Columnist.
Want to hear a real laugher? Despite the current disharmony in politics, there's one policy on which all of Washington agrees. Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, president and Congress all agree that after last fall's financial crisis, the federal government has to regulate the financial industry more closely to protect our economy from risk of systemic financial collapse. Here's the joke. As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It's the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians -- the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street.
Al-Qaida is becoming the weapons of mass destruction of the Obama administration's war in Afghanistan. Or, to be more precise, it is a reverse WMD. For the George W. Bush administration, the likely presence of WMD in Iraq was a major justification for going to war. For Vice President Joe Biden and some senior Obama White House staff members (we do not know the position of the president yet), the alleged weakness and ineffectiveness of al-Qaida is sufficient justification for ending our major ground troop presence in Afghanistan.
The gist of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's analysis that presumably will be presented to President Barack Obama is: If 1) you and Congress fully resource the effort (troops, materiel and civilian aid) and 2) if we get much better at coordinating all our assets -- Defense and State departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development, intelligence, contractors, NATO and others -- then 3) there is a better than even chance of success in Afghanistan, which will take 4) between five and seven more years. Note that the president is not likely to be told that the Pentagon can "predict" success -- only that it would be more likely than not to succeed. Thus, the president will have to place a heavy bet at odds barely better than a gambler would get on even or odd at the roulette table. But unlike the gambler, who can leave the table, the president is forced to bet -- either go or no go. There is a potentially huge danger to leaving (as well as to escalating) -- for both national security and political reasons.
As the town hall meetings on health care started in early August, the Democratic Party's talking points accused the attending citizens of being "demonstrators hired by K Street lobbyists." Then they started calling them a "mob." Getting into the spirit of his party, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called those who oppose Obamacare "evil." Then House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called the dissenters "un-American." For good measure, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused them of being Nazis. Former Democratic President Jimmy Carter followed with the assertion that "racism" motivates President Barack Obama's health care opponents. The culmination -- so far -- of this cataract of calumnies was voiced by Pelosi, who, after calling her opposition Nazis, audaciously and chillingly implied that their rhetoric might cause an assassination (as she alleged conservative homophobic rhetoric did in the 1970s): "I have concerns about some of the language that is being used, because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric was very frightening."
With one-sixth of the Obama administration's term of office complete, last week it revealed its profound commitment to an unprecedented policy of eschewing the exercise of great-power diplomacy -- and indeed of being willing to consciously accept humiliation -- in the hope of gaining future advantage from talking with hostile but weaker nations. Following up on his campaign commitment to unconditional diplomatic talks, the president -- in dealings last week with Iran and North Korea through his government -- yielded previously asserted conditions for negotiations as a price his administration is willing to pay for talks with those nations. Earlier in the year, the president set Sept. 30 as a deadline for Iran to suspend its nuclear program in return for substantial talks with the United States -- or face tougher economic sanctions. Also, the president previously sent personal letters to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in hopes of direct, private engagement.
As the politicians who support the president's health care plans escape back into Washington from America -- and as the politicians who oppose the president's health care plans leave their safe redoubt in the heartland and go once more behind the lines into the hostile territory of the Federal Triangle -- only one thing is certain: We don't know the end of this story. If we had a plebiscite on it today, polls show the president's plan would lose. But we are governed by representative government, not plebiscite. And our representatives represent many things. They represent their own convictions, their contributors' interests, their political parties' interests, their own career interests, their voters' interests and opinions, and -- on occasion -- what they see as the national interest.
"President George W. Bush kept us safe from further terrorist attacks." Few presidential claims have been less persuasive to the public than that. Yet after Sept. 11, most Americans thought, "It's not a question of whether, but when." We would have been grateful if we had known at the time that there would be no further attacks while Bush was president. However, as time passed, fewer and fewer believed that Bush's specific judgments and actions were keeping us safe. Most probably assumed our deliverance from a second attack on our soil was attributable to some combination of blind luck and the vigilant work of thousands of our security workers. And, of course, without both of those factors, we would not have avoided danger so far.
On May 27, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson had telephone conversations about Vietnam with McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, and Sen. Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. First, to Bundy, he said: "It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there. ... I don't think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere. ... I don't think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damn mess I ever saw. ... What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? ... What is it worth to this country?"
Those of us who are self-appointed advocates -- who expend our efforts trying to persuade a few more people to our political point of view -- must sit back in slack-jawed wonder when the great American public makes one of its great roars, as we all have been hearing in town hall meetings across the country. In the animal kingdom, it is the lion that has the loudest roar. Scientists say it is made as a warning to advertise the animal's presence. Are you listening, Washington? The current American public's roar certainly is being heard around the world. Consider the following lead from Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper a few days ago:
I have talked with soldiers from Afghanistan -- both American and British, both in the ranks and field-grade officers -- in an effort at making sense of what we are doing there. The White House and Pentagon publicly say they are reassessing policy in Afghanistan. It is well that they should. So far, both means and goals are confused.
