WERE THE NEO-CONS RIGHT, AFTER ALL?

Here is a round-up of posts about the situation going on right now in Lebanon. You may also have read about what is happening in Egypt. So, what is it all about?

The much maligned neo-cons had a theory about the war on terrorism. It went like this;

1. You can't win the war by hunting down and capturing or killing terrorists one at a time. There are too many, too well entrenched in too many countries. As you capture and kill your way throughout their ranks, more are recruited into the fold.

2. Therefore, the only way to win is to "drain the swamp", that is, eliminate the breeding grounds for the terrorists. The best way to accomplish that is to provide an alternative to the millions of Arabs and Muslims who look to Bin Ladenism as a way of life for the future.

3. The alternative is freedom and prosperity.

4. The way to achieve freedom and prosperity for the Arabs is to knock down one of their most brutal home-grown dictators, Saddam Hussein. After all, we Americans (along with the British to some extent) were at least partly responsible for Hussein and his ilk taking power in Iraq, as well as many other despots in the region.

5. With Hussein gone, use the power of America to help the Iraqi people build a functioning democracy in their country. Once that is done, the rest of the Arabs will begin to wonder why, if the Iraqis can do it, they can't do it too.

President Bush accepted the neo-con theory and acted on it. Overthrowing Hussein was a relatively simple military matter. It took only about three weeks. Building Iraq into a functioning democracy has taken a lot longer, and is still far from complete. But what we see going on before us now as we enter March, 2005 is truly amazing. Clearly, a majority of the Iraqi people want democracy. They were willing to suffer death or maiming to go out and vote. Thousands of Iraqis continue to risk their lives every day serving their new country.

What is even more extraordinary is the way in which the rest of the Arabs are reacting to what is happening in Iraq. Demonstrators are coming out in the thousands to demand a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Demonstrators are pushing President Mubarak in Egypt to make good on his recent promise to hold a real election in that country. The Palestinians have elected a new government which is struggling mightily to break the bonds of the past and make a real peace with Israel. Even the Saudis were forced to loosen things up a bit with local elections (even though they didn't include women). Some are likening all of this to what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Sometimes, it takes a dramatic event to push the dominoes over. In 1989 it was when Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end to the Brezhnev Doctrine. When the people of Eastern Europe realized that Soviet tanks would not roll into their countries if they turned out their local Communist puppet governments, those governments fell like so many straw men. Perhaps we will look back on the events going on now in the Middle East and realize that it all began when a brutal tyrant was overthrown by the U.S. and it's allies, and the people of Iraq stepped forward and took control over their own government.

Were the neo-cons right, after all? It is looking like a better bet with each passing day.

I WISH THERE WERE MORE LIKE THIS

Her name is Cinnamon, the child of Marin County hippies. Now, she calls herself a 9/11 Republican.

Having been indoctrinated in the postcolonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. Its democratic form of government and capitalist economic system was nothing more than a machine in which citizens were forced to be cogs. I put aside the nagging question of why so many people all over the world risk their lives to come to the United States. Freedom of speech, religious freedom, women's rights, gay rights (yes, even without same-sex marriage), social and economic mobility, relative racial harmony and democracy itself were all taken for granted in my narrow, insulated world view.

So, what happened to change all that? In a nutshell, 9/11. The terrorist attacks on this country were not only an act of war but also a crime against humanity. It seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time, and it still does today. But the reaction of my former comrades on the left bespoke a different perspective. The day after the attacks, I dragged myself into work, still in a state of shock, and the first thing I heard was one of my co-workers bellowing triumphantly, "Bush got his war!" There was little sympathy for the victims of this horrific attack, only an irrational hatred for their own country.

As I spent months grieving the losses, others around me wrapped themselves in the comfortable shell of cynicism and acted as if nothing had changed. I soon began to recognize in them an inability to view America or its people as victims, born of years of indoctrination in which we were always presented as the bad guys.

Read the whole thing. Would that there were more like her.

SHOW TOPICS

Looking at the news, I see a few potential topics for tonight's show:

Was electric de-regulation a good idea? According to this article, it depends whether you are a big business or a small homeowner.

Five hockey players were expelled from Milton Academy because they were sexually serviced by a fifteen-year-old girl. This story is about the girl's family taking her out of the school. If statutory rape laws are to mean anything, shouldn't these young men be prosecuted?

Here is a defense of the President's immigration reform plan. This article highlights the divisions within the conservative movement on this issue.

WBZ AGAIN THIS WEEK

I will be on WBZ-Boston this week doing two overnight shifts. I will be on Wednesday 2/23 and Thursday 2/24 from Midnight to 5 AM. WBZ can be found at 1030 on the AM dial.

CAN WE WIN WITHOUT COMMITTING WAR CRIMES?

This morning finds another story about American GIs torturing prisoners and trying to cover their tracks.

Bob Herbert also rails against the practice of grabbing suspected terrorists and flying them to countries where they can expect to be tortured.

A Marine is facing charges he murdered a couple of suspected insurgents in Iraq when he shot them after they advanced upon him while he was, in Arabic, ordering them to stop.

What do all these stories have in common? They all represent the often brutal, but sometimes necessary tactics used during wartime. Since at least the early 19th century, and maybe before, here in the West we have tried to lessen the inherent brutality of war by coming up with rules of conduct. The Geneva Conventions were the culmination of those efforts. The question that needs to be asked is; do the rules of war apply when fighting an enemy that doesn't represent a nation-state? Do they apply when the enemy is not a signatory to any treaty and has, in fact, used the most vicious tactics imaginable against primarily civilian targets?

Thus far, the official stand of our government is to follow the conventions where they apply. This means we cannot, officially, treat prisoners outside the boundaries of those conventions. But is this really the way to go against this particular enemy? Can we win by following those rules? Clearly, everywhere in the chain, our soldiers and spies are crossing the lines. They are doing so, in my estimation, not because they are brutal, sadistic people, but because they are frustrated by a brutal, inscrutable enemy who cannot be pinned down in conventional warfare.

I wish I had the answers to these questions. I cannot in good conscience advocate that our soldiers and spies commit war crimes (torturing prisoners, summary executions of suspected insurgents, etc.). Yet, I wonder if we can win this war without those kinds of tactics.

BARE-KNUCKLE DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ

I loved reading this story about the election results and the jostling for position in post-election Iraq. My favorite part, after the reported 58% turnout, was this...

Some Sunni groups have charged that voting irregularities, such as the lack of sufficient ballot papers in Sunni areas, skewed the election. The electoral commission says it will accept formal complaints during a three-day period and certify the results only after the complaints are examined. Mishaan al-Jabouri, a Sunni whose party is likely to win a single seat, said he believes Shi'ite election officials wanted to limit Sunni participation and pronounced the election ''unfair" and ''20 or 30 percent honest." Still, he practically glowed as he declared: ''It's better than Saddam's day. . . . We're talking against the government, and no one's executing us, like before."

If a majority of Sunnis begin to think like this gentleman, and the Shi'ites and Kurds don't overplay their hands (admittedly those are big ifs), then there is a great deal of hope for a democratic Iraq.

WBZ APPEARANCES THIS WEEK

I will be doing the overnight shift twice this week on WBZ-Boston. I will be doing the Wednesday (2/16) and Thursday (2/17) morning shifts from Midnight to 5 AM. The station can be found at 1030 on the AM dial.

WHY FINISHING THE JOB IN IRAQ IS IMPORTANT

If you think it is just conservative hawks like me that believe in what we are attempting in Iraq, please read this column by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

What Iraq is now embarking on is the first attempt - ever - by the citizens of a multiethnic, multireligious Arab state to draw up their own social contract, their own constitution, for how they should share power and resources, protect minority rights and balance mosque and state. I have no idea whether they will succeed. Much will depend on whether the Shiites want to be a wise and inclusive majority and whether the Sunnis want to be a smart and collaborative minority.

There will be a lot of trial and error in the months ahead. But this is a hugely important horizontal dialogue because if Iraqis can't forge a social contract, it would suggest that no other Arab country can - since virtually all of them are similar mixtures of tribes, ethnicities and religions. That would mean that they can be ruled only by iron-fisted kings or dictators, with all the negatives that flow from that.

But - but - if Iraqis succeed in forging a social contract in the hardest place of all, it means that democracy is actually possible anywhere in the Arab world.
Democrats do not favor using military force against Iran's nuclear program or to compel regime change there. That is probably wise. But they don't really have a diplomatic option. I've got one: Iraq. Iraq is our Iran policy.

If we can help produce a representative government in Iraq - based on free and fair elections and with a Shiite leadership that accepts minority rights and limits on clerical involvement in politics - it will exert great pressure on the ayatollah-dictators running Iran. In Iran's sham "Islamic democracy," only the mullahs decide who can run. Over time, Iranian Shiites will demand to know why they can't have the same freedoms as their Iraqi cousins right next door. That will drive change in Iran. Just be patient.

The war on terrorism is a war of ideas. The greatest restraint on human behavior is not a police officer or a fence - it's a community and a culture. Palestinian suicide bombing has stopped not because of the Israeli fence or because Palestinians are no longer "desperate." It has stopped because the Palestinians had an election, and a majority voted to get behind a diplomatic approach. They told the violent minority that suicide bombing - for now - is shameful.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

WBZ THIS WEEK

I will be on WBZ radio in Boston this week pulling some overnight shifts. I will be on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings from Midnight to 5 AM. You can find it at 1030 on the AM dial (at night it can be heard in 38 states and parts of Canada).

SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM

This morning on WBZ we had a lively discussion about Social Security reform, following the President's State of the Union address. Every time I do a show on this issue, I find myself repeating certain facts that are still, apparently, not generally known.

1. The Social Security program is a pay-as-you-go system. The taxes from today's workers and employers (FICA) go to pay today's beneficiaries. It is not a trust fund in the traditional sense. While the SSA sends out personal details of your "account", you do not actually have any money in the legal sense of the word waiting for you when you retire, like you would in a private trust fund. Your account is a promise of benefits from the Federal Government that can be changed by Congress at their discretion.

2. The vast majority of beneficiaries are the elderly. Almost 40 million people are receiving Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI), while only about 7 million are getting Disability Insurance (DI). We cannot fix the system by simply dealing with those getting non-retirement benefits.

3. The Federal Government did not create this problem by "stealing" the Social Security surplus. Since the system is a pay-as-you-go program surplus money raised through FICA taxes are not accrued in the trust fund and invested like they would be in a private pension plan. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, for different reasons, have opposed investing Social Security Trust Fund money in stocks and bonds (Republicans quiver at the thought of government bureaucrats wielding enormous sums of money in private markets and Democrats shrink from the thought of those enormous sums being put at risk in those markets). Therefore, since you have to do something with the money, the surplus is converted into special government bonds, an accounting measure that allows the transfer of the money from the trust fund to the general fund, where it is spent on a variety of Federal programs.

4. When the program was created in 1935 there were approximately 16 workers for every retiree. Now there are about 2.5 workers per retiree. In 1935 most people did not live long past age 65. Now the fastest growing population of elderly folks are those over 80. The longer you live, the more benefits you collect. Most elderly people collect significantly more in benefits than they paid in FICA taxes (although this will change with generations about to retire, as they have spent most of their working lives paying significantly higher FICA taxes).

5. The Trustees of Social Security estimate that the program will begin paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2018, just thirteen years from now. At that time the Social Security Administration will have to turn in those government bonds in order to pay out 100% of promised benefits. That money will then be transferred from the general fund of the Federal government. This will require the President and Congress to either raise more revenue or cut other programs, unless the economy grows at such a rate that revenues increase of their own accord. The Trustees say that by 2042 the program will have liquidated all its government bonds and will, without action by Congress, be unable to pay 100% of promised benefits. They estimate the program will be able to pay only 73% of benefits at that time.

These are the facts as I understand them. The Trustees come up with their figures based on a complex projection formula. If certain factors are changed, then the deficit and insolvency dates will change. Lifespans could increase at a greater rate, resulting in more benefit payments and those dates would come sooner. The economy could grow at a higher rate and those dates would be pushed back. However one looks at it, the fact is that the program will have to be adjusted in order to be put on a sound financial footing. Our challenge as citizens is to educate ourselves about the problem in order to have an informed opinion about the possible solutions.