How we (could have) won in Vietnam

The cover story of Newsweek (11/16/09) suggest that if we had stuck to our guns, committed more troops and had more patience we "could have won in Vietnam." The underlying purpose of this piece was to suggest that we could win now in Afghanistan if we stick to it. That's great news, I guess.

If only...

How would things be different today if we had not lost Vietnam anyway?

Vietnam is a trading partner and part of the global fee markets surge. They are a market for U.S. goods and we for theirs. Vietnam is a member of the WTO and they have a seat on the UN Security Council. We have a negative trade balance with Vietnam. We export to them an annual average of about $2.5 billion in goods and services. They export to us an average of $10 billion a year, up 258 percent in the last four years. Would that be different today if we stuck it out in Vietnam? Would the trade imbalance be even greater, or what?

Nam is a tourist attraction for Americans. We love Vietnamese food.

Soviet communism collapsed without the help of Vietnam's victory over the greatest military force in the world.

But Vietnam remains a communist government!

We would have won nothing we didn't get by losing. That's the truth of it.

We probably save ourselves some money when you think about what we would have needed to spend to prop up an artificial "democracy" rather than the self-determined government they have today with all its lack of human rights and its corruption.

But look at what we lost. We lost 60,000 American troops, many more physically and psychologically wounded for life, which created a boon for the homeless industry here at home.

Twenty-three percent of America's homeless population is composed of veterans, almost half of those from the Vietnam War. Eighty-nine percent were honorably discharged and two-thirds of them served three or more years. For recent service veterans, unemployment is 11.2 percent, which is 4 percent higher than the similar age group in the general population.

So, when President Obama called for 30,000 new American troops (at a cost of $1 million a year each) what does that mean?

It means that among those who make it back, about 3,500 of them will not be able to find work and a number will be homeless and troubled by alcohol, drugs and mental problems.

The President was sincere and moving in his call to essentially support the reissue of the Busy policy, but there are two things I don't understand here. After 9 years of war:

• What leads us to believe that terrorists train and recruit only in Afghanistan as opposed to, say, Tampa, FL, or London or in Somalia? It's as if we believe that if you "win" in Afghanistan and that country suddenly becomes a full-fledged, uncorrupted, democratic republic with a capitalist economy relying on something other than exporting heroin (fat chance), terrorism will be defeated because that's the only place to train terrorists? Terrorists don't wear uniforms and they don't have a home field. Terrorists are like roaches, they are impossibly durable and they adapt to a nomadic life on the move according to their needs. They live on hate, and that's some mighty good eatin' in the Middle East.
  

• There will now be 100,000 American troops plus NATO troops and an unreliable (in every sense of the word) number of crack Afghani troops. And when I say "crack" I mean the kind you smoke, not the kind you're proud of. All this firepower (about 200,000 all told) is assembled to defeat the awesome Taliban whose monumentally scary fighting force numbers about 10,000!

This 200,000 to 10,000 sound like a fair fight, right? It's worth the economic and the personal cost, right? Right? Sure, right after we get all terrorists to agree to go to Afghanistan so we can kill them.

Look, we've launched unmanned intelligence-gathering drones with regular and infrared cameras from German to survey Afghanistan for 24-hour periods, sent all the pictures to Washington in flight and returned the drone back to Germany unharmed. If we have to do something in Afghanistan, then I support VP Biden's call for drones and Special Forces. If you can find Taliban miles above the earth, what do you need 100,00 guys for? If you find them, use Special Forces to close the deal. You know the Taliban will know where our guys are.

Religion and Politics – Part 1

Evangelicals believe the idea of “a wall of separation” between Church and State is a product of liberal imagination because no such thing is even mentioned in the Constitution.

Neither is God.

Were the Founders anti-God? Of course not. But to them, God was a private matter, thus the private practice of religion is what is protected by the Constitution. As renowned Catholic historian Garry Wills wrote: “The American Republic is the first and only secularly based government in world history.” The legitimacy of the nation rests in the will of the people not “God’s will.”

Rewriting American history from the “Christian nation” point of view leans heavily on the Puritan era. Every schoolchild is taught that the Puritans came to the New World to escape religious persecution. The persecution they escaped however was persecution by other Christians (the state religion) not godless heathens.

Revisionist history implies that the Puritan mission in the New Canaan was to create a new religious freedom however this manifestly was not the case.

The Puritans did establish a pre-American Christian state marked by persecution inside and outside their own community (e.g. the Salem Witch Trials, Indians, Quakers, Catholics.) Colonial citizens were taxed to support the church in 11 of the 13 original colonies and there was a religious “test” for holding public office. In many cases the test was also applied to voting rights. Delaware required that public officials take an oath swearing support for “faith in God the Father, and Jesus Christ His Son and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed and forevermore.” Pennsylvania required officeholders to be Protestants who not only believed in God, but also in the “divine inspiration of the Old and the New Testaments.” Only New York and Virginia excluded the religious test. The Virginia Constitution, under the strong influence of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Patrick Henry and Washington, banned the “religious test” and became the model for the US Constitution. The New York Constitution went further:

Guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith bigotry and ambition of the weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind.

Fundamentalists like David Limbaugh today insist “that America was founded as a Christian polity which persisted until subverted by a cabal of 20th Century liberals and freethinkers who replaced it with a ‘un-American’ secular state.” Just nonsense. There was no America until 1789, long after the Puritans stopped burning “witches” and cutting off Quaker ears.

The Founders feared tyranny of all kinds, including religious tyranny to which the Puritans showed an easy propensity. As Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #10:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points…an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power…have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

In the bitter 1800 presidential campaign, Christian extremists did great personal damage to Thomas Jefferson. In an anonymous piece written for the New England Palladium:

Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is at that moment set on our whole religion; our churches will be prostrated and some infamous prostitute under the name of Reason will preside in the sanctuary now devoted to the worship of the Most High.

The religionists believed Jefferson’s devotion to the principles of reason showed “disrespect Jefferson won the election of 1800 in a tie breaking vote cast in the US House of Representatives but the damage caused to his reputation by the un-Christian Christian campaign was long lasting. FDR put Jefferson on a US Postal stamp, then the nickel, and finally, the Jefferson Memorial in 1943. It took 125 years after his death.

Because “God was ignored in America’s founding document” campaigns to “fix” this were launched six times over the next 82 years. The first campaign for the “God” amendment to the US Constitution called for a Constitutional Amendment to acknowledge “the rulership of Jesus Christ and the supremacy of the divine law.” The Christian Amendment, in various forms, was pushed with major campaigns in 1864, 1874, 1894, 1910, 1945, and 1954. The attempt to de-secularize the Constitution failed every time it was tried.

Religious tolerance is typically not found in religions themselves. As Will Durant wrote in “The Age of Faith,” “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty, certainty is murderous.”

Facts may be ignored or re-shaped in the interest of a religious political message. For example, Newt Gingrich manipulated the facts in his latest presidential campaign book “Winning the Future,” which includes a DC walking tour for Christians. In a classic misdirection, he cites a Jefferson quote engraved around the rotunda in the Jefferson Memorial. “I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” This is falsely presented by Gingrich as an example of Jefferson’s support of Christianity in government just as it was once used to rationalize racial segregation. However, the quote is from a letter Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush complaining precisely about the forces of organized religion and the clergy who tried to destroy him in 1800.

They (the clergy) believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes and they believe rightly: for I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny (i.e. including religious tyranny) over the mind of man. But that is all they have to fear from me; and enough too in their opinion.

The Constitutional Convention, after great deliberation, abandoned the Christian state model and the states agreed with them and ratified the secular Republic. The religious right is trying to overturn that vote today through propaganda because they have never had the votes to do it with the truth.

Veteran’s Day

Heartfelt thanks and respect to all of our veterans, past and present.

Less can be said the jingoistic judgments of who send the troops into harms way and the rest of us who stand by and watch it happen as if we were watching the Weather Channel.

The Class of 2010 has lived with the “War on Terror” since they were in seventh grade. Now we will be asking them to go and fight. It’s ironic that as we pay homage to our war dead and wounded, the urgent issue now is whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan.

This is not a political decision. Take it and the entire question of Wars on Terror out of politics and emotion. Place it into the barest of government questions. What is the greater good?

Over the centuries, Afghanistan has been invaded, occupied and given up by the Persians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and the Russians. And now, it’s America’s turn to prove history wrong for the first time again.

In the last two weeks I had opportunities to speak privately with a US Senator who just returned from Afghanistan and who sits on the Intelligence Committee. As well, I spent more extensive time with the retired US General who headed security in Afghanistan.

In unconnected conversations they both said to me two things almost word for word.

“We’re just blowing up rocks.”

“How can we ask Americans to sacrifice for a corrupt regime?”

H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) “the most important American writer of weird fiction since Poe” said that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Ironies and contradictions abound within us, as if our psyche were an ocean liner with guests carefully scheduled so as to never run into each other.

Who is the enemy in Afghanistan? The Taliban or is it the War on Drugs opium trade which ends up as heroin on US streets? Opium accounts for about 50% of Afghanistan’s GNP.

How is that battle for hearts and minds going? Our soldiers are handing out candy to kids while we fight to prop up a blatantly corrupt and abusive political system just because it is not the Taliban. At the same time we are trying to destroy 50% of the Afghan GDP. They gotta love us.

The war on terrorism is undeclared in the sense that there is no one to declare it against and the funding for it is “off the books,” as if it were free to wage or that the debts we pass on here are much less burdensome than the cost of say a national health care program.

MATERIAL COST

The fight over health care reform includes the stubborn issue of cost. Many Americans compartmentalize health care into a financial deficit problem while such a view is ignored when it comes to these wars. The “War on Terror” already costs Americans in economic terms alone, more than the projected costs of the most extravagant health care proposals. If they cost the same and you can’t afford both, how would you decide? Is our national health unconnected to our physical and economic security?

Regarding the national economic stimulus package it ‘s disconcerting to some that adding or retaining a job is estimated to be a one-time cost of $235,000 per job even though every dollar of that money is being invested one way or another in the American economy. It seems less alarming than the $1-million-per-soldier cost, per year in Afghanistan alone. These costs were calculated in connection with adding 40,000 new troops in Afghanistan. Is that productive? The question is not about 40,000 troops or a compromise number of some kind. It’s about whether we should be there at all given the other priorities we face.

Of course estimating costs for a war with a non-existent state, a non-standing army, a geographically indeterminate and an unknown enemy is difficult to be sure. In inflation adjusted dollars, Viet Nam cost about $400 billion to lose. It would cost the US almost $200 billion just to support the proposed 40,000 troops over the next ten years.

Another ten years of this war on terror at the current run rate will reach up to $2 trillion. It cost $2 trillion in inflation adjusted dollars to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini in half the time we have already spent on the “War on Terror.”

What conviction have we that the war on terror will ever end? Or that it will not spread to Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran or Somalia or Florida or Fort Hood?

HOW DO WE DEFINE “VICTORY” IN THE WAR ON TERROR?

If we cannot answer that then not only can we never estimate the real cost but we can never win. Do all terrorists need to come forward and surrender? Do we win when everyone likes us?

A JUST WAR?

For those of you who were in seventh grade when the war on terror was sold to the American public, you should know that an actual rationale offered was St. Augustine’s calculus of a “just war.” The absurdity of this application is immediately clear on the pivotal matter of “proportionality.” We have sent the best soldiers in the world in superior numbers, with the best training and technology in world history to fight a “war” with mosquitoes and to bomb rocks.

There are good reasons to make war decisions unemotionally and in the context of the greater good. Offering up American lives, limbs and public treasure in Afghanistan to make political points is what Spinoza called fighting:

“… as we would for salvation and will not think it is shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that a man may have a ground for boasting.”

NO MORE TROOPS. GET OUT!

The Politics of College

I am grateful and enriched by exposure to our college students. You are lucky and you can be as special as you chose. Lord knows the Republic is desperate for your dedicated talent. Take seriously your opportunity and understand that the public story on college "for everyone" is a classic political rouse. Here's why:

It is widely believed that every American should have the opportunity to go to college and earn a degree.

Simple idea and a great one. But an inherent flaw is that 90 million adult Americans are unable to read at the fifth grade level and are unable to make change for a dollar. The "college is pillar" is a calculated and simplistic appeal to swing voters. It's not a real call to national action. The college pillar skips right over literacy. It is also disingenuous to disregard the connection between household income and college possibilities. The average SAT verbal score for children qualified to take the SAT from homes with annual income of $10,000 or less is 427. Politicians aren't talking to those people. Focusing on students ready for college is most likely to mean students from households with incomes closer to $100,000 and up where the average verbal score is 560.

The need for college education is stressed by every politician and business leader out there. Corporate employers are dying for talent and college educated employees have incomes nearly double those without college. But college graduation rates have remained steady for the last 35 years and among those who go to four-year colleges, 500,000 a year drop out while we graduate about 1.4 million.

The idea that college is the great social equalizer is political theater. Consider that in America's top 146 colleges and universities, "only 3% of the student body is from families in the country's bottom quarter of wage earners." In a stunning 2003 report from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy and the U.S. Department of Education it was learned that only "31% of the (college) graduates scored at the proficient level -- meaning that they could read lengthily, complex texts and draw complicated inferences."

Many corporate employers find a large percentage of those who actually go to college require some kind of remedial reading and writing coursework to gain an entry level job. Nevertheless, the median household income for college grads is $64,406 while it is $35,744 for high school-only grads. The high school diploma earner's household income is 44% less than the college grad household. However, the median household income of the non-high schook grad is $17,261, indicating an even greater earnings gap (52%) between them and the high school grad. Forget trying to force more kids into college. Any study one might cite on the overarching importance of early childhood development proves that this is where the country should focus first because it has the greatest yield. "Full-funding of Head Start" is not enough and swing voters don't want to hear about Head Start, let alone what we really need to do.

MF

Memories from the Mayor's Office

I'll admit to a case of nostalgia after the Institute's recent State of the City Mayor's Forum. Awash in memories, two oddly stand out right now.

As chief of staff for the mayor, I can say that I never enjoyed a political job more. We swung at every pitch. At this point I was seven years removed from being a student at Xavier.

There are many small pleasures serving in office and one of mine was the creation, through the mayor's office, of the Cincinnati Summer Basketball League, which was notable, most of all, for the opportunities it gave to our players. The mayor took the Cincinnati Basketball All Stars on the road to Boston and Washington and three of our kids got college scholarships and one went to the NBA (LaSalle Thompson-University of Texas.) Many of the kids brought their clothes in Kroger grocery bags because they didn't own a suitcase as they had never gone anywhere before. It wasn't like negotiating peace in the Middle East, but our kids got exposure and experience otherwise unavailable. Then again -- there's still no peace in the Middle East, is there?

Cincinnati was the first place I remember where the now classic fight was waged over the use of public funds to build a sports venue for a wealthy sports team owner. This fight is still going on across the country today with owners threatening to move their teams if they don't get new stadiums with highly profitable luxury boxes. Over the years, as a political consultant, several of my mayors faced these threats and my advice persistently was always the same and always ignored: "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." Too much of the public psyche is tied to professional ball clubs, and it's crazy. What happened to capitalism? This is a form of social welfare. We built a campaign against it and, in the end, the arena was built, but with private funds, and it thrives today as a concert and show venue even though the hockey team moved to Buffalo long ago.

MF

Ben's Speech

If you had to choose the single most important political speech in American history, it would be almost impossible. Of course, Lincoln's Gettysburg address, written on scraps of paper during the train ride to give the speech, is a strong contender. There are others.

My personal choice is Ben Franklin's final appeal for passage of the Constitution by the Constitutional Convention. The Convention was divisive and difficult and came near collapse often. Franklin was in his 80s, infirm and gout ridden, exhausted from putting out the fires of dissension and dissatisfaction, and he could barely speak. Delegates had to strain to hear in that hot and contentious place. The importance of this speech is this: If it hadn't worked, there may not be an America. Here's what they heard:

...for having lived long, I have experience many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once throught right, but found to be otherwise ... Most men, as indeed most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them is so far error ... I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such ... I doubt too whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution, for when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does and I think it will astonish our enemies who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded, like those of the builders of Babel and that our states are on the point of separation only to meet thereafter for the purpose of cutting another's throats.

Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better ... the opinions I have to its errors, I sacrifice to the public good ..."

MF

Politics and Clowns

A clown can be scary because he is inscrutable and emotionally indecipherable but, more, because he tries too hard. Everything is over the top. An unchanging, painted smile is unnerving and forces us to ask: what's underneath? If you fought a war against a clown army, you couldn't say, "wait until you see the whites of their eyes," because you can't see their eyes and, therefore, the windows to their souls are inaccessible. You would have to wait until you saw their huge floppy shoes, and that's a risky plan in battle.

The problem is something called "Coulrophobia." It means fear of clowns and comes from the Greek meaning, "fear of people on stilts." Dr. Stubbs and Krusty make us want to get out of any place they are in as soon as possible.

Along those lines, there is an uncomfortable connection between clowns and politics. The political clown's job is to distract attention from real issues through extravagant behavior and to redirect attention to themselves and whatever story they invent. Political clowns perform this function through "spin" powered by the belief that if something is said loudly and often enough it becomes true. The bleating of political clowns make the boy who cried wolf seem honorably prescient by comparison. In a 24/7 news cycle world filled with competing political clowns, the job has ridiculous importance, built on tantalizing, but dissembled, trivialized and misleading, sound bite "wedgies." In this case, a "wedgie" is an ancillary, but exploitable, bias looking for a reason to blossom into a useful cover for the bias itself.

Presidential campaigns begin trying for true relevance, and in early contests, when there are many candidates, this is possible, and there is no chance to focus on sock color or flag pins. But sitting in the wings of the public imagination, fomenting, are the clowns waiting for the field to narrow so they can destroy the public conversation and any substantial idea or controversial challenge with 1,000 paper cuts.

Cable TV news and the Internet are oxygen to the industry of political clowning, which aims to influence the obsessive competition for swing voters, often with a one-issue focus. We are often seduced and passively entertained by political clowns, like a magician's audience suspending belief and falling happily for the distractions upon which successful slight of hand is dependent.

The Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, Henrich Boll, who held up a Dark Side mirror to post-war Germany, wrote a novel, The Clown, that warned clowns of the dangers of actually believing their own shtick:

... I fall into the most embarrassing trap to which a clown is ever exposed – I laugh at my own tricks. A ghastly humiliation ... [it was] the desperate icy control with which I turned myself into a puppet; it was terrible ...