reflectivepundit

McChrystal Does Not Survive—Afghanistan War Strategy Does

By Brigitte L. Nacos

By removing General Stanley McChrystal as top commander in the Afghan theater of war and replacing him with General David Petraeus, President Barack Obama missed a golden opportunity to revise the losing Afghanistan strategy that transcends his declared goals of disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Instead, the president said, “It is a change in personnel, but it is not a change in policy” as General Petraeus, Defense Secretary Gates, and Vice President Biden stood next to him.

Both Petraeus as commander in Iraq and McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan were eager to translate the so-called insurgency theory into practice—Petraeus once the troop surge was on the way in 2007 and McChrystal once Obama sided last December with his counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan combined with a troop surge of 30,000 that came on top of 21,000 additional troops he ordered in March 2009 to Kabul. 

Although the history of counterinsurgency campaigns is littered with failures and although the news from Afghanistan has been grim of late, the counterinsurgency strategy survives McChrystal perhaps in a more intense form under Petraeus.

Admittedly, General Petraeus had success in Iraq within a reasonable time span—but Afghanistan is a far cry from Iraq.

Typically, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaigns in failed states entail not only military and police action but also the building or rebuilding of political, civic, and economic institutions; this requires many years of hard and expensive efforts to have a chance to succeed. In short, this comes down to nation-building.

President Obama has not retreated from his promise begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in the middle of 2011. If he sticks with his Afghanistan strategy, he will have to change his time line for withdrawal drastically and budget many more $billions for this war.

By giving the command in Afghanistan to Petraeus, there seems no chance for Vice President Joe Biden to get another hearing for his 2009 recommendation of a limited objective in the region: Deploy a small number of Special Forces to attack and defeat the remnants of Al Qaeda in the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border region as well as the Taliban leadership and hard-core followers.

On the other hand, the McChrystal scandal has drawn attention to the almost forgotten war and perhaps will now bolster the opposition to the Afghanistan strategy in the congress and the public.

Notes on the Oil Spill Disaster, Leadership, Politics, and a New Energy Policy

By Brigitte L. Nacos

When it comes to responding to the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there is much blame to go around. While BP was and remains the villain-in-chief, the president’s handling of this crisis has not been impressive either. It might well be that behind the scenes the White House was engaged from the outset, but in the face of an unprecedented ecological disaster the president himself should have addressed the nation early on and shown his hands-on role in managing the crisis. While a far cry from his predecessor’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the images of Obama’s holiday activities during the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago were unsettling. To be sure, a president does not have to be in the Oval Office to communicate with people anywhere. But perceptions are more important than reality. And playing in a pick-up basketball game in Chicago sent the wrong signals in the face of a major disaster.

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The spill has blurred party ideologies and lines along the most affected coastal states. Louisiana is but one example. Not only because of Mary Matelin and James Carville, the odd political couple’s united front. Take Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican, and U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat: both demand that the Obama administration lifts its temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling while they lament the disastrous effects of the BP spill that has yet to be plugged. It may well be that deepwater rigs in the Gulf "employ, directly, hundreds of people and indirectly thousands,” as Landrieu argues. But such harm pales in comparison to the greatest ecological disaster in America’s history. How in heaven can a guy like Jindal attack Washington for not doing enough to clean up the terrible consequences of the spill and in the same breath join into the drill-baby-drill scream of Big Oil’s beneficiaries of generous campaign donations in Congress and elsewhere? 

Senator Reid has nothing to apologize for

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is amazing how the most bigotted right-wing pack has the nerve to attack Senator Reid and how he has been pressured into apologizing for a remark he made early in the 2008 campaign, namely, that then Senator Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

While strangely using the language of the past, in content this was a reasonable assessment by someone who has no problems with racial and ethnic differences but is fully aware of the realities of prejudice and bigotry and,yes, racism in society. 

Reid has a strong pro-civil rights record and was among the earliest supporters of Obama. What he expressed was simply the concern that America is far from post-racial. Look at elected and appointed African-American public officials and corporate successes and you will see that lighter-skinned minorities have the edge. Just think of trailblazers like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. This all is rooted deeply in the past.

Not Reid but the conservative elite and the populist dividers should be blamed. Instead, a media--including the allegedly liberal media--that crave controversy echo the right-wing’s accusations of Reid’s “controversial” statement and run with comparisons to Trent Lott’s past embarrassments. When Lott boasted his support for one-time presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, he seemed to indicated that a Thurmond presidency would have meant a different course of history—presumably a derailment of the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King's role.

Harvard law professor Lani Guinier is the only one who got it right, when she said according to the New York Times that Mr. Lott “seemed to be expressing nostalgia for the segregationist platform of Mr. Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, while Mr. Reid comments seemed to be addressing ‘an unfortunate truth about the present.’” Too bad that we do not see and hear Lani Guinier more in a media that give readily access to the practitioners of attack politics.

It is now clear that we do not have to wait for Sarah Palin to settle in at Fox News for a media removed from the fair and balanced label.

Playing Political Football with the Trial of 9/11 Plotters in New York

By Brigitte L. Nacos

More than eight years after the 9/11 attacks, more than six years after the breaking news of the 9/11 mastermind’s arrest, and after many years of secrecy, human rights violations, legal maneuvering, and inaction—most of it during George W. Bush’s presidency--, the Obama administration decided to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad and four others in a federal court in downtown Manhattan.

This seemed a logical choice. After all, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, one of the participants in a plot to bomb several Manhattan landmarks, and a number of other terrorists were tried, convicted and sentenced to life or long prison terms in the same court house without any problems.

Yet, Attorney-General Eric Holder’s announcement that the 9/11 plotters will be tried in a civil court in New York City rather than before military tribunal at Guantanamo was greeted with far louder opposition than support. Republicans were shameless in playing political football as they once again exploited the families of 9/11 victims for their partisan games.

As the Washington Post reported, before the attorney-general began his testimony before the Senate Judiciary, GOP Senators introduced “[m]ore than a dozen friends and relatives [that] had assembled in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday morning to watch the hearing.” After the hearing ended, Holder met with families and friends of 9/11 victims and listened to their opposition to bring them to justice in a civil court. The Post described the meeting as an “encounter with grief-stricken relatives.”

While one certainly sympathizes with the emotions of relatives and friends of 9/11 victims, eight years after the terrorist attacks politicians and reporters should stop dramatizing and amplifying the emotional plight of these families as if it were forever unique to this particular group of people.   

The White House--a Bastion of Jocks? And What About Gender Bias in Sports Reporting?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Has President Barack Obama committed an unforgivable offense against gender equality by playing hoops with male members of the administration and congress only?

Two weeks after ABC News reported on an all-male game of basketball on the White House court and comedian Jay Leno enlisted Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services and a former college basketball player, to poke fun at the president for excluding women, the New York Times revisited the president’s alleged faux pas and its larger meaning in today’s edition.

According to reporter Mark Leibovich, the issue transcends that one particular all-male basketball game in that the “technical foul over the all-male game has become a nagging concern for a White House that has battled an impression dating to the presidential campaign that Mr. Obama’s closest advisers form a boys’ club and that he is too frequently in the company of only men — not just when playing sports, but also when making big decisions.”

And not enough with Obama’s preference to play hoops with the guys, the Times mentions also that according to “Mark Knoller of CBS, the president has played 23 rounds of golf since taking office, none of which have included women…”

Is it true or a figment of media hype that at a time of pressing foreign and domestic policy  problems and issues—just think Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, health care reform, economic woes, etc., etc.--, the people in the White House are concerned about this so-called gender issue?

In spite of Hillary Clinton at State, Valerie Jarrett as the closest Obama adviser in the White House, Sonia Sotomayor as pick to join the Supreme Court, and a number of influential women in White House and cabinet, were are told that Obama’s White House is a bastion of male power and according to the Times “rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other “dude” and testosterone-brimming personalities…” 

While I am not sure that female members of the administration and congress would want to play basketball with the guys, there are probably enough female golfers who would love to give the president and the guys a run for their money.

Since the lack of female participants in the president’s relaxation time on basketball courts and golf courses is deemed evidence enough for the political correctness guardians to weigh in, the Times should be the last one to dwell on this.

What Endgame in Afghanistan?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
President Barack Obama has differentiated between a war of choice in Iraq and a war of necessity in Afghanistan. As he ponders whether and how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, he has yet to reveal the objectives of the present NATO forces and the expected troop surge to an increasingly skeptical American public. Indeed, recent opinion polls show that a plurality of Americans wants a reduction in present troop levels, not an increase. The same is true for some prominent voices and unlikely bedfellows to the right (i.e., columnist George Will) and to the left (i.e., Senator Russ Feingold).

After his recent trip to Afghanistan, Senator Lindsay Graham said according to today’s New York Times that Afghanistan is the country “where 9/11 was planned and executed.” And he advised the president to explain more convincingly “the consequences of Afghanistan being lost and becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda.” Those are as valid arguments today as they were right after 9/11. Then the objective was to vanquish the leadership of Al Qaeda Central and of their Taliban allies and thereby remove the terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden and his directorate.

Although the Bush administration claimed victory after destroying Al Qaeda’s headquarters and camps and chasing Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into Pakistan to the almost unanimous applause at home, bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and their circles were alive and well across the border—and still are. As to the real reason for going to war in Afghanistan, the allegedly highly successful intervention was a failure.  
Obama was right, when he criticized his predecessor during the campaign for rushing into a war of choice in Iraq instead of concentrating on the war of necessity against Al Qaeda.

The recently stepped up use of special commandos and un-manned drones to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their Pakistani hiding places was a right decision and has achieved some success. This is the way to go. Pour more resources in fighting and defeating Al Qaeda Central for good, the real threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies. That was the objective in the fall of 2001and that should be the objective today.

Feeding Frenzy Town Hall Meetings: Stop Hate Speech Before It Explodes Into Violence

Rush Limbaugh: “Adolf Hitler, like Obama, also ruled by dictate.” He compares Obama and the Democrat Party to fascists that do not allow private sector, put to death the unfit, etc. 

Glenn Beck, Fox News host: he called Obama a fascist, a Nazi, a Marxist and alleged the establishment of a secret network of government-run concentration camps for dissenters.

Anne Coulter has said that people are rightly worried over health reform, as "one excellent way to cut costs is to let old people die."

Betsy McCaughey has claimed that the House health care reform bill would "absolutely require" end-of-life counseling for seniors "that will tell them how to end their life sooner."

Sarah Palin:  "The America I love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told people at a town hall meeting that they have “every right to fear” a provision in a House bill that would provide funding for end-of-life counseling. Grassley said. “We should not have a government program that determines we’re gonna pull the plug on Grandma.”

In short, then, critics of the Proposed Health Care reform claim that it is fascist, it is socialist, it is communist, it is un-American, unpatriotic—it is against everything good in the American system.

All of this plays into conspiracy theories and prejudices of the right-extreme fringe that has experienced a revival since the Barack Obama won the presidential election.

Republicans, Democrats, and Self-Interest: Threat to Meaningful Health Care Reform

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Nobody should be surprised that Republicans inside and outside of Congress attack a meaningful health care reform along the lines of President Barack Obama’s central promise during last year’s campaign. That is at the heart of their ideology. Just listen to conservative talk show hosts and their nonsense about the advent of socialism or communism right here—starting with “ObamaCare.” Or take a look at the Wall Street Journal’s editorials, op-ed articles and letters-to-the-editor and you get an idea about the scare tactics and bogus arguments made by the defenders of the status quo.

Complaining about the House bill that would use a surtax on high income individuals and couples to help finance the health care reform package, the writer of one letter in today’s Wall Street Journal warns, “Raising taxes on those who are most likely to invest and create jobs will reduce trend-line U.S. growth and increase unemployment.” Who in heaven would believe that a modest tax hike would impede Americans with high incomes “to invest and create jobs” as the writer suggests?

Another letter writer states, “I am dumbfounded that the representatives of a nation whose economic fortunes—more than that, whose fundamental culture and identity—are entwined with the spirit of entrepreneurship can contemplate so carelessly wrecking the structure of incentives which have served us so well and for so long.” To be sure, the existing structure has served the upper strata very well for a long time. But that is not true case for the vast majority of hard-working men and women with modest incomes.

Ironically, the self-serving conservative propaganda seems to weaken public support for health care reform. Repeat the “s” word for socialized medicine often enough or tell horror stories of alleged failures in Canada’s public health system again and again-- and even the neediest among us get scared enough to oppose change that would benefit them most. You never hear about the success stories in countries with mandatory and comprehensive health insurance. Germany and its health care system as part of the country’s “capitalism with a human face” is a good example.  

Post-9/11Torture and the Need for a Truth Commission

By Brigitte L. Nacos 
According to Eric Brahm, a “truth commission's main goal is to establish what happened in the past. Truth commissions do not normally have the power to prosecute.” Such a body typically sheds light on human rights violations, war crimes, and hate crimes that were encouraged, blessed, and perpetrated by officials or agents of the very state that creates a truth commission after the offensive practices have been halted as morally and legally wrong. While the need for truth commissions arises typically in the wake of abuses by authoritarian states, such a body would be well suited to investigate and write the complete chapter of post-9/11 torture in U.S. controlled prisons abroad.

Given the pressing problems on his plate, President Barack Obama has reason tell us that it is more important to look ahead rather than be distracted by problems in the past. But there is a way to keep the eye on the ball of today’s and tomorrow’s decision-making without completely ignoring past wrongdoings. The calls for the prosecution of former officials in the White House, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense are justified in the face of the already available evidence, but I prefer the establishment of a truth commission with full access to all relevant information rather than the prosecution of the by now well-known cast of torture advocates and defenders that would widen the divisive partisan and ideological divide.

If we want to learn from the shocking decisions that involved top-officials in the Bush administration and what was revealed to some members of Congress, including leading Democrats, we need to learn the whole truth and let the chips fall wherever they may. Otherwise former administration officials, such as Vice-President Richard Cheney, can continue their propaganda campaign of fear in defense of the utility of torture in bolstering homeland security.

I agree with David Epstein’s take on the liberal media’s cavalier reporting about the Bush administration’s torture record (as we know it so far) compared to their never-ending attacks on both Bill and Hillary Clinton because of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Remarkably, the same moral guardians in the fourth estate who never tired of condemning the sex scandal in the White House have not shown such such an appetite to denounce the Bush administration’s torture policy. Instead, they continue to avoid the “t” word and report benignly about “enhanced interrogation.”

All the more reason for a truth commission.  

High Time to Stop Piracy

By Brigitte L. Nacos
As the crew of a U.S. Navy destroyer looked on, four Somali pirates continued to hold the captain of a U.S.-flagged cargo ship hostage in an un-powered lifeboat off the coast of Africa. Hours earlier, the armed pirates had boarded the Maersk Lines' "Alabama” and taken the unarmed crew hostage. While details of the incident, the captain’s predicament, and the crew’s ability to regain control over their ship remained sketchy, it is known that there have been six such pirate attacks in the region within the last week and more than 150 last year. Moreover, at the time of this latest incident more than a dozen ships and more than 200 sailors are held by pirates who demand many millions of dollars in ransom.

Last fall, the United Nation’s Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution asking member-states to deploy naval vessels and military aircraft to actively fight against rampant piracy on the high seas. Resolution 1838 called “upon all states interested in the security of maritime activities to take part actively in the fight against piracy.” But while pirates have been fought off and in some instances captured by war-ships of several nations, there has not been an effective response to the UN resolution, no concerted military action. When Somali pirates were captured in the past, they were typically handed over to Kenyan authorities since most aggrieved nations seem unwilling to bring these gangs to justice in their own courts. The United Nations should therefore to direct the International Criminal Court to try captured pirates.  

While the container ship Alabama was the first American vessel to be taken over temporarily in the waters near the Horn of Africa, last December pirates chased and shot at the U.S. cruise M/S Nautica with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel because the Nautica was faster than the pirates’ boats.