Heresy!
by digby
Wow. Representative Alan Grayson actually disses Ronald Reagan and lives to tell the tale:
One of the biggest political disappointments of the moment to me is that more Democrats aren’t making the case against Reagan and the legacy he inflicted on this country. It’s a direct path from him to the trouble we’re in today and nobody has yet explained that to the American people.
Good for Grayson for boldly going where few Democrats have the guts to go.
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Scholarly Gentleman
by digby
Via County Fair, I found my way over to ConWebblog and their post about this latest smear job at Newsmax:
We detailed how James Humes, in his March 12 Newsmax column, purported to quote President Obama saying of a bust of Winston Churchill, “Get that goddamn thing out of here.” Humes has now amended his column — not by deleting a quote for which he has yet to provide a credible source for, but by adding another paragraph:
While the story was never fully substantiated, despite frequent repetition on radio talk shows, the sentiment seems to have been confirmed by Obama’s subsequent actions.
Translation: I can’t prove Obama said this — in fact, I can’t even name anyone who said he did, despite “frequent repetition on radio talk shows” — but I’ll pretend he did anyway because it meshes so well with my smear of Obama. Humes also alters another falsehood, substituting the false claim that Obama “grew up in Kenya” with the statement that Obama is “the son of a Kenyan.” Humes’ ugly smear of Obama plotting tribal revenge, however, remains intact.
Be sure to click through the links to see the priginal smear job. It’s quite unbelievable.
But I was curious about this fellow James C. Humes who wrote the smear job in the first place. Apparently, I am an ignorant lout for not recognizing the name because he is quite the distinguished fellow:
Professor James C. Humes (Colorado University at Colorado Springs) was awarded an O.B.E. by Queen Elizabeth for the award-winning, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Churchill: Speaker of the Century.” Humes is a former presidential speechwriter.
He’s also a major speaking coach, wildly popular among the political class.
And he is a lying sack of fetid compost.
As a side note, he teaches at the same university (different campus) that the other Churchill taught — you know, Ward Churchill, who the wingnuts ran out of town? This guy, however, is a fine example of academic integrity.
The book
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Punchlines
by digby
It seems as though I can’t click a link (or look at my morning papers) without seeing another story about the Stewart vs Cramer smackdown. And virtually everyone seems to be shocked by the fact that Cramer was so docile and unprepared when he appeared.
I don’t think it was surprising. He thought he would get one of those friendly interviews that John McCain usually gets. After all, Stewart skewers politicians but treats them rather gently when he interviews them, right? But that’s a common misreading of Stewart. He skewers a lot of different things, including politics and culture, but his primary object of derision and satire is the media and particularly the lying gasbags who populate the cable shows. It’s the whole premise of his show.
For some reason the political media establishment just doesn’t get this. Recall the bizarrely confused reaction from the villagers at that notorious Colbert White House correspondents dinner appearance. They honestly didn’t understand that Stewart and Colbert have nothing but contempt for them.
If you haven’t seen it in a while, check it out:
I think this is one of the best illustrations of the media’s insufferable insularity and self regard. It’s not just nobody rubes like me, who watch these people with slack jawed incredulity that such amazing lack of self-awareness exists in ostensibly grown up humans. (We know they view us with a sort of anthropological curiosity like one of those lost tribes in the Amazon, even as they proclaim to be jess’ folks.) But the people they admire and secretly think they are — the cool, smart, sexy, funny guys — also find them ridiculous and dangerous, just like the rest of us. And these scribblers and gasbags clearly don’t see it.
So, you see Cramer on The Daily Show, clearly a fan, thinking he’s going to be part of some sort of good natured ribbing and he finds himself on the receiving end of a scathing critique right in his face. It had never occurred to him that Stewart really meant any of the things he was saying. After all, they’re both cool guys, right? Playing the game. Winners!
He just doesn’t get the joke. None of them do.
If you doubt that, here’s Cramer’s reaction on his own show to Stewart’s smack down.
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Eradicating The E. Coli
by dday
It is exceedingly smart for the President to tackle food safety in his weekly address. The Twitterers in Washington will yelp “But how can he take on something ELSE?” But I’m going to go ahead and guess that 100% of Americans eat food. And the e. coli conservatism of the Bush years had a real and profound effect on people. There’s a lady on my street who I see walking my dog every now and again, and one of her dogs died from the melamine scandal a couple years back. Here in California, the tainted spinach scare of 2007 cost the state’s farmers hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s astonishing that we have had to worry for so long about the quality of the food we purchase, and it contributes to this anti-government backlash that they are incompetent and unable to deal with even core functions.
And that was true – under an executive branch that didn’t regulate and didn’t care about food safety. But this executive branch will. And Obama’s opening paragraph of his weekly address signals that government is vital and needs to be treated with seriousness and respect.
I’ve often said that I don’t believe government has the answer to every problem or that it can do all things for all people. We are a nation built on the strength of individual initiative. But there are certain things that we can’t do on our own. There are certain things only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and don’t cause us harm. That is the mission of our Food and Drug Administration and it is a mission shared by our Department of Agriculture, and a variety of other agencies and offices at just about every level of government.
In the address Obama announced the appointment of Margaret Hamburg as the new head of the FDA. She has a long record in government, including a stint as New York’s health commissioner. Her deputy, Joshua Sharfstein, is the Baltimore Health Commissioner. They are serious people who are not former lobbyists or executives of the industries they will regulate, and they will get the proper staffing and funding to actually carry out the mission of the department.
People have lost faith in our institutions. A more competent and successful FDA may seem small, but it’s part of an effort to restore trust in government, as the only entity big enough for numerous tasks. Proven ability in making food safer and more secure can lead to proving that government can administer health care or implement a workable system to fight global warming. With e. coli conservatism demonizing the functions of government for so long, it’s vital to see some pushback.
The address is below.
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In Charge, And Mad You’re Not Happy About It
by dday
Chris Bowers has the depressing details on the financial services industry, through their advocates in the Senate, continuing to hold up eminently sensible foreclosure reform.
A House-passed bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of troubled homeowners’ mortgages has entered a holding pattern in the Senate, where the necessary 60 votes remain elusive.
The bankruptcy provision – often referred to as “cramdown” – is a key component of the Obama administration’s housing initiative, but it worries moderate Democrats in both chambers.
Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh and Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter are leading a group of Senate moderates in an effort to limit the bill’s reach in a way that could attract 60 votes.
Senate leaders had hoped to have the bill go straight to the floor as early as this week, but it may now have to go through the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee as proponents of the measure search for a deal. On March 11, the bill was referred to the panel.
“There are still significant concerns with the bill on both sides of the aisle,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, a group that lobbies on behalf of the banking industry.
Lenders fiercely oppose the cramdown language, which would allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the principal owed on a primary-residence mortgage and order other modifications in mortgage terms.
These lenders lied on forms to get customers into loans, lied to their customers about the terms of those loans, sold these unstable loans around the world and caused a near-collapse of the global financial system.
In America, that not only means they still have a check on legislation, they think the lawmakers are being too mean to them as well.
“When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America, I personally don’t understand it,” (JP Morgan CEO Jamie) Dimon said in his speech. “I would ask a lot of our folks in government to stop doing it because I think it’s hurting our country.”
Jamie Dimon and all his buddies are lucky they aren’t sharing the same cell right now. The audacity of these people, to have rewritten the rules of the US economy only to see it fail, and then demand courtesy!? We have paid you our tax dollars, given you the capital to finance your adventure (h/t Jon Stewart), and now you want a chocolate from us?
Oh, they also want all accounting laws changed so they can more easily fudge the numbers, too.
Before financial institutions have collapsed over the past several months, they have come to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, pleading for a change in mark-to-market accounting rules so that they can continue to appear to be solvent on their balance sheets.
Robert Herz, head of the FASB, told a panel of lawmakers Thursday that the loudest critics of fair market accounting practices have been the very same banks that have gone belly up when regulators would not let them adjust their accounting.
“There seems to be a clamoring for changing mark-to-market rules that seems to come largely from institutions that may be insolvent,” Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said to Herz at a meeting of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises.
Grayson said that, from Herz’ testimony, it seemed that “there may be institutions that are insolvent and they haven’t been forced to write down their books to the point [of insolvency] yet, and those are maybe the same institutions that are asking us to modify the mark-to-market rules so that they won’t have to admit that they’re bankrupt. Is that correct?”
Herz said that it was.
As Grayson says, “We have people who break every rule in the book and then they think that the answer to their problems is to break more rules.”
I’m all for criticizing the Obama Administration for their failure to come up with a workable plan to fix the banks; heck, I’ve done it on occasion. But I save some special loathing for these criminals running major companies into the ground, lying to everybody about the inner workings of their companies, exerting the same power and influence over the legislative process as if nothing happened, and coming back for more changes and work-arounds so they can keep the Wurlitzer playing for just a few hours longer. I think trained chimps in the corner offices of every firm on Wall Street could do better. And they wouldn’t ask us to stop being so mean to them.
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Nothing To Fear But Idiots On TV
by digby
On the heels of Larry Summers’ speech today, Matthews chattered a bit about optimism and the Ballyhoo Boys (as he called the administration.) He also observed that people understand Bernie Madoff is a crook, compared it to the economy as a whole and wondered if maybe the whole economy was a ponzi scheme. It was actually mildly interesting, for him anyway. But soon, it devolved into this predictable predigested mishmash:
Robert Kaiser, Washington Post editor and author of “So Damn Much Money”: Summers implied that we’re not greedy anymore and I wonder. Look at all these earmarks in the omnibus spending bill…
Matthews: same old games
Kaiser: same old games, and that’s depressing that so many member of congress are acting as if it’s no big deal
Fineman: it’s not only depressing it’s counterproductive because if the new mantra is that we have to live within our means then congress has to do it too and we all have to pitch in, there has to be some ..
Matthews: right
Fineman: real hard choices made. The president keeps saying we’re going to have to make hard choices. Which choices are they and how is the congress making them?
Matthews: He comes into office with all the priestly vestments and all the rustle of vestments in the sanctuary, this is all going to be clean and perfect. And all of a sudden he comes up against Nancy Pelosi and all the people on the hill who have their own agenda and spending dreams, which is years and years of pent up desire to spend money. Right? And they did it. And if we have another stimulus bill it’ll happen again. And business is looking at it and saying they’re just a greedy as we are, they just don’t have the income we have.
Right, the stimulus and budget bills are exactly like Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme and greedy hedge fund operators incomprehensible financial instruments. Ok.
As for Fineman, I can’t help but scream at the TV when I see this kind of commentary, “what do you mean we, jackass?” Here we have wealthy, elite celebrities incessantly complaining that the American people aren’t being asked to sacrifice enough. As if a huge number aren’t losing their homes and their jobs — or are desperately afraid they are going to. As if virtually every average worker who was saving for their retirement isn’t looking at a decimated savings. As if average people aren’t being crushed by the costs of college and health care and debt they built up over years of income stagnation just to keep from falling behind. Yes, Americans have spent too much. But that spending is what propped up this bubble (or succession of bubbles) for years and nobody was telling them to do otherwise. In fact it was the opposite — you were a sucker if you didn’t get in the game.
And Jesus H. Christ, do these people really believe that the way to save the economy is for the government to punish average citizens some more in the name of “shared sacrifice?” Somehow, I don’t think the shared sacrifice is defined in quite the same way for the average middle class American as it is for Chris Matthews and his pals. After all, he makes five million dollars a year. I’m sure his portfolio has taken a hit and I’m sure he he feels he is suffering, but a family of four that’s lost two thirds of its $50,000 annual income isn’t likely to see their immediate fear and pain as being fully comparable to that felt by TV celebrities whose vast holdings have been somewhat reduced. What’s really being “shared,” other than the idea that rich people shouldn’t have to pay taxes and everyone else should prepare to die young?
Fineman, like so many of his fellows, is obsessed with this idea that the American people have to make “hard choices” — which translates into “entitlement” reform and reining in government spending, both of which are completely out of the question in this environment for both economic and moral reasons. It’s easy for him to say it with such pious certainty. He’s wealthy. It’s understandable that he and all of his friends are concerned about their future, as everyone is, but that just isn’t on the same level of suffering and insecurity as those who are cutting back on their groceries or having to negotiate with their doctors over which tests they can afford to get to find out if they have cancer.
Like most villagers, both Fineman and Matthews think they are regular working class guys who have the standing to lecture other Americans about sacrifice. But they sound like tin-eared fools to the audience outside their own rarified circle. Aside from the sheer economic ignorance of such statements, it once again demonstrates their distance from the lives of the average Americans they purport to represent. (It reminds me of a very liberal writer I once encountered who casually told me that one simply couldn’t live in LA on less than 300k a year. I honestly didn’t know how to reply since I’ve been here for nearly 25 years and never made anything close to that. Apparently, I’m not “living.”)
These upper class celebrities going on and on about earmarks and the unholy Pelosi’s supposed profligacy in the same breath with which they condemn wall street hustlers and wealthy con artists is just dishonest — and cruel. Only the most regressive Randian wingnuts see congress funding useful projects in their districts as “stealing,” especially at a time when government spending is is the only thing that’s keeping the economy from sinking into a depression. And the sacrifice they demand will be felt by their unwealthy fellow citizens as serious pain at a time when they are already suffering from the vagaries of the unregulated capitalistic free-for-all these wealthy elites cheered on for the past twenty years.
Right now it would be wise for the rich and famous to keep a very low profile as they sit poolside at their mansions fretting about runaway “entitlements.” It brings to mind certain unpleasant historical parallels that make one think of guillotines or beerhalls and the like, which could lead to all sorts of unintended consequences for everyone.
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Rigged
by dday
I sincerely hope that nobody is surprised by the fact that MSNBC, which has hyped the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer “battle royale” for over a week now, has coincidentally dropped coverage of it at precisely the moment when Stewart delivered the knockout punch and made minced meat out of Cramer, CNBC and the entire media-industrial complex:
TVNewser reports that “MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today.” By TVNewser’s count, Cramer’s Daily Show interview was only mentioned once on MSNBC today and that was during the White House press conference when a reporter asked for Obama’s reaction.
CNBC is part of a corporate entity (although, interestingly, they don’t report to the news division). That corporate entity is not going to get rich by highlighting the deficiencies of certain parts of its business. As much as CNBC deserves scorn and Jim Cramer deserves a subpoena, it’s not just them. It’s the entire media complex. And this indictment of their business won’t be prosecuted and turned into a conviction.
James Rainey is also interesting today about CNBC and the larger implications.
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The Democrats We Have
by dday
For too long we’ve heard from Democratic leaders that we just need Democrats, any Democrats, to gain back the majority from Republicans, or we just need a Democrat, any Democrat, in the White House, or we just need a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats, any Democrats, and everything will fall into place. This has always been a ploy to get grassroots financial support, and we are seeing the essential bankruptcy of that ploy today.
When President Obama submitted a budget that predicted passage of a revenue-raising climate change bill, hopes rose that Congress could successfully rein in carbon emissions this year.
But a cap-and-trade climate bill is almost certain to be filibustered by Republicans — and in a letter delivered to the Senate Budget Committee yesterday, eight Democratic senators joined 25 Republicans to defend the GOP’s right to set a 60-vote margin for passing emissions limits.
“We oppose using the budget process to expedite passage of climate legislation,” the senators, including eight centrist Democrats, wrote in their missive.
Using the procedure of budget reconciliation, which would allow a climate change measure to become law with 50 votes while preventing filibusters, “would circumvent normal Senate practice and would be inconsistent with the administration’s goals of bipartisanship, cooperation, and openness,” the 33 senators wrote.
Actually, the normal Senate practice is that items included in the budget should go through the process of budget reconciliation. Further, normal Senate practice for 200-odd years up until now is that filibusters weren’t routinely used to obstruct all legislation. But that history has been forgotten, for the specific reason that a group of Democratic Senators don’t want to pass climate change legislation. Here are the names:
The eight Democratic senators who signed on to the letter are Robert Byrd (WV), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Evan Bayh (IN), Mark Pryor (AR), Bob Casey (PA), Carl Levin (MI), and Mary Landrieu (LA).
Of those eight, only Robert Byrd is possibly asserting Senate rules in drawing this line in the sand, although being from a coal state you cannot be sure. The others make up the core of the Senate Blue Dogs, and lawmakers from states with a vested interest in stopping America’s addiction to oil. They don’t want to stop the gravy train that has funded their rise to political power, and so the planet continues to burn and moneyed interests continue to hold the marionette strings over their heads. And even beyond these louts are additional members who want to stand in the way of progress.
President Obama’s budget doesn’t have enough support from lawmakers to pass, the Senate Budget Committee chairman said Tuesday.
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said he has spoken to enough colleagues about several different provisions in the budget request to make him think Congress won’t pass it.
Conrad urged White House budget director Peter Orszag not to “draw lines in the sand” with lawmakers, most notably on Obama’s plan for a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions.
“Anybody who thinks it will be easy to get the votes on the budget in the conditions that we face is smoking something,” Conrad said […]
Conrad joined Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.), the top Republican on the Budget Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in criticizing the administration’s cap-and-trade proposal for not doing enough to counterbalance increases in energy costs that will be felt by consumers and companies, especially those in energy states such as North Dakota.
Conrad said that it would be a “distant hope” to expect the climate change plan to pass unless it includes help for industries that would be hit hard by limits on carbon emission production.
Yes, I weep for the polluting industries who have skated by without having to pay for the externalities they create for decades, who have generated phantom wealth by destroying the planet and never having to pay for it (Yes, I know that link is a Tom Friedman column, drill down to the quote by Joe Romm).
Conrad, in addition, doesn’t want Obama getting any big ideas about spending any money as a down payment on health care reform, either. And he doesn’t see the need to restrict Big Agriculture subsidies to wealthy farmers either, with the detachment of a Senator representing the farm state of North Dakota.
Conrad is but one of the budget-writing barons who have their jurisdiction over the legislating process and are quick to assert it. And this is standard practice and how the process works, so that’s fine. But what Conrad and his pals are putting forward are the same short-sighted, uninspiring policies that have created mistrust and anger with the Democratic Party for a generation. Democrats were inspired by a Presidential candidate talking about big ideas and plans to solve pressing problems for the first time in a long while. But he is one man representing part of one branch of government. As Matt Yglesias rightly notes, he needs partners on the Hill:
The legislative accomplishments of 1933-34 and 1965-66 were partially the result of tactical acumen in the wake of an electoral victory on the part of the White House.
But in part, they reflected a genuinely willing congress. There was a key block of legislators in the mid-1960s who really wanted to dramatically advance social justice in the United States. They wanted black kids and white kids to attend the same schools, and they wanted the schools to be better. They wanted equal voting rights and equal rights to public accommodations and a guarantee of health security for the poor and the elderly. They though it was obscene for extreme poverty to flourish in the wealthiest country on earth. Lyndon Johnson’s leadership was important to making that happen as was, obviously, the role of social movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. But LBJ and MLK didn’t bewitch the congress into having those priorities. A critical mass of key members really wanted to solve these problems.
When I read stories about Democrats signing letters urging the leadership not to pass cap & trade through budget reconciliation, or whining that Clinton-era tax rates will wreck the economy, or preemptively caving on permit auction, then it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s not the administration doing something wrong is that the key members of congress just fundamentally agree with George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell that it doesn’t matter if people die of treatable illness or if the planet ceases to support human life.
I’ve been reading G.Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot’s The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, and what jumped out at me is that, while John Kennedy and Barack Obama shared a lot of the same profile at the beginning of their Presidencies – both were cautious centrists who were wary of the left flank of their parties – in Kennedy’s case what ultimately led to the eventual policy successes (most of them carried out under Lyndon Johnson) was the strength and ingenuity of the leaders in Congress, who were skilled enough and bold enough to push these changes through. I don’t see that kind of urgency in today’s Congress. They are perfectly content on the poll-driven margins to fulfill the John Kerry 2004 agenda – stem cell research, SCHIP, half-measures on energy, etc. I don’t mean to denigrate these accomplishments. But actually, I do. We have too many problems that have gone unsolved for too long, and it seems like the political muscles among liberals in Congress have completely atrophied. And these hornets have been allowed in the nest, these corporate whores who exist as moles inside the caucus to make sure all this hope and change doesn’t hold a hope of changing anything.
Under normal circumstances, these would be debates we could have and struggles we could play out for a year or so. But the string has run out. The time has all but passed. And yet the same elites predominate. If there’s an excess of fear out there right now, at least part of it stems from the feeling that these elected men and women are either unable or, more likely, unwilling, to ever do what’s necessary, not for prosperity, but for survival.
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Principles
by digby
I’m pretty sure everyone gets this, but in case you don’t, the reason that Governors Rick Perry and Mark Sanford are “refusing” to take the stimulus money is because they are running for president. They are making the bet that the economy will either be very bad, in which case they can run against Obama’s socialistic policies which ruined the country — or that the economy will be off the table as an issue and it won’t make any difference. (I would guess they are thinking the first is the most likely.)And since their state legislatures will override their “principled” opposition, they know that they won’t actually be responsible for denying people unemployment benefits in the worst recession since the great depression. That’s what passes for integrity among Republicans.
Of course, they aren’t exactly the first to play this sort of game, are they? The Democrats were faced with a similar dilemma in 2002. The presidential hopeful club had to decide whether to support the Iraq war or risk being called unpatriotic and a “captive of the anti-war left” if they didn’t. They all voted for it and none of them made it to the White House. Their calculation was wrong on every level, not the least of which is that it was a cynical, political move that cost many lives. That’s something they’ll have to live with.
It was obvious at the time that the principled vote was also the smart vote: there was no way any Democrat would win in 2004 if the war was going well — and if it wasn’t, having voted for it was not exactly going to be a selling point. That turned out to be true in both 2004 and 2008. The guy who won was the guy who spoke out against the war at the time. The principled move was also the smart move.
The principled position in this case is for the conservatives to admit that this crisis requires government intervention, but that’s obviously not on the menu. But these Republican Governors are being saved from such a dilemma by their legislatures, which don’t have the luxury at the moment of taking a cynical political position that will result in actual harm to their constituents. If the economy improves by the next presidential election, it’s going to be Morning in America redux and they won’t have a chance anyway. They have to bet on failure and this is the only way they can really demonstrate in 2012 that they wouldn’t have made the “mistakes” Obama is making is by taking an insane position now and pretending that would have made the difference. I don’t know if it will work, even if things are still bad in 2012. But it’s probably the only thing they’ve got since their ideology is so bankrupt they literally can’t run on anything real.
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A Proposal For Afghanistan
by tristero
Part One: Two Op-Eds
There were two op-eds on Afghanistan in this morning’s Times. Predictably, Boot, Kagan, and Kagan’s “How to Surge the Taliban” is, as the physicists say, not even wrong. I’ll leave it to others to pick the article apart; I have far more intellectually challenging things to do today, like spending an hour or so meticulously shaving the pith from a pile of navel orange skins. (I want to make mock chicken orange sometime soon.)
Leslie Gelb’s “How to Leave Afghanistan” is both impractical and strangely clueless about the law of unintended consequences. For example, Gelb proposes:
India in particular wants to combat extremism in Pakistan. It could do that by reducing its forces on the border with Pakistan, for example, thereby allowing Pakistani moderates to focus their attention more on the growing and already formidable extremist threat within.
About two seconds of serious thought – can you say “Kashmir conflict?” – should make it quite apparent that, barring an unlikely diplomatic rapprochment between India and Pakistan – completely unspecificed by Gelb, and for good reason, because it is unimaginable on the scale he’s talking about – this isn’t going to happen. Obviously, if India reduces troop levels, Pakistan won’t concentrate on their west but instead will increase their efforts to annex Kashmir. And then, India will react, Pakistan will respond and…
And then there’s this:
The more the Taliban set up shop inside Afghanistan, the more vulnerable they will be to American punishment. Taliban leaders must have good reason to fear America’s military reach. Their leaders could be hit by drones or air strikes. The same goes for their poppy fields, from which they derive considerable income.
This is part of the exact same fallacy that created Bush/Iraq. People, especially leaders of fanatical movements, don’t think this way. They fight back. Hard. In other words, what Gelb is suggesting here – bombing the Taliban into compliance – will increase terrorism against Americans and also inevitably lead to the troop escalation he claims to deplore.
Finally, Gelb lapses into incoherence:
Withdrawal need not mean defeat for America and victory for terrorists, if the full range of American power is used effectively. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger proved that by countering the nasty aftereffects of Vietnam’s fall to communism in a virtuoso display of American power. They did this by engaging in triangular diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union; brokering a de facto peace between Israel and Egypt; and re-establishing American prowess in Asia as a counterweight to emerging Chinese power. By 1978, three years after Saigon’s fall, America’s position in the area was stronger than at any time since the end of World War II.
I have absolutely no idea what Gelb is talking about here. For example, exactly what “area” is Gelb talking about? Could he possibly mean Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1978? Is Gelb making some kind of sick joke about American prowess? That area was devastated by American foreign policy. Also, what’s Egypt and Israel got to do with Asia? Furthermore, the last I checked, Richard Nixon wasn’t president in 1978 and Kissinger, thank God, was no longer in the US government.
Gelb has not thought clearly about the problems for the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Part Two: An Alternative
I will now propose an alternative solution to the situation in Afghanistan. Gelb glancingly discussed something similar in his article, but didn’t have either the intelligence or intellectual courage to place it front and center. I propose we revive an idea that was raised by some of us in the frenzied month after 9/11, when the rest of the country, including Bush, was eagerly signing up for war on bin Laden’s terms and on his turf.
I propose we bomb Afghanistan. I propose we carpet bomb Afghanistan. With butter and silicon.
In other words, I propose a massive program of economic and technological aid to Afghanistan, unprecedented in scope and ambition, dwarfing the Marshall Plan. I propose building schools by the thousands and hospitals by the hundreds to win over the hearts and minds of the people. I propose a massive infrastructure project to connect even the most isolated areas of Afghanistan by modern highways and sustainable energy sources, thereby providing Afghanis with the opportunity to grow their economy. I propose paying the poppy farmers large subsidies to grow other crops. I propose establishing factories to manufacture the latest chips and high tech gadgets.
Of course, there’s a very ugly word that succinctly describes my idea. But simply because I’m suggesting what might be described as out-and-out bribery is no reason to dismiss it out of hand. Had we bribed Saddam with, say $50 billion, he almost certainly would have left Iraq, and countless thousands of Iraqis, not to mention some 4257 Americans, would still be alive. And we would have saved some $150 billion.
Besides, bribery works, at least it has in Iraq, To the extent that the “surge” had any positive effect, much of it was due to the bribes we doled out to Sunnis – who were fighting the US presence – so that they would instead attack the terrorist group called “al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Butter and tech, hearts and minds. That, and not force, represents the best hope to meet the confounding challenges for American security that today’s Afghanistan represents.
Part Three: Discussion
Now, there are a few wee problems with my proposals, not the least of which are these: the United States is broke, busted, disgusted, and our agents can’t be trusted. Another bunch of problems: there is a pile a mile high and wide of corpses, all inadvertent victims of American largesse and intervention. There are damn good reasons why this great book was written.
And there’s another problem. Everything I proposed – well, nearly everything – is stuff we should doing here, in the US, and can’t, for a variety of reasons, mostly going under the rubric “Republican.”
But before you dismiss my idea as pure poppycock, I want to ask you: Is it any less reasonable than Boot, Kagan, and Kagan’s utterly absurd ideas? Is it any less full of unwarranted assumptions, bad analyses, and foolish misplaced hopes than Gelb’s?
That is my point. As bad as the idea I’ve proposed is – and yes, I really don’t amy faith in it – it really is only slightly worse than those of the so-called experts. And maybe, in some ways, it’s a better idea. You should be afraid, very afraid:
First, Gelb’s stupefyingly bad op-ed and the neocon idiocies of Boot, et al, are as good as it gets in the upper reaches of American foreign policy wonkdom.
Second, that will not prevent the rest of the foreign policy mucky-mucks from discussing these terrible ideas in sober, reasoned tones.
Finally, and most importantly, the problems George W. Bush and his irresponsible gang of fools left the world with are unbelievably dangerous. Even a foreign policy establishment filled with geniuses – which is never the case – would find many of the holes Bush dug nearly impossible to climb out of.
We live in interesting times. Very interesting times.