Letter 61 to Friends and Familiares: counterinsurgency and why it does not work

This text is, in actuality, a response to a colleague's thinking through a new counter-insurgency framework designed to leverage the proven benefits of the free markets to address the failing counter-isnurgency in Afghanland.

by NedMcD | July 2, 2012 - 9:52pm

·         Login or register to post comments

Gentlemen,

As a life-long civilian, outside the tight culture of the active duty military and even tighter one of the Special Forces, I would like to make three points in my note.

1.     I appreciate the Army decision-making model, as a civilian who has worked with the State Department in Iraq and USAID in Afghanistan.

2.     The breadth of this Small Wars Journal article makes a succinct response impossible.

3.     One's conviction ought not to be assumed as arrogance.

Decision-making for the really dangerous real world. What outsiders often find surprising is the amount of open debate within the Army (and, by that, I mean all of the uniformed services). The chain-of-command applies far more to the implementation than to the conception. Yours is a great model for decision-making in highly uncertain, not to mention dangerous, atmospheres.

Missive Impossible. Over the last few days, I have written several drafts of this note; all end up being long and rambling because I try to answer specific points from the text. In desperation, I clipped thoughts verbatim from the article to narrow my view to the basics and ended up with two full pages. 

Don´t convict conviction. In writing you all, I really have to confess to strong disagreement with assumptions underlying the appended comments. The author's conviction reflects the world of finance from which he and I each came. The fact is, in that world, if an innovator displays tentativeness, both he and the idea are gone.

Defense of the vision underlying this proposal. We most assurèdly face the uncomfortable truth right now that the ‘whole-of-government’ mission in Afghanistan is not turning out the way we had hoped. Such a truth is understandably difficult to accept in the face of your comrades lost, our toil devoted and everyone’s treasure invested. Hopefully, facing this truth can set us free from narrow or desperate thinking.

That possibility does not make things easy. Part of modernizing (i.e., joining the world of and via globalization) entails ‘creative destruction’, not only of industries but of traditions along the way. This process has occurred over time and across time-zones in places as diverse as Europe, Africa and the Pacific Rim. Nonetheless, time takes time and, sadly, many transitions exact blood with the toil.

The transition from tribalism to globalism in Afghanistan will entail an eventual ascendancy to power of the middle and upper middle classes against static power structures. With two years left in Afghanistan, we are very fortunate to have this author with his strong sense of the ground truth there, elaborating a new counter-insurgency model. After all, almost all of the counterinsurgency literature out there is written by those who lost one or formulated their ‘cutting edge’ ideas on K-Street for money or in Cambridge for attention.

When one cuts through the essential details of this proposal, what we have here is something that addresses why most counter-insurgencies fail: modernization takes too long for kinetic adventurism. I am reminded of Viêt Nam. Within twenty-five years of the fall of the South Vietnamese, that society was beginning to resemble far more what we Americans had so wanted to see during our intervention. In a sense, we won through losing.

What! How is that? Our presence planted the seeds for that society's inner growth toward its cuturally reconciled version of capitalism, modernity and democracy. The best of the example we set remained with the people to be ingested over time and without the off-setting distraction of the presence of ‘occupiers’. That is exactly what this program can do: set an example of freedom and hasten the process of modernization through empowering a nascent middle class inside the villages to change the culture from the bottom up.

When enough villagers, born with that rare capacity of dual-minded decision-making, have the confidence to apply it, they may well begin to create a vanguard of change. How? By bringing up children as a new generation of entrepreneurs and by mentoring others of their generation. The diffusion of skills over time will present a more compelling model for counterinsurgency than what we see today. Call the process one of ‘cultural evolution’.

All this will take time, several decades in view of the country’s low education rates, for the newer middle class culture to emerge. That is what we should expect, not because Afghans are inert or stupid but because this modernization will have to come to terms with various deeply ingrained indigenous traditions to make a lasting change -- one that is likewise reconciled with the culture. That is why I like to say that the battlefield in situations like this one remains the future.

This proposal, then, enables select Afghans – an entrepreneurial segment – to bring modernization gradually, through a growing and uniquely Afghan version of a venture capital community at the country’s current center of gravity: the villages. The departing example set by the U.S. remains our choice. Nevertheless, the future of Afghanistan belongs to our host-country counterparts. This program widens their choice for an alternate, better, destiny.

Thank you for your patience.

Old letter from March 2003

TIME FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO DECLARE WAR FORMALLY (c. 15-Mar-03)

I remember sitting in front of my television in amazement at Hodding Carter III’s statement on a talk-show (“Night-Line”, I believe) almost a decade after he soothed so many of us every day as a foreign service officer briefing a frustrated, wounded nation on the Iran hostage ordeal. In this instance, Mr Carter made a casual comment on how the U.S. should react to Libya’s evident and lethal complicity in terrorism targeted against Americans. He stated something to the effect that Congress ought to declare war openly. What was amazing to me about Mr Carter’s comment was that it made so much sense yet held so little currency among his compatriots, including me.

These days, we, all of us, worry about the unknowable consequences of a war against Iraq. My support for this U.S. / U.K.-led aggression – and this invasion will be aggressive – lies in convictions that I have held for some time.

• Saddam Hussein is an odious man heading an atrocious régime with documented proof of a willingness to use poison gas and a reasonable presumption that, if the option were available, he would use nuclear weapons.
• His gangster régime has actively courted, condoned and sponsored terrorism, reportedly paying $25,000 to the families of suicidal murderers in the streets of Israel, the Middle East’s only enduring democracy and most vibrant, progressive society.
• With the co-precedent of Afghanistan, the downfall of Iraq’s régime – and the destruction of Iraq itself – will send a clear message across the world, beyond the Axis-of-Evil, that governments sponsoring terrorism face bloody consequences for their actions.
• Western democracy is under attack and if a religious or class-based war (more likely, both) is in the cards, it is almost certainly inevitable by now; that being the case, we have to win this war, a war we did not start.

Hatred of our country in the Middle East, and among many of the world’s one billion Muslims, is quite real, quite durable, quite deadly. Further, America has had several “wake-up” calls over the past generation as indicated by this incomplete list drawn from memory.

• The assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy by a Palestinian for R.F.K.’s supposed acquiescence to some imagined “Jewish” elite (1968);
• An attempted assassination by Iraqi agents of President George H.W. Bush shortly after his leaving office (1993);
• The murder of two U.S. diplomats, Cleo Noel and George Moore, in the Sudan by surrogates of Yassir Arafat (1973);
• An assassination of a U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Francis Meloy, in Beruit (1976);
• The taking of American citizens as hostages in Iran (1979-1981);
• The attack against and destruction of U.S. embassies and the murder of hundreds over two decades in Pakistan (1979), Lebanon (twice in 1983 & 1984) Kenya (1998), Tanzania (1998);
• More hostages taken by Hizbullah (1980s).
• The murder of 241 U.S. peace-keeping troops in Lebanon (1983);
• The deadly, unprovoked attacks on the U.S.S. Stark (1987) and the U.S.S. Cole (2000)
• The stark slaughter of 189 U.S. passengers on Pan American flight 103 (1988);
• Three attacks – two mass murders – against the World Trade Center (in 1993 and 2001);
• The attack against the Pentagon (2001); and,
• The murder of 93 passengers on the 9/11 United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

 When I wrote out and later documented this list of evil, I felt like someone had hit me up-side of the head: we are already in a war!

President Bush’s strong and blunt response is clear: America did not start this war but we mean to finish it. It is likely to be impossible for the U.S. to dismantle terrorist networks around the world; we will need help. Why not enlist the most effective allies of all: the nations that sponsor these killers? By holding these criminal countries directly accountable for their actions that their surrogates commit against humanity, we give them ample incentive to rein in their mercenaries.

While the Reagan Administration’s bombing of Tripoli seemed like a coarse response to Libya’s conspiratorial role in terrorism during the 1980s, it proved to be effective in abating Libyan sponsorship, at least in the short-run. It is important that we hand on a safe world to our children. Gangster régimes, like Saddam Hussein’s, cannot continue on as they have in the past, fettered or not.

Yet conviction and military might do not relieve the United States of America from the obligations of its moral leadership. And we shall remain accountable to these higher standards exclusively for a while until the euro becomes a global currency on par with the dollar and the European Union emerges as a super-power some time over the next five or ten years. The evident concern expressed by friend and foe alike about the fall-out of a possible invasion of Iraq is that the U.S. has lost its sense of proportion, that we are beginning to act with a sense of impunity.

There are grounds for such concerns. Every day, it seems, our media portrays the leaders of allies who disagree with us as somehow unequal to the tall order of statesmanship and manliness. The amount of proven reserves in Iraq, the U.S. consumption patterns of fossil fuels and the frank acknowledgement by Bush Administration officials of an extended occupation of Iraq arguably add up to an ulterior motive for this conquest: subsidized oil.

• Concerns of carpet bombings of Baghdad make me aware of the suffering of a populace devastated by ten years of sanctions that have increased infant mortality rates, under-nutrition and appalling health-care conditions. Collateral damage could degenerate into unilateral, if unintentional, slaughter.
• And, yes, the ghost of Viet-Nam still lurks amongst us: do we as a nation really want place in harm’s way so many of our fine young people? This war may end up being an urban war, one that is more costly in the lives of young Americans than was Desert Storm. These concerns deserve a fair and open hearing for many reasons.
• Germany, Russia and France are nations surviving a century of war; they host large muslim minorities.

Specifically, French President Jacques Chirac was one of the galvanizing forces behind N.A.T.O. finally intervening in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s.

Soon after 9/11, German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder gave a heartfelt speech proclaiming Germany’s solidarity with and affection for the American people, not a speech announcing an abdication of the responsibility of a great nation – and stalwart ally – to voice its reservations with U.S. policy.
The Supreme Commander of N.A.T.O. in its intervention into Kosovo – U.S. General Wesley Clark – views this imminent invasion as a colonialist endeavor.

As reported by Albert Hunt in his recent column in the Wall Street Journal, Marine General Anthony Zinni – often a trouble-shooter for U.S. interests in the Middle East – has cautioned wisely against head-long pursuit of military objectives without a clear and persuasive post-battle plan for Iraq.

• That the U.S. could re-coup the $200 billion magic-number price-tag for invasion with a 7-16% subsidy – akin to a traditional volume discount – on purchases of 20% of Iraq’s reserves precludes a simple dismissal of the “oil-grab” reservation.
• A precisely argued dissent by Scott Ritter, a former arms-inspector, of the current evidence presented by the U.S. that Iraq is re-arming remains unanswered.
• Also unanswered are questions relating to the potential detection capability of allied jet-fighters to provide sufficient reconnaissance while enforcing the no-fly zones.

While I sound like a detractor of our President’s policy, I do not mean to be. We are, however, embarking on a risky policy since, in this war, our loved ones will be vulnerable to the terrorist reprisals almost certain to follow an invasion of Iraq. Further, we place the principles of our republic, not to mention our humanity, at risk to the allure of empire and a grisly new ‘reality’ TV.

Nevertheless, democracies really are under attack and we all want to do our part, at least as each of us perceives it. And this challenge to each American reminds me of the wisdom of Hodding Carter’s comment on television so many years ago. If we are to start a war against Iraq and win it, we should do so rightly by…

1. …a full and open declaration of war against Iraq by Congress
2. …announcing any oil concessions expected by the U.S. / U.K. to recover the costs of régime change before the declaration of war passes Congres
3. …pivoting nation-building in Iraq on an independent and self-determined government.

These three principles would serve as a general guideline for attacks against national governments plainly backing terror against the U.S. We have to remember seductive euphemisms for Empire from the past such as “mission civilisatrice” or “the white man’s burden”, remaining mindful that nation building does not become a new velvet glove on the same old iron fist. Finally, we have to keep in mind that nation-building – which I interpret as implanting democracy in regions that have endured tyranny – may not work.

Pluralist societies flourish in those places where every group gives up something – that is: the prospect of complete victory or unrivalled use of resources – to gain a lot (i.e., peace and security). Some regions may simply not be ready to end the misery; at that point, we do what we can and leave.

An additional principle, not completely relevant to Iraq’s secular society, would also pivot nation-building upon a guarantee of universal liberties including the liberty…

1. …from fear (guaranty of rights to, and protection of, ethnic or religious groups, specifically, in this instance, the Shi’ites and the Kurds)
2. …from ignorance (guaranty of universal education)
3. …from superstition (guaranty of the re-education, re-empowerment and re-integration into the work-force of women).

Why?

Accountability is the life-blood of representative government. That means our Congress has to have the courage to declare war in a very public manner; we have to go forward as a reasonably unified society for we fight not only for stability of oil prices but to hold high the Wilsonian dream of leaving a world to our children that is truly safe for democracy. Further, our president and the leaders of the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal have staked out a lonely, difficult and, I believe, terribly brave position. Each may be a marked man.

If we can not in good conscience – after two or three days of congressional debate, publicly televised on all networks – support an invasion of Iraq at this time, then our president needs to know that, now. If Congress and the Administration lack the confidence to make a quick, public and effective case followed by a prompt declaration of war, perhaps we ought to listen to our wary friends, this time, and stand down.

As a restive Johnsonian democrat, I would find it difficult to support any carping by my party after-the-fact, especially if such complaining included statements to the effect that this war was never declared. Congressional acquiescence last autumn was bi-partisan. We have the time – two days, if we work at it – to air the evidence and for Congress to declare a war in a manner consistent with the thoughtfulness recommended by our Constitution.

If the U.S. and the U.K. relent in the end, I hope that I can remember to give Messrs Blair and Bush due credit for the statesmanship required to place the welfare of their subjects – and of democratic liberties, everywhere – above their personal standing in the short-term. In the meantime, we would have to continue on with redoubling our preparedness.

For this war on terrorism, fraught with moral ambiguity as it is, is certain to be around for us to fight another day at a time when we are ready militarily, emotionally and morally. Notwithstanding the incessant publicity about Homeland Security, etc., we have a long way to go and need to apply more resources to firm our domestic flank. God-willing, we will not have to face another day-of-ignominy like 9/11 to get there.

Letter 58B: North American politics at the cross-roads-The United States

This second essay on North American politics at the cross-roads, in this case that of the United States, has been very difficult to write as seven drafts (each started from scratch) amply attest. The reason for this brain-freeze is easy enough to explain. For many Americans (e.g., me), citizenship is a part of self. As it is more challenging to examine oneself than it is to analyze another, so it is proving to be for me with political thinking. To be sure, there are other reasons; yet my lack of perspective is a big one for me.

Unlike México’s choices for destiny, our cross-roads seem to be more dilemmas imposed upon a declining power. Though I have tried writing about the same policy specifics in many different ways, I fall back, exhausted, to two basic questions that define the politics.

• Will it be guns or butter?
• Does the Constitution really matter anymore?

Bottom line, I fear that we are losing the belovèd America I knew – a noble, mighty nation founded by philosophers that later trounced the fascists. The days of euphoric recall of the greatest generation, for an era that almost none of us knew directly, are fading fast. Great as our fathers and grandfathers were in times of national need and nightmare, liberty's price remains vigilance and not reminiscence.

Guns-versus-butter is nothing new, especially to baby-boomers. Thanks to recent fiscal fugues, albeit imposed by the national necessity following 9-11, as well as the Federal Reserve playing God with the greenback, the dollar is close to facing its last rites as the international currency. In the long run, this is likely to be better for the world. In the short run, however, it may well be stagflationary Hell for us.

For twenty years, I have been reading about, and blowing off (apparently, like many others), the fiscal time bombs of healthcare and social security. On the other hand, we are now struggling to maintain defense spending at an unsustainable and insatiable level higher than such expenditures by the rest of the world combined. In truth, this relative level may be exaggerated by differences between countries in the national accounting for healthcare and retirement for the military.

Trying to be the sole superpower has consequences, not the least of which is accelerating use of interventions to cover for policy failures or, worse, the absence of any policies at all. Thus “might makes right” in the eyes of the political ‘pragmattorney’ who turns expedients into precedents to ossify them into policies. Overuse of our military is not only immoral toward, but also dishonours the mission of, our citizen-soldiers, active duty and National Guard alike. The consequences for innocents around the world are little discussed, at least among U.S. political leaders.

So the current debate on the Healthcare Bill as opposed to Defense ‘sequestration’ really boils down to which of two implied rights – one to health-care or another to unassailable military power – will prevail. Neither choice is particularly palatable. For many reasons, the Healthcare reform in the current law is unconstitutional. The eight words mentioning the “general welfare” in the Constitution can not justify the politics of convenience at the expense of some seventy-seven hundred other words contained in our national contract.

The whining over sequestration is equally bogus. Thoughtful analyses, readily available, indicate that the consequences – in dollars and cents – will be similar to other periods of demobilization after modern wars (declared or undeclared); and, we are de-mobilizing by withdrawing from Iraq and as we wind down operations in Afghanistan. Instead, this rhetoric against sequestration shrouds the unseemly choice of picking guns over butter.

As mesmerizing as this cross-roads of empire versus social programs is to me, the mortally dire challenge is the current and unrelenting erosion of the Constitution by a President who, by all accounts, is a very intelligent and high-minded man. Security-versus-liberty has always been a subject for heated discussions over dinner. This time around, however, we may be presiding over the slippage of republican constitutionalism from a democratic ethos to manipulated mythos.

The Constitution is damnably inconvenient; it is supposed to be. Yet we live under an Administration, the outward behaviors of which are as dismissive toward constitutional constraints wisely imposed as those manifested by President Nixon. Consider these examples, if you please; acknowledge them, if you don’t please.

1. A recent executive order allowing the President to govern by executive fiat. Such powers are reserved for war-time (i.e., real wars where the very existence of the republic is at stake). Now, the President’s mere and unilateral declaration of a national emergency will suffice.
2. Signing a Defense Authorization Bill enabling the government to jail citizens or resident aliens as potential terrorists without due-process merely for suspicion of being (i.e., seeming like) terrorists. The old I.N.N.A. (Irish Need Not Apply) has evidently been supplanted by A.N.N.A. (Arabs Need Not Attorneys).
3. Apparent support for an Air Force plan to develop and deploy domestically drones the size of golf-balls or toy helicopters for routine surveillance of Americans thought to be of interest to the military with 'incidental' findings turned over to civilian law enforcement agencies.
4. A campaign to vilify Bradley Manning and to prosecute Julian Assange as a spy for the responsible release of information arbitrarily classified to keep it out of the public domain.  At least the wikileaks documents I have read have taken pains not to endanger people; embarrass, perhaps.  Place in harm's way? No.
5. Open defiance of Congressional subpeonas through an indefensible invocation of ‘executive privilege’ combined with a dubious, media-saturated assertion of a current policy gone terribly wrong as representing nothing new.  That excuse did not work for John Mitchell, et al. and President Nixon nor should it for Eric Holder and President Obama forty years later.
6. Violations of Pakistani and Mexican sovereignty in the same manner as the Nixon Administration did with Cambodia, though with fewer civilian deaths and Congressional acquiescence in these instances.  

As with most dilemmas of one’s own making, if our nation is to be great again, she will have to be so from the inside out. In 1968, Senator Kennedy called for a national cleansing of the sickness of the “menace of mindless violence.” That call still holds today. Yet the violence now extends also to that against our national character, our constitutionalism.

This oncoming period of national renewal will not be easy for any of us. It may require remedies – like progressive taxes or imposing tort reform – that are anathema to both sides. While I shudder at the possible pain ahead, deep within me, resides that traditional American optimism and adaptability. Time and time again, politicians have vastly underestimated the moral tenacity of the ‘simple’ electorates who hired them in the first place.

Letter 58A: North American politics at the cross-roads: Part I, México

Both the U.S. and México have presidential elections this year within four months of each other. While both involve politics at the cross-roads, the moods could not be more different. While each nation has its anxieties, one faces hard choices while the other responds to a call of destiny, of national risk.

Mexicans head to the polls in ten days. Since I have not followed the election closely and have watched only one debate, I cannot say much about whom I would prefer. My political propensity would be for the P.A.N. party, the conservative voice. The candidates were interesting in the national debate of ten days ago. So, in my adolescent way, I would like to share some first impressions of these candidates.

My favorite was Gabriel Quadri, the resident intellectual. Quadri has held some important posts in the Mexican government but not elected office. He is an intellectual as his unfortunate 4% showing in the polls attests. Quadri was an unsung hero in the debate nevertheless since his presence and breezy demeanor elevated the tone of the discussion. Bottom line, he lack that cast-iron belly to be “el Hombre”.

My second favorite, strictly on impressions, was Andrés Manuel López Obrador. First, he cited President Franklin Roosevelt favorably, disproving the theory that, in the eyes of every Mexican, each American is presumed ugly until proven dead (mini-ha-ha). López Obrador led a break-away populist movement from the traditional ruling class (of the P.R.I.) after the downfall of México under President Salinas de Gortari in the mid-1990s. ‘AMLO’, as he is called in the press, reminds me of President Truman, with his questionable cronies but character beyond question.

My third pick, in a virtual dead heat with López Obrador was Enrique Peña Nieto of the P.R.I. (Partido Revolucionario Institucional-¿how is that for an oxymoron?), whom I affectionately call pinhead (PNhead). Peña Nieto probably won the debate in terms of his polished presentation and holding his own with Quadri on content.  Yet he seemed less sponaneous than his quirky counterpart, perhaps a little slick. PNhead has taken flak for looking like a movie-star and being married, after he was widowed, with a 'tan guapa' television personality. On balance, notwithstanding some skeletons doing a hat-dance in his closet, he seems to be high-minded and capable.

My 'way-last' pick was Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (P.A.N.). She has an attractive and erudite air about her. Nonetheless, I found her performance in the debate to be very disappointing because she turned so negative.  Unsurprisingly, she called the P.R.I. a dictatorship, a refrain true enough until President Zedillo but hacneyed by now.   Vázquez Mota was, in turn, dismissive toward Quadri, out of step with culture of courtesy in México.  She harshly criticized López Obrador (for being, well, AMLO). All of what  Vázquez Mota said may be true, yet I heard too little about what she stood for; in truth, she sounded desperate.

In all, I think the crop of candidates is quite good and representative of the strains of thought – or, the thoughts of strain – woven through Mexican society: populism from the campo to the disenfranchised fringe of the cities (AMLO); the youthful emergence of an urban middle class intent on making México a power in her own right (PNhead); the deep but numerically limited tradition of leftist intellectualism in México City (Quadri); and, the fretfulness of the scared and alienated (common anywhere these days; Vázquez). México is at a cross-roads as her current, embattled President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa – whom I admire – prepares for a well deserved rest and retirement.

Here’s why.

President Calderón has strengthened his country through several unglamorous or unpopular initiatives:

• the war on drugs or, better put, the fight to rally the rule of law;
• an accounting system aimed at reinforcing a new transparency upgraded across the government;
• a financial system greatly strengthened, though still requiring improvement, after the 2008 banking crash in the U.S.;
• an increased emphasis on college level studies in the sciences with México now graduating more B.S.es (no, not B.S.ers) in recent years than the U.S.;
• reforms to support entrepreneurs (e.g., a patent law that doesn’t enable defensive patents); as well as,
• trade treaties galore, making México the freest wheeling country on the planet.

These are serious structural changes that have positioned México at the convergence of four points of inflection in her destiny.

First, the struggle with the drug cartels is at a possible tipping point. The population has increasingly turned against the gangsters, though the conflagration, costing more lives than we lost in Viet Nam, is deeply unpopular for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, this is a fight to save the rule of law in México; the country will prevail because she simply has to; at least, that is my hunch.

With the new law favoring class-action suits in México, it would be interesting to see if an N.G.O. would sue the drug cartels, for example in the name of all the 1.4 million citizens of Juarez City, for damages suffered at the hands of these warring gangsters. This law lends itself to this type of action since plaintiffs can wait until the case is decided in their favor before signing up and not end up on a hit list should the case fail.

Second, the country has invested in basic scientific research for fifty years and in applied engineering research for forty, currently producing 40% more graduates – in absolute numbers – than the U.S.  México has a population better and better educated (at least for the upper half), making her ideal for foreign direct investment in value-added manufacturing.

Third, is the industrial inflection. With the skill base transcending the maquiladoras, Mexican companies along the U.S. border are now migrating backwards in the value chain, having been exposed to the transfer of technology. The science and research centers are being nudged by a Science and Technology Law of 2009 to take the intellectual capital accumulated over two generations and mobilize it through technology transfer.

Gradually these government-sponsored centers are pushing forward along the same value chain as the more energetic maquiladoras in the private sector. The point of inflection here is the convergence of the maquiladoras moving rapidly backwards (out of competitive necessity imposed upon U.S. firms by globalization) and the science centers moving forward cautiously along that national value chain.

Fourth, México’s free-trade régime – to the extent that any such fiction manifests anywhere – is in a sweet-spot (¡not sweat-shop!) geographically. Think of the R.C. sign of the cross. The forehead is the U.S. and Canada; the bottom of the sternum is Brazil and South America; one shoulder is Japan and the Australasian Pacific Rim; the other shoulder is the European Union. Who is in the middle of these four points, at the heart of it all? México, that’s who.

With wide-open sea lanes for access, a high quality but relatively inexpensive work force and a propitious position on the U.S. door-step thanks to N.A.F.T.A., this country might be the sweet spot for future advanced technology manufacturing: not too big to be a nuisance but just right for leveraging the knowledge and research of other countries laboring under worsening shortages of engineers.

The choice belongs to the Mexican people. While I hear many educated Mexicans complain of their compatriots’ fatalism, I sense an emerging middle class filled with readiness to risk, led by restless entrepreneurs blessed with a strong work ethic deemed by O.E.C.D. sees as second to none. If México can steer a course increasingly independent of the United States, in twenty-five years, my home country may well be banging on her door begging her young to move north.

Letter 57: time alone - time enough

Life’s interventions have a peculiar timing, or they do not. After the past month, I cannot say and really no longer care. What remains evident is that life has a way of making sure I listen.

That call is not the irresistible charm of a siren; been there, done me. Instead, it is the overbearing, at times lethal, screech of illness. Fortunately, mine was not serious though the screech quite grating.

Nevertheless, the illness landed me – butt-first – in an excellent hospital with attentive nurses and conscientious doctors here in Mexico. The Peace Corps physician, la Dra. Lourdes Gonzales, was a god-send to me.

My colleagues at the science center where I serve really cared about my welfare and have shown me a steady solicitude since my tentative return to work. These blessings have accelerated my recovery and, to all these people, I am grateful.

A week of looking alternately at an intravenous drug unit (the first I can recall ever being plugged into me) and a ceiling with plaster tiles cut from the exact same mold, followed by a week stationary rest, left me a great deal of time.

Though I tried reading, I was not up to it; physically, I was almost too weak to hold the book up. So I just lay there, immersed in a mixture of self-pity and self-reflection.

Mortality was not the big deal for me. Long ago, I came to terms with the fact that when I die, loved ones will grieve. That hard reality in itself is sobering. Yet the world, my employer, even my family and countless innocent bystanders will somehow manage without me.

After a couple of days of reflecting on a variety of life experiences that ran the gamut of time of human feeling, I started trying to tie these often discordant images into a coherent meaning.

Recalling that my overriding goal in life had always been the pursuit and attainment of wisdom, I raked through these memories, these triumphs, these defeats, these resentments, these fantasies. Influencing me to be honest about this time alone was the fact that my little jaunt to the hospital was the first such divertissement in forty years.

Honesty is an ambivalent virtue, perhaps over-rated. In any case, in that enforced solitude, I took stock on just how much closer to wisdom I was now than when I first read The Death of Socrates , Siddhartha and Stride Toward Freedom in 1972 or walked around le Mont Saint Michel on a winter twilight in 1975.

Not much, it turns out. You see, I had wisdom all figured out. All I really needed to do was suffer enough, like Job, and then I would attain wisdom.

Well I have suffered plenty in recent years, at times facing calumny and at other times making those difficult decisions of which memory never lets go. Perhaps my reactions to those realities— confronted by each of us – have diminished me, taken me further away from wisdom.

Absent the suffering, I "just knew" that wisdom would come with age and experience, preferably diverse. Nope; again my mind seems smaller – not in intellectual capacity – but in that balance of courage and conscience that wise people historically have exhibited. Shoot, mister, I have experienced many things in many places, all to no discernible end.

Then came the last conviction that by reading that next ‘right’ book – of fact, fiction or philosophy – would I taste the forbidden nectar of wisdom. Well, wrong again. Yes, I can quote or note a lot of things. These trifles fall to dust in the face of wisdom and my knowing how painfully far away from it I really am.

None of these elements have proven to be stepping stones to that wisdom. In fact, I believe I am a smaller minded man today than I was thirty years ago. Granted, to outward appearances, I may qualify as knowledgeable, maybe even intelligent. But wise?

That I am not; nor, honestly these days, do I expect ever to be. After all of this thinking, it dawned on me that the “Male Calvinist Pigs” of centuries ago may have been right, to some extent, about divine predestination. Yikes.

To me at least, wisdom likely is distilled from all of the things I have already mentioned (and more, I am sure) through the medium of “grace”. Not in the Hemingway but in the more traditional sense.

Lucky for me, I had caught a whiff of this other-wordly, if not ethereal, quality from several people in schools along the way and others whom I met fresh out of college.  Theirs was an innate purity and grace, or so I thought at the time; I do not know, even today.

What I do know is that I wanted what these people had and that I never came close to getting it. It is not easy to admit that I will likely enjoy neither grace nor wisdom, at least in this world. These days, I still come across grace in people, though, with time, it seems rarer.

Grace remains as unmistakable today as it was unusual in my teens and early twenties. 

So, during those hours of solitude in illness, I wondered – aloud and alone, even – what was it that had failed me in my life's quest for wisdom. Why did that boney-fingered grip around my heart not let go and reach toward grace and, through it, wisdom? Presented the opportunity several times, I cravenly shied away.

Now, I have a tentative idea. Grace may indeed be a gift quite independent of anything I am or do yet it requires that most elusive of all human virtues. And, what virtue is that?

Well, to answer that question, I defer to Alfred Lord Tennyson, so little in vogue these days of edgey realism and brutal achievement. Tennyson did a far better job than I ever will in identifying that wispy virtue. In his timeless, enchanting recount of the Arthurian legend, Idylls of the King, Tennyson wrote:

“O son, thou hast not true humility,
the highest virtue, mother of them all…
                                  …for what is this
thou thoughtest of thy prowess and thy sins?
thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself
as Galahad."

Letter 56: Thoughts on the Health Care Reform Bill

It has been four weeks since I listened to all (six hours, I think) of the Supreme Court oral arguments on the Health-Care Reform Bill.  Unfortunately, between time requirements in my Peace Corps service and an illness, I am only now, with fading memory, pecking out these thoughts. 

The three topics discussed by the Supreme Court were whether an individual can be coerced into buying insurance; whether the law is severable (akin to a ‘line-item’ constitutional review); and, whether Medicare and Medicaid should be extended further into the states.  A few house-keeping notes. 

• First, the two constituent bodies under the Constitution – the states and the people – are asserted to be coerced and are in fact affected by this decision. 
• Second, this decision and this bill are not about President Obama.  In fact, “Obama Care” is a misnomer since the President actually proved himself to be a statesman by negotiating an outcome after the bill had come to an impasse in Congress.  Apparently, a large chunk of the bill came out of the Heritage Foundation, hardly a partisan Democratic organization. 
• Third, the alternative I propose may not be available in view of our current fiscal insolvency.  Besides, it sounds a little simplistic.

Coerced transaction.  Of course this is a coerced transaction.  Justice Scalia failed to grasp the economics of pooling risk, as Paul Krugman pointed out, with his analogy to buying a commodity.  Nevertheless, requiring young people at the pain of a stiff fine to purchase something manifestly outside their needs can only be coercive. 

Coercion, however, is permitted by the Sixteenth Amendment; former Justice Learned Hand deemed taxation as a “coerced transaction.”  So, call this fine what it is: a tax.  The Constitution permits taxing for the general welfare.

Severability.  Severability, if permitted, should be applied in this case to the reauthorization bills to avoid a funding crisis.  Nice try, whoever crafted the law, but the ‘reform’ part of the bill ought not to derive a bogus legitimacy from routine spending bills.  Of course, how a bankrupt country expects to pay for all of these things lies beyond the scope of this letter.

Extension of the power of Medicare and Medicaid.  Big Problem; this involves a coercive usurpation from the states of rights protected under the ninth and tenth amendments.  As dismissive as most people are of the now famous “broccoli” argument of Justice Scalia, that popular disdain blithely ignores a far more fallacious, and damaging, argument asserted by Justices Kagan and Breyer. 

That argument states to the effect: the Federal Government’s willingness to give a lot of its money to the States can not be considered coercion.  Here are the fallacies of this logic:

• First, the Federal Government is not giving anything to the States because it has nothing to give.  That money belongs to people who earned it through their toil and then paid taxes.  Alternatively, it is money funded by a debt issue – meaning it is money that belongs to future private earnings taxed to pay that debt.
• Second, this is as not as simple an offer as it sounds.  When Justice Kagan asks rhetorically, why anyone would turn down ten million dollars to work somewhere, she is overlooking the possibility of a bribe.  Let us imagine a policeman who is about to arrest a bank-robber.  The desperate fellow says, “Hey, pallie, how about half the loot if you let me go?”  The officer is not being coerced but we hope he does not take that bribe or the thin blue line just got snipped.
• Third, that is not all the two Justices overlook.   Not only is there a big enticement in taking the Medicare / Aid monies under the extension, but there is a large penalty: losing all current federal support for elderly and indigent care.  Now that is like the bank robber saying instead, “Hey, pallie, how about half the loot if you let me go?”  The officer says no and is about to add attempted bribery as another crime committed when the robber cuts in, “Okay, then, have it your way. But if you don't take this deal, bud, we will kill you and your family.”  The robber somehow proves he is not bluffing and so the police officer relents.  That is coercion.

Taking these last two points back to this case, does the analogy fit?  Unfortunately, yes, it does.  Who is the robber?  The federal government.  Who is the police officer being coerced? The states.  What is the crime? Usurpation of states’ rights by the Federal government. The law is unconstitutional, except for the reauthorizations.

So should we turn our back on our fellows who are old, indigent or both and cannot afford health-care?  That surely does not sound like the America I want to live in, does it?  Put another way: is health-care a right?  After all, President Franklin Roosevelt and other liberal presidents have argued that it is.  I tend to agree with Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton: health-care is a right. 

There are two issues to be reconciled with this notion.  First, if health-care is a right, then it is one that is not enumerated in the Constitution and thus reverts under the ninth and tenth amendments to the states or to the people.  No, general welfare language (i.e., collective security) does cut it for it is not explicit enough.  So how do we get to a right of health-care?  There are two constraints to consider before proposing a solution:

• First, what is the level of health-care contemplated by this right?  Hint: of course medical care is rationed; it always has been.
• Second, we are the United States of America.  We are not Japan, Canada or Britain.  A lasting solution to this national dilemma will have to be organically consistent with our culture and Constitution.  We can not expect to apply another country’s plan willy-nilly as a template.

So, here is what I propose.  That the Federal government provide a minimum guarantee of health-care in the form of preventive health-care.  This could be accomplished transparently by allocating $1,000 per person and send sending these ‘capitated’ payments to the states for each resident in the state as a block grant.  This $1,000 level is arbitrary and whatever the median cost of preventive health-care across the country could then be adjusted for the comparative cost of health-care of each state (within reason). 

Any additional ‘right’ to health-care would come from the state, which tends to be more answerable to its citizens.  This right is collective in nature because of the pooling of risk; hence, it reverts to the states, not the people.  Additionally, private insurers could sell ‘supplemental' health policies. 

These would be paid for by people or by their employers (as an attraction to work for said employers) as they deemed necessary.  In truth states have already started experimenting in health-care provision (e.g., much maligned ‘Romney Care’ in Massachusetts).  Over time, I suspect, the states and the people would become willing to delegate some of their rights or autonomy to the Federal government for additional leadership on the health insurance issue. 

This expectation brings to mind President Carter’s old proposal of some type of coverage of the upper reaches of catastrophic illness.  Then the states, the people and private sector are left to fill in the space (e.g., child-birth) between the two book-ends of preventive health insurance and catastrophic reinsurance.

How much this would cost is anyone’s guess.  This idea may not be affordable and may overlook too much of what we take for granted.  Only time, and, in the short term at least, the Supreme Court will tell.

Letter #55: The Bleakness of Freaky Friday

This new Executive Order (E.O.) issued on March 16th (ironically the birth-date of the father of our Constitution) is frightening and is yet another reminder that the America of today is not the America I knew. I do not agree with the ‘Anonymous’ message insofar as I did not read an explicit element of compulsion in the E.O. in forcing people to work for the government (unless Selective Service were expanded to include the National Defense Executive Reserve).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs1ZIMovelY&sns=fb

Nevertheless, the broad authorities given could conceivably (and applying little imagination) lead to that. What concerns me is that these authorities are appropriated by a supposedly peacetime government and not during a formally declared state of war. Instead these powers are placed in the Presidency in anticipation of some future yet undefined 'national emergency'. On a pragmatic level, there is a telling difference between this E.O. and the National Defense Authorization Act (N.D.A.A.), which allowed for interning U.S. citizens as potential terrorists without explicit recourse to due-process.

In the N.D.A.A., President Obama signed a repugnant bill out of the necessityof supporting our younger brothers and sisters in uniform serving in nasty places, with the verbal proviso that he would not enforce the provisions so contrary to our national mission as a republic. This E.O., however, was drafted under the authority of, and issued by, President Obama himself.

Being the bored crank that I am, I have read the language of this E.O. thoughtfully. By not drilling down into referenced documents, I may be missing context here. In trying to fathom how such a usurpation of power by a fine man and liberally predisposed President, I came up with four guesses to which I assigned entirely subjective percentage probabilities to identify relative possibilities, writhing in my mind only.

• President Obama signed this order under threat to his life, limb or loved ones (1%).
• President Obama signed this order under influence; i.e., he was bamboozled (2%).
• The United States is, or will soon be, in a state of war (30%). Finally,
• This E.O. is an indirect justification for a massive intervention into the economy similar to the New Deal or the economy during World War II (67%).

The first two possibilities are largely theoretical since I do not subscribe to conspiracies nor do I sense that the President is either stupid or weak-willed. On the one hand, too many people would have to be involved in such a conspiracy for it not to migrate into the public discourse. On the other, President Obama survived Chicago politics and has demonstrated an ability to say or do something that is unpopular.

For the third possibility, this E.O. reads more like a war mobilization order to implement a Congressional resolution declaring a state of war. Since, Afghanistan is the only military conflict in which the U.S. is currently involved, and one that hardly poses an existential threat, a reasonably bored crank would infer that this mobilization order pertains to an imminent state of war (likely not to be declared as it should be), perhaps with Iran, North Korea or Syria, none of which appear to be existential threats. Of course the anti-nation of Pakistan, with its low-hanging nuke-fruit dangling in front of IslaMaoists, is the wayward wild-card on our existential radar.

The only two conceivable existential adversaries are Russia and China. Yet, while one power has been aggressive in trying to recapture or at least reintegrate old fiefdoms, Russi'a aggressiveness may be limitless but her ambitions limited. The U.S. and Europe are dealing with that threat. The other power, Red China, appears to be on an inexorable rise to the top, set to overtake the U.S. economically in the next few years. Yet China’s policies have been less overtly aggressive; the threat from the People’s Republic is more towards intellectual property and cyber-security, both material but not enough to warrant this E.O.

Finally, the last alternative appears the most likely. If so, I suspect that President Obama has lost patience with, and faith in, the market system for allocating resources efficiently (patience) and effectively (faith). The Secretary of the Navy testified last week that the military will continue to buy massive amounts of bio jet-fuels, though they cost seven times the cost of fossil fuels and that doing so will create the pathway to a sustainable market eventually.

This sounds like command economics to me. At the very least, this sounds like the activist economic planning of France in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. What did all of that technocratic meddling actually accomplish? You make the call. On the side of irony (if not history) arises the question of wondering if the Pentagon is taking a page right out of the playbook of the People’s Army in spearheading social change.

This program of ‘contemplating our naval’ is continuing because, potential adversaries hold a lot of the oil we consume. That sobering fact has been true for a long time and yells out loud for building the Keystone pipeline and, if necessary, figuring out how to satisfy legitimate environmental needs. The Pickens plan for a reasonably paced switch-over to natural gas over time, with gradual maturation into economically viable bio-fuels in a generation’s time makes more sense than this “moral equivalent of war”.

http://www.pickensplan.com/

The last alternative makes sense also because of the implied ability of the President to support trade unionism, which I support – but through transparent appeal of the unions to the work-force without coercion (i.e., right-to-work). Indeed, about 20-25% of the work-force needs to be unionized to keep corporations honest. Corruption, not capitalism, wrecked the trade unions. The E.O. also spells out a preference from small businesses, the traditional engine of job creation.

Laudable as all the goals are of what I view as the most likely alternative, they undercut the good side of capitalism and they erode people’s civil liberties in favor of a paternalist corporativism. Now President Obama seems like a decent man with high character; I mean that sincerely. What if we are not so fortunate with future presidents?