Month: February 2010

Yglesias doesn't approve of Rep. Paul Ryan's alternative budget:

One could speak about this in detail, but in brief my take is that it’s totally unworkable. The whole reason Medicare was put in place in the first place, rather than just hiking Social Security benefits, is that the individual insurance market doesn’t work and it especially doesn’t work for senior citizens. As I observed in a little-read December 29 post, this would change if congress passed the Obama health care plan. If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.

But look: this is a real debate about ways to solve our problems. More, please. On both sides.

Gates' statement had all the usual Gates touches: a commitment to objective, calm, and professional review. And it has a plea to outsiders not to overly politicize this by using soldiers and their families as pawns in the debate. The bottom line is a 45 day review to make sure that the current policy is being applied fairly and a year-long review to examine every aspect of this proposed change.

But Mullen's statement was a stunner. He did more than endorse this long process of inquiry and debate and to ensure that the current policy is implemented more fairly – so that anyone with a grievance against a gay servicemember can out him or her and end his or her career.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated before Congress that he personally believed the policy violated a core principle of the US military: integrity. He said that requiring servicemembers to lie as part of their duty to their country violated their integrity as soldiers and the military's integrity itself. He said, in other words, that the current policy is dishonorable. I agree with him.

He remains open to competing arguments and data as this process goes forward, as he should.

But as of now, he believes the Clinton policy violates the integrity of the US military. I don't think you could be much fairer than this approach and although I remain impatient for an end to this ban, I also believe it is only responsible to develop a careful plan to implement it and to ensure that the core task of the military, gay and straight, remains the defense of this country and its interests around the world. 

Now let's do what we can to keep the debate calm and reasoned and civil. Mullen and Gates set a tone the rest of us, on both sides, need to follow. Because lasting reform will become impossible without it. And servicemembers, gay and straight, deserve to be able to do their job with this matter finally behind them.

In my judgment, the most important event of 2009 was the Green Revolution in Iran. But I think it is important to grasp that it was more than a simple event. It is a continuing process. It is far from over and it is gaining strength.

Next week, on the critically important date of February 11, we will witness another set-piece battle between the military junta and the people. The junta is already hanging young protesters as yet another desperate tool to intimidate the opposition in advance. It’s heart-breaking. But it leads, in today’s New York Times, to this remarkable statement from a Muslim in the country that, in some ways, pioneered the Islamist wave still engulfing and decimating the Muslim world and so many beyond it:

“My son is a martyr for democracy.”

Those of us who initially supported the Bush administration’s war on terror, including its catastrophic invasion of Iraq, did so in part because we believed that a statement like this could alone change the dynamic that led to 9/11. I am unrepentant about the motive and the analysis. I am unrepentant in believing that constitutional democracy is the only long-term way to defeat Islamism’s threat apart from the self-defeating violence of al Qaeda and of its allies and fellow-travelers. I am deeply ashamed that I failed to foresee the sheer impossibility of imposing this by force of arms on cultures deeply resistant to Western norms and engaging in utopian fantasies and ahistorical amnesia.

Nonetheless, almost a decade after 9/11, here we have the real thing: a Muslim democratic movement that has grown from within and is led by the next generation, in which the symbols and tropes and color of Islam are being marshaled to defend human rights, and democratic processes, and the civil sacredness of un-rigged elections.

So let the neocons, ex-neocons, cons and libs, realists and internationalists come together on this point: these people are the ones we have all been waiting for. This statement above is a moment worth stopping to absorb. I believe, moreover, that it is vital – vital – that the West does not get in the way between these people and their own democratic revolution. In fact, Obama’s steady handling of this moment – quiet encouragement of the Greens and a public refusal to be baited by the regime – has been, in my view, helpful to the revolution’s success.

And yes, I believe it is succeeding. The courage of the Iranian people – especially when compared to the cowardly, self-serving cynicism that courses through the American republic – is indisputable. And next week, we will see their latest battle, against a regime whose legitimacy has gone, whose isolation around the world is deeper than at any time in its history, and whose fate is as sealed as those tyrants in Moscow two decades ago.

Know hope.

They're live now – streaming on CSPAN here.

"The momentum is clearly on our side. It's time for Congress to have the guts to stop turning its back on talented and professional soldiers just because they're gay," – Congressman Patrick Murphy (D-PA), an Iraq veteran who happens to be straight.

A reader writes:

Your fury at Obama over his refusal to put the Bush administration on trial for war crimes is understandable, but misplaced (and it is Obama, not Holder, who made this decision long ago, and set the subsequent agenda). You write:

"[T]he Obama administration is circling the establishment wagons on defending Bush era torture and war crimes. They seem either a) incapable of understanding the gravity of what went on or b) deliberately refusing to tackle clear violations of the law out of the usual political cowardice."

You leave out the real motivation, which is neither stupidity nor cowardice, but pure pragmatism: any such war crimes trial would eat up the entire Obama administration, along with any hope of addressing the economic, military, environmental and social crises we face; it would ignite a full-blown civil war that would make the current culture war seem like child's play; and it would accomplish nothing that cannot be done in other, more subtle, but perhaps stronger ways.

I know you feel strongly about this issue, as you should, but to call this "betrayal" makes you sound exactly like the angry far left. It also leaves you looking completely inconsistent, on the one hand defending Obama against just this kind of attack, and supporting his pragmatism, clear-eyed vision and strength of mind and will, and on the other, accusing him of treason, immorality and spinelessness. Which is it?

I noted that Obama said "we ended torture" when he listed his accomplishments during the SOTU address. Torture. Not "enhanced interrogation techniques". I thought that was about as blatant an admission in front of the whole world as there could be. And infuriating as it is, that's it: Obama has made the decision to move forward. It's the right decision–the right decision for the country, the right decision for world. It is not betrayal. We do not have time to consume another four or five or ten years embroiled in the Bush/Cheney nightmare. We have to move on. There will be no legal trials. Obama's use of the word "torture" the other night was it: 'We admit it. We tortured. The Bush administration is guilty. And they will never be tried, except in the court of history–but we all know the truth, don't we? Now, let's get on with it.'

Yes, it's bad. But the alternative you seem to support would be far, far worse. You ought to back off a bit–"betrayal' is over the line. It was Bush/Cheney who betrayed, not Obama. You want the new captain to insist on a show trial of the old–"show", because everybody the world over already knows the truth–while the ship careens through a reef-strewn sea in the midst of a hurricane? No thanks.

I take my reader's point. And I should indeed have simply noted that pure pragmatism has almost certainly been the primary reason for sweeping all of this under the rug. I also understand the culture war ramifications of opening this wound and truly confronting it. I understand – which is why last fall, I wrote an appeal to the better angels of the Bush administration to both own and disown this stain in order to spare the country of this polarizing engagement with the awful truth.

But I also fear. I fear that the precedent of allowing war crimes to stand, without any accountability, means that torture will return. I fear that the GOP, in its proto-fascist reincarnation, will view these pragmatic gestures as validation and vindication of their past – and future. I fear that these forces, if not directly confronted, will grow stronger. When I see the actual pride so many have taken in adopting the practices of the Gestapo and the Khmer Rouge, and the blanket denial of obvious facts, I worry about the future identity of America. The Obama election was a chance to reboot, to say we got it. But that moment of clarity, that opportunity for renewal is in danger of being eclipsed by pragmatism in places where pragmatism cannot hold: the baseline norms of Western civilization.

And when we supported Obama, we did not believe we were supporting an effort to cover for and ignore the war crimes of the past. We did not believe that the next attorney general, by announcing a preliminary review only into excesses beyond the torture and abuse techniques of Bush and Cheney would thereby implicitly condone the torture techniques of Bush and Cheney, treating them as if they were not criminal at all, and thereby stating for history and as precedent that war crimes did not take place, when they clearly did.

We face a deeply ideologically and religiously motivated opposition party, dedicated at this point to the maintenance of absolute parliamentary discipline to reverse and halt any profound change from the Bush and Cheney years. And they are succeeding on many levels. But none more so than this. In the Yoo and Bybee cases, we did not have a situation in which they were going to be prosecuted for war crimes as they should be; we merely had an already obvious statement that their legal work to provide cover for anything Cheney wanted to do was so shoddy as to warrant professional consequences. That's all. But even that smidgen of accountability for war crimes has been bungled, delayed, and treated as trivial or bureaucratic.

There are consequences for this decision. Profound ones. And one day we may live with them again.

The Big Picture surveys the scene three weeks later.

Pee-wee gets an iPad! I'm so glad he's back.

As ever, Bill Kristol leads the charge against gay people and implies – against all the evidence – that they are somehow incapable of being just as good warriors as straight men and women. I wonder, for example, if he believes that Israel, whose security is much more potentially vulnerable than our own, is weaker because it doesn’t bar perfectly good soldiers because they violate ancient Leviticus strictures.

Kristol, of course, is an extreme outlier on the matter of homosexuality – he has endorsed the view that gays can and should be “cured” through “therapy,” opposes any secure legal rights for gay couples, and backed a constitutional amendment permanently stigmatizing gay people as second class citizens. He is perfectly capable of trying to stir up Christianist soldiers against their commander-in-chief and using this issue to demagogue the president. But he is wrong in thinking that ending the ban is somehow a function of “abstract thinking”.

Huge amounts of research and the experience of several countries have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that allowing all able men and women to serve who can perform the tasks required has no impact on military preparedness. Barring some simply for who they are violates a core principle of a democracy. It carves out a group of people who are barred from defending the country they love, essentially segregating them as unworthy of a core aspiration of citizenship. Imagine how Kristol would feel if Jews were allowed to serve their country but only on condition that their faith or ethnicity were kept quiet? Would he really believe that opposing that is a function of abstract and irrational liberalism?

Here’s his pathetic response to the core question:

Advocates of repeal will say sexual orientation is irrelevant to military performance in a way these attributes are not. But this is not clearly true given the peculiar characteristics of military service.

I presume he means that he thinks that straight servicemembers would be traumatized by having to serve alongside gay servicemembers because they harbor absurd fears that they will be sexually harassed or even “assaulted”, as his ally Tony Perkins recently asserted. So soldiers who can take on al Qaeda are too weak-kneed to deal with a gay buddy in the next bunk? Most Americans in 2010 have a higher opinion of the maturity and professionalism of today’s volunteer military than Kristol does. The younger generation, for the most part, finds such bigotry ridiculous. Of course, any sexual misconduct by gay servicemembers should be dealt with as severely as with straight servicemembers. But the bigotry of others is not a reason to prevent the honest service of so many Americans. It wasn’t right in 1948 when Truman ended racial segregation. It isn’t right now.

And then, the final canard – the idea that now is not the time to do anything because we are at war. But remember that Kristol believes our current war is permanent; and if one war ended, he would be doing all he could to advance the next one. And so this is mere rhetoric – rhetoric to disguise Kristol’s core belief that gay citizens should be permanently ghettoized outside civil society and public institutions, prevented from forming families, stigmatized for forming stable relationships, encouraged to be cured or stay closeted, rendered as invisible in society as they were decades ago.

Union-Cantinil, Guatemala, 4.39 pm.

The book, The View From Your Window, with 200 of the best window views published by the Dish over the last three years, beginning at dawn and ending at dusk with a foreword by Andrew Sullivan, can be previewed here and ordered here.