reflectivepundit

The Surge in Afghanistan: Consistent With Obama’s Campaign Speeches

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Tom Hayden, one of the most prominent leaders of the Anti-Vietnam Movement of the 1960s, wrote the other day in The Nation, “It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car. Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments.” His sentiment is far from unique among Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters during the presidential campaign.

They either did not pay attention to candidate Obama’s stump speeches during the campaign or they did not want to hear and believe what their candidate said with respect to what he called “a war of necessity”—Afghanistan.  Otherwise, they couldn’t have been too surprised about the president’s finally revealed Afghanistan strategy.

On October 22, 2008, shortly before he won the presidential election, Barack Obama said in a speech in Richmond, Virginia, what he stated in earlier and later stump speeches: 

“Ending the [Iraq] war will help us deal with Afghanistan…In 2002, I said we should focus on finishing the fight against Osama bin Laden. Throughout this campaign, I have argued that we need more troops and more resources to win the war in Afghanistan, and to confront the growing threat from al Qaeda along the Pakistani border…”

“Make no mistake: we are confronting an urgent crisis in Afghanistan, and we have to act. It's time to heed the call from General McKiernan and others for more troops. That's why I'd send at least two or three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan. We also need more training for Afghan Security forces, more non-military assistance to help Afghans develop alternatives to poppy farming, more safeguards to prevent corruption, and a new effort to crack down on cross-border terrorism. Only a comprehensive strategy that prioritizes Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda will succeed, and that's the change I'll bring to the White House.”

So, the president decided to do what he said as candidate.

However, it is far from clear whether the positive results of the surge in Iraq can be repeated in Afghanistan by deploying 30,000 more troops there in addition to several thousand additional troops from a variety of other NATO members and the more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers already added on President Obama’s watch earlier this year. 

Deceptive Propaganda and Health Care Reform

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The images of mostly old Americans in chaotic townhall meetings this fall are unforgettable as are the untrue arguments against meaningful health care reform made in those gatherings. Although enjoying the benefits of their government-run Medicare entitlements, the elderly in particular ranted and raved against a public alternative to private health insurance.

The deceptive propaganda campaigns (just think of death panels) by conservative ideologues and a greedy insurance industry have misled rather than educate certain segments of society. Thus the outcry against the alleged horror of government bureaucrats making decisions about health care needs—although bureaucrats in insurance companies decide day-in and day-out what medical treatments will be paid for--or not.

When a propaganda of fear warns of socialism and communism taking hold and replacing good, old capitalism, such nonsense tends to scare the hell out of those who fear to be the losers of reforms.

It is a disgrace that a rapidly growing number of Americans do not have any health insurance. But not only Republicans but also several Democrats in the U.S. Senate do not embrace meaningful health care reform that must include a public option. Therefore, MSNBC’s talk show hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow called for setting up temporary free clinics for the uninsured to shame those conservative Democrats--Lincoln and Mark Pryor (both D-Ark.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—into joining the majority of Democrats and prevent a filibuster against health care reform in the Senate.
 
Until last night, when I happened to look at Larry King Live, I had never heard of “The Dr. Oz Show” and its host Dr. Mehmet Oz. But this physician’s account of his involvement in such a clinic in Houston drove home the plight of many, many millions of men, women, and children without health insurance.

There was the gripping account of a little girl that was recently examined in one of those temporary clinics in Houston. Although working, her mother has not been able to afford health insurance. As it turned out, the little girl had a hole in her heart. One wonders how many treatable health problems are not discovered for lack of insurance.

And that in the United States—not some third world country!

When Generals Go Public in Policy Debates: McChrystal and MacArthur

By Brigitte L. Nacos
I wonder whether General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has forgotten the one chapter in the annals of history that deals with the firing of General Douglas McArthur by President Harry Truman in 1951. Although MacArthur was one of the best-known and admired military leaders of World War II, he lost his position for repeatedly going public to voice his disagreement with the president’s Korea and China policy.

In public appearances of his choice, McChrystal has forcefully lobbied and pressured the White House and Defense Department to embrace his new strategy for winning in Afghanistan without time consuming deliberation. Obviously, the timely leak of his 66-page assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and the request for significantly more troops were part of his public offensive.

To be sure, generals should speak their mind, when it comes to the conduct of war or other military questions and issues. But they should do so within the military chain of command and in private meetings with both military and civilian leaders in Washington.

More recently, top military leaders have been criticized for not standing up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team during the planning of the Iraq invasion and for not insisting on far more troops for the post-invasion phase in their dealings with the civilian leaders in the Pentagon and White House. The only one who did speak out, General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, was eventually forced into retirement. But unlike McChrystal now, Shinseki did not leak his written assessments on Iraq War planning or lobbied in favor of his position in public appearances of his choice. On one occasion, he answered questions during his appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. That was the beginning of the end of his military career.

Had McChrystal simply given his strong views during a Senate hearing and in response to Senators’ questions, there would not be any reason to criticize him. But in view of his going public approach, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was right, when he said that both civilian and military leaders must "provide our best advice to the president candidly, but privately.” And emphasizing that he was speaking for the Department of Defense, Gates said, “once the commander in chief makes his decisions, we will salute and execute those decisions faithfully and to the best of our ability.”

That is the way it must be in this democracy. 

Presidential Power, Health Care Reform, and President Obama

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When it comes to ranking the greatest communicators in the White House, Ronald Reagan and the two Roosevelts, Franklin and Theodore, deserve top billing as does the current president. But even in the age of communication presidents cannot rely solely or mostly on what Samuel Kernell has explained as the need to “go public” and win popular support for presidential policies.

Barack Obama’s personal and his campaign camp’s communication skills were instrumental in winning first his party’s nomination and ultimately the presidency. Once in the White House, however, a president’s power to get his enacted does not derive from public support only.    

To be sure, public support is very important. The idea here is that popular backing of presidential policies will help to persuade members of congress and other influential actors to follow presidential leadership. Yet, bargaining with and convincing Washingtonians at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that it is in everyone’s interest to follow the president’s lead remains very much part of presidential power as it was in the past and as Richard Neustadt described it so well fifty years ago.

More recently, as presidential scholar Richard Rose recognized, post-modern presidents face three imperatives: going public, going Washington, and going international in the sense of communicating with and persuading the general public and fellow-decision-makers at home as well as foreign governments and publics. 

Going public and going Washington effectively is imperative especially with respect to a domestic policy goal that aims at fundamental changes. Meaningful health care reform is such a policy objective.

But, strangely and inexplicitly, President Obama was late on both counts. It was only after the opposition had gone public and eroded public support for a meaningful health care reform that candidate Obama promised during the campaign that the White House decided in favor of direct presidential appeals to the American people. And to this day, there is no intensive “going Washington” campaign.

To persuade members of Congress it is not enough to invite a bunch of representatives and senators to the White House for a group session with the president. As Lyndon Johnson demonstrated, when he pressed for key civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, support for highly controversial policies can be won by one-on-one contacts with as many individual law-makers as possible. The great communicator Ronald Reagan, too, worked the phones to push members of congress to support his first budget and major tax cuts—although he was recovering at the time from the injuries suffered during an assassination attempt.

Perhaps it would be too late now to make a difference in the outcome of the health care reform but White House aides should read or reread some basic literature on presidential power—starting with Neustadt, Kernell, and Rose.

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.

Tom Ridge and the Cooked Terrorism Alerts: Selling Fear Works

By Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and Robert Y. Shapiro

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, is in the headlines because he reveals in a book he authored that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national terrorism threat alert level just before the 2004 election. Actually, as noted on this blog in fall 2006, Ridge had voiced this suspicion after he resigned as Secretary of Homeland Security in early 2005, when he told reporters that "there were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it [the color-coded alert level], and we said, ‘For that?" The White House and others in the administration knew exactly for what: they believed that raised alert levels increased the fear of Americans and their support for the crisis-managing president. They were right as our systematic research has demonstrated.

Terrorists, policy-makers, and terrorism scholars have long assumed that the mere threat of terrorist strikes affects societies that have experienced actual terrorist attacks. But so far research has neither validated this conventional wisdom nor demonstrated in detail how mass-mediated threat communications by terrorists and terror alerts and threat assessments by government officials affect the public in targeted countries. Our research fills this gap.

To begin with, we found that in the 39 months after 9/11, network TV-newscasts devoted large amounts of airtime to threats communicated by Osama bin Laden and his associates and to terror alerts and threat assessments issued by administration officials. In the evening newscasts of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, the average length of news segments devoted to Al Qaeda threat messages was close to four minutes and five-and-a-half minutes for those reporting that the administration had increased the color-coded terror alert level. In contrast, when the official terror alert was lowered by the administration, television devoted on average only one-and-a-half minutes to this news. Similarly, all cases of increased terror alerts levels were reported as lead stories, whereas only thirteen percent of the lowering of terror alerts were lead stories–if they were reported at all.

These coverage patterns played into the hands of the Al Qaeda leadership whose communications left no doubt about their intent to make the American public more fearful. But President George W. Bush and his administration, too, benefited from the generous coverage of their terror alerts, warnings, and assessments in that this reminded the public frequently why the "war on terrorism" had to be fought. Shortly after 9/11, the administration urged the TV-networks not to air bin Laden/Al Qaeda tapes, but there were no follow-up complaints. Obviously, the White House did no longer object to the media’s attention to Al Qaeda communications. After all, President Bush himself told a White House reporter with respect to a bin Laden tape that  was released and heavily covered five days before the 2004 presidential election, "I thought it was going to help. I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden does not want Bush to be president, something must be right with Bush."

When Peace Negotiations Fail: Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Reporting about talks between “intermediaries” and the Taliban as well as other militant factions in Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins wrote recently that these secret negotiations have taken place “for months,” “accelerated since Mr. Obama took office” and have been conducted with the blessing of the Kabul government and without opposition from Washington. Reportedly, the Taliban and other militants insist that the removal of U.S. and coalition forces from Afghanistan must be part of any peace deal, whereas the Obama administration demands that the Taliban disarms as precondition for negotiations. Imagine for a moment that the two sides would agree to each these conditions and come to a peace agreement.

You would have to believe in the fairy tale to expect that such an arrangement would work in the real world--certainly not as long as Taliban leader and bin Laden ally Mullah Muhammad Omar and his Afghan counterparts spread violence and terror in order to hold and expand their power positions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Officially, it is the goal of the Obama administration to win over “moderates” within the Taliban and thereby strengthen the support base for peaceful cooperation and legitimate participation in Afghan public affairs. But neither this official position nor the indirect talks with Taliban and other militant leaders promise any progress in the search for a peaceful solution in Afghanistan.

One does not have to look further than neighboring Pakistan for evidence. After all, it was the peace-agreement between the Pakistani Taliban and the provincial government of the North-West Frontier region of early 2009 and approved by the national parliament that led to civil war-like conditions, terrorism, and, most of all, a colossal humanitarian crisis. As part of the settlement, the army withdrew from the region. But although the agreement gave the Taliban the right to impose the most extreme form of sharia law and de facto control over the SWAT valley, the extremists did not lay down their arms as they had agreed to. Instead, they fought to expand their rule of terror into other regions of the country with the goal to take down the central government and bring their brand of religious rule to all of Pakistan. 

In short, the agreement that surrendered a whole province with a population of 1.5 million to the Taliban emboldened the extremists to mount a brutal offensive beyond the Swat region shortly after the “peace” deal was agreed to.

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.  

President Obama and the Promise versus Reality Gap

By Brigitte L. Nacos
During the primary season and the general election campaign Barack Obama promised real change in Washington. Not cosmetic change. Goodbye to the entrenched politics of special interests that trumped the common good. No lobbyists in his White House and administration; instead, a new breed of public servants with highest ethical principles.

Merely two weeks into his presidency, Mr. Obama’s scorecard is disappointing. He and his inner circle that was so successful in sticking to the winning message of change during the campaign laid bare a disconcerting Promise v. Reality gap. While fulfilling the promise by proclaiming strict new ethics rules for public officials in his administration, the president violated those values immediately when he exempted first his now secretary of the treasury and then the designated secretary of health and human services. By backing two men for cabinet posts even when it was crystal clear that they did not pay substantial amounts of their taxes, the president embraced a double standard that does not bode well for his credibility on ushering in the promised new era of responsibility.

We now have a treasury secretary in Timothy Geithner who also oversees the Internal Revenue Service, the very agency that prosecutes tax cheaters. Never mind that Tom Daschle threw in the towel, the fact that the president continued to back him as secretary of health and human services and as health care reform czar, was a slap in the face of his campaign promises. His tax problems aside, how in heaven would you want to have with Daschle a man in charge of reforming the health care system who has had a lucrative and cozy relationship with the very health care industry that has stood in the way of fundamental reforms for the benefit of the American people?

Unlike Rush Limbaugh who has said that he wants President Obama to fail, I support the president and I want him to succeed with the important policy initiatives he promised.

Subsidies for Foreign Car Makers and the Fall of Detroit’s “Big Three”

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) and Representative J. Gresham Barrett (R-South Carolina) who have spearheaded the attacks against a rescue package for Detroit car makers, claim to fight against government interference in the free market. Barrett, whose district sits next to a BMW plant, warned, “We're not supposed to pick winners and losers and micromanage companies.” And according to Shelby, American car companies “build the wrong stuff.” He characterized General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler as “dinosaurs” and suggested that “we should let them go.”

Ironically, a major reason for the predicament of the one-time “Big Three” is the advantage of foreign car makers vis-à-vis domestic companies on the far from level playing field. A few week ago, United Autoworkers president Ron Gettelfinger said in a press conference that since 1992 foreign car makers received more than $3 billion in incentives to locate their plants in particular states and communities. Singling out the state of Alabama, the union leader said:

“We have Hyundai Motor Company that got $252 million in incentives. Toyota there got $29 million in incentives. Honda, $158 million and Mercedes $253 million in incentives. It just seems odd to us that we can help the financial institutions in this country and that we can offer incentives to our competitors to come here and compete against us but at the same time, we are willing to walk away from an industry that is the backbone of our economy.
And while I read these figures to you, which are the actual figures that we have been able to dig up, I want to go to one particular story and that is the plant in Mercedes, the Mercedes plant in Alabama.
As it turned out, as I said Alabama offered $253 million but the state offered to train the workers, clear and improve the sites, upgrade the utilities, buy 2,500 vehicles and it is estimated that that incentive package totaled somewhere around $175,000 per employee to create those jobs there. And on top of this, that state gave this automaker a large parcel of land-around $250-$300 million dollars.”

That is only part of the story. Whereas the U.S. companies are burdened with legacy costs, namely pensions and health care for retirees, foreign newcomers are free of such obligations. Like other industries in the South, car plants have typically a non-union labor force. The states that have proven particularly attractive for foreign companies, namely, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina, are so-called right-to-work states in which fewer employees cannot be forced to join a union even if they work in a unionized plant.