The high price of the war in Iraq

As President Obama fulfills his campaign promise to end the combat role of U.S. armed forces in Iraq it is worth taking time to consider the high price of that conflict which began with the U.S. invasion in March of 2003. Aside from the very real costs in blood and treasury, Anne Applebaum examines some of the casualties:

America's reputation for effectiveness. The victory was swift, but the occupation was chaotic. The insurgency appeared to take Washington by surprise, and no wonder: The Pentagon was squabbling with the State Department, the soldiers had no instructions and didn't speak the language. The overall impression, in Iraq and everywhere else, was of American incompetence—and, after Abu Ghraib, of stupidity and cruelty as well. Two years ago, a poll showed that vast numbers of our closest friends felt that the "mismanagement" of Iraq—not the "invasion" of Iraq—was the biggest stumbling block for allies of the United States.

No wonder, then, that America's ability to organize a coalition has also suffered. Participation in the Iraq war cost Tony Blair his reputation and the Spanish government an election. After an initial surge of support, the Iraqi occupation proved unpopular even in countries where America is popular, such as Italy and Poland. Almost no country that participated in the conflict derived any economic or diplomatic benefits from doing so. None received special U.S. favors—not even Georgia, which sent 2,000 soldiers and received precisely zero U.S. support during its military conflict with Russia.

It will be a lot harder to get any of the "coalition of the willing" to fight with us again. Indeed, "Iraq" is part of the reason why there is so little enthusiasm for Afghanistan and why it is so difficult to put organized pressure on Iran.

Another victim of the conflict was America's ability to influence the Middle East. Admittedly, we were never as good at this as we would like to be, but the chaos in Iraq has clearly strengthened Iran. It has had no positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By helping raise the price of oil for a few years—this was supposed to be a "war for oil"; remember that?—it has also strengthened Saudi Arabia, the regime that produced 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers.

Of course, the high oil price also strengthened Russia and Venezuela—not that anyone has much noticed—because another casualty of the Iraq war has been America's ability to think like a global power. Even if we eventually pull out of Iraq altogether, we will have been bogged down in that country for the decade that also saw China's rise to real world-power status, Latin America's drift to the far left, and Russia's successful use of pipeline politics to divide Europe—all trends that commanded hardly any attention from the Bush administration and so far even less from Obama.

Finally, there are few domestic items that are often overlooked. One worries me in particular: America's ability to care for its wounded veterans. In historical terms, the number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq has been low—some 4,400, as compared with nearly 60,000 in Vietnam. But thanks, in part, to extraordinary advances in medical technology, the number of severely wounded veterans—men and women who will need the highest level of medical and psychological care for the rest of their lives—is far higher than ever before. We need innovative programs—programs like Musicorps, which I described last year—but high levels of bureaucratic energy are required to create and fund them. And the bureaucracy is understandably tired.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the assessment of the Iraq war is a project for the next decade, not the next week. Before speaking on Tuesday, Obama might ponder the words of Chou En-lai—who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Nixon, "It's too soon to tell."

Ideas have consequences and Kilpatrick's legitimized the worst behavior

Garrett Epps on the late James J. Kilpatrick:

Americans honor history not so much by forgetting it as by turning into a Disney movie. Nothing too scary, nothing ambiguous, above all nothing shameful. The Civil War was a big mistake that really had nothing much to do with slavery. The internment of the Japanese and Japanese American was a forgivable burst of enthusiasm. Segregation was a slight breach in manners; Martin Luther King was a jolly cross between Polonius and Santa Claus.

I thought of this national foible this week when American journalism gave a tender sendoff to conservative commentator James J. Kilpatrick, who died Sunday at the age of 89. The Washington Post called him "one of the most popular and eminent conservative writers of his generation." The New York Times said that "when he was not tackling national issues, he took aim at flabby prose and bureaucratic absurdities." His main contribution to national life, one would think from reading the obituaries, was "in-your-face, conservative bickering with liberal commentator Shana Alexander" that gave rise to Dan Ackroyd's famous line, "Jane, you ignorant slut."

To be sure, most obituarists rather diffidently praised Kilpatrick for moving away from his earlier segregationist views, which were then forgotten in a burst of admiration for his writings on grammar and usage.

Almost none of the obituaries noted that he did terrible damage to the United States Constitution--damage for which he never even weakly apologized, and which continues to do harm to the national dialogue today.

Kilpatrick's death comes in the midst of a new burst of pseudo-constitutional ugliness--with attacks on religious freedom, birthright citizenship, and federal civil-rights protections increasingly dominating the right-wing airwaves and the blogosphere. As I watch governors "reclaim" their state's "sovereignty" and legislators attack newborn children as "anchor babies," I am flooded with a sick déjà vu. I lived through this once before; and in that earlier cantata of hate, Kilpatrick was one of the choirmasters.

Jack Kilpatrick was my hometown newspaper editor during my childhood in Richmond, Virginia. I never met him and have been given to understand that he was a genial soul. But in print he was a racist dragon. His writings were hateful, but more than that, they were effective. Almost single-handedly, Kilpatrick laid the intellectual foundations for "massive resistance," the extremist Southern strategy of defying the Supreme Court by closing public schools to thwart court desegregation orders.

When Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, a remarkable number of Southern leaders quietly expressed a willingness to comply. As segregationists, they weren't pleased; but the rule of law called for obedience to the Court.

A few, the most dedicated racists, would have none of it. "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" George C. Wallace memorably proclaimed. Wallace was a vulgarian; but the intellectual leader of the "segregation forever" movement was James J. Kilpatrick. Using the editorial columns of The Richmond News Leader, he made Virginia and then the South too hot to hold any white leader who talked of compromise.

Kilpatrick supplied a constitutional theory to justify defiance, and it is one that will seem familiar to anyone who follows the Tea Party movement today. The Supreme Court's interpretations of the Constitution were wrong--not just in Brown, he explained, but ever since 1803. "The sovereign states," not individuals, were the only important citizens of the Union. When the federal government, or the Supreme Court, overstepped its bounds, states could simply "interpose" their authority and nullify their orders. The Fourteenth Amendment (which was probably not valid anyway) did not provide for racial equality. The Tenth Amendment guaranteed state "sovereignty." The United States of 1954 was the United States of John C. Calhoun, "unchanged by John Marshall, unchanged by the Civil War, not altered in any way since the Constitution was created in 1787."

Kilpatrick's concern was not simply purity of principle though; he was frank to say it was the purity of the white race. "What has man gained from the history of the Negro race?" he wrote in 1957. "The answer, alas, is 'virtually nothing.'" When the founders of the segregationist Prince Edward Academy fell short in assembling a library needed for state accreditation, Kilpatrick donated his own books to make sure that the all-white school could open on schedule. As late as 1964 he wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post arguing that "the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race." Mercifully, in view of violence against black people in the South, the editors spiked this piece.

Which brings us to Kilpatrick's legacy. "Kilpatrick, by propagating a whole vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance -- interposition, nullification, states' rights, state sovereignty -- provided an intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the coming years," Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in their 2006 book, The Race Beat.

Ideas have consequences, conservatives like to say. Kilpatrick's racist ideas legitimized the worst kind of hatred, and his constitutional doctrines gave cover to defiant Southern governors like Orval Faubus and George Wallace.

But Kilpatrick never quite faced up to his. In later years he admitted that his racism was a bit much. But he rewrote his own history to make himself a moderate. ("I ardently supported [the Voting Rights Act of 1965] because I knew, as only a white Southerner can know, what chicanery my people had employed to prevent blacks from voting," he wrote in 1988. In 1965, however, he was actually denouncing that Act for striking "with the brute and clumsy force of a wrecking ball at the very foundations of American federalism.")

The evil that men do lives after them. Kilpatrick's ideas echo in the rhetoric of figures like Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Virginia Atty. Gen. Ken Cuccinelli. They want to break the nation into 50 kingdoms, where local majorities can stigmatize and segregate the groups that they don't like, where the federal commerce power cannot protect citizens' health and safety, where federal civil rights laws cannot reach intransigent local sheriffs and mobs.

We've been here before, not just once but several times. After the Civil War, we let ourselves forget the agony that "state sovereignty" had inflicted. After "massive resistance," we rewrote the history to make Martin Luther King a toothless windbag and Jack Kilpatrick a beloved uncle. Now it may be happening a third time. The constitutional dialogue has turned toxic; we need to remember that where "sovereignty" and "interposition" appear in public discourse, they are usually quietly escorted by racism and intolerance.

Historical memory is our only protection. Sadly, that requires some harsh words in an old man's obituary. But the alternative is worse.

Social Security and the inventing of a crisis

Since it was first enacted in 1935, Social Security (i.e., the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program) has been the target of conservative Republicans. There have been different reasons for their opposition to the program that provided relief to families who, prior to Social Security, had to financially support their elderly loved ones but generally it is because they support abolition of Social Security through some variation of privatization of the system.

However, privatization for the sake of privatization has been a tough sell to the American people and outright abolition is non-starter so they look for other reasons to attack the system and try to pare it back little by little.

Paul Krugman looks at the most recent invented crisis in Social Security:

Social Security turned 75 last week. It should have been a joyous occasion, a time to celebrate a program that has brought dignity and decency to the lives of older Americans.

But the program is under attack, with some Democrats as well as nearly all Republicans joining the assault. Rumor has it that President Obama’s deficit commission may call for deep benefit cuts, in particular a sharp rise in the retirement age.

Social Security’s attackers claim that they’re concerned about the program’s financial future. But their math doesn’t add up, and their hostility isn’t really about dollars and cents. Instead, it’s about ideology and posturing. And underneath it all is ignorance of or indifference to the realities of life for many Americans.

About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.

Meanwhile, an aging population will eventually (over the course of the next 20 years) cause the cost of paying Social Security benefits to rise from its current 4.8 percent of G.D.P. to about 6 percent of G.D.P. To give you some perspective, that’s a significantly smaller increase than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which Washington certainly didn’t consider a crisis, or even a reason to rethink some of the Bush tax cuts.

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

It would be easy to dismiss this bait-and-switch as obvious nonsense, except for one thing: many influential people — including Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the president’s deficit commission — are peddling this nonsense.

And having invented a crisis, what do Social Security’s attackers want to do? They don’t propose cutting benefits to current retirees; invariably the plan is, instead, to cut benefits many years in the future. So think about it this way: In order to avoid the possibility of future benefit cuts, we must cut future benefits. O.K.

What’s really going on here? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.
And neither wing of the anti-Social-Security coalition seems to know or care about the hardship its favorite proposals would cause.

The currently fashionable idea of raising the retirement age even more than it will rise under existing law — it has already gone from 65 to 66, it’s scheduled to rise to 67, but now some are proposing that it go to 70 — is usually justified with assertions that life expectancy has risen, so people can easily work later into life. But that’s only true for affluent, white-collar workers — the people who need Social Security least.

I’m not just talking about the fact that it’s a lot easier to imagine working until you’re 70 if you have a comfortable office job than if you’re engaged in manual labor. America is becoming an increasingly unequal society — and the growing disparities extend to matters of life and death. Life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot at the top of the income distribution, but much less for lower-income workers. And remember, the retirement age is already scheduled to rise under current law.

So let’s beat back this unnecessary, unfair and — let’s not mince words — cruel attack on working Americans. Big cuts in Social Security should not be on the table.

Returning to majority rule

The filibuster has long been a tool for minority rule (or misrule) in the United States Senate but only recently has come to represent an ongoing symbol of non-stop blockage of majority rule. The AFL-CIO makes the case for reforming the system:

Despite the election of a Democratic President and large congressional majorities, Senate filibusters have prevented Congress from addressing many of our most pressing problems. Over and over, we have seen House-passed bills blocked by a minority of Senators – refusing even to allow an up or down vote on important legislation or to confirm nominees to critical posts. In fact, since January 2009, the House of Representatives has passed more than 400 laws, and most of them will never be considered in the Senate because a filibuster – or a “hold” or other threat of a filibuster – will permit the minority to block the majority from ever getting to a vote.

Many Americans believe that the Senate has always lived with filibusters and that the current Senate logjam has its roots in 200 years of Senate history. In fact, during the entire 19th Century, there were only 23 filibusters. From 1917 (when the Senate first adopted cloture rules for cutting off debate) until 1969, there was an average of less than one filibuster a year. In the 1970 and 1980s, the annual average rose to around 17.. It was not until the Republicans lost control following the 2006 election that the number of filibusters exploded (as measured by the number of “cloture” motions that the minority forced). In the 110th Congress, there were 139 cloture motions, the record by far, and in 2008 alone one out of every five Senate votes was a cloture vote. In the current 111th Congress, coinciding with the arrival of the Obama Administration, there already have been 113 to date. Today, holds and filibuster threats have become such a routine matter that no bill or nomination can move forward until the Majority Leader can demonstrate that there are 60 votes – a super-majority – for passage.

Even one Senator can tie up the Senate for days by threatening to filibuster. Senators can filibuster motions to proceed to legislation – preventing even the debate from getting underway. By placing a hold on a nominees – a signal that 60 votes will be needed for confirmation – even one Senator can keep a critical Administration post from being filled. Currently, there are holds against 80 nominations, 20 of which are for judgeships, a record number. More importantly, filibusters have made it virtually impossible for the Congress to address the jobs crisis, energy policy or immigration reform. The cloture statistics alone – dramatic as they are -- actually understate the degree to which the Senate is now effectively controlled by a minority that is dedicated to obstruction and delay.

***

The Founders may have believed that making it possible for the Senate to engage in extended debate would keep the majority from acting in haste, but the Framers considered and rejected the notion that a supermajority should be required for any votes other than those on constitutional amendments, impeachment, treaties, veto overrides and expulsion of members. In fact, the filibuster evolved in order to guarantee adequate debate, not to empower a minority to block substantive consideration of a measure or nominee entirely or hijack the Senate from majority rule. Tragically, the abuse of the Senate Rules has allowed the current Republican Party in the Senate to behave as if 51 votes is no longer the benchmark for the passage of legislation or to confirm an Administration nominee. The abuse of the filibuster doesn’t just threaten our progressive agenda; it threatens our democracy and must be challenged.

The fallacy of linking unemployment to immigration

Are immigrants a significant cause of unemployment? Would their deportation open up jobs for native Americans?

David Frum writes:

… here’s a crucial fact that Brookings omits: that 125,000 per month increase in the US labor force is not a law of nature. In fact, during the Bush years, more than half the growth in the US labor force was due to the arrival of immigrant labor.

Immigrants now make up some 15% of the US labor force. They are concentrated in the less skilled portion of the labor force and in industries hardest hit, especially construction.

If immigration levels were curtailed, the job gap would be a lot smaller. And if illegal immigrants returned home, rather than being put on a “path to citizenship,” the problem of putting the unemployed back to work would be smaller and easier.

Karl Smith responds to Frum’s “lump of labor fallacy”:

The US population and thus the number of job seekers has fairly grown remarkably over the last 200 years. Why is it that unemployment hasn’t grown steadily as well?

Because every worker is also a consumer. When you send a immigrant worker packing you are sending his consumption packing with him. For those who have trouble with the abstract interwovenness of the economy think about it this way: Is the one thing our economy really needs right now fewer residents and thus less demand for housing?

If anything we have a construction industry which is predicated on a large and growing population. Perhaps faster growing than we can maintain, but in any case, slowing down growth is not likely to improve matters.

Immigrants – documented or undocumented – create jobs. First, by willing to work for low pay and at often menial tasks (e.g. gardeners, domestic servants, etc.) jobs are created where done existed before due to higher priced domestic labor. Second, as Smith points out above, every worker is a consumer. U.S. dollars paid to an immigrant as wages does not suddenly disappear. It gets poured back into the U.S. economy as payment for rent, the purchase of food, the purchase of a car, etc. thus creating (or maintaining) jobs for others elsewhere in our complex economy.

And lets not forget how immigrant farm labor makes our food purchases affordable thus stretching our spendable cash for nonfood purchases creating jobs elsewhere in the labor market.

Whatever other considerations there are to take into consideration regarding the issue of immigration, forcing immigrant workers/consumers to return to their native lands is not a positive step to take in regards to its impact on our struggling economy. In fact, it would be hurtful.

Cutting taxes and slashing spending to deliberately keep the fiscal crisis alive

Republicans hope to seek advantage in this fall’s midterm elections by stoking fears about federal budget deficits while at the same time pandering to voters with appeals to lower taxes. Assuming their concerns about the deficit are real (and they aren’t) then how can they advocate lower taxes at the same time? There are two possibilities. The first is that despite the facts and common sense a majority of the leadership of the modern Republican Party is clinging to a cut-taxes-at-any-cost-ideology regardless of whatever the consequences its impact has had and will continue to have on our economy. The second possibility is the “starve the beast” scenario. In other words, they are well aware tax cuts will only deepen the federal deficit but their real motive is to keep the financial crisis alive in order to slowly dismantle government program by government program they dislike despite the consequences for our society.

Paul Krugman explains:

… Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.

But we’re talking about voodoo economics here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that belief in the magical powers of tax cuts is a zombie doctrine: no matter how many times you kill it with facts, it just keeps coming back. And despite repeated failure in practice, it is, more than ever, the official view of the G.O.P.

Why should this scare you? On paper, solving America’s long-run fiscal problems is eminently doable: stronger cost control for Medicare plus a moderate rise in taxes would get us most of the way there. And the perception that the deficit is manageable has helped keep U.S. borrowing costs low.

But if politicians who insist that the way to reduce deficits is to cut taxes, not raise them, start winning elections again, how much faith can anyone have that we’ll do what needs to be done? Yes, we can have a fiscal crisis. But if we do, it won’t be because we’ve spent too much trying to create jobs and help the unemployed. It will be because investors have looked at our politics and concluded, with justification, that we’ve turned into a banana republic.

Of course, flirting with crisis is arguably part of the plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

The myth of conservative opposition to deficits

In politics there is a constant struggle between reality and perception. Nowhere is there a better example of the latter often becoming confused with the former than the belief that the right-wing of the Republican Party (which these days essentially is the Republican Party) opposes federal budget deficits. Despite what they may say it is simply untrue that the modern conservative movements through its representatives in the Republican Party oppose deficits. Mathew Yglesias explains:

1) There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.

2) The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.

3) When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.

4) Senator Mitch McConnell says it’s a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn’t be offset by other changes in spending.

5) The deficit reduction commission is having trouble because they think conservative politicians won’t vote for any form of tax increase.

In sum, there are zero historical examples of conservatives mobilizing to make the deficit smaller. What is true is that most conservatives oppose increases in non-military spending when those increases are proposed by Democratic presidents. A minority of conservatives are more consistent opponents of increases in non-military spending. But the key element of conservative fiscal policy is that tax revenue as a percent of GDP should be made as low as possible. This isn’t a goal they pursue that stands in some kind of balance with concern about the deficit, it’s the only goal they pursue. You can like that or not, but every single journalist who writes articles about the deficit debate that doesn’t highlight the conservative movement’s deep, decades-long hostility to deficit reduction is being grossly irresponsible.

Death and taxes (but not for the wealthy)

The late George Steinbrenner, who built upon a fortune he inherited from his father, will pass on to his heirs not only a fortune but a tax-free fortune thanks to the campaign against the so-call “death tax” and the compromise in the adjustment of tax rates. Michael Tomasky opines:

I do not mean to say with the above headline that George Steinbrenner's heirs and assigns aren't mourning the scion's death yesterday at age 80, as undoubtedly they are.

What I do mean to say is that Steinbrenner's passing points us to an odd quirk in US estate-tax law.

In 2008, Forbes put Steinbrenner's net worth at $1.3 billion. And because he died in 2010, not 2009 or 2011, his heirs won't pay a penny of federal estate tax.

This is how the compromise was worked out in Congress when Republicans began agitating about the "death tax" in the early 2000s. You can see a graph here. In 2001, the "exclusion amount" - the level of taxable estate value (gross value minus various deductions) was $675,000. The R's gradually increased it over the decade until last year it was $3.5 million (for individuals that is, and $7 million for couples - that is, married couples, needless to say, heaven forbid not gay ones).

But this year and this year only, there's no federal tax at all. That's because it goes back up next year, with a much lower exclusion amount ($1 million) and a higher rate (55% rather than 45%). So Steinbrenner, who inherited a quite grand shipping fortune from his own father and to his credit turned it into a grander one, and then enjoyed the benefit of a presidential pardon from Ronald Reagan for funneling illegal campaign contributions to Nixon, has seen fate smile on him again.

As for the estate tax, nothing so represents the GOP's true agenda as its campaign to eliminate this tax. I would agree that $675,000 was far too low a threshhold, and I'm the first to say (I've said it) that the Democrats erred in not changing it themselves first. When the GOP seized on the issue, they were able to forge an alliance between the wealthy and the middle class, because by 2001 many middle-class people were sitting on estates worth $675,000. That's an alliance that never loses. The Democrats were dumb not to raise it to something like $2.5 million.

But eliminating it altogether as Republicans want...you know, I guess I'd only say that these people (and their children) made their money in the United States of America, and somewhere and somehow along the way the US helped them make their fortunes, and although it's very quaint to talk about things like citizenship and civic responsibility, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they owe some portion of their success to their country.

It's the old story about the self-made man who never took a dime from anyone until someone pointed out to him all the many ways in which the civic and regulatory infrastructure of the country made it possible for him to earn far more than he might have earned if fate had plopped his soul inside the womb of a woman in Nigeria or Costa Rica. But we're not supposed to speak of such things these days.

The estate tax serves to prevent the perpetuation of wealth, free of tax, in wealthy families or, as Winston Churchill argued, estate taxes are “a certain corrective against the development of a race of idle rich”.

The problem with McChrystal is not just the remarks but his pursuit of Afghan policy

By the time you read this the decision about the future of General Stanley A. McChrystal’s command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan may have been made. The General is to be meeting with President Obama later this morning following quotes attributed to him and his staff mocking the White House and civilian decision makers on the Afghan conflict. McChrystal will reportedly offer this resignation and there is speculation he will be relieved of duty for insubordination.

However, Peter Beinart argues that the problem with McChrystal goes beyond intemperate remarks he and his aides made about the civilian leadership of the United States. Rather he argues the problem is with the General pursuing a policy of trying to win the war in Afghanistan at any cost contrary to the stated foreign policy of the United States of limiting the conflict and not allowing it drain U.S. resources and distract it from other important tasks at home and abroad. He writes in the Daily Beast:

For close to a year now, it’s been painfully clear that McChrystal, with the backing of David Petraeus and the rest of the top military brass, wants America to make an unlimited commitment to the Afghan war. Counterinsurgency, they believe, works; all it requires is an unlimited amount of money and time. As Jonathan Alter details in his book, The Promise, McChrystal and company spent last summer waging a media and bureaucratic campaign aimed at forcing Obama to make that unlimited commitment. Obama resisted, insisting on a timeline for beginning America’s withdrawal. But the fight goes on. In his book, Alter quotes Biden as pledging that “In July of 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.” Confronted with that quote last weekend, Robert Gates shot Biden down, declaring that “that absolutely has not been decided.”

Obama’s problem isn’t that McChrystal is talking smack about him. His problem is that McChrystal isn’t pursuing his foreign policy. McChrystal wants to “win” the war in Afghanistan (whatever that means) no matter what it takes. Obama believes that doing whatever it takes will cost the U.S. so much money, and so distract the administration from other concerns, that it will cripple his efforts to stabilize America’s finances and rebuild American economic power. That’s the struggle that Hastings exposes: between a single-minded general who will stop at nothing to fulfill his mission and a president who believes that even if that mission saves Afghanistan, it could bankrupt the United States. It’s a struggle about whether America is going to adjust to the new limits on its power or pretend that they don’t exist.

That’s the real relevance of the Harry Truman-Douglas MacArthur analogy. Truman didn’t just fire MacArthur because the general treated him with disrespect. He fired him because MacArthur wanted to do whatever it took to liberate the Korean peninsula, including bombing mainland China, whereas Truman came to realize that Korea must be a limited war, fought merely to preserve South Korean independence. In insisting that America’s Cold War strategy be the containment of communism, not the rollback of communism, Truman kept the pursuit of military victory from destroying American power.

Now Obama must do the same. Last summer, he tried to split the difference—surging in Afghanistan while simultaneously pledging to retreat on the theory that within eighteen months the U.S. could so weaken the Taliban that they would sue for peace. Six months in, that strategy looks increasingly absurd. As its most honest proponents concede, counterinsurgency is a long, messy business, especially when the president whose country you’re trying to save is indifferent, if not hostile, to the effort. In all likelihood, when the deadline for troop withdrawal arrives a year from now, Obama will be forced to choose between something that looks like an unlimited commitment and something that looks like defeat. He’ll be forced to make the choice that he avoided last year.

Obama should make it now. He should use McChrystal’s transgression to install a general who will publicly and unambiguously declare that America’s days in Afghanistan are numbered. He should use this moment not just to show that he won’t tolerate insubordination, but to take control of his foreign policy, as Truman did in 1951. Calling McChrystal on the carpet isn’t the point; the point is ending a war that could wreck Obama’s presidency. That would be the best revenge.

Self-defeating actions on the high seas

Israel's storming of the Mavi Marmara evokes memories of the British storming of the SS Exodus in 1947. The Exodus was carrying Jewish refugees from Europe to British-ruled Palestine (including present day Israel). The Royal Navy intercepted and boarded the Exodus in international waters to enforce a British ban on immigration into Palestine Mandate. When the passengers and crew resisted, the British used force killing three. The survivors were deported to a detention camp in British occupied Germany. The worldwide condemnation of the heavy-handed British actions was a factor in the eventual withdrawal of the British Empire from the Middle East. The failure to plan and the step-by-step mishandling of the situation led the British to paint themselves in a corner with few options and the defeat of the very policy they were trying to enforce.

Putting the wisdom and morality of the current Israeli (and Egyptian) blockade of Gaza aside for the moment, the boarding of the Turkish Mavi Marmara was an incredibly bungled affair with potentially very serious consequences for Israel. Navies and coastal police board ships all the time to check for smuggling or drug running and enforcement of blockades is one of the things navies do. There are tried and true methods to do this. Given the high stakes involved it would seem a lot of planning would have gone into this operation starting at the highest levels of the government. Instead, the failure to plan has left several dead and wounded and is threatening the very policy the Israelis were trying to enforce.

Fred Kaplan explains:

There was nothing surprising … about the appearance of these boats. They had converged and set sail from Cyprus a day earlier. More to the point, the activists had been planning their voyage—and very publicly announcing their intentions—for weeks.

The Israelis, in short, had plenty of time to issue warnings, explain to the public (including to the Turkish government) what steps might ensue if the activists carried out their plans—and, more important, to plan what the Israeli navy should do if the boats broke through the 28-kilometer "exclusion zone" (which apparently they didn't quite cross before the landing took place in any case).

That the Israeli government did nothing to gain the upper hand in the all-but-certain propaganda battle to come is baffling.

But what's appalling—really mind-twisting—is that the Israelis seem to have had no plan for what to do under such circumstances in general.

Again, a blockade is a military act; this blockade has been in effect, and has had to be enforced several times, for three years. At least once before, in June 2009, Israeli commandos boarded a boat carrying aid for Hamas and towed it to Ashdod without incident. Other nations' navies, as well as multinational task forces, have boarded boats suspected of carrying drugs, nuclear materials, or other contraband for many years. There are time-tested, well-rehearsed methods for doing this without triggering violence—and for quickly suppressing violence, should it break out.

Yet the Israeli navy seems to have had no plan of what to do if commandos boarded a boat and its personnel fought back, whether with fists, bricks, guns, or whatever. Could this be? Or if there were plans, if the commandos have held training exercises under every conceivable scenario, why did everything go wrong here?

More broadly, doesn't the Israeli navy have plans, hasn't it conducted exercises—just as navies worldwide have plans and have conducted exercises—to block these sorts of incursions without storming the boat to begin with? This wasn't an aircraft carrier or a destroyer heading toward Gaza's harbor; there are ways to disable boats of this size without sinking them. There are also ways to block a boat from reaching a coastline without intercepting it in international waters.

When Israeli lawmakers and opinion leaders—not just the typical critics of Israel, but Israelis themselves—call for an investigation of what happened, this is the ultimate question they're getting at: Are Israel's political and military leaders carefully, intelligently, competently defending Israeli security?

The failure onboard the Mavi Marmara was not merely a matter of technical details or tactical mistakes; it was—or at least appears to have been—the result of gross incompetence and strategic malfeasance.

Any Israeli Cabinet minister or military commander of even the slightest intelligence must know that military actions, especially military actions against civilians—even when justified—have political consequences. This doesn't mean actions shouldn't be taken—just that calculating their costs and benefits should, by this time, be second nature.

It is in this context that Ha'aretz columnist Ari Shavit wrote today that, in its actions onboard the Mavi Marmara, "Israel is serving Hamas' interests better than Hamas itself has ever done."

Here is how Hamas' interests have been served so far:

• Under severe pressure, Egypt, which has blockaded Gaza by land for its own political reasons, has opened its borders (at least for now), a move that is likely to facilitate more weapons shipments than the most extreme estimates of potential smuggling from the Mavi Marmara would have supplied.

• Turkey, the only predominantly Muslim country that regards Israel as an ally, has recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv amid massive anti-Israeli protests in the streets of Istanbul.

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on his way to Washington to discuss the resumption of Palestinian peace talks with President Barack Obama, had to go home (for obvious reasons), and the prospect for renewed diplomacy—which had gained much support in the region—has, to say the least, diminished.

• The case for tighter sanctions against Iran, to the extent that they involve sympathy with Israel's security concerns, has been dealt a setback, just as the U.N. nuclear agency has announced that Iran has enough fuel to build two A-bombs (though the fuel still needs to be enriched).

• The U.N. Security Council has condemned Israel's actions, and countless aid groups, including no doubt several that are hostile to Israel, are sailing toward Gaza, as if to dare the Israelis to fire on them too and, in any case, to deal another blow against the legitimacy of the blockade.

In sum, in order to keep one ship from delivering aid directly to Hamas—and, as Ha'aretz put it, choosing "the worst of all possible options" to do so—Israel has plunged itself into the deepest state of isolation that it's experienced in years.

One way to begin extracting itself from this morass might be to reconsider the Gaza blockade. The logic of the policy is unassailable: The ruling party, Hamas, doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist and occasionally hurls mortar shells at Israeli territory. Israel is reasonable to make sure that goods coming in to Gaza don't include weapons.

However, the execution of the policy has been unreasonably draconian. Israeli officials take so long to inspect the cargo that medicines often expire by the time they reach Palestinian patients. Construction materials, such as pipes and heavy metals, are confiscated on the grounds that they could be used to make weapons, and so the Gaza authorities are unable to rebuild destroyed neighborhoods.

According to some estimates, the flow of goods coming into Gaza—not just food and medical supplies but goods of all sorts—amounts to a mere one-quarter of pre-blockade levels.

The situation has not only spawned a humanitarian crisis, it has also played into the hands of militants who seek to exploit the genuine concern of international aid groups for their own advantage—and to further portray Israeli policy as savage while evading their own responsibility for the continued hostilities.

This situation has become symbolic of Israel’s recent hard-line governments to react in often self-defeating ways rather than think through the consequences of their actions. The Netanyahu government should be held accountable for advancing the cause of Hamas through its bungling.

Reflections on growing up and Memorial Day

I grew up in the small community of Liberty, Indiana. It was (and remains today) a small town but the center of a much larger surrounding rural community in Union County. Memorial Day was a communal event. Small red paper poppies with green wire, handmade by veterans in veterans’ hospitals, were a common sight on the lapels of people a day or two leading up to Memorial Day.

My father was a WWII veteran and a member of the local American Legion and VFW posts. One or both organizations had lists of all the veterans buried in all the cemeteries in the county. Members were assigned a cemetery and given bundles of small American flags to decorate graves. For a few years my father was assigned a small cemetery on the east side of town. It was small and not particularly attractive. There were no indications of recent burials. It was largely a forgotten cemetery of forgotten people. My father’s assignment was a family affair for us. We would hunt for the graves of the men who had served. I would find the unkempt site of a buried veteran who died decades ago and who was then honored those few seconds by a small boy with a small flag.

Memorial Day in Liberty those days was a time when the entire community came together. On Memorial Day morning people would gather downtown in preparation for a march to the large town cemetery on the west side of town. Veterans, whose old uniforms obliviously had shrunk around the waists, led the parade. I marched with the Boy Scouts and my sister with the Girl Scouts. Those with no formal grouping would bring up the rear. There was no music – only the drums – as we marched. People would watch us from their front porches or the sidewalks.

The ceremony at the cemetery was always solemn. A speaker would make a short presentation about the men who had served in the armed services followed by a three-volley salute with rifles by the veterans at exactly noon and ending with taps by a bugle hidden from our view. We marched back downtown in silence. At the end of the march everyone would rush to their cars and turn on the radios to hear the latest about the Indy 500 that had already started.

(Note: I first published this in 2006.)

Passing the costs of extracting oil onto the developing world

The disaster for the oil industry resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has less to do with the oil spill itself than the fact it occurred so close to the shores of the United States. Americans are dependent on cheap oil and prices do not reflect the real costs of extracting crude from the earth. Prices are not only kept artificially low but do not reflect the costs for people in non-Western nations who suffer the consequences of oil spills with some frequency but lack the leverage to force the oil industry to clean up its messes.

John Vidal, the Guardian’s environmental editor explains:

If this accident had occurred in a developing country, say off the west coast of Africa or Indonesia, BP could probably have avoided all publicity and escaped starting a clean-up for many months. It would not have had to employ booms or dispersants, and it could have ignored the health effects on people and the damage done to fishing. It might have eventually been taken to court and could have been fined a few million dollars, but it would probably have appealed and delayed a court decision for a decade or more.

Big Oil is usually a poor country's most powerful industry, and is generally allowed to act like a parallel government. In many countries it simply pays off the judges, the community leaders, the lawmakers and the ministers, and it expects environmentalists and local people to be powerless. Mostly it gets away with it.

What the industry dreads more than anything else is being made fully accountable to developing countries for the mess it has made and the oil it has spilt in the forests, creeks, seas and deserts of the world.

There are more than 2,000 major spillage sites in the Niger delta that have never been cleaned up; there are vast areas of the Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon that have been devastated by spillages, the dumping of toxic materials and blowouts. Rivers and wells in Venezuela, Angola, Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda and Sudan have been badly polluted. Occidental, BP, Chevron, Shell and most other oil companies together face hundreds of outstanding lawsuits. Ecuador alone is seeking $30bn from Texaco.

The only reason oil costs $70-$100 a barrel today, and not $200, is because the industry has managed to pass on the real costs of extracting the oil. If the developing world applied the same pressure on the companies as Obama and the US senators are now doing, and if the industry were forced to really clean up the myriad messes it causes, the price would jump and the switch to clean energy would be swift.

If the billions of dollars of annual subsidies and the many tax breaks the industry gets were withdrawn, and the cost of protecting oil companies in developing countries were added, then most of the world's oil would almost certainly be left in the ground.

Starve the beast, feed the deficit

Paul Krugman looks at comparisons between the debt problems in Greece and in the United States. (This is a follow-up to his blog post on the same subject yesterday.) While both nations are running large budget deficits the future prospects for each differ significantly. The American economy is finally growing due to fiscal stimulus and expansionary policies by the Federal Reserve. That growth, in turn, will boost revenues. Relatively low interest rates on U.S. bonds give the Americans time to deal with their deficit. Greece, on the other hand, faces zero economic growth and interest rates on bond twice that of American bonds. Importantly also is the fact Greek currency is now the Euro and they cannot devalue it as they could with their own currency.

While we in much better shape that Greece we could have been still yet in far better shape. So why aren’t we? Krugman explains:

In short, we’re not Greece. We may currently be running deficits of comparable size, but our economic position — and, as a result, our fiscal outlook — is vastly better.

That said, we do have a long-run budget problem. But what’s the root of that problem? “We demand more than we’re willing to pay for,” is the usual line. Yet that line is deeply misleading.

First of all, who is this “we” of whom people speak? Bear in mind that the drive to cut taxes largely benefited a small minority of Americans: 39 percent of the benefits of making the Bush tax cuts permanent would go to the richest 1 percent of the population.

And bear in mind, also, that taxes have lagged behind spending partly thanks to a deliberate political strategy, that of “starve the beast”: conservatives have deliberately deprived the government of revenue in an attempt to force the spending cuts they now insist are necessary.

Meanwhile, when you look under the hood of those troubling long-run budget projections, you discover that they’re not driven by some generalized problem of overspending. Instead, they largely reflect just one thing: the assumption that health care costs will rise in the future as they have in the past. This tells us that the key to our fiscal future is improving the efficiency of our health care system — which is, you may recall, something the Obama administration has been trying to do, even as many of the same people now warning about the evils of deficits cried “Death panels!”

So here’s the reality: America’s fiscal outlook over the next few years isn’t bad. We do have a serious long-run budget problem, which will have to be resolved with a combination of health care reform and other measures, probably including a moderate rise in taxes. But we should ignore those who pretend to be concerned with fiscal responsibility, but whose real goal is to dismantle the welfare state — and are trying to use crises elsewhere to frighten us into giving them what they want.

You can read Krugman’s entire article here.

For those concerned that Americans are being taxed to death the taxes Americans paid in 2009 were the lowest since the Truman administration in 1950 according to this story in USA Today.

Oil rig owner presents survivors of rig with form to waive rights

Survivors from the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico were presented with forms to sign hours after the incident to waive their rights to seek any compensation for their injuries. The accident killed 11 of their co-workers and continues to spill oil into the Gulf.

The forms presented by Transocean officials were not statements of what the rig workers may have witnessed or experienced but that they were not a witness to the incident and were not injured. So much for trying to get to the bottom of what happened and taking care of the people whose lives were on the line.

Transocean LTD is the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor and owned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded on April 21.

TPM has this:

When rescued workers were brought ashore following the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig last month, officials with drilling giant Transocean presented them with forms stating they had not been injured and that they had no first-hand knowledge of what happened. Lawyers for the workers are now crying foul about what they say is an all too common industry practice to impeach workers' credibility in future legal proceedings.

Some workers are saying they were coerced into signing the form, a charge Transocean denies. But the episode is reminiscent of reports that BP presented Alabama fishermen with contracts that included a no-sue clause in exchange for $5,000.

The rig exploded April 20, killing 11 members of the 126-person crew. When the survivors finally came ashore on a rescue boat at Port Fourchon, Louisiana -- 27 hours after the accident, according to Transocean -- they were brought to the Crowne Plaza Hotel outside the New Orleans airport.

There, they were presented with this one-page form (obtained and posted by NPR), with two sections for workers to initial:

I was not a witness to the incident requiring the evacuation and have no first hand or personal knowledge regarding the incident.
________
(Initials)

I was not injured as a result of the incident of evacuation.
________
(Initials)

Rig worker Chris Choy, 23, told the PBS NewsHour: "It shouldn't count, because I had been up for almost 40 hours, and just gone through hell. And they want to throw papers in my face for me to sign to take them, you know, out of their responsibility."

In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Tony Buzbee, a Houston attorney representing 10 of the rig workers, who has also sued BP and Transocean after previous accidents, said that such forms are quite common after "mass casualty" accidents on land or at sea. He said the statements can come back to haunt workers during a deposition or at trial.

"It not only protects them against that individual worker, but it might protect them against that worker being a witness for someone else," Buzbee says.

"It's used in several ways: number one, if the worker later is called as a witness to say, 'Yes, I saw Joe Blow fall down the stairs.' Then this statement is thrown in his face," says Buzbee. "Later if the guy's neck begins to hurt and he seeks treatment, they stick the statement in his face and say, 'Well you told us on the day of the incident you weren't hurt.'"

You can read the entire piece here.

The oil spill in the Gulf and the underlying problem of American energy consumption

There are two things we don’t know about the current massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and there are two things we do know.

What we don’t know: 1. No one yet knows the reasons for the explosion at and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico almost two weeks ago. 2. And no one yet knows the reasons why the safeguard system to shut off the well failed to work.

What we do know: 1. The current and unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico from oil spewing out of an underwater well will prove to be one of the worse environmental catastrophes to impact this nation and our neighbors to the south. 2. And this is yet again one more symptom, or result, of this nation’s addiction to cheap petroleum.

The United States surpassed self-sufficiency in oil production over forty years ago and now consumes approximately 25% of the oil produced from around the world. The real costs of oil are largely hidden from American businesses and consumers. Taxes are kept low and do not reflect the costs taxpayers pay for elsewhere for military defending the nonstop flow of oil from the Middle East, the regulatory infrastructure set up to protect consumers, and the costs of cleaning up the messes left behind from oil production and consumption whether, for example, air pollution or oil spills like the one we are witnessing in Gulf.

A quick fix to the Gulf oil spill would be to restrict these types of rigs and drilling in and around the shores of the United States. The problem is that doesn’t address the consumption end of the production/consumption equation. It only pushes the dangers of production to someone else’s backyard. Lisa Margonelli explains in the New York Times:

… Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.) Since the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, and the more than 40 Earth Days that have followed, Americans have increased by two-thirds the amount of petroleum we consume in our cars, while nearly quadrupling the quantity we import. Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.

The Deepwater Horizon spill illustrates that every gallon of gas is a gallon of risks — risks of spills in production and transport, of worker deaths, of asthma-inducing air pollution and of climate change, to name a few. We should print these risks on every gasoline receipt, just as we label smoking’s risks on cigarette packs. And we should throw our newfound political will behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans.

Simply pushing oil production away from us does not solve the underlying problem. …

The problem isn’t our dependence on foreign oil; the underlying problem is our dependence on oil. (I would argue there is no such thing as domestic oil – it all is on the world market.) As our population grows and as we become more dependent on technology in various forms – all of which requires some form of energy to function – then we need to seriously explore energy-efficient technologies and alternative forms of energy.

We have to do better.

Where are the tea partiers when we need them?

The government passes a law in which police are required to use an individual’s race, language or accent to determine whether or not the individual should produce government issued documentation. What do conservatives, who complain the expansion of governmental powers are a threat to the nation’s freedom, have to say about Arizona’s new immigration law? In fairness, a few Republicans have denounced the law or questioned its wisdom. But by and large the right wing of the Republican Party (which is to say the Republican Party) has either been silent or has jumped on the anti-immigrant bandwagon. There certainly have been no Tea Party rallies denouncing big government in Arizona.

Peter Beinart has this assessment in The Daily Beast:

Where are the tea partiers when we need them? For a year now, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and their minions have been warning that America is morphing into a police state. If government more heavily regulates insurance companies, they insist, or if it puts a price on carbon, personal freedom will soon be a distant memory. America will become Amerika, a totalitarian dystopia where citizens can’t even walk the streets without their government-issued identity papers, a place where police can detain people who have committed no crime just because they left their wallets at home. America will become, in other words, Arizona.

So where are Palin and Beck, those latter-day Paul Reveres, now that Governor Jan Brewer is doing to the southwest what President Barack Obama supposedly hopes to do to the nation? They’re blissfully unconcerned; they don’t see any threat to liberty at all. After all, it’s not as if Brewer is regulating the derivatives market.

Ain’t it always this way. For the better part of a century, American conservatives have declared that if you allow the government to raise your taxes and regulate your business, you will eventually find the secret police at your door. It’s an old argument, and there’s a certain logic to it. When the government taxes and regulates, it does impinge upon personal freedom. And if it taxes and regulates so massively that people can’t enjoy any of the fruits of their labor, then you may well be on the road to serfdom. Progressives have never believed that America’s comparatively puny welfare state threatened anyone’s basic property rights. And they have stressed the way in which government—by widening access to health care, for instance, or strengthening labor unions—can actually enhance freedom as it intervenes in the economy. But there’s a reasonable debate to be had. Theoretically, there’s no reason why the fight against higher taxes could not spur someone to champion individual liberty in every aspect of life.

Except that when the civil liberties tests come, the leaders of the American right usually fail. If opposing taxation and regulation is really the best preparation for battling oppressive government, then where was Henry Cabot Lodge when labor activists and German-Americans were brutalized during World War I? Where was William F. Buckley during McCarthyism? Where was Barry Goldwater during the struggle for civil rights? Where was Antonin Scalia during Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that tested the constitutionality of a ban on gay sex? Where was Sean Hannity when the Bush administration eavesdropped on Americans without asking the FISA court? Where is Sarah Palin when Arizona writes harassment of the swarthy into state law?

None of this is to say that when it comes to protecting personal liberty, American progressives have always been on the side of the angels. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, they have committed, and tolerated, terrible abuses as well, especially in wartime. Nor is it to deny that there are principled libertarians like Ron Paul who are as committed to keeping the government out of America’s bedrooms as out of its wallets.

But the harsh truth is this. More often than not during the last century’s great struggles against government abuse, conservatives have married economic libertarianism with political authoritarianism. And the reason has been simple: Their ox wasn’t being gored. If conservatives were right that when government infringes upon your property rights it inevitably tramples other rights as well, you might expect the people who pay the highest taxes to be ones most likely to have their phones tapped or their doors broken down or their relatives detained without charge. But that is not the way it works. Historically, the Americans who find their civil liberties most frequently trampled are new immigrants, or political radicals, or religious minorities, or sexual nonconformists. And the people who defend them are not the people who most despise higher taxes; they are the people with the most inclusive conception of national identity, those who can see these despised and victimized aliens as equally deserving of America’s promise of liberty. That’s why Palin and Beck flunked the Arizona test. Championing liberty doesn’t require hating Washington; it requires empathizing with the most vulnerable people in society, the people government is most likely to abuse. And those aren’t the people being invited to the tea party.

DR Congo: Rape capital of the world

The Democratic Republic of Congo has endured overlapping wars and violent conflicts for several years. There have been armies from a number of different countries and private militias roving the central African nation raping, looting, enslaving and killing with no one to stop them. The central government has been so corrupt and weak it has not been able protect its citizens.

The breakdown of the social order war brings is no more evident than in the epidemic of rape of women and girls that is occurring in the DR Congo. According to a study by Oxfam, reported on in the Guardian:

Sexual violence has become increasingly pervasive in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where civilian rape has risen 17-fold in the past few years, says a report released today by Oxfam.

The study found that 38% of rapes were committed by civilians in 2008, compared with less than 1% in 2004. "These findings imply a normalisation of rape among the civilian population, suggesting the erosion of all constructive social mechanisms that ought to protect civilians from sexual violence," it said.

Armed groups, including the army and Congolese and Rwandan militias, have raped tens of thousands of women in Congo. But the report, Now, the World is Without Me, said about 56% of sexual assaults were committed by armed men in homes in the presence of the victim's families, including their children. About 16% reported were in fields, and 15% in forests. Incidents of sexual slavery were reported by 12% of women surveyed, with some held hostage for years.

According to the BBC:

The Democratic Republic of Congo is "the rape capital of the world", a senior UN official has said.

Margot Wallstrom, the UN's special representative on sexual violence in conflict, urged the Security Council to punish the perpetrators in DR Congo.

Rape remained a dominant feature of the ongoing conflict in eastern DR Congo, with impunity being the rule rather than the exception, she said.

More than 8,000 women were raped during fighting in 2009, the UN says.

"Women have no rights, if those who violate their rights go unpunished," Ms Wallstrom told the UN Security Council on her return from DR Congo.

"If women continue to suffer sexual violence, it is not because the law is inadequate to protect them, but because it is inadequately enforced," she said.

The UN mission in DR Congo, Monuc, has been trying to deal with the problem by escorting women on their way to market, developing early warning systems and working with local officials, according to a UN statement.

In April, research on sexual violence in DR Congo's eastern South Kivu province produced shocking findings.

The report by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative showed that 60% of rape victims in South Kivu were gang raped by armed men, more than half of the assaults took place in the victims' homes and an increasing number of attacks were being carried out by civilians.

Eastern DR Congo is still plagued by army and militia violence despite the end of the country's five-year war in 2003.

Monuc troops have been backing efforts to defeat rebels linked to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, who are operating in eastern DR Congo.

Whether rape occurs as a weapon of war or as a common crime makes little difference to the women who are attacked. The social order has collapsed. Not only are they assaulted but their government has little to offer in the way of protection from being raped again.

You can read the entire stories cited above from the Guardian here and the BBC here.

Hollowness of the right's freedom-rhetoric

The right wing of the Republican Party has found asserting the cause of freedom and raising the specter of big government has become has become a useful rhetorical device to oppose and even block reform legislation by our elected representatives to make life better for the American people. If the “freedom talk” were truly based upon libertarian principles then an interesting debate might ensue but sadly it is quite hollow. These same conservatives promote state power to wage indiscriminate war against foreign nations, torture individuals suspected of terrorist activities, discriminate against immigrants who make the food on our tables affordable, and ban marriages between individuals whose sexuality they disapprove. They are libertarian only when it comes to hands off policies towards the powerful unelected financial interests such as Wall Street banks and insurance companies that affect all of our lives.

John Schwartz has written a very good essay (if somewhat longish) on the subject of “progressive politics and the meaning of American freedom” at the Democratic Strategist. Matt Yglesias has written the following response:

I was a philosophy major in college, and as such I came to appreciate the importance of the controversy between the libertarian conception of "negative liberty" (the absence of state coercion) and the modern liberal idea of "positive liberty" (the presence of opportunity). And John Schwarz has given us a brilliant tour of how this these contrasting conceptions of liberty—or, to use the more Anglo-Saxon term, "freedom"—can illuminate certain high-level disagreements of principle about public policy matters and how this dispute has played out in the history of American political rhetoric.

So far so good. But I think this issue is much less relevant to actual political practice than he seems to believe. In particular, I seriously doubt that Republican Party success at mobilizing freedom-rhetoric has much of anything to do with Barack Obama's falling poll numbers or public hostility to Obama's health care or cap and trade proposals. After all, these proposals existed during the 2008 campaign and were described then as threats to American freedom, but at the time those arguments had little purchase. On one level, the reasons behind the change are complicated. On another level, they're simple—the poor performance of the American economy has eroded people's trust in incumbents in general, Obama in particular, and the public sector writ large. There's good reason to believe that this will turn around if the economy turns around, but not otherwise.

Beyond narrow electoral considerations, I also think it's a mistake to too-closely identify the right's freedom-rhetoric with the formal philosophical conception of libertarian-style negative liberty. It is, rather, a slogan that's invoked as a gesture of ideological identity and solidarity that's largely devoid of semantic content—it plays a role similar to the one "yes, we can" (itself an echo of the United Farm Workers' "¡si se puede!") plays for Obama's supporters.

Consider that the proponents of right-wing "freedom" are not even slightly inclined to back elements of a libertarian agenda that conflict with conservative identity politics. When John Boehner says "most importantly, let's allow freedom to flourish" he's not suggesting we should open our borders to more immigrants or drop the vestigial Selective Service system or allow gay couples to marry or let Latin American countries sell us more sugar or reduce military expenditures. Indeed, the very same critics who castigate Obama for limiting Americans' freedom also accuse him of being insufficiently eager to torture people, unduly hesitant to detain suspects without trial, and too eager to take the side of black professors subject to police harassment for the crime of trying to enter their own home.

Which is just to say that Boehner is a conservative. He sides with the military, with law enforcement, with the business establishment, and with the dominant ethno-cultural group in the country. In the United States of America, people who adhere to these values like to talk about "freedom" but this has nothing in particular to do with any real ideas about human liberty.

Back in September of 1960, the leading lights of the nascent conservative movement met in Sharon, Connecticut to found Young Americans for Freedom and they proclaimed that "foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force." A naive person might read that and conclude that William F Buckley, Jr was a strong proponent of federal anti-lynching legislation and other civil rights laws since, clearly, it was African-Americans in the Jim Crow South who were most subject to "restrictions of arbitrary force" and general lack of freedom. In the real world, a couple of lines down the Sharon Statement is talking about state's rights, "the genius of the Constitution - the division of powers - is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government." In 1962, YAF gave its Freedom Award to none other than Strom Thurmond, and in 1964 they helped organize the GOP nomination victory of Barry Goldwater, spearheading the party's turn away from its historic support of liberty for black people. Somewhat similarly, the far-right parties in the Netherlands and Austria are both called "Freedom Party."

Which is not to say that invocations of "freedom" circa 2010 are really about racism. It's just to say that in 2010 as in 1960 they're about conservatism in all its splendor and horror, and have little to do with serious disagreements about the nature of liberty.