader did not order the Guardian Council to treat everybody equally and revise its criteria to be as inclusive as possible. He ordered that the Guardians, in the interest of expediency and exigency of the regime, have to reconsider the qualification of the candidates that he had explicitly mentioned in his letter: Mehr-alizadeh and Moin. Indeed, the Supreme Leader made no mention as to whether he believed the Guardians could have made a mistake, but he asked them to make an exception in the interest of the regime.

The "interest of the regime" necessitates the propping up of a democratic fraud, one that teeters between farce and occasional hope (Khatami); an imabalance that can not be maintained for much longer.

Reform in Iran, aka "The Shell Game"

The following excellent site has translations of the correspondence between the Supreme Leader and the Parliament's Speaker:

http://secularcaniranik.blogs.com/
scaniranic/2005/05/correspondence_.html

One-Dimensional Man meets Kafka. To "order" reform does not a reformer make. As the writer concludes:

"Rafsanjani, realising that the skirmish with the Guardians can promote the profile of Dr. Moin as a victim, will try to promote himself as the president who can get the job done without getting caught in the kind of squabble that brought Khatami's administration's performance to a halt. In fact, if Rafsanaji's campaign is smart enough, it can promote Rafsanjani as an experienced leader versus Larijani, as an "effective" politician against Moin, as a forceful and intelligent statesperson against Karoubi, and as the deputy commander-in-chief of the regime during much of the War, against Ghalibaaf (the former Police Chief) and Rezai (the former Revolutionary Guard Commander).

Despite the fact that ensuring a high voter turnout in the elections has been identified as an expediency, i.e. important for the survival of the regime, by both the Parliament's Speaker and the Supreme Leader, and despite that they have both reminded the Guardians of this critical issue, the effect can still turn many people off and cause them to decide not to turn up at the polls.

The people have just been told by the un-elected Supreme Leader and his Watchdog, the Guardians, that it is the Supreme Leader who calls the shots in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Consequently, even if the people decide to vote for Moin or Rafsanjani or anybody else, it is the Supreme Leader and the Guardians who have to make the final decision.

While the Supreme Leader by allowing the qualification of Moin presents himself as "rational" and "pro-pluralism", "popular sovereignty" is shown to be explicitly at his behest. The Guardians, as the electoral watchdog, can still decide to declare the result of the elections in many ridings null-and-void, and that is yet another episode that will not unfold until after the elections.

The drama has turned into a farce, and nobody is laughing.

Let us be reminded of how the Parliament's Speaker finished his letter to the Supreme Leader:

The Order Still Rests Upon Your Eminence (Mr. Supreme Leader)."

The Cost of WARTs

A ruined nation, a $300 billion dollar price tag, and collusion with genocidal thugs. Do you feel safer yet?:

"…activists, who note that Bush himself has been silent on Darfur since the end of last year, are concerned that his reticence actually signals a policy shift spurred by growing covert cooperation between U.S. and Sudan's intelligence services in the so-called ''global war on terror''. Khartoum, which hosted al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden for several years in the 1990s, has tried to persuade Washington of its utility in that respect since shortly after the Sep.11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had secretly flown Khartoum's intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington for high-level meetings with his U.S. counterparts last month despite the fact that he has been accused of directing military attacks in Darfur, the Los Angeles Times reported recently."

http://www.ipsnews.net
/interna.asp?idnews=28803

Un-American Plans for Health Care

This is an ongoing series of posts on Medicare and the failure of the American healthcare system. You can read previous posts (and it may prove beneficial in providing background info) here, here, here, and here. Xpatriated Texan provides a semi-regular posting on the topic in addition to his own blog, which can be found here.

President Bush is, at least at his words, very fond of small businesses. He is very fond of saying that he is helping them. However, his idea of help them get healthcare is allow them to band together to buy health insurance. While this noble idea fits well with the free-market ideology it doesn't really deal with the reality of the situation. How likely do you think it is that, say, 100 small businesses to gather together to do anything?

The term "small business" is intentionally vague. According to the US Census Bureau about five and a half million firms and just over seven million establishments are considered small businesses. Together, they employ some one hundred and fifteen million people and contribute close to four billion to the economy through payroll. Obviously, this is a significant segment of our economy.

Of this number, only some seventeen thousand firms and slightly more than a million establishments actually employ more than five hundred people. The vast majority of these actually have less than a hundred employees. Why is this important? Because, referring back to my earlier posting, one of the primary ways of keeping insurance costs down is to spread the costs over a large number of people. An employer with five thousand employees can demand a much better price for insurance benefits than can a firm of only five hundred. The difference is so much more exaggerated when only a few dozen employees seek benefits.

At this point, it seems like the President's idea is a good one - why not let these small businesses pool their buying power to ensure better benefits for their employees? The first reason is that many of them are in direct competition with each other. If you run a convenience store, how likely are you to go to the owner of the convenience store across the street and agree to pay for each other's employees? (Hint: Don't hold your breath.)

Of course, some are not in direct competition. However, they still must budget valuable time to create a group of businessmen to work together. More time would be needed to decide which one will bargain on their behalf. More time still to work out a benefit plan with an insurance company. More time to come back to the group with no assurance that any given offer will suit the needs of any specific businessman. In other words, it is a huge investment of time and energy with no guarantee of return.

You can also see that small businesses are at a disadvantage when dealing with insurance companies. Companies with small numbers of employees not only pay more to start with, but they face greater percentage increases in buying insurance than do larger firms. The gulf in the ability to provide benefits increases at an ever increasing rate. This is the President's plan for small businesses.

If you've followed my posts, you know what I'm about to suggest. There is no need for the President to throw these brave businessmen and women upon the vagarities of the market. Rather, a system already exists by which they could provide their employees a modest level of benefits for a reasonable price. Opening the system to these small businesses would create a stream of revenue that would help drive down the cost of providing insurance to the elderly and disabled. It would immediately create a system where benefits are 100% portable.

Medicare B currently has a full cost of less than $4,000 per person. Split between employee and employer, that drops it to a very affordable $2,000 per person per year. If employee and employer are both allowed to pay for this benefit with pre-tax dollars - as are most health benefits - then the affordability quickly becomes a non-issue. Suddenly the small employer can offer health benefits that are close to being on-par with those of larger companies. Smaller businesses are now more competitive and more profitable and employees are healthier and less likely to leave employment for a better opportunity.

All that stands between this idea and its implementation is an ideological opposition to government acting in the best interest of those whom it governs. A blind adherance to such ideology would naturally claim that the health of the citizens are of no concern of the government. If so, then let it be said and opposed on these grounds. However, the government of the United States was created to guard the rights of its citizens - chief among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - to steal a certain famous line.

How can we claim to have a right to life if we have no right to maintain that life? In a modern society, where reasonable health care can arguably increase the length of life, the breadth of liberty, and is crucial to the pursuit of happiness, how can we turn a blind eye to the forty million plus citizens who move in and out of coverage every year?

When we have the means of doing this cheaply, including as many as we can, the continuing inaction becomes a violation of the public trust. It is a destructive cancer at the heart of our country, slowly destroying true economic opportunity. It is the proof of hollow words, hollow leadership, and hollow ambition. It is un-American.

Reformist Tendencies in Iran

In an intriguing maneuver, Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, over-ruled his appointed Guardian Council allowing two reformist candidates to run for the Presidency. Writes Neil MacFarquhar:

In a response to an order by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme religious leader, a watchdog group dominated by his hard-line allies reversed an earlier decision and said today that two reformist candidates could run in presidential elections next month, according to state-run television. . . . .

"It's appropriate that all individuals in the country be given the choice from various political tendencies," Ayatollah Khamenei, the ultimate judge for all matters of state, said in his decree, which was carried by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Various political tendencies? In terms of political space within Iran, it’s always noteworthy whenever there appears to be hard-line factions more conservative than the theocrat himself, either in being anti-reform or anti-fashion.

Business too, is another divisive issue for the Iranian hierarchy. Where was the Ayatollah Khamenei on the sudden closure of the Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA)? After business oriented factions from the transportation ministry built the airport with the help of a Turkish company, resentful hardliners within the army abruptly seized it and shut it down. This internal power struggle led to a parliamentary (Majlis) investigation into why the army over-stepped its bounds and the eventual re-opening of the airport. The lines of authority and power in Iran are jumbled and often at cross purposes.

A more populist reformist tendency, recently started by Iranian dissidents and bypassing the tangle of the Iranian state structure, focuses on building a movement around a national referendum:

Perhaps even more significant than the numbers is the fact that the movement has garnered support across the Iranian political spectrum, from left-wing groups to nationalists to moderate monarchists such as Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah. “This referendum has for the first time ever in the life of the Islamic republic caused a movement that has mobilized various ideologies,” says Hossein Namdar, an Iranian-American who hosted one of the petition’s original signatories on the latter’s recent visit to the United States. “All these political groups and activists, with different ways of thinking, are agreeing on one thing: a referendum for establishing a new constitution, based solely on the desire of the Iranian people.”

Galloway's Style and the Cassus Belli

Even conservative commentators have grudgingly praised George Galloway’s flat-out audacity and slick oratory in their post-fight analysis of his U.S. Senate performance. Fox News’ John Gibson asks:

But Galloway is a rhetorical thug and if you're going to go up against him, you better bring your best stuff.
So where was Senator Norm Coleman today?

Writing for the National Review, Alex Massie noted the rhetorical differences and relative advantages of a House of Commons debating style over that of the American Senate:

While the House of Commons is not what it once was, it is still a bear pit compared to the somnolent rectitude of the United States Senate. That much became clear when the British MP George Galloway appeared at a Senate subcommittee hearing on the abuse of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program on Tuesday. . . . .

It was hard to know quite what Senators Norm Coleman and Carl Levin expected from the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow; it was impossible not to suspect they got more than they bargained for. As a rule senators are not, I think, accustomed to being accused by their witnesses of committing “schoolboy howlers.”

Christopher Hitchens writing from one of his newer venues in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, expresses his paradoxical pride in British pugnacity:

In a small way--an exceedingly small way--this had the paradoxical effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. The torpid majesty of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who is in addition a man without embarrassment who has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods.

Note the comparisons used by Massie and Hitchens for the British lower house and the American upper respectively: “bear pit,” “hard school of debate” to “somnolent rectitude” and “torpid majesty”. No doubt America is on the poorer end of the eristic equation. Such differences in schooling don’t change the fact that Galloway is a pompous prick with a vile history of pro-Baathist politics, his brazen misadventure in the U.S. Senate, however, exhibits the deep weakness in the American-led case for war and its aftermath. If Iraq was doing anywhere near as well as its intellectual authors forecasted Norm Coleman would’ve put Galloway away -- regardless of Scottish wile and oratorical style. Speaking of the justifications for the war, Hitchens continues his essay by restating his reasons for supporting the war, and in doing so, reveals a remarkable short-sightedness he has yet to come to grips with:

There are only two ways this suffering could have been relieved. Either the sanctions could have been lifted, as Galloway and others demanded, or the regime could have been removed. The first policy, if followed without conditions, would have untied the hands of Saddam. The second policy would have had the dual effect of ending sanctions and terminating a hideous and lawless one-man rule. But when the second policy was proposed, the streets filled with people who absolutely opposed it. Saying farewell to the regime was, evidently, too high a price to pay for relief from sanctions.

If the goal is the end of Iraqi suffering, then the removal of the dictatorship was but the first step in a nation-building process not an end in itself. Many times in history a dictator has been overthrown and the state and society of a given nation has continued to degenerate. The regime of Czar Nicholas II had to be removed to improve the lot of the Russian people, the Shah of Iran had to be deposed, Mobutu needed to be overthrown to relieve the suffering of Zaire (Congo). None of these coups led to markedly better circumstances for their people or the world at large. Hitchens writes and has written quite cogently about the long U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein and American complicity in the sad fate of Iraq, all arguments in favor of some form of engagement necessary to atone for these past sins. But such penance, whatever its expression, needed to be carefully planned and exactingly enacted with gravity, expertise and awareness -- both for the realities of the pre-war situation and the desired end state. It was apparent from before the war that the Bush administration had neither capability. If the chosen responsibility, the goal of the war was to relieve Iraqi suffering, then simply removing the Hussein was not enough, especially if Iraq slides into more terrorism and civil war as a result of the rushed intervention:

I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick. They should be careful what they wish for.

For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. "If we let go of the insurgency," said another of the officers quoted anonymously last week, "then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos."

Animal Rights Terror

As a vegan and longtime advocate to stop the needless suffering of animals, I found this story in the Guardian today sort of curious. Certainly not an advocate of terrorism of any kind, the evolution of the Terrorist--or who is considered to be such--is pretty interesting (and, also, frightening) and seems to be an expanding science worthy of a map.

The Memo

Essentially, the British memo merely confirms what we've already known for a long time: The Bushies decided to oust Saddam first and then went about trying to assemble an argument for doing so. Down the historical road, when assessments are made, the Bush administration will be graded lowly for its behavior in just these sorts of ways. But I'm not sure if it is enough to have much of a political impact, in this country, tight now. From the NY Times.

More than two weeks after its publication in London, a previously secret British government memorandum that reported in July 2002 that President Bush had decided to "remove Saddam, through military action" is still creating a stir among administration critics. They are portraying it as evidence that Mr. Bush was intent on war with Iraq earlier than the White House has acknowledged.

Insurgency 101: Look the Devil in the Eye

So who are the Iraqi insurgents? The NYTimes runs two separate stories attempting to answer that question, one which approaches the topic head on, by James Bennet, and the other a bit obliquely, by Steven Weisman and John Burns. Parsing distinctions and throwing up taxonomies to describe the differences between the many insurgents, terrorists and jihadis operating in Iraq is a useful exercise, and Bennet’s piece is largely about the confusion among counter-insurgency experts as to the sociologic behind the hideous acts of mass killing. What do ‘they’ hope to gain from terrorizing the Iraqi public instead of attempting to win them over? This line of inquiry proves too much for Christopher Hitchens, who tears into Bennet for not labeling the anti-government guerillas the way Hitchens demands: jihadists. Hitchens has a point in that the most extreme and probably the most deadly terror elements appear to be Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq, certainly among the worst examples of Islamist nihilism -- but at what point do these jihadist meet up and conspire with Sunni insurgents who can actually be won over by politics? (I don’t hew to Hitchens reflexive outrage over the term ‘insurgent’, you can be a rebel as still be scum.) Discovering the point on the continuum between a jihadist without politics and an insurgent with politics is a precondition to offering a political solution to the insurgency, if that is even possible. Moqtada Al-Sadr in this context is an understandable figure: he adheres to political goals based on a reactionary form of Shi’a Islam, a harsh style of theocratic governance that resembles the Iranian state. Sadr has already declared his hopes for an Islamic Republic with himself in a dominant role but his relative pragmatism and reluctant obeisance to a Shi’a hierarchy has subjected him (so far) to the twin blades of US military supremacy and the higher rank of the Ayatollah Sistani. That is politics however marginal and ugly.

On the other hand, jihadist 'goals' are so far beyond the practically attainable -- with their ardent but vague calls for a caliphate or a return to the Ottoman Empire -- that their demands seem millenarian; messianic more than political. What is likely at work here, among the most militant of the faithful, is a basic nihilistic impulse, one examined by writers like Ian Buruma and Paul Berman but rarely extrapolated on in-depth for the nitty-gritty of military and political purposes. Can such nihilistic terrorists really be defeated through a partial war, and if not, how can they be incorporated into a political process? These jihadists in Iraq have not made more concrete political demands because sizable segments within their ranks do not have conventional political demands. Demands which are open to compromise and negotiation, demands that can be incorporated into a successful state structure as potential policy.

Like Eric Hobsbawm’s 1959 classic, Primitive Rebels, the worst, at the end of the insurgent spectrum, constitute a violent social movement whose desires are pre-political in nature, bettered expressed with a language of millenarian discontent. Their agitation is for the mystical arrival of a great period of divine justice, of human perfection attained through obeisance to Shari’a. Wrote Hobsbawm of his own subjects:

Moreover, they are pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world. . . . . They do not as yet grow with or into modern society: they are broken into it . . . . Their problem is how to adapt themselves to its life and struggles, and the subject of this book is the process of adaption (or failure to adapt) as expressed in their archaic social movements. (p. 2)

Hobsbawm was cautious enough to note that words like ‘primitive’ and ‘archaic’ should not mislead his readers, since such social movements have long historical evolutions and cultural sophistications behind them. And as Chronicles contributor Steven M. Levine often notes, there are many forms of modernity, (Mohammed Atta had a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from a Hamburg University) but the specific modernity confronting jihadist insurgents in Iraq is that of a multi-ethnic democracy in which their extremist brand of religion is a mere minority view, a situation of profound confusion and anathema. In response they seek not to win over the Iraqi population but to punish them. Punish them for succumbing to democracy and collaborating with the American Occupation. Punish them for their lack of faith in a strict Wahabi Islam, their adherence to Iraqi’s Shi’a apostasy. Punish them for adapting to, maybe even welcoming, a modernity with no room for strident caliphates and Islamic empires.

In this grim respect, the horrors unleashed on the Iraqi civilian population resemble the Algerian civil war of the 1990’s far more than James Bennet’s example of Greece in the 1940s. In Algeria, the internecine warfare and random terror unleashed by Islamic terror groups and the state battling for supremacy cost over 70,000 lives. Like earlier prophetic movements, the Algerian extremists and jihadis didn’t have policy prescriptions or a true politics to implement or argue for. Their millenarian beliefs slid into nihilistic excess the farther they got from winning popular support. Writing about this form of Islamic millenarianism, Western thinkers like Berman and Buruma have linked it back historically to intellectual movements among totalitarian regimes, Russian anarchism, and ultimately, following in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt, German Romanticism. Writes Bennet in the NYTimes:

Among Iraq's insurgents, the jihadists are one group that has suggested a sweeping goal. They want to establish a new caliphate - a religious regime with expansive boundaries. For them, the destruction and chaos in Iraq may represent creative forces, means of heightening the contrasts among sects, religions and whole civilizations. Searching for parallels, several experts compared the insurgents in Iraq to the violent anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That movement took root among the alienated and uprooted who could find no place in modern society.

We may be tempted to think that such movements can not survive for long, that the fever for the apocalypse will self-immolate in short order and rationality will then re-assert itself. Mimetically, though, there are troubling counterexamples. Armageddon sells well and never seems to go out of fashion. The Baptist autodidact William Miller predicted the end of the world from New York first in 1843, then again in 1844, a mania that claimed over 50,000 American adherents in his time. The descendents of his delusion, the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, still believe and live in the end times. Most have modified and reconciled a pre-political apocalyptic movement enough to live within the confines of modern society, though some splinter groups take the basic premises of prophecy and doom too far (the tragic case of the Branch Davidians). For the most part this Protestant millenarian sect (denomination?), rarely violent to begin with, has been further tamed, tamed into a largely peaceful, prosperous society without open ethnic warfare. Imagine, for a moment, the history of Miller’s movement if those conditions were reversed. The seeds of nihilism and the apocalypse are not only strewn in other cultures.

What if there is no political solution for the Sunni insurgents in Iraq? What if the moderates are really as nuts as Fakhri al-Qaisi first discussed on Chronicles here . Hopefully he’s just an unusually placed idiot, but if he’s actually representative of a larger constituency then how can recalcitrant Sunni communities be ready for the necessary compromise of politics when their vision of the present reality is so dramatically different from the norm? Writes the NYTimes:

The council's secretary general, Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Baghdad dentist with a long history of involvement in conservative Islamic groups, contests even the demographics that suggest that any majority-rule government in Iraq will have to be led by Shiites. He argues that Shiites, generally considered to be about 60 percent of the population, are actually about half that, and Sunni Arabs closer to 40 percent than 20 percent, as most Iraqi studies have suggested.

After a raid on the council's offices this week, he said that the council was genuine in its desire to participate in the political process, but that its commitment had been shaken.

"I think it's a scheme to wipe us out, destroy us," he said. "Their slogans about democracy are all lies."

In al-Qaisi we see a potential wedge to pry apart the jihadists from their Sunni base, but unfortunately his possible utility is accompanied by a deep suspicion of the present process and bizarre, politically untranslatable beliefs. Al-Qaisi, at least, is expressing his desires in a political language, yet the vocabulary appears too warped for a real dialogue. Where is the political space for such a character or his kin to move or evolve? If there is to be a political solution for the problem of the Sunni insurgency, then the question needs to be addressed.

Genocide in Retrospect

Why is it that tragedy can only be assessed in retrospect? This seems almost doubly true in the case of genocide. The 20th Century saw the world shocked over and over again by genocide, as if with each incidence of genocide is inherent an aspect of deep denial. "It's simply not possible, we seem to say to each other and ourselves endlessly, that people can act this way towards each other. " And yet they do, over and over again, because we are always so shocked and therefore unbelieving.

WNYC interviewed today the incredible (and incredibly sad) General Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire, a prime figure in the scandal that was the Rwandan genocide, sounds like Doug McKenzie and in need of an eternal hug. He is the subject of a relatively new film called Shake Hands With the Devil. At one point in the film, Dallaire describes his shock at one point at how the international community could have left him without help.

With the deserved hype of the movie Hotel Rwanda, people are able to connect this past failure of diplomacy and international assistance with the present situation in Darfur. But not enough to do anything to stop this new round of genocide. I feel as though, we have all already begun to acclimate ourselves to speaking about Darfur in retrospect, as if it is already a failure of the past rather than something that can be stopped now.

"Why didn't we do anything to stop Darfur?" we'll say. "We all knew what was happening, it was just like Rwanda. Well, one thing is certain, this will never happen again."

Medicare B - Changing the Math so it Works for Everyone

This is an ongoing series of posts on Medicare and the failure of the American healthcare system. You can read previous posts (and it may prove beneficial in providing background info) here, here, and here. Xpatriated Texan provides a semi-regular posting on the topic in addition to his own blog, which can be found here.


As anyone who is on Medicare can tell you, it isn't perfect. One of the things that is wrong with Medicare is that doctors don't like it. The reason is simple - Medicare doesn't pay as much for services rendered as do other types of insurance. Face it, if you were a doctor, you wouldn't want to get paid less for seeing patients that are almost guaranteed to need more from you.

The problem with trying to pay doctors more under the current system of Medicare B funding is that it ends up costingboth recipients and the federal government more. This is not unique to Medicare, though, it is the way every single insurance company in the world works. If you are going to pay out money; then you must bring money in. So the answer is not the one uber-conservative think tanks are trying to push - the abolition of Medicare. Doing so would do a combination of two things: 1) raise the price of other insurance as those who no longer have Medicare coverage flock to private insurers; and 2) ensure that those who can't pay for private insurance simply do without any health care coverage at all.

But this line of thinking only works so long as you remain in the tight little "Medicare as it now operates" box. That's the sort of failed thinking that has led to this crisis in the first place (if you don't think it's a real crisis, read the background links listed above). What we must do is to use some creativity and put ideology aside. We have to break out of the tiny Medicare box.

The policy intiative I have been arguing for is to allow everyone to buy into Medicare B at full cost. Currently, that cost for recipients is at $78.20 per month. That reflects only 25% of the total cost, though. The full buy-in cost would be $312.80 per month, or $3,753.60 per year for one person. It isn't chump change, but it isn't a horrible price, either. It is squarely within the price range of many of the 32% of the self-employed without health insurance. It is definitely within the range of the 68% of those who already pay someone else for it. In other words, there is a distinctive segment of society that would directly benefit from this idea and are simply waiting on the ability to use it.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that would mean some eight-and-a-half million people ready (possibly) to buy into Medicare B. If only half of those bought into Medicare B, that would be an increased revenue of some $1.3 billion per month - more than $15 billion per year. Since the government already allows self-employed persons to write off up to sixty-five percent of their health care premium, the loss in revenue would be marginal. The gain to Medicare, however, would be enormous.

Medicare B is, by law, revenue neutral. That means that an increase in spending - such as that caused by increasing pay to doctors - results in an increase in payments from recipients and the federal government. The good news is that the equation works in reverse as well. If more money comes in than is used; then premiums go down. The savings from lower payments into Medicare B for the government would more than pay for the loss of revenues that the thirty-five percent of healthcare premiums that isn't deductable would bring in. In other words - the government saves money.

Let's say for argument that premiums could be brought down by $10 per month. That would save seniors money. It would also save the people who buy-in even more money - $40 per month more, to be exact. So everyone saves money. The poor old doctors, though, are left holding the medical bag and getting paid less than what they (arguably) deserve.

Again, the answer is simple. Rather than dedicating all of the reductions to lowering premiums, why not give half of it back to doctors in the form of higher payments? Wow. That was hard. As Emeril Lagasse says, "This ain't no rocket science here." So elders only save $5 per month and buy-ins only save $20 per month. Wah. Guess what? You've still strengthened the system.

Allowing doctors to benefit (albeit in a round-about way) from keeping costs down actually gets everyone on the same side of the boat. The doctor says, "I can give you this new drug that costs the system $50 per pill and get no increase this year, or I can give you this perfectly good $0.50 pill and actually help make myself more money." That's called "using self-interest" to drive the system.

This is only using the fairly small percentage of Americans who are self-employed as an example. There are many people who work full time and have no health insurance. Every week, Medicare tax is taken out of their paycheck to pay for healthcare they may never live to receive themselves. That's wrong. They should be allowed to buy-in to Medicare B along with everyone else. Based on the working principles of insurance that every health insurer in the country already uses, this will only pump more money into the system and bring the cost down even more.

This is not a national health care system. It is an option for those who want to use it - totally voluntary. If people are allowed to use pre-tax dollars to buy their insurance through Medicare B (like they are for every other health care plan); then the enrollment will only be higher - which is good for the system. It is not "big gubmint" deciding what health care you should have. It is simply the government of the people and by the people working for the people.

Oil for Food Reaches Texas

Conservative bloggers like the Belmont Club have long had an obsession with the UN’s Iraqi food-for-oil scandal, a corrupt and complex concoction that seemed to emanate from a nexus of everything conservatives despise: France, Russia, Kofi Annan and even Canada. But now, a little publicized Senate report is showing that U.S. oil purchases may have taken the predominate share of the booty:

In fact, the Senate report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

We'll eagerly await the Belmont Club's analysis of this irksome little item. Of particular interest are the activities of a Texas company called Bayoil which shipped Jordanian oil out of an Iraqi port:

The Jordanian oil purchases were shipped in the weeks before the war, out of the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya, which was operating without UN approval or surveillance.

Investigators found correspondence showing that Odin Marine Inc, the US company chartering the seven huge tankers which picked up the oil at Khor al-Amaya, repeatedly sought and received approval from US military and civilian officials that the ships would not be confiscated by US Navy vessels in the Maritime Interdiction Force (MIF) enforcing the embargo.

Odin was reassured by a state department official that the US "was aware of the shipments and has determined not to take action".

Perhaps Senator Norm Coleman, who is running the Senate committee investigating this imbroglio is a little over his head.

US Losing More Leverage in Iraq

As Condoleeza Rice's mere lecture to various Iraqi leaders on national unity and multiethnic democracy reveals the Bush administration's growing frustration and loss of political leverage, so too does a recent Iraqi government ruling further curb the interventionist powers of the both the U.S. military and Iraqi forces:

Iraq's government said Monday its soldiers would no longer participate in raids on mosques in their fight against an increasingly violent insurgency, banning a tactic that Sunni Muslim Arab leaders had long argued was provoking sectarian strife.

Sunni and Shiite insurgents alike have already used mosques as weapons depots, car bomb workshops and outright bases, so the often touted sanctity of worship sites seems a bit subjective. Balancing the goodwill that this new ban will win against the abuse it generates doesn't really concern the Iraqi Islamic Party:

"This is a proper decision that came at the right time. The armed forces shouldn't enter mosques or worship places and disrespect them," said Naseer Ani, head of the political office for the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni political party. "This decision will help to calm the situation down in the country and decrease violence. It will give the Iraqis the chance to trust and respect their armed forces"

Sheikh Oman Dulaim, a member of the influential Muslim Scholars Association and a preacher in a Sunni Mosque in Baghdad, said, "We'll wait to see if this will be effective in reality." He added that, if implemented, the new policy "would lead to less violence."

But it could also pose a problem for U.S. forces, who in recent clashes with insurgents have relied upon Iraqi troops to enter mosques, where insurgents sometimes take refuge. U.S. commanders believe the Iraqi troops' presence would be less offensive to worshipers. . . . .

"Our standard policy is that when there are [Iraqi Security Forces] with us, we don't enter unless engaged," said Marine Maj. Ed Sullivan, who serves as a liaison in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

Asked how the new Iraqi policy would affect operations against insurgents, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for U.S. forces here, said it was "premature to say how it'll effect things," but that the issue "will have to be discussed" between U.S. and Iraqi officials.

Discussed indeed. And if the U.S. decides that it objects to this policy, how exactly are they going to phrase their unhappiness to the highest levels of the Iraqi government, Sunni political parties and Grand Ayatollah Sistani (an apparent influence on this new policy)?
Easy prediction: an increased militarization of some of the more radical mosques. Creating safe zones for insurgents in the middle of cities is an odd gift given past patterns of behavior.

Addendum: The NYTimes gives a much more skeptical and in-depth treatment of the new ban on raiding mosques here.

Iraq Partitioned

Good post by Juan Cole on the overall undesirability of partitioning Iraq. This one needs a response from our own AK, who has been the most consistent voice of skepticism about the viability or even desirability of holding the country together.

Some readers asked me why I was so against partitioning Iraq.

It is because it would cause a great deal of trouble to us all, not least Iraqis. Iraq is not divided neatly into three ethnic enclaves. It is all mixed up. There are a million Kurds in Baghdad, a million Sunnis in the Shiite deep south, and lots of mixed provinces (Ta'mim, Ninevah, Diyalah, Babil, Baghdad, etc.). There is a lot of intermarriage among various Iraqi groups. Look at President Ghazi Yawir. He is from the Sunni Arab branch of the Shamar tribe. But some Shamar are Shiites. One of his wives is Nasrin Barwari, a Kurdish cabinet minister. What would partition do to the Yawirs? . . .

The Arc

One of the most amazing pieces I've read in the Times this year. James Bennet's article about the plan to imagine the physical structure of a future Palestine--and in doing so, reimagining (perhaps) the Palestinian identity. Will the Arc be "too precious to lose" and thus cause the Palestinians to resist violence? If I had lots of dough, I'd put my money on this.

HIS sense for Palestinians' nostalgia, for their attachment to the land, even for what their cities actually looked like - that would all come much later. On a Saturday in January last year, in his design studio in Santa Monica, Calif., all Doug Suisman had to go on were some maps and aerial photographs, an adrenaline spike supplied by a deadline, and the grandeur of his commission: design the state of Palestine.

Even by the standards of these vivid, unpredictable days in the Middle East, the proposition seems hubristic: As part of a two-year, $2 million inquiry to determine whether Palestine could succeed, the Rand Corporation turned to Mr. Suisman, a hip if civic-minded architect with sparse background in the region, to envision the state. He had been to Israel once, in 1972, and he had never visited the major Palestinian cities.

Rest of article...

Big Test: Uzbekistan

This is a big test, I would say, for the Bush democracy doctrine. There hasn't been much talk about Uzbekistan from the administration precisely for the reason that it has been a US 'ally' in the war on terror and hosts an important US military base. But Central Asian percolations have spread.

President Islam A. Karimov of Uzbekistan on Saturday defended the harsh crackdown on a violent uprising that had engulfed an eastern city the day before, even as new protests unfolded and hundreds of residents in the region fled to the country's border with Kyrgyzstan.

These remarks, however, sounded more ominous:

Mr. Karimov acknowledged that popular dissatisfaction and a sense of helplessness among the residents had fueled antigovernment sentiments.

He made clear, however, that his government would respond forcibly to any challenge, suggesting that Mr. Akayev had responded weakly to a popular uprising.

"I am categorically opposed to revolutions," he said. "I favor evolution."

The response from the Bushies will be most illuminating.

U.N.: Iraq Emerging as Drug Trafficker

Just when we were wondering if things could get any worse...
On the other hand, this is our chance to combine the War on Terror (WART) with the War Against Drugs (WAD): presto! whammo! It's the WARTWAD!

from the AP, 05/12/05:
VIENNA, Austria - A U.N. drug body warned Thursday that Iraq is emerging as a transit point for drugs, with traffickers working with insurgents and terrorists, and called on the international community to tackle the problem before it's too late.

Drug traffickers from Afghanistan have begun crossing Iraq to get to Jordan, the exit point for Asia and Europe, said Hamid Ghodse, the president of the International Narcotics Control Board. Afghanistan is the world's main source of opium and its derivative heroin.

Ghodse said traffickers cooperate with terrorist and insurgents, thereby worsening the situation in Iraq. He urged the international community and Iraqi leaders to act before the trafficking route becomes entrenched. All efforts to support Iraq must give due focus to the drug problem, he said.

"You cannot have peace, security and development without attending to drug control," he said.

Worth It?

Is risking the safety of Israeli police and military and leaving future Palestinian residents of now-Jewish-occupied parts of Gaza completely homeless worth it? $46 million to haul the demolition back to Israel if only to "avoid televised scenes of Hamas and Palestinian flags raised over Israeli houses"? Repellant. Israelis are going to have to comes to terms eventually with the impending end of the Occupation--now is a good time to start.

Israeli Debate Continues Over Fate of Settlers' Abandoned Homes


By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: May 11, 2005

JERUSALEM, May 11 - As Israel paused today to mourn its military dead, ministers argued about whether to dismantle the homes of the Gaza settlers who will be evacuated from the occupied territory in mid-August and the impact of the withdrawal.

The defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, who is considered close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said that he opposed the razing of the homes of settlers because of the extra risk to the military and the police and the extra time it would take.

"I'm not prepared, as defense minister of the State of Israel, to endanger Israeli soldiers in order to destroy the houses of settlers," he told Israel radio on a somber day of commemoration for the country's 20,368 dead since 1947, a figure that nearly every newspaper noted.

"After we evacuate the settlers, we would have to maintain military forces, security guards and forces to destroy the houses in the middle of enemy territory," he said, a move that would put them at risk of attack. As important, perhaps, a Defense Ministry study suggests that razing the 1,600 or so dwellings and bringing the rubble back to Israel would cost $46 million and take eight months.

rest of article...

The Interventionist Left and its Discontents

As I pointed out awhile back, I never understood how interventionism became for some on the liberal-left a full-scale politics. Here is how I put it in November:

I must say that during the Nineties I missed the spat between liberal interventionists and the hard anti-imperial left. Why did I miss it? Because I never quite grasped how interventionism could be the defining issue for a left or liberal-left politics. I still don't. Because I never took interventionism as the basis upon which to define a politics, the anti-imperial left never took on the status of enemy number one. For me, interventions are a policy, not a politics.

I not only agree with my former self, I should have been more critical of the interventionist left. The reason is that the interventionist left has, in principle, merged with the imperialist right. While many of its partisans would point out great differences between it and the Bush administration and its ideologues, these differences always concern, as David Rieff argues in his new book 'At the Point of a Gun', style and not substance. Bush and Co., so it is said, are hillbillies who should have been nicer to everyone else, who should have planned more for the aftermath of war, etc. etc. But what would have happened if Bush had been nicer to our allies and the UN etc., had taken account of the State departments planning, and had from the beginning justified the war as a humanitarian intervention? What resources would the left interventionist have for resisting the Iraq war in that case? Not many I would submit. Here I think our own Morgan Meis has been far more consistent than many insofar as he has always taken the Iraq war to be an anti-fascist humanitarian intervention. With this diagnosis, he follows out the left-interventionist line perfectly.

One can understand how the interventionist left wound up in this situation: with the conditions of global power being what they are, they have nowhere else to go than to American power. But this is the problem with this position: it is forced into accepting the program of the imperial right. Of course, many just reinterpret this program in such a way that it dos not have this ramification. Here we have an expression not of false consciousness but of the more interesting and paradoxical phenomena of self-conscious false-consciousness: i.e., a conscious unwillingness to look into the pitiless condition of man and the workings of history.

Medicare's Nero and Bush's Fiddle

While President Bush zooms around on Air Force One, talking to pre-screened crowds about his plans for Social Security, blithely ignoring the reality that Americans hate his ideas, he is totally ignoring the real emergency in America’s Social Safety Net.

If you look at the latest report from the Medicare Trustees (www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/tr00summary.pdf) (sorry, I can't get it to work as a link). I’ll summarize for you: Medicare is in deep doo-doo. Let me hype some hysteria before I save the universe.

The DI (Disability Income) portion of the fund will begin paying out more than it takes in no later than the year – wait for it – 2007. The HI (Hospital Insurance) portion will last a full three years later and begin losing money in 2010. The worst case scenario is that both will be flat broke by 2012. However, they are supposed to last until 2023 and 2025 respectively.

To me, burning very expensive jet fuel in Air Force One to run around playing Chicken Little about Social Security while totally ignoring Medicare is tantamount to auditioning for the role of Nero. All we need is a fire and a fiddle.

The SMI (Supplemental Medical Insurance) portion – the part that pays for Medicare B – is expected never to run a deficit because the government exercised rare good judgment and passed a law that requires annual costs be automatically split between government and recipients in such a way that costs are just covered. However, by only covering those people who are both poor and most likely to have high medical bills – the “typical” Medicare recipient makes only $14,300 and has at least two chronic medical conditions – the cost of Medicare B will continue to rise. From around $66 last year, the monthly cost of buying Medicare B for beneficiaries is now $78.20.

At the lower cost, when combined with out-of-pocket expenses, it still represented as much as 23% of the average recipient’s total expenditures. If Medicare B continues to cover only the old and sick; it will continue to rise and eventually become too expensive for recipients to pay for. Already, studies estimate that only half of all eligible people actually enroll in Medicare B programs to help pay the costs of premiums. As the cost of Medicare B rises, healthy people opt out of the program, so that only the very worst remain covered. Currently, only 5% of all Medicare recipients account for 47% of Medicare B spending. 20% of all recipients account for 84% of spending. The more that healthy people that drop out the worse the program works for everyone.

The only way to reverse this trend is to use the principles of insurance. Rather than the inevitable cutting of benefits, raising of entry requirements, and/or raising of taxes, it is better – and more actuarially sound – to expand the program. If you open it, as it now exists, then the government will be bound to kick in 75% of monthly premiums. That will hardly begin to save money.

However, it can be saved by operating under good insurance principles and opening it to any American to buy into at full cost. That raises the price from $78 per month to $78 per week. That’s a lot of money. If the cost is split between employer and employee, then the total out-of-pocket is $39 per week. A rise in minimum wage of $1 per hour allows an employee to pay that without actually losing any money they already have. Granting a tax abatement to small businesses to cover that same level of expense makes it a wash to small employers.

This proposal gives millions of Americans access to health care. It protects Medicare B for older Americans, and possibly even makes it cheaper for them. It allows small businesses to build a benefits package that will compete with larger employers. A safety net that makes the market place more competitive. That should be something that both Conservatives and Liberals can get behind.

Xpatriated Texan is a semi-regular blogger at OTRC. His blog covers politics in New Jersey, Texas, and the rest of the US from the perspective of a liberal theology of Christianity. Stop by Xpatriated Texan and leave a few comments on other topics.

NOVEL writers

Laurie Stone, one of the writers in the NOVEL installation at Flux Factory, has posted her first piece of writing on the blog that is being run by OTR in order to help document the project. You can check it out here.

Emily, a beautiful Brit with wavy, blond hair, came to the opening party. We sat on the floor of my little house, and when she bent her head, I noticed auburn and copper strands mixed with the blond. She was teaching 17th Century literature at a college and was surprised that Milton sold so well to undergraduates—especially Paradise Lost and Areopagitica, where the brutish patriarch argues for freedom of the press.
The night before, this house was a jangle of roofless angles. Eight architects and builders with tool belts strapped sexily around their hips, sawed and hammered and nailed. I was amazed by their ability to transform ideas into solid forms, even though I knew that’s what architects and builders do. I collected fallen screws and slivers of wood, swept saw dust into billowy piles that looked like cottage cheese. The workers stayed up all night, catching naps, picking at chicken, hummus, salad, and cheese. . .

Sharia and Sudan

Type in "sharia" and "Sudan" in Google and you get 118,000 hits. Type in "genocide" and "Sudan", you get 626,000. A perhaps pointless and flimsy experiment, but one that furthers my frustration at the lack of discussion regarding the relationship between Sudan's strict policy of Sharia law and the country's continuing violence at the hands of its government. An article I found in this week's Mail & Guardian (South Africa) shows too that the violence and oppression doesn't just affect Christians and other non-Islamic groups:

Scores of Sudanese gathered on Thursday in front of a courthouse to demand a death sentence for the editor of a daily newspaper who is accused of insulting Islam's prophet.

Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed, editor of the independent and pro-Islamist Al Wifaq, is standing trial for republishing an article from the internet that questioned the parentage of the Prophet Muhammad.

The newspaper has been suspended for three days. Ahmed refuted the charges and apologised in a letter to the press.

Police filled the area around the courthouse early on Thursday in anticipation of the crowds. Hundreds of people gathered by mid-afternoon.

"Death for the faseq!" many chanted, using the Arabic word for a deviant Muslim.

(rest of article)

Good Unilateralism?

A provocative and counterintuitive claim about the desirability of US unilateralism in our time by Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld. Here's the basic thesis:

The unilateralism I am defending is not a license for aggressive U.S. militarism. It is commanded by the aspirations of democracy and would violate its own essential principles if it were to become an engine of empire. But the great and unsettling fact of 21st-century global governance is that America is doomed to become something like a world policeman. With the development of small, uncontainable nuclear technologies, and with the inability of the United Nations to do the job, the United States will be in the business of using force abroad against real or feared criminal activity to a far greater extent than ever before.

And he tempers it with this:

Since September 11, 2001, the White House has flirted with a dangerous double unilateralism, joining the president’s willingness to act without international consent abroad to an effort to bypass Congress and the judiciary at home. In December 2001, without congressional approval, the president announced the withdrawal of the United States from an important missile treaty with Russia. In early 2002, the White House began claiming a presidential power to deem any individual, including an American citizen arrested on American soil, an “enemy combatant” and on that basis to imprison him indefinitely, with no judicial review. Later that year, the president came close to asserting a power to make war on Iraq without express congressional authorization.

This double unilateralism, which leaves presidential power altogether unchecked, is a great danger. If we are to be unilateralists abroad, we have a special responsibility—to ourselves and to the world—to maintain and reinvigorate the vital checks and balances of American constitutionalism at home.

I wonder how such a notion strikes the Neibuhrians among us.

A Question

I wouldn't want to criticize the reporters at the major newspapers who are currently in Iraq. After a period of gung-hoism in which they probably failed to raise as many questions about the war as they should have there has been a constant stream of sobering news about the difficulties and disasters of the past two years. It is also incredibly dangerous to be in Iraq and any reporter spending time there is risking his or her life in doing so.

But there is one thing I would like to know more about and I'm perplexed as to why it isn't happening. Where are the long and serious discussions with the Iraqi leadership. There just isn't very much information. It is as if this government is being run behind closed doors. To some extent, of course, that is exactly what is happening, due to the wrangling and power dealing and simply just because of security concerns. But still there should be more direct reporting of what they are doing, why, and what they think about it. The government needs to have an international voice. To the extent that Al-Jafaari and others are failing to demand to have such a voice it is there own fault (and Jafaari has not exactly amazed or astounded anyone as a leader so far). But it is still the role of the press to cover this new, and reasonably historic, government in depth. And you just can't find it.

I was deeply annoyed last year when the CPA stupidly and arrogantly stood forth as the voice of Iraq. It was absurd. The CPA was a debacle, a sham, and a shame. At the time, I desperately wanted the Iraqis in the governing coalition to be given, and to demand more power. They should have been the ones giving the press conferences and speaking to the world. Now, thankfully, there is no CPA to block the way. People like Talabani and Jafaari are giving the press conferences. But where is the information, where are the interviews, where are the profiles and the extended reports? Puzzling.

The Sunni Dilemma

The Iraqi Sunni political figure, Fakhri al-Qaisi, strikes me a fairly repellent. Qaisi’s insistences that Sunnis actually outnumber Shi’a in Iraq; that Zarqawi’s terror network -- which targets Shiite mosques -- is really a Shiite front; and his “comfort with violence” which seems to view car bombings as a legitimate political response all should put him beyond the pale of contemporary Iraqi politics. How could a Shiite dominated government even begin to deal with such a contrarian figure whose politics are tinged with some degree of sympathy for the insurgency? Yet, according to the NYTimes, both Iraqi leaders and Americans say he is just the kind of individual that needs to be incorporated into mainstream politics. Certainly, his present “moderate” position is not an easy one to hold:

"Zarqawi wants me, the U.S. troops want me, the police want me," Mr. Qaisi said wearily.

Is Qaisi really the sort of Sunni leader that the Iraqi government must reach out to? The NYTimes concludes:

For the Shiites, it is tempting to simply dismiss such opinions. But if the Sunnis, however contrarian, are ignored or left out of Iraq's new political sphere, they will fight harder, and will almost certainly have the sympathy of neighboring Sunni governments like Saudi Arabia, whose borders are easily crossed by jihadist volunteers.

"The Sunnis will not give in," said Ghassan al-Atiyya, a secular Shiite and the director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy, a Baghdad research institute. "If you fight them, you turn them into national heroes. You must find the moderates and deal with them."

Perhaps first you must educate them as to the fundamental realities of the present for no consensus or agreement can be achieved from such a dramatic divergence of accepted fact. Without a substantial makeover, Sunni leaders like Qaisi hold both impossible political positions and ideologies, a good recipe for extinction.

NOVEL

Since OTR is vaguely hosted by Flux Factory in some rough way (or roughly hosted by Flux in some vague way) we've decided to make OTR a place where some of the writing from the newest Flux installation can find a home. The installation is called NOVEL and here is a preview of it from the Village Voice:

Georges Simenon could write a novel in 11 days; according to a since debunked legend, he once finished an entire book in a day, enclosed David Blaine–like in a clear room while the public watched. Beginning May 7, Flux Factory's "living installation" Novel puts three authors—Grant Bailie, Ranbir Sidhu, and former Voicean Laurie Stone—in three different enclosed environments for 30 days. Visitors can watch them scribble or stew from 3 to 5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends. On June 4, the writers come out of the chrysalis having completed a brand-new novel. (Then they're welcome to participate in my installation, which is a five-year artwork called Revision.) Designed by a team of architect-artists and guest curated by Bee Season author Myla Goldberg, Novel features weekly Saturday-evening readings of the works in progress. A May 15 panel discussion (featuring Goldberg and journalist-fictioneer Tom Bissell) and a May 22 forum with the space designers will further elaborate the issues involved: creativity, solitude, concentration, how to go to the bathroom. Here's hoping the author-subjects can stick to their stories: Didn't Pascal posit that all human misery comes from the inability of man to sit still in a room?

Work in progress will be published on the OTR website. Stay tuned.

W.F. Buckley: "Declare Victory and Split"

Sure, the godfather of modern conservatism has admitted that Iraq was a mistake before, but now, in this somewhat tortuous piece, William F. Buckley is beginning to ask how America can leave Iraq. What is missing in this reluctant and obligatory step toward withdrawal is any mention of the cassus belli premised on WMDs. That is a past best forgotten given the demands of the present. Buckley seems to admit that the current state of chaotic and violent affairs could continue to degenerate and that victory is not assured, a far cry from the full-throated optimism of many of Buckley’s fellow conservatives before the war. Buckley, in weighing our commitments to our own soldiers over that of the fate of the Iraqi nation, comes to some grim conclusions:

It may sound inhuman, but it is very human to care about our own on the battlefield. And doing so sharpens the strategic picture for us. We are entitled to say to ourselves: If the bloodletting is to go on, it can do so without our involvement in it. The indecisive course of affairs keeps us from saying with any confidence that Iraqi security forces are now capable of maintaining a peace. Some will reason that the impulse to kill will wither the day the last American embarks for home. But it is by no means safe to conclude that if U.S. troops withdrew tomorrow, killings in Iraq would end. The U.S. troops are the most tempting targets of the insurgents, but every day bombs go off, and suicide killers set out, even when there is no prospect of killing a U.S. soldier.

That suicide bombings and mass violence would continue in Iraq after an American withdrawal does not sound like a successful component or victorious campaign in the War on Terror, right? As to our responsibilities towards the Iraqis themselves, see if you too don’t find some contradiction in Buckley’s thinking between bearing the first “burden” and relieving America of the second:

There are two burdens in America, one of them ascribable to our conscience. We can’t “desert” those who enlisted in our proclaimed cause. We did exactly that when we deserted Vietnam, but we are unlikely to do it again in the Near East, because too many people are looking directly on and would understandably react against U.S. nonchalance with rage and contempt.

But the burden we took on as the military agent of regime change is legitimately moderated by the passage of time and the achievement of proximate goals. We said we’d remove Saddam Hussein, and we did. We said we’d train non-Baathist security personnel, and we have not only done so, we’ve left in place reserves that can maintain institutional batteries of reform. We said we would introduce popular rule, and we did so: parliamentary government at least exists. [emphasis added]

Proximate? How about the proximity to Bush’s goals of a safe, peaceful, stable and democratic Iraq (in this case the four being deeply inter-related)? How about a decisive victory over the forces of terror? My cynical parsing of Buckley’s conclusion is that he is hedging towards the very sort of rhetorical legerdemain that he claims he’s not hedging towards:

The day has to come, and the advent of that day has to be heralded, when we say that our part of the job is done as well as it can be done, given limitations on our will and our strength. It is an Iraqi responsibility to move on to wherever Iraq intends to go. Our job depends heavily on being done when we declare it to have been done, not by the legerdemain proposed thirty years to get us out of Vietnam, but by reasonable talk about reasonable but limited commitments to Iraqi reform. [emphasis in the original]

So withdraw according to when “we declare it" and not by any definitive standards or goals? Mission accomplished, it is time to go home.

Medicare B and the Denial-of-Reality-Right

I am forced to admit that, as much fault as I find in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy, she did provide one of my favorite quotes in arguing for it. “A lie,” she writes in Atlas Shrugged is the worst insult you can give a man. It tells him that you find him incapable of dealing with reality.”

Reality is certainly a problem for many people on the political right. Take, for instance, this quote from the 2004 State of the Union Address, “A government run health care system is the wrong prescription. By keeping costs under control, expanding access, and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America’s health care system the best in the world”. Actually, it is the last part that shows a distance from reality. The Heritage Foundation was quick to pick up the lie to push its own agenda for health care, though.

The truth, however, is that by almost any objective measurement, the US does not have the best health care system in the world. For instance, Health Policy Reform actually finds that the US lags behind such countries as the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Groups like Physicians for a National Health Program are even pushing to implement systems that emulate those in other countries.

Such efforts, however, are as much lacking a touch of reality as those of the far right. The truth is that there are too many interests vested in the current system to implement such a huge upheaval. While I believe all elephants can be eaten one bite at a time, it would be pure gluttony, and foolish, to try to eat the biggest elephant simply because it looks tasty.

Health care reform is badly needed, but it must begin with where the system is now. It isn’t exactly broken, because it works for a lot of people. What is needed is a way to make it profitable for those who lack access to the system to gain that access. That means finding a way to enlarge the system while still operating on sound. Specifically, we have to utilize the principle of risk averaging and the law of large numbers.

Risk averaging is exactly what it sounds like. Let’s say there is a ten percent chance of every person in America incurring a one hundred dollar health care bill this month. If you have a group of one hundred people; then you can be sure that ten of them will need to pay one hundred dollars worth of medical bills each. You don’t know which ones, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the risk is averaged among the whole group. To be profitable, you only have to charge the hundred people enough to pay a little more than the total of the medical expenses. In this example, you only have to charge each of the hundred people ten dollars to break even. If you charge eleven, you make profit.

The law of large numbers says that such percentages are more precise in larger groups. The ten percent chance in the above example is for every month, so some months you’ll have more and some you’ll have less. To remain solvent, you have to maintain a large amount of reserves to cover the months when lots of people get sick. If you increase the pool from one hundred people to one thousand people; the monthly expenses get larger, but the percentage fluctuation from month to month gets smaller. If you increase the pool to a million people; then the law remains true.

In other words, insurance works best when it insures a lot of people who might need it, but won’t necessarily need it all the time. If you have a small group; then it doesn’t work so well. If you have a group that has a lot of sick people; then it doesn’t work so well. Interestingly enough, a large portion of people who do without health care fall into the first group and a large portion of people in the second group are covered as a group in violation of good insurance principles.

The first group is the seventeen million people in the country who work full-time in this country but do not have health insurance. The vast majority of these people work for small employers (less than a hundred people) where it is too expensive for the employer to provide health care benefits. These people, who are generally between twenty-five and fifty, usually have at least one child to take care of – who usually doesn’t have health insurance, either.

The second group is the forty-one million people who are enrolled in Medicare. Since only the elderly and disabled are eligible for this program, it operates against principles of good insurance. Rather than spreading risk between members, it builds risk cumulatively. The result is higher costs to the government, higher costs to beneficiaries, and higher