Pasty little Ross, in “The War We’d Like to Forget,” says America’s most important interest remains a stable, unified Iraq, even if it takes longer than any domestic faction wants. Mr. Cohen, in “A Nation Hard to Short,” says the miracle of New York gives reason to believe in America. Prof. Krugman, in “An Incoherent Truth,” says on health care, the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense. The conservative Democrats can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project. Here’s Asshat:
It was the kind of symbolic moment that George W. Bush must have yearned for during the Iraq war’s darkest days. Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of a sovereign (sort of), stable (up to a point) and democratic (within limits) Republic of Iraq came to Arlington National Cemetery Thursday, and laid a wreath in honor of the 4,328 American soldiers who have died fighting in his country.
Few Americans noticed, though, and even fewer cared. It would take more than a photo-op at the Tomb of the Unknowns to make the nation rethink the Iraq war. Having spent the better part of the Bush era arguing foreign policy with a fury not seen since Vietnam, Americans have settled on a remarkably durable consensus: It was a mistake. We’re winning. Let’s leave.
Each of these beliefs is contestable. But almost nobody — right, left or center — seems to have much interest in debating them. Most conservatives still believe that the invasion of Iraq was just and justified. But it’s clear from several years of polling that they aren’t about to persuade the public. So you’re much more likely to hear them emphasizing the successes of the surge than relitigating the W.M.D. debate.
Plenty of war-skeptics are unconvinced that Iraq’s recent stabilization will deliver a happy outcome in the long run. But the surge smoothed the way for withdrawal, which is what the war’s critics have wanted all along — so why rock the boat?
For the Obama administration, there’s nothing to be gained from reopening old wounds. They’re just happy to have inherited a timeline for pulling out our troops, instead of having to negotiate their own.
In many respects, this ideological truce is welcome. The fortunes of war have made every American faction look foolish at some point, and modesty is becoming to all sides. Anti-war liberals (and, much less influentially, anti-war conservatives) got the most important question right. But the anti-war side often seemed far too willing to leave Iraq to the furies, and far too reckless about the strategic consequences of beating a retreat.
Pro-war Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton talked a good game about seeing the conflict through, but they got both of the crucial decisions wrong – backing the invasion in 2003 and then, fingers in the wind, voting against the surge in 2006. (Naturally, they were rewarded with the reins of Barack Obama’s foreign policy.)
It was left to the much-hated neoconservatives to push and push, even when it seemed politically impossible, for the change of strategy that ultimately stabilized Iraq. But of course the neoconservatives were picking up the pieces from a debacle that their own overconfidence made possible in the first place.
These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.
Except that the Iraq war isn’t finished yet. There are still 130,000 American troops in the country. As Maliki acknowledged during his visit to Washington, there will probably be thousands of soldiers there after 2011, when the current Status of Forces Agreement states that our troops must be withdrawn.
Nobody’s sure exactly what this residual force will be doing. But that’s because nobody — nobody — knows how Iraq will look once American combat troops are gone. As soon as we do, the current consensus will likely come apart. It holds, for now, because everybody has an interest in the idea of a swift withdrawal. War supporters want the chance to claim victory. War opponents want the chance to claim vindication. Obama wants the problem off his desk.
But America’s most important interest remains a stable, unified Republic of Iraq, even if takes longer than any domestic faction wants. Afghanistan may be “the good war” to most Americans, but Iraq’s size, location, history and resources mean that it’s still by far the more important one.
Yes, the 9/11 plot got its start in a chaotic, conflict-ridden Afghanistan. But a Middle East-wide war could get its start in a chaotic, conflict-ridden Iraq. Indeed, before the surge, it almost did. This reality will keep us heavily involved, one way or another, long after our “withdrawal” is complete.
And if the hard choices start again, it will require that the American people pay attention, once more, to a war they’d just as soon forget.
God, I’d love to slap the snot out of him… Here’s Mr. Cohen:
The other morning, I caught Warren Buffett on MSNBC. The Sage of Omaha was in sprightly form, perhaps buoyed by the market’s summer surge. He was asked where the market was headed in the next few months and he said he had no idea but he knew one thing: “It’s hard to short America in the long term.”
All the debt, personal and national, notwithstanding, I have to second that. As it happened, I’d been up very early that morning to talk to CNN’s excellent John Roberts about Iran. Waiting for the show, I looked east across Central Park to the rising sun just knotting its tie over the serried high rises of midtown and the Upper East Side.
It was a magnificent sight, the city resplendent. New York has recovered, if not its stride, at least its balance.
Ten months ago, when Lehman Brothers went poof in the night, and its spooky chief executive Richard Fuld hustled off to sell his Florida mansion to his wife for $100, the city was shell-shocked. It was intact, but emptied and drained, its density gone, as if a neutron bomb had struck.
The sidewalks seemed too wide for scattered people. You could hail a cab in the rain at 6 p.m. on Fifth Avenue with ease. Waiters stared out from empty restaurants as if trapped suddenly in some Hopper painting. Jobs vanished faster than you could say leverage.
The damage from Fuld’s follies — and that of other 31st-floor types giddied by their ephemeral mastery of the universe — has not stopped giving. Credit appraisal is stuck on stupid. If you couldn’t fend off a loan in the days of mortgage madness, now you can scarcely get one with a perfect credit score.
An executive on the board of a large regional bank told me the other day that 95 percent of time is now spent on compliance, which does not leave a lot for doing business. That’s the world of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the opposite of the former PRAT (Please Reserve a Table) world of bankers.
Unemployment is still rising, and could hit 10 percent in the fall. Real estate has scarcely stabilized its free fall. Corporate profits, returning, seem based more on inventive cost-cutting than new revenue flows.
If moribund is 1 and feverish is 10 on the New York restaurant-and-taxi gauge, the city is hovering at about 4.
But it’s come back. It’s righted itself in short order. That has something to do with smart governance but more to do with the gritty culture of the city, its work ethic, its inspiring sense of its own grandeur, its shared knowledge of the personal struggle that goes into a day. A Fuld, who never took the subway, never sat in Bryant Park with a sandwich, knew nothing of what makes the city tick.
My dawn moment with the skyline is a moment every New Yorker knows, when the demanding city suddenly gives back, yields beauty from its pounding restlessness, grants some miracle of iron and light, and in so doing summons the energy and civility that has helped set things right.
Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who died last week, used to talk about that New York skyline, about the way he would dream of it during his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland (the inspiration for his hugely successful “Angela’s Ashes”), and about his fights with his brother Malachy over who should own the right to have such dreams.
He was talking about the summoning power of America, a land hardwired to the future; and, in his way, about the deeper reason why Buffett is right to say, “It’s hard to short America in the long term.” That reason is the enduring belief of millions in America as a transforming power.
The close to my day had a certain symmetry. I found myself in Queens that night, looking at the now glittering towers of midtown from the far side of the East River. Their orange glow was gone but not their beauty. I thought that New York was always surprising.
Some Iranian-Americans had invited me to a wonderful dinner complete with crispy rice (our “vegetarian crackling” as one woman once put it to me in Tehran) and unctuous beef simmered in bitter herbs. Their families had all fled Iran at different times — before the Revolution, in 1979, or in the tumultuous years afterward. Various odysseys had eventually brought them to New York.
Where they had begun again, giving their part to the city’s compact and reserving part of themselves for the memories from which America is only partial deliverance.
The talk of the revolution made me think of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman whose death had immediately preceded McCourt’s. From day 50 of the 1979 U.S. hostage-taking in Tehran, Cronkite always told Americans what day the crisis was in, right up to the 444th day.
Perhaps Buffett has succeeded Cronkite as “the most trusted man in America.” My day of connections was over, a full day in an America that’s hard to short in the long term.
And now here’s Prof. Krugman. I believe I will send his column to my useless Congresscritter, one of the bluest of blue dogs…
Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.
But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)
Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.
By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.
On the other side, individuals would also be prevented from gaming the system: Americans would be required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, rather than signing up only when they need care. And all but the smallest businesses would be required either to provide their employees with insurance, or to pay fees that help cover the cost of subsidies — subsidies that would make insurance affordable for lower-income American families.
Finally, there would be a public option: a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers, which would help hold down costs.
The subsidy portion of health reform would cost around a trillion dollars over the next decade. In all the plans currently on the table, this expense would be offset with a combination of cost savings elsewhere and additional taxes, so that there would be no overall effect on the federal deficit.
So what are the objections of the Blue Dogs?
Well, they talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it’s tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year’s big Bush tax cut — a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit?
But it’s actually much worse than that — because even as they complain about the plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.
There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.
But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid — and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.
So what do the Blue Dogs want?
Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.
One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.
But I guess I’m not quite that cynical. After all, today’s Blue Dogs are politicians who didn’t go the Tauzin route — they didn’t switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.
Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.
Is that what the Blue Dogs really want to see happen? We’ll soon find out.
