Month: June 2007

Today’s Michael Gordon report from Baquba captures some of the inherent difficulty of the war in Iraq. It’s their country, not ours. All they have to do is run away, or booby-trap everything. We run out of serious troop levels next spring. They stay for ever, and show no sign of any willingness to make the political compromises necessary to become anything other than a failed state. And so the hideous violence and chaos continues. In some ways, Baquba is a metaphor for the entire enterprise:

The insurgent strategy appeared to be to use deep-buried bombs under the road and small-arms fire to force the soldiers to take refuge in the houses adjoining the route — and then to blow them up. Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, which carried out the assault on western Baquba, said the network of house bombs here was the most extensive he had seen in Iraq. He said that in the first seven days of the attack, the brigade destroyed 21 house bombs. The platoon had encountered more than its share…

"I don’t know how realistic it is to ask for this, but I really think we could destroy this block, not cause any damage to the civilian populace and reduce a lot of risk to ourselves," Lieutenant Morton said over the tactical radio. "This entire place is literally rigged."

Indeed.

There’s new evidence that Donald Rumsfeld specifically authorized the torture of John Walker Lindh, through his general counsel, William J. Haynes II. The biggest thing I glean from the Cheney series in the WaPo is how early and decisively, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided that this war would be won by torture. No war ever has, but they knew better. More to the point: this issue was never seriously debated in an open and honest fashion in the White House. It was simply done – and done in a way that circumvented the law, the other responsible parties in the administration, and the constitution, under a philosophy that there are no constraints on executive power in wartime. Wartime, it’s important to remember, is now permanent. The powers that Cheney has seized apply permanently and to anyone in the United States. There is no oversight and no law – just raw executive power. It is what America was founded to resist. And it is a sign of American decline that the American people have simply accepted the end of their most basic liberty with a shrug of indifference.

Houston, Texas, 4 pm.

For a newly updated, interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.

Dan Savage asked me to write about the turning point of 1996 in the HIV epidemic in the US for the gay pride issue of the Stranger. My attempt to celebrate that success was lambasted by the usual suspects. Gabriel Rotello has written yet another screed attacking me, with the charming slur that I don’t actually care about anyone with HIV apart from myself. Here’s my effort. Make your mind up if you think it celebrates HIV-transmission, or conveys the impression that I do not care about other people with HIV:

Here’s what you need to know about what gay life was like before 1996, before life-saving treatments for HIV came online: that it was fucking hell on earth; that gay men lived through a virtual holocaust; that death was everywhere, and before death, there was total, enervating, soul-destroying fear.

I meet young gay guys today and they don’t know what it’s like to watch your best friend pound the floor with his fist in agony because the pain won’t stop; to pick up a buddy off the carpet when you drop by after work, and see his brittle bones covered in fresh gray diarrhea; to see a friend wake up one day and be unable to tie his shoelaces because toxoplasmosis had eaten half his brain away; to have your shirt cuff brush past a friend’s skin and have him scream in agony because of neuropathy; to dance on a disco floor next to a rail-thin guy covered in KS lesions who knows this is the last time he’ll dance to anything; to open up the local gay rag and find 10 pages of obits where the real estate ads now sit; to hear a friend speak of watching as a needle is pushed into his open eyeball to alleviate the threat of CMV; to see your date consume two handfuls of toxic drugs twice a day to do something about a virus that would nevertheless kill him at the age of 29; to hear of couples torn apart and bereaved lovers thrown out of their homes because their in-laws hate them and their husbands just died; to scan the eyes of a doctor to see if he’s lying to you about your prognosis; to catch the face of an old man on the street and realize seconds later that he was a friend who looked 25 only a few months before; to attend more funeral services than happy hours; to feel shame because of an illness; and to endure sickness knowing that there is no end or future except pain and death.

The rest is here. Rotello’s much-predicted second wave of deadly HIV has yet to materialize.

Reason has a good review of the latest Michael Moore movie. Moore is both a practiced liar and not-too-smart. The implication that "free healthcare" run by the government is somehow immune to the laws of economics is classic Moore boilerplate:

One of the systems Sicko suggests as a template for a remodeled American health care is the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). The "first way [the British] decided to pull together after the [Second World War]," Moore says, "was to provide free medical care for everyone."

Viewers are taken to London’s Hammersmith Hospital, held up as a shining example of socialized care, where doctors are well-paid and patients well looked after. Moore ambles through the corridors interviewing patients that acclaim the NHS’s ‘free care,’ and express horror at the barbarism of the American system. Indeed, the facility’s "cashier" exists to give money to patients—for travel reimbursements—rather than taking it from them. But as is often the case with Moore’s films, the reality is more complex.

In 2005, London’s Evening Standard reported that Hammersmith Hospital would slash hundreds of jobs; the hospital, the most debt-ridden in Britain, was hemorrhaging money and desperately needed to cut costs. And while the hospital was "downsizing", Hammersmith’s CEO—yes, even the NHS has an executive class—collected a year-end bonus of close to $20,000. Small beer by American standards, but enough to provoke tabloid headlines in Britain.

Much like the American hospitals Moore excoriates, Hammersmith Hospital, the Evening Standard reported, faced pressure from administrators to limit the number of patients treated in order to cut spending. In a country where the government promises to winnow down queues to 18 weeks, this isn’t an anomalous problem. A recent BBC documentary accused the NHS of using dangerously high doses of radiation on patients "to save time and money."

I’m sympathetic to reforming the availability of health insurance, and could live with the Romney healthcare initiative, which mandates individual insurance, but lets the private sector run the show. But allowing individuals to own their own health insurance and carry it from job to job would be a more meaningful reform – and univeralism can be over-rated. On this, I’m in agreement with this National Review editorial. And yes, I see no problem with the wealthy having access to better care than the less wealthy.

Moreover, a wholesale shifting of healthcare from the private to the public sector simply means replacing rationing by wealth with rationing by number, and a drastic decrease in individual freedom on both sides of the medical equation. You’d replace insurance company bureaucrats who deny care with government bureaucrats who deny care. Removing the financial incentive from doctors simply means they will provide sloppier treatment. They’re not saints. They’re human beings. And slashing the profit motive from the drug companies will simply mean fewer new drugs for fewer illnesses. This is the trade-off the left will deny till they’re blue in the face. But it’s a real trade-off.

The European health systems have, of course, been free-riding on private U.S. drug research for decades. Name a great new drug developed in Europe these past ten years. Their own pharmaceutical industries have been decimated by the socialism Moore loves (and many of Europe’s drug companies have relocated to the US as a result). But I fear the left is winning this battle; and the massive advantages of private healthcare are only appreciated when you lose them. 

Harvard’s students fast for their janitors. Or: "How To Lose Five Pounds and Feel Totally Self-Righteous." There is another option.

How Hillary Clinton will survive the inevitable round of scandals coming her way.

Almost half of the Jihadists got away:

Col. Steve Townsend told a group of journalists that his soldiers had wrested control over most of the area from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, deprived the insurgent group of its nominal capital and made headway in protecting the residents from reprisals by militants.

But he acknowledged that his forces had not killed or captured as many of the insurgents as he had hoped.

"We are on our way to securing the population of Baquba, which is what we came here to do," said the colonel, who commands the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the Second Infantry Division. "I am pretty satisfied, with the exception of my own goal to kill and capture as many as possible so we don’t have to fight them somewhere else."

And so whack-a-mole continues.

An unconfirmed report of Iranian aggression. Cheney is prepping.

It’s the lingering divide within American conservatism, brought to vivid life by Johann Hari on the National Review Cruise:

"Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley’s an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Yeah. They do that to me as well. Good company.