Letter 63: a conservative apologia for the 112th Congress

Dear everyone (i.e., all three people aside me who will actually read this letter home),

This missive tries to answer, from my conservative bias, an interesting argument raised in a Washington Post article in support of the widely held notion that this current Congress, the 112th, has been the worst in American history.  On a housekeeping note, I assume the label of ‘conservative’ knowing that I am not a pure conservative. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/13/13-reasons-why-this-is-the-worst-congress-ever/

Additionally, I believe this Congress has had more than its fair share of Republicans focussed on bringing down President Obama.  Since I often write that the country is in need of a national renewal – starting from within each one of us – such personal animus has no place in the national discourse.  We need creative political ideation, not craven personal obliteration.  So, onto the response…

BLUF: our government, Congress and citizenry are in a time of intense debate, high uncertainty and unforeseeable consequences.  Perhaps this Congress represents a pause before a plunge into the new history of a previously untried political philosophy.

I.                    Number of bills passed.  This measure reflects more the bias of the author since many conservatives believe a fundamental problem for the U.S. is the passing of too many laws, reactive in nature, leading to regulations too restrictive in application, translating into fewer small businesses and increasingly suffocating beleagured middle class.

II.                 9-10% approval ratings.  Disheartening, to say the least, since these rock-bottom numbers indicate that people may no longer be exempting their own Representatives from the scorn formerly reserved for all of Congress.  Demagoguery by the Republicans certainly has played a part in this crisis of confidence in our legislature (e.g., the deliberate misnomer of the health-care bill, brokered by the President, as ‘ObamaCare’, especially as this compromise integrates findings from the Heritage Foundation).  Frankly, my countrymen are smart enough to squinch up their noses at such sophistry.

III.               Polarization.  A wise man once told me that ‘confusion’ is a high state just preceding creativity (i.e., call me a confused mad-Manet wannabe)…If this statement be true, this assertion and the one previous argue toward a time of change, perhaps radical change.  Such prospects are frightening and people tend to lean back on their basic beliefs while the source of discontent – the American people, particularly the middle class – demand something new and different aside from the same ‘threadbare’ prescriptions.

IV.              The G.O.P. has set back the recovery through the debt ceiling ‘bullying’.  I was a Democrat of many years in the mid-1990s.  I remember all my more liberal friends excoriating the Republicans for “shutting down” the government for a short period at that time.  Unstatesmanlike though this Republican action appeared to be, I privately thought that it was a good way to make the main point of the party’s ‘contract’ with America (i.e., by whacking the mule with a two-by-four).  It proved to be the main reason why President Clinton later produced historic surpluses (though based, at least in part, on convenient ‘J-curve’ assumptions on future revenue in-take on social security).  This Congress, unrepentant though it was, made crystal clear through this debt-ceiling spat, that we cannot spend-and-borrow our way out of national economic malaise.  Yes, President Bush (of whom I am a BIG fan) had a part in creating this challenge. 

V.                Lower Credit Rating.  I mean, really.  This assertion clarifies the bias of the author.  Mind you – bias in public disquisition is a good quality for it provokes debate.  In actuality, given explicit and implicit debt levels to G.D.P. – we look more like a single-A rated country than a triple-A one.  Call it a bigger credit bang for the excess military buck.  A end to cheap Chinese credit, imported by the same Treasury charged to protect the integrity of the national currency, will crash the global economy.  This ceiling and its offspring, sequestration, can be better viewed as a stand to preserve our national sovereignty than as some punishment imposed by the privileged.

VI.              Sequestration. Personally, I welcome this admittedly sledge-hammer form of fiscal discipline.  Sooner or later, the country will have to face up its fiscal profligacy.  Sequestration was the alternative to limiting the debt ceiling; a good compromise to enforce fiscal discipline while granting our lawmakers a final chance to do for us what they had previously failed to do by themselves.

VII.            Repeal  times thirty-three.  Got it.  I have previously decried the demagoguery by my fellow conservatives on this issue of the healthcare bill.  Nevertheless, the health-care law is not popular among a voting public that clearly believes, as I do, in a right to basic health-care.  My sense remains that my countrymen do not want that right extended through excessive government oversight.  That said, while I prefer a system that evolves up through the states organically (that is, constitutionally), based on federal minimum standards, this legislation should stay in place until a better alternative emerges. 

VIII.          Budget legerdemains of Senate Democrats.  In truth, I was not aware of this issue.  Good for the author for proving that bias stated in public disquisition, founded on integrity, improves the content of the larger political dicourse.

IX.              Zero appropriation bills passed.  Obviously not a wonderful statistic.  Yet I view this ‘reason’ more as evidence of the previous assertion, empirically supported, of polarization.

X.                The ‘infrastructure fiasco’.  As a fiscal conservative who viewed the stimulus bill as unaffordable and as a failure in its implementation, I am not surprised that my fellow Republicans would be loath toward giving more permission to squandered largesse.  These stop-gap measures are votes of no-confidence against what conservatives view as a failed discretionary spending policy, led by the President, that may have slowed growth over the medium term.  That is to say: the Republicans use this stop-gap approach to keep the President on a tight leash until the President changes or a new Administration is inaugurated.

XI.              The temporary suspension of F.A.A. operations.  I must confess my ignorance on this issue.  It seems to be a particularly powerful example of other assertions; namely, the polarization and absence of enacted legislation.

XII.            The blocking of the nomination of a qualified Governor for the Federal Reserve.  Unless the author has left something out, there is no justification for Senator Shelby’s actions nor the G.O.P. leadership’s tolerance of it.

XIII.          The experts agree.  Beyond my limited knowledge to comment on this point.  Such agreement is not surprising, since at least some Republicans and conservatives do appear to be more intent on curtailing President Obama’s career than in honestly trying to find ways to steer our country through a very challenging time now and yet to come.

XIV.          There are problems to solve.  “, Sherlock”; or, I think we all agree on that one.

Letter #62: a culture of violence and the second amendment

UPDATE: 25th of March 2017.
This essay was drafted four (4) months prior to the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Since the horrid night in Colorado, the United States have hosted twenty-five (25) multiple or mass shootings of innocents, killing 200+ people and injuring in excess of 175 others. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data 
The firearms industry and inattentive or unwilling family members or care-givers share responsibility for these crimes as many of the shooters are mentally ill and / or suicidal.
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/06/446348616/fact-check-are-gun-makers-totally-free-of-liability-for-their-behavior 
The industry can no longer fatten its bottom line by flooding cosmetically changed military weapons into civilian markets; lobbying for lax controls of weapons purchases; and, hiding behind a self-serving law that shields it from the liability of knowingly manufacturing weapons that lead to so many murders and even more suicides. 

ORIGINAL ESSAY 
(unchanged from August 2012, except for typographical corrections)
While the nation mourns, silently, the recent spate of shooting sprees in different regions, for different reasons, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of these unrelated but correlated crimes remains the absence of an assertive response by leaders in either of the two parties.  Such was not always the case.  The day following the murder of the right Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, Senator Robert Kennedy, himself in a heated political contest, gave one his finest of many great orations to an audience in Cleveland, Ohio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Vll-t0H6A  (excerpt)

In those five minutes of brave anguish for the country he loved forty-four years ago, Senator Kennedy addressed the growing endemic sickness engulfing the larger society: that of mindless violence.  His words surely resonate with the sadness of our own time.

With twenty years of violence, through terror, war and crime that kill ever more innocents, it is little wonder, then, that the national leadership – aside from the usual round of gun control bills that no one takes seriously – does not react or reacts sluggishly.  America is used to violence, inured to the harsh consequences for so many innocents, willing to forfeit for security those very liberties that many sacrificed so much for so long, asking for so little in return.  Truth is: we expect violence now because we are immersed in a culture of violence.  These days, much like the 1960s, much of the violence is motivated by overt and even covert hate.

Certain peoples – Arabs (or Sikhs mistaken as Arabs), gays, Mexicans -- often suffer the overt hatred of others who see them as different and vulnerable enough to bully.  Nevertheless, other crimes, like the shooting in Colorado, have no apparent motive other than bloodshed; such people cannot have charity in their hearts to be able to take the lives of others they do not know.  Tagging Saint Thomas Aquinas, such covert hate may be as simple as the absence of love.

What frightens and saddens me so is that this national sickness, under which we suffer today, was first decried by Senator Kennedy two generations ago.  A long time, two generations is; long enough to harden the fear and mistrust of 1968 into a culture of violence today.  Cultures take a long time to change – as Moses found after liberating his countrymen from slavery so long ago – and, perhaps, they take even longer to heal when they turn criminal.

Indeed, this perceived culture of violence, with apparently unchallenged depredations against the vulnerable, may be acclimating us toward a culture of hate.  Yet there is still time to avoid the self-same darkness that swept over what had been arguably the world’s most civilized country, Germany, during the first half of the last century.

That prospect points toward the necessity of a national renewal.  Events over the past six months have dizzied us – shooting of people and looting of power (in the name of security).  Indeed, Berlin, Munich and Nuremberg may be resurrecting themselves (in another, equally seductive, guises) as Boise, Milwaukee and North Carolina.  

This comparison may sound extreme and it no doubt is needlessly alarmist.  Yet we need to recognize that, while our society is far from hopelessly blood-drunk, we have a national sickness.  While the proliferation of guns has certainly aggravated the violence, neither guns nor the second amendment created this culture.  We did.  Likewise, we can undo it.

National renewal will require national dialogue on many levels.  Many of the diverse dimensions of this national gauntlet – cast at our feet by years of neglect of what really makes America great rather than what makes her mighty – lie well beyond the scope of this essay and the confines of my mind. Nevertheless, we can start this national dialogue, this national contemplation, with an open and free debate on the second amendment.

The question I would pose to us is: ¿is the right to bear arms unlimited as (at least I believe) the National Rifle Association argues?  The United States struggles within two dilemmas imposed by this menacing culture of mindless violence:

• theoretical in that two rights – one to life, liberty  and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., property) -- articulated in the Declaration of Independence and to be protected under the Constitution -- as opposed to the right to bear arms are currently in collision; as well as,
• existential in that the bad guys may already have the (often semi-)automatic weapons and so the decent people ought to be able to defend themselves with similar arms.

Even the dilemmas clash since they imply opposite policy outcomes.

As this long overdue debate begins, if in fact it ever does, for my part, I support a stricter view of the second amendment for the same reasons that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did: because that prescribed right enabled her family and their neighbors collectively to take to the streets with guns to forestall the rising retaliation of bullying bigots against the simple assertions by African Americans of their God-given rights in 1950s Birmingham.  In Baghdad, I fell off the fence on the conservatively constitutional side many years ago.

A guard at Adnan Palace, then the senior headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, had to go home each evening, wearing the uniform of his company.  Neither that private security contractor (i.e., his employer), nor the Coalition forces nor even his fellow Iraqis would permit him to carry a gun.  Yet he had to walk through a city sliding into a sectarian cleansing (primarily, Shi´ite on Sunni).  Not only would this fellow stick out as a ‘collaborator’, he could easily be mistaken as a Sunni by the Shi’ite death squads.  His name was Adnan – therefore, likely a Shi’ite – but who would know?

Mr Adnan supported his extended family. He had already been kidnapped once by corrupt police, tortured for sport and shaken down for months of his pay.  Such an attack may have been forestalled had Mr Adnan owned his pistol.  Bullies prey on the vulnerable; even a pistol can deter those wielding heavier weapons in favor of looking for easier pickings.  My Iraqi friend was a sitting duck and the sole breadwinner for a dozen or more relatives in those desperate times.  In that situation, his humble request for money for a small caliber pistol – permits be damned – seemed eminently reasonable.

After all, a man has a right to protect his family by protecting himself as the source of income.  Now America is not yet anywhere close to where Baghdad was seven years ago; hopefully, we shall never endure a time like that.  Nevertheless, those trying circumstances of Mr Adnan certainly vindicated in bold relief the natural right underlying the second amendment of protecting oneself against the tyranny of kings or the depredations of gangs.

LET THE SHOUTING BEGIN and go on and go on and so on until we approach a modus Vivendi, if not a full and proper consensus.

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."