MoDo has a question: “Why Is He Bi? (Sigh)” She whines that The One likes to have it two ways at once. The Moustache of Wisdom says “It Has to Start With Them,” and says three questions come to mind when thinking about Afghanistan. Mr. Kristof, who is in Say, Nigeria, comes “Face to Face With a Mother’s Pain,” and says an American student meets a starving mother in southern Niger, and reminds us to care. Here’s MoDo:
He was born this way.
Bi.
Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary.
Our president likes to be on both sides at once.
In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy — and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.
On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.
On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending. On the environment, he wants to increase energy production but is reluctant to drill. On health care, he wants to get everybody covered but will not press for a universal system. On Wall Street, he assails fat cats, but at cocktail parties, he wants to collect some of their fat for his campaign.
On politics, he likes to be friends with the other side but bash ’em at the same time. For others, bipartisanship means transcending their own prior political identities. For President Obama, it means that he participates in all political identities. He does not seem deeply affiliated with any side except his own.
He was elected on the idea of bold change, but now — except for the capture of Osama and his drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen — he plays it safe. He shirks politics as usual but gets all twisted up in politics.
The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry.
Obama is “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, which, as any girl will tell you, is the first sign of a commitment-phobe.
Maybe, given all his economic and war woes as he heads into 2012, Obama fears the disapproval of the homophobic elements within his own party. But he has tried to explain his reluctance on gay marriage as an expression of his Christianity, even though he rarely goes to church and is the picture of a secular humanist.
While picking up more than three-quarters of a million dollars from 600 guests at a gay and lesbian fund-raising gala in Manhattan on Thursday night, the president declared, “I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country,” even as he held to his position that the issue should be left to the states to decide.
He’s not as bad as New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who gave another grumpy interview on Thursday, this time to The National Catholic Register, asserting: “You think it’s going to stop with this? You think now bigamists are going to want their rights to marry? You think somebody that wants to marry his sister is going to now say, ‘I have a right’? I mean, it’s the same principle, isn’t it?”
The archbishop concluded: “Next thing you know, they’re going to say there’s four outs to every inning of baseball. This is crazy.” (He’s beginning to sound like Justice Scalia.)
Still, Obama’s reluctance to come out for gay marriage seems hugely and willfully inconsistent with what we know about his progressive worldview. And it is odd that the first black president is letting Andrew Cuomo, who pushed through a gay-marriage bill in Albany on Friday night, go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time.
But for the president, “the fierce urgency of now” applies only to getting checks from the gay community, not getting up to speed with all the Americans who think it’s time for gay marriage.
As with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Obama is not leading the public, he’s following. And worse, the young, hip black president who was swept in on a gust of change, audacity and hope is lagging behind a couple of old, white conservatives — Dick Cheney and Ted Olson.
As a community organizer, Obama developed impressive empathetic gifts. But now he is misusing them. It’s not enough to understand how everybody in the room thinks. You have to decide which ones in the room are right, and stand with them. A leader is not a mediator or an umpire or a convener or a facilitator.
Sometimes, as Chris Christie put it, “the president has got to show up.”
With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is.
He should draw inspiration from the gay community: one thing gays have to do, after all, is declare who they are at all costs.
On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.
MoDo thinks Obama likes to “bash” the other side? Give me one example MoDo, just one. Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
When President Obama announced his decision to surge more troops into Afghanistan in 2009, I argued that it could succeed if three things happened: Pakistan became a different country, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan became a different man and we succeeded at doing exactly what we claim not to be doing, that is nation-building in Afghanistan. None of that has happened, which is why I still believe our options in Afghanistan are: lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small. I vote for early and small.
My wariness about Afghanistan comes from asking these three questions: When does the Middle East make you happy? How did the cold war end? What would Ronald Reagan do? Let’s look at all three.
When did the Middle East make us happiest in the last few decades? That’s easy: 1) when Anwar el-Sadat made his breakthrough visit to Jerusalem; 2) when the Sunni uprising in Iraq against the pro-Al Qaeda forces turned the tide there; 3) when the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was routed in 2001 by Afghan rebels, backed only by U.S. air power and a few hundred U.S. special forces; 4) when Israelis and Palestinians drafted a secret peace accord in Oslo; 5) when the Green Revolution happened in Iran; 6) when the Cedar Revolution erupted in Lebanon; 7) when the democracy uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt emerged; 8) when Israel unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon and Gaza.
And what do they all have in common? America had nothing to do with almost all of them. They were self-propelled by the people themselves; we did not see them coming; and most of them didn’t cost us a dime.
And what does that tell you? The most important truth about the Middle East: It only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them. If it doesn’t start with them, if they don’t have ownership of a new peace initiative, a battle or a struggle for good governance, no amount of U.S. troops kick-starting, cajoling or doling out money can make it work. And if it does start with them, they really don’t need or want us around for very long.
When people own an initiative — as the original Afghan coalition that toppled the Taliban government did, as the Egyptians in Tahrir Square did, as the Egyptian and Israeli peacemakers did — they will be self-propelled and U.S. help can be an effective multiplier. When they don’t want to own it — in Afghanistan’s case, decent governance — or when they think we want some outcome more than they do, they will be happy to hold our coats, shake us down and sell us the same carpet over and over.
As for how the cold war ended, that’s easy. It ended when the two governments — the Soviet Union and Maoist China, which provided the funding and ideology propelling our enemies — collapsed. China had a peaceful internal transformation from Maoist Communism to capitalism, and the Soviet Union had a messy move from Marxism to capitalism. End of cold war.
Since then, we have increasingly found ourselves at war with another global movement: radical jihadist Islam. It is fed by money and ideology coming out of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. The attack of 9/11 was basically a joint operation by Saudi and Pakistani nationals. The Marine and American Embassy bombings in Lebanon were believed to have been the work of Iranian agents. Yet we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, because Saudi Arabia had oil, Pakistan had nukes and Iran was too big. We hoped that this war-by-bank-shot would lead to changes in all three countries. So far, it has not.
Until we break the combination of mosque, money and power in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which fuel jihadism, all we’re doing in Afghanistan is fighting the symptoms. The true engines propelling radical jihadist violence will still be in place. But that break requires, for starters, a new U.S. energy policy. Oh, well.
George Will pointed out that Senator John McCain, a hawk on Libya and Afghanistan, asked last Sunday, “I wonder what Ronald Reagan would be saying today?” with the clear implication that Reagan would never leave wars like Libya or Afghanistan unfinished. I actually know the answer to that question. I was there.
On Feb. 25, 1984, I stood on the tarmac at the Beirut airport and watched as a parade of Marine amphibious vehicles drove right down the runway, then veered off and crossed the white sand beach, slipped into the Mediterranean and motored out of Lebanon to their mother ship.
After a suicide bomber killed 241 U.S. military personnel, Reagan realized that he was in the middle of a civil war, with an undefined objective and an elusive enemy, whose defeat was not worth the sacrifice. So he cut his losses and just walked away. He was warned of dire consequences; after all, this was the middle of the cold war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. We would look weak. But Reagan thought we would get weak by staying. As Reagan deftly put it at the time: “We are not bugging out. We are moving to deploy into a more defensive position.”
Eight years later, the Soviet Union was in the dustbin of history, America was ascendant and Lebanon, God love the place, was still trying to sort itself out — without us.
Oh, yes, Tommy. Let’s DO ask what Ronald Reagan would do. Other than arm the Taliban, I mean… You asshole. Here’s Mr. Kristof:
A chance encounter in a village here between an American medical student traveling with me and a starving African mother was almost too wrenching to handle.
The winners of my annual win-a-trip contest, Saumya Dave of Atlanta, the medical student, and Noreen Connolly, a teacher from Newark, traveled with me to a remote village here in southern Niger. We came across a young mother who was quietly starving beside her thatch-roof hut, along with her two surviving children (two others had already died).
The mother, Miero Finiba, told us that she was eight months pregnant (confirmed by a health card) and had nothing at all to eat in the house (confirmed by her husband). She and her children had last eaten a day earlier, when neighbors — themselves impossibly poor — shared some of their food.
Ms. Finiba was also afflicted with a leg infection that looked gangrenous. That meant that if she didn’t starve, she might soon lose her leg — or, more realistically in a village with no medical clinic, simply die of the infection.
Her two small children, ages 5 and 2, would then be at great risk of dying without their mother to look after them. The father is blind, from a disease called river blindness, which is transmitted by black flies, and cannot cultivate the fields.
It was at that point in the conversation that Ms. Dave choked and teared up. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
That was exactly the right response. Journalists should keep a certain distance, yes, but that doesn’t mean that we dispassionately chronicle the death of a starving mother and her children. Ms. Dave was embarrassed that she had lost her composure, but I wish more people would feel the same distress as a food crisis spreads around the developing world.
Global food prices are spiking, not yet reaching their peak of July 2008 but heading there. The World Bank calculates that rising food prices pushed 44 million more people into poverty in the latter half of 2010.
What normally happens is that we wait for a famine, and then rush in with emergency rations. But that’s extremely expensive, and it also comes too late — even for survivors.
Research in recent years has established that hunger in the prenatal period and in infancy deprives a child of the nourishment the brain needs to grow properly. For example, babies who were in the uterus during the 1944 “Dutch famine” of World War II did worse on mental tests than those of similar ages — even 60 years later.
So what can we do, particularly in an era when we face our own severe spending constraints?
There are inexpensive steps that can help avert this kind of hunger. I talked about one low-tech solution in my last column: greater encouragement of breast-feeding, which one study says could save 1.4 million lives a year.
We can also insist that governments in the developing world reduce suffocating corruption that raises transit costs. On both the Mauritania/Senegal and Niger/Burkina Faso borders, we saw huge numbers of trucks lined up, waiting to be “inspected” by customs officials — which in Africa often means paying a bribe. That’s disgraceful and adds to food prices.
In Niger, we also visited a village savings-and-loan project established by CARE that helps women start small businesses. Essentially, it’s a microsavings project, so that women have a nest egg when it’s needed to buy food.
One woman we talked to had started in such penury that four of her children had died of starvation or disease. But with CARE’s help, she started preparing black-eyed peas for sale, branched into growing peanuts and fattening sheep, and with her profits bought a motorcycle that is rented out as a taxi.
And in eastern Burkina Faso, we visited a project of Helen Keller International, financed by the United States aid agency, that shows village women how to grow gardens of high-nutrition vegetables. These gardens create a safety net and ensure that babies get vitamin A and other nutrients.
The Obama administration has promoted aid programs that boost agricultural output to fight malnutrition and poverty. That’s not as catchy as setting up emergency feeding clinics in a famine-devastated land, but it’s far cheaper to avert the crisis than to wait for it.
Another crucial need is family planning, which some of the women I talked to hadn’t even heard of. That would reduce the pressure on the land and the number of mouths to feed.
And Ms. Finiba, eight months pregnant and starving? With the help of Helen Keller International we were able to get her food and, it seems, medical care. But rising food prices may put millions more into Ms. Finiba’s sandals, just as donor countries’ budgets are under pressure.
We need more people raising Ms. Dave’s teary question: Is there anything we can do?
The answer is: Yes, definitely!
