Prescribed to Fail: Doctor's Orders

This Investor's Business Daily piece ignites an issue that’s been rolling around in my head in recent months.  Many right-thinking and liberty-loving individuals were appalled at the concept of the individual mandate.  Yet there’s so much more to fear about “Obamacare” than just the twisted reality we now live in where we can be penalized for NOT engaging in commerce.



I’d like to suggest there is more pernicious work afoot.  Reading the information outlayed in the IBD story paints a bleak picture.  It outlines a set of incentives which seem to establish a system that is catastrophically unsustainable.  

Here’s a summary: Obamacare's imposed "Community Rating" will drive premiums up for the young and healthy (see the IBD article for more detail).  The value in having health insurance for this key demographic erodes as costs leap ahead yet quality (at best) stays the same.  Paying the penalty to forego insurance becomes an attractive alternative, the young and healthy opt out of enrolling in insurance plans.  The old and sick need the premiums paid by the young and healthy to cover their care.  With enrollment dropping, premiums must rise to compensate for the smaller number of participants.  And the cycle repeats, each time driving costs higher and driving people on the margins out.

The system put in place with the “Affordable Care Act” (a laughable name by any measure) appears so inept, so obviously fraught with error that one is forced to ask “how could anyone be so daft to enact this policy?”  Daft like a fox.

I’m certainly not the first to suggest what follows, but I’d like to go on record.  I want to take what was once my benign fear and make it a public display of desperation.  After reading the IBD piece it seems painfully obvious: the system was designed to fail.  “Obamacare” was happily sent on an unsustainable trajectory not out of stupidity, but intentionally to tear down any remnant of private enterprise in healthcare.

When the left had full control of the Federal Government, a radical change from pseudo-private healthcare prior to a single-payer, government controlled system was still a bridge too far.  But the manifest failures from a system doomed to fall apart could very well provide the impetus to move to a fully state controlled system.  (Note: I say “pseudo-private” under the assumption that we haven’t had a free market in healthcare in decades; if you believe otherwise, I respectfully conclude you are kidding yourself or have no concept of real economics).

Political history is replete with examples of the Federal Government making wild miscalculations and promoting unsustainable policies only to come along with a grander (and more horrible) solution.  The response tend to be more burdensome for the taxpayer and all the more taxing on individual liberty.  For example, the recent financial crisis is a case study in this downward spiral.  Bad regulations, weak enforcement, and ill-conceived mandates for lenders contributed to the mortgage crisis in 2007-08.  The response?  A miserable piece of regulatory overkill now known as Dodd-Frank.  A real problem in mortgage lending just got a prescription worse than the symptoms.

The question isn’t if we will replace the “Affordable Care Act”, but when and what will supplant it.  My nagging fear is that the blame for its failure will be placed at the feet of private enterprise.  And if that battlefield of public opinion is lost, I hope the grand new healthcare solution covers unorthodox back problems.  Because you’ll have to bend in an awfully unnatural way to kiss your ass good-bye.

Lesson on Gun Control

In light of the recent gun debate, I thought this might be a good lesson. Tune in to this at the 5:00 mark for an especially critical lesson. I admire Dr. Gratia's guts; truth can be a tough message to a room full of U.S. Senators.

Too Good to be True

All for naught? (Kandahar Province, 2011)

Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan? (Published at the Washington Times)

“It is really too bad,” says General Elphinstone as Britain’s short-lived Status of Forces Agreement for Afghanistan descends quickly into “ice and blood and groans and death and despair” in George MacDonald Fraser’s historical fiction novel on the 1842 massacre at Gandamack.  Anthony Cordesman could not have said it better himself, judging by his December CSIS report that spared no military kiss-up or diplomatic busybody. With the US troop levels past their peak, and with post-2014 status of forces agreement (SOFA) talks flirting with the so-called “zero-option,” what is “really too bad” is precisely the US insistence that everything in Afghanistan is really too good: “The US military needs to stop embracing the mission,” he concludes. “Civilians need to stop overselling the merits of peace negotiations [.]”

Cordesman blames an “analytically illiterate media” for giving a pass to the Pentagon’s “statistical rubbish” and “worse than useless” reports on progress against the insurgency. Yet Cordesman’s quaint talk of “insurgency” reveals his own blind spot to changing times: what the Pentagon once called “battle space” is now “area of operations”; what were “combat operations” are now “stability operations”; and what was long ago a “counterinsurgency” is now a political-diplomatic attempt to tip-toe out of Afghanistan while avoiding perceptions of American culpability for the Taliban takeover of the south and east that will follow.

Far from being duped, the media and the civilians once bullied by “runaway generals” are now getting just what they wanted: a strategy hashed out by Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings and Fannie Mae chief turned National Security Advisor Tom Donilon could hardly top the current strategy of quietly divorcing counterinsurgency while keeping Afghanistan, with all of its political toxicity, at an Iraq-style arms’ length.

Yet as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s authoritarian drift and al Qaeda in Iraq’s resurgence one year after the US troop withdrawal from Iraq suggest, the arms’ length approach to negotiating the endgame may be good politics, but it does little for counterinsurgency. COIN, as Afghanistan veteran Emile Simpson stresses in his new book “War from the Ground Up,” is premised on the idea that coordinated political-military operations must earn the population’s trust. Even putting aside any notion of America’s moral responsibility for post-2014 human rights abuses and civil war, the most unsentimental among us have yet to explain why anyone should expect an insurgency uninhibited by COIN to suddenly embrace introspection and reform its tastes for terrorism.

The counter-coindinistas rebut that Afghans are forcing our hand. “As we know from our Iraq experience,” says White House advisor Doug Lute, “if there are no authorities granted by the sovereign state, then there's not room for a follow-on U.S. military mission.” Yet the real lesson from the failure to extend Iraq’s SOFA, as New York Times reporter Michael Gordon details in his recent book, “The Endgame,” was the US side’s “trouble taking yes for an answer.” Whereas President Bush had successfully prodded Maliki to crack-down on Shiite death-squads by forging a close relationship based on the notion that “you don’t put your friends in an uncomfortable position,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s paradigm that “you don’t make peace with your friends” prevailed over both Admiral Mullen’s troop level recommendation’s and Vice President Biden’s very own 2010 prediction: “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA.”

What Afghanistan’s SOFA talks are really about is perception. In Iraq, “the critical issue was not the US troop presence,” argues political advisor Emma Sky, “but the U.S. commitment to Iraq – and the building of a relationship that went beyond military support[.]”  Yet whereas the focus in Afghan talks thus far is on American perceptions (“We are leaving in 2014. Period,” Vice-President Biden has said), there is also the pesky matter of Afghan perceptions.  As one of my former Afghan staffers – a woman who has braved repeated death threats for working with Americans – put it in an email to me just this week, “My concern is getting bigger for 2014 when the US troops withdraw from Afghanistan.”

The American aversion to putting lives at risk for a lost cause, as well as the need to prioritize in the face of a deepening debt crisis, necessitates that the specifics of the Afghanistan SOFA talks have narrow parameters. The battle for perceptions, however, is wide open; yet for all the talk of a soft power “reset,” it is a battle the US seems determined to lose.  Alas, you go to war with the diplomats you have, and American diplomats are digging in for a “transformation decade” of “silk road” dreams and Taliban co-governance. “In your arrogance, you think you write the script,” says war correspondent Lara Logan. “But you don’t.”

Indeed, as one former US official told Dexter Filkins last summer, “Every plan for the future I’ve seen assumes a deal with the Taliban.” But do we know who we are dealing with? If the US AfPak Hands program is any indication, with its bizarre emphasis on training counterinsurgents to speak Farsi over the Taliban’s Pashto, it would seem not. “I’d gone to Farsi language training for four-and-a-half-months and I got sent to a Pashto-speaking area,” said one disillusioned AfPAk Hand in a testament to America’s botched soft power.

Even within the confines of a stringent SOFA, the US can still exert influence. India, which still harbors COIN illusions, judging by its recent decision to train hundreds of Afghan Army officers at its Counterinsurgency and Jungle Warfare School, is waiting for the day we end our fixation on pleasing our enemies in Pakistan. We could work with Afghans to legalize poppy for medicine. We could redouble efforts to kill Mullah Omar – a symbolic blow that would be more devastating to the Taliban than the loss of Bin Laden, who had long worn out his welcome amongst Pashtuns.  And we could adopt the Bush tactic of building our allies’ trust and confidence via personal relationships and moral clarity.

“Countries don’t ‘end,’” writes Aatish Taseer in his Pakistan novel Noon. “They rot away slowly.” For now, the rot continues in ways eerily similar to Fraser’s Afghanistan, where the Royal Army was “forever patrolling and manning little forts, and trying to pacify and buy off the robber chiefs, and people were wondering how long this could go on. The wise ones said there was an explosion coming.”

American Decline and the Promise of Pax Scandinaviana

Founders' Porch goes scholarly...

An American "Hyper-power" resists decline at the
 Olympic Qualifier in Antigua, Guatemala in May 2012.

Over a decade ago Kenneth Waltz noted that “American leaders seem to believe that America’s pre-eminent position will last indefinitely.” President Barack Obama has proved no exception: in his 2012 State of the Union address he argued, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Robert Kagan concurs, noting that “great powers rarely decline suddenly,” that the recent economic meltdown is but a cyclical bust, that the US military “would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle,” and that competitors like China have far to go to match American military, economic, and cultural power. In fact, argues Tufts China expert Michael Beckley, far from decline, American power relative to China is even greater than it was at the beginning of the auspicious post-Cold War era.

Yet despite their rightful aversion to American decline, all three overlook an ominous reality upon which most international relations scholars and economists – from American primacy sympathizer Richard Haas to realist Richard Betts to globalist Joseph Stiglitz– find agreement: an America $16 trillion in debt, staggering back from costly “head-to-head battles” in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and bracing itself for the rise of nonpolar threats of a globalized world and the IMF-predicted 2016 Chinese economic eclipse, is surely in decline.

Blessed be the Blasphemers

Even when their skanky Christmas carols unleash violence... (Published at The Columbia Communique)

When the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a holy bounty on novelist Salman Rushdie’s head in 1989 for the crime of writing a novel, the Frenchman John le Carre was one of only a few prominent Westerners (including Yousef “Baby, it’s a wild world,” Islam) to publicly sympathize with the Ayatollah. So some years later when le Carre had to defend one of his own writings from anti-Semitism accusations, the late Christopher Hitchens said le Carre was like “a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.”

If that is so, then perhaps Rushdie, who called the in-hiding director of a Life-of-Muhammad YouTube parody “disgusting” while in the same breath promoting a recently released memoir on his own days in hiding, is himself like a man who, having taken the liberty to relieve himself in the various hats and cupboards and wallets of international brothers and sisters for free speech (whether or not they shared Rushdie’s flare for characters who get shot in the genitals while taking dumps or get magical erections when politicians hum), makes haste to miss the outstretched hats all-together and aim straight for their heads.

“He's done something malicious, and that's a very different thing from writing a serious novel, you know,” said Rushdie. It’s even different from writing a serious song, for that matter: there’s a big difference, for example, between the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens singing his halal “Father and Son” duet – “I know, I have to go away” – and, say, Bette Midler singing a maliciously seductive and un-Islamic skanky Christmas classic: “I really can’t stay (Baby it’s cold outside), I’ve got to go away.” That was al Qaeda Godfather Sayid Qutb’s grievance, anyhow, after hearing Judy Garland's version at a Colorado Christmas party in 1949: “Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips,” as unserious Americans indulged in “the rhythms of this seductive song.”

Perhaps, then, it was with a guilty conscience that Midler tweeted, “Where are the idiots who made the video and put it on YouTube? When do we meet them? They should be charged with murder.” Never mind the actual murderers, Americans can sleep safely knowing that our military reacted swiftly by deploying the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to personally telephone a supporter of the trailer and request he withdraw his support. Of course, it’s now clear that if government officials had exercised the same restraint in “jumping to conclusions” as they had when Major Nidal Hassan yelled “Allah Akhbar” and shot down 29 Americans at Fort Hood, they would have never blamed one of the most sophisticated attacks on a US diplomatic mission in history on a supporter of an unserious YouTube trailer. But just to be sure, with Christmas sneaking up, it’s never too late to start dissuading supporters of Midler’s cheeky carol.

Because that’s where we arrive when we walk back the thresholds of provocation of religion. “The issue is one of genuine respect,” writes one Columbia student (Communique, “Video of a Dying Ambassador,” 10/25/2012). Time was when Columbia students demanded that religion respect us. Can this really be our limit of advance, 250 years after Voltaire’s malicious and disrespectful Candide? As the student concludes: “So the next time individuals in the West publically insult Islam’s most sacred prophet, what message will we take from the reaction?”… Pardon me, but is that a threat?

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” said President Obama in his UN speech last month. Why? What makes religious guys more worthy of immunity to slander than the guy who made the YouTube trailer? In other words, the future does not belong to you, Pussy Riot. Have you seen their unserious, malicious, anonymous, slip-shod, anti-religion “punk prayer” YouTube video, filmed at a Cathedral named for Jesus himself? The girls – whose past orgy-protests were disgusting in an actual, orgy kind-of-way – were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for their film. “It is simply impossible to imagine a more inane film—a handful of talentless mannequins hurdled in front of curiously incompetent cameras,” said Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi – except that was in reference to the Muhammad film. When it comes to any other prophet, the struggle carries on.

As the US Embassy in Cairo put it from under the shadow of an al Qaeda flag: “[The Embassy] condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Indeed, Ebenezer Qutb would be pleased to know that the US government condemns holiday cheer too, to the extent that it enrages Muslims. Because as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan recently put it, “The rising number of attacks on U.S. troops by Afghan police and soldiers may be due in part to the stress on Afghan forces from fasting during the just-concluded Muslim holy month of Ramadan.”

So back to the question: what message will we take from the next reaction to religious heresy? The better question, perhaps, is what message will the religious take from our reaction to their reaction? What message will they take when American presidents praise “the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy,” as if blasphemy were a vice?

Blessed be the blasphemers: for little else stands between Midler’s brimming elf-hat and us.

“Go ahead, make my day”

Clint Eastwood’s “un-conventional” convention speech works. His analogy via performance is sublime.

For those of you who didn’t see, Mr. Eastwood-- willing to adopt the role of charming, yet bitter old man--spoke and performed before an audience at the RNC political convention last night. His take was a refreshing display of simplicity in a political world where the grand and complex is favored.

But the particular part that has drawn out so many opinions was Eastwood’s conversation with an imaginary President Obama sitting in an empty chair. I’ve heard detractors and doubters from both ends of the political spectrum express confusion, loathing, and a general attitude of looking down their nose at Eastwood’s unusual performance. Shallow thought might lead you to doubt his seriousness or even his sanity. But I ask you to consider it as though I believe it should: a pointed satire.

We have an imaginary President.

To consider the last three-and-a-half years a successful presidency is to suspend reality. Frankly, you’d have a pretty vivid imagination. Further, Obama seems to be a legend in his own mind. He’s created a make-believe narrative in which spending money we don’t have, amassing debts that cannot be re-paid, and imposing the will of the Federal state over the freedom of individuals are all things to be praised and celebrated. He further urges voters to willfully neglect the facts of his failures and forget his broken promises.  To consider Obama a President of any worthwhile success, one must use all of their imagination in inventing reasons to like the job he’s done. He’s an amateur; an imaginary president at best.

And the boss’s chair is empty.

The office of the president demands many things; chief among them is leadership. Obama’s fondness of buying votes with the public treasure, submitting laughable budgets to Congress, and spouting divisive rhetoric comprise an unrivaled record of incompetent leadership. And now, in this American hour of angst and distress, we need leadership most. It seems that Americans have the sense that nobody’s minding the store. And they’re right. Their Commander-in-Chief was busy making healthcare a bureaucratic nightmare, killing U.S. citizens with drone strikes, and hosting Hollywood fundraisers while Rome is burning.

I loved Eastwood’s take on Obama’s empty-chair, imaginary presidency. An election between such a clear disappointment and a man who can’t seem to fail in his pursuits shouldn’t be this close. Maybe for more years of amateur hour at the White House will really wake people up. So vote for Obama, go ahead and make my day.

The Kiss of Failure?

How US failures in Iraq doom US strategy in Syria... (Published at The Kurdistan Tribune)

Smells like corruption...
F.P. goes undercover to photograph this Kirkuk oilfield

As the Syrian regime turns increasingly to air strikes in order to perfect its strategy of terrifying its population into submission, time is running out for the US to devise a strategy of its own. Unfortunately, any US strategy for Syria will be the victim of blowback from its policy of keeping Iraq at arm’s length in recent years, whether regarding its failure to influence Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to see through the security mission, or to stand by the Kurds. Ironically, if the Syrian regime does eventually fall, these failures will only become more pronounced as Iran shifts focus from Damascus to Baghdad.

Up to now, political expedience has characterized the US position on the Syrian revolution, resulting in the United Nations taking the lead by inflicting “meaningful dialogue” on the Syrian regime. Last week the UN released a report announcing that the regime did indeed commit a war crime when it killed 100 civilians over two months ago. Yet war crimes have piled up since then, and will persist as the UN prepares a September report identifying the war criminals. With its observer mission ending last weekend in failure, the UN has now resorted to replacing Kofi Annan with Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi as mission chief. In other words, the UN has replaced the man who threw away a fax warning of imminent genocide in Rwanda with the man who leads the push for peace talks with the Taliban (“if you grow your beard, keep your woman at home, you’ll be all right,” he has said).

The Obama administration’s warning this week that Syria’s use of chemical weapons would be a “red-line” that could trigger US intervention suggests a possible turn toward US leadership in Annan’s wake. That is a positive step, particularly considering that Annan’s former chief of staff infamously ignored Saddam’s chemical attacks in Iranian Kurdistan due to his mission’s limited “terms of reference.” Yet given that Saddam killed 5,000 people in one day in Halabja with chemical weapons, the administration’s drawing of the line at genocide leaves much strategizing to be desired.

Unfortunately, blowback from mistakes in Iraq in recent years limits the strategizing. Since 2009, the US has stood by as Prime Minister Maliki has converted his Dawa party into what some Iraq experts liken to a “Shiite Baath party.” Maliki, a “civil servant” whose net worth according to some Iraqi journalists is $36 million, has ambidextrously taken on the roles of Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and Minister of the Interior all at once, simplifying enforcement of his policy against aiding Syrian rebels. Yet just this week, despite speculation that Maliki is assisting Iranian arms flows to the Syrian army via Iraq, the US’ top military officer kept things cordial during his meeting with Maliki: “I don’t intend to ask him specifically about whether they are taking any active role in the Syrian situation.”

Sulaymaniyah's finest watermelons.

Strangely, the same US officials who criticized the Bush administration for its de-Baathification policy in 2003 looked away in 2010 as Maliki’s party declared 500 candidates ineligible for election due to alleged Baathist associations. Last year Maliki fired a hundred undesirable university faculty members, and he continues to round up former low level Baathists for alleged conspiracies, all as the US remains silent. Meanwhile, oil may abound in Iraq, but those outside the favored political circles make do with the 2 hour per day electricity grid. This is the pluralistic model the US has to show to the victorious Syrian revolutionaries when the post-Assad possibility of retribution against Allawites and Christian minorities closes in.

A former CIA case officer suggested last month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “To Topple Assad, Unleash the CIA,” that the US mobilize the Iraqi Kurds against Assad. But just which Iraqi Kurds would we use? The Kurds of the PKK, whom we help kill through our military assistance to Turkey? Or perhaps the rank-and-file Kurds of the Pesh Merga, for whom US support of Kurdistan’s corrupt political parties has paid few dividends. Indeed, the ongoing clash over oil revenues between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Baghdad holds little significance for average Iraqi Kurds, it merely being a question of money going to equally corrupt Dawa or PUK/PDK officials.

If the US replaced its deference to Baghdad with a policy that supported, say, the KRG’s Turkish pipeline ambitions on the condition of transparency reforms, perhaps the US would have greater reason to expect favors returned in Syrian Kurdistan. Yet the US remains hands-off as thugs like PUK boss Omar Fattah profit off of donations to chemical attack memorials and order opposition journalists beaten. Indeed, when Kurds hear of American officials in Kurdistan, it is usually in regards to the shady dealings of former officials lured into the cesspool: former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, for example, holds a lobbying office in Erbil while serving on the Board of an oil firm operating in Kurdistan. And US Army Col. (ret.) Harry Schute (one of the first post-Saddam American commanders in Iraqi Kurdistan) married a 21 year-old Kurdish woman, according to Hawlati News, and now dons Kurdish dress as he advises the corrupt security apparatus that many ordinary Kurds fear. 

Me with Pesh Merga reservists (i.e. any Kurd)

Furthermore, the Kurds, who have reason to doubt American earnestness on preventing chemical attacks, are perhaps more interested in US red-lines regarding post-Assad rebel access to chemical weapons. Even with a Kurd presiding over the Syrian National Council, Arab-Kurd relations remain uneasy, with one meeting in Cairo last month ending in fistfights. The US troop withdrawal from Iraq last December endangered Kurds in multi-ethnic cities such as Mosul and Kirkuk (since then sectarian violence has only risen, with 200 Iraqis killed in the past three weeks). Why should Syrian Kurds trust us to see the job through in Syria? Indeed, as al Qaeda’s terror and Iranian imperialism speed up in Iraq, surge architect and Romney foreign policy advisor Fred Kagan’s prediction that, “The decision to abandon Iraq entirely will stand as one of the monumental strategic follies of the 21st century,” looks increasingly true. 

US strategy in Syria will plod ahead with “nonlethal assistance,” though most rebels wonder where even that is. American aid, a Syrian activist told the Washington Post this week, “is all virtual.” Unfortunately what is not virtual is a chemical weapons stash amassed with the aid of Western firms left unsanctioned by the 1980s realist consensus. Nor, unfortunately, is the rising violence in Iraq virtual. Last year an administration official said in reference to sectarianism in Syria, “Nobody wants another Iraq.” Ironically, because US officials have not wanted to deal with Iraq, Iraq is what a post-Assad Syria may just get.