War Isn't Over, Even If You Want It

Sorry for that riff on an old John Lennon song, but it's July 4th and a good day to catch up on my Iraq war reading. May I recommend this essay in the New York Review of Books by Michael Massing, who recently returned from Iraq after "embedding" with U.S. troops on patrol in several neighborhoods in Baghdad.

He did a masterful job of narrating how his U.S. military minders attempted to stage manage his tour -- a fact of life for any foreign correspondent made exponentially more perverse when traveling through a war zone. But he deftly got his soldier-minders to open up, and his reporting reveals some startling truths about what is going on, especially among the middle-ranked officers:

As I'd expected, my embed had provided little opportunity to hear the Iraqi point of view. Rather, it offered a look at the war through the eyes of the US military, and in that respect it had been very revealing. On the one hand, it had left me with little doubt about the very real gains the surge had brought about, and about the effectiveness of the Petraeus-led counterinsurgency strategy. The situation in Dora had obviously improved, and the combination of aggressive raids, large-scale detentions, and mixing with the community (together with the Sunni Awakening) had had a big hand in achieving that.

At the same time, I'd gotten a look at the crushing effect the war is having on the troops. The breakdown in the Army has advanced so far that in a mere thirteen hours, I could see the rising dissatisfaction, anger, and rebellion within it. The message from the soldiers themselves was that keeping so large a force in the field over the long term seemed unsustainable.

That fact, more than the situation on the ground, will dictate the next president's options in Iraq.

There's also some juicy tidbits about Iran's growing influence in Iraq, the corruption of U.S. private contractors, the squandering and plundering of Iraq's oil wealth, and, unbelievably, the ongoing incompetence and lack of coordination among U.S government agencies trying to sort out the mess.

If you are turned off thinking and reading about the war, as I am on most days, Massing's essay is definitely worth fifteen minutes of your time. It is bracing to be reminded of the magnitude of the disaster that President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers will bequeath to his successor, whomever that will be.

It's All About the Oil

Russia's Resurgence Rests on a Shaky Foundation

MOSCOW -- My second post from Russa is now up on the Scientific American website. I've been reading long-time Russia scholar Marshall Goldman's new book, Petrostate, on my travels here, and it provoked these thoughts as I wandered Moscow's streets during the long twilight hours.

Blogging from Russia for Scientific American

Hello from Tomsk, Russia on the western edge of Siberia! On my way here on assignment for the Scientific American website, I stopped off in Moscow and visited with one of the non-government organizations (NGOs) that have popped up in this country in recent years to help the estimated one million Russians living with HIV. I wanted to get their perspective on the issue of major pharmaceutical companies increasingly moving their clinical trials to countries like this one.

My first blog post on my visit is available on the Scientific American website. I hope you check it out.

In Defense of the Helsinki Declaration

Author Sonia Shah on the Nation website blasts the Food and Drug Administration for repealing U.S. adherence to the Declaration of Helsinki and substituting the agency's Good Clinical Practice guidelines to govern clinical trials run in foreign countries. I'm glad somebody picked up on our story from last week.

One reader of that earlier story suggested researchers operating in developing countries must offer local standards of care to the comparison arm of a trial, and can't get away with only offering a placebo. But what are the local standards of care? A close reading of the FDA's 1996 "E6" guidance on Good Clinical Practice (see page 39) says only that the clinical trials must comply with "applicable regulatory requirements" in the local country.

You wouldn't have to be much of a lawyer to interpret that to mean that if the local standard of care was less than what was globally available (think about an expensive anti-cancer drug, for instance), or if there was no local standard of care, then a new drug being tested in a clinical trial could be compared to either a placebo or an older ineffective medicine and still be in compliance with the E6 Good Clinical Practice guideline.

There is much room for mischief in such guidelines, especially in poor countries with inadequate regulations and lax oversight bodies. Contract research organizations are popping up all over the world to conduct clinical trials for the global pharmaceutical industry. The U.S. should be helping these countries police those groups better, not passing regulations that will make it harder for them to protect their own citizens.

Krugman's Confusion

Paul Krugman of the New York Times is one of my favorite columnists. And even though I voted for Barack Obama in the Maryland primary, I respect his pro-Hillary Clinton drumbeat of criticism aimed at Illinois' junior senator because I believed, until recent weeks, that spirited intellectual competition would sharpen both candidates for the bruising struggle ahead. I want the Democrats to win back the White House in the fall, a must in my view if we're going to get this country back on track. In the end, I'm a Yellow Dog Democrat. I'll gladly vote for either of them over John McCain, who promises us endless war in the Middle East and, on domestic issues, is a transparently duplicitous character getting a free pass from an infatuated national media.

As was apparent from the earliest days of this campaign, Clinton's greatest strength is among working class voters, educated women and older Democratic voters -- all for obvious reasons. The first constituency is crucial, since the others will go Democratic no matter who gets the nomination. The last time workers got a raise in this country was in the late 1990s. We're heading back into tough economic times. I don't think there's a dime's worth of difference between the two candidates on how they'd manage the economy, but trusting someone clearly associated with the last successful Democratic administration seems like a perfectly reasonable response to me.

But in today's column, Krugman attacks Obama for running ads stressing Clinton's support for making purchasing health insurance mandatory, and then suggests Obama's supporters have to be asking themselves "what is this campaign about?"

I don't want to rehash the wonkish debate over mandates. I know a lot about health care. I don't think they're necessary to get to near universal coverage. I think they're a trap politically. And they could be a trap as a system if they're not structured the right away, which is being proved right now in Massachusetts. Why should either Democratic candidate sign on in advance to this particular aspect of health insurance reform? It's precisely what a wonkish candidate who thinks they have all the answers would propose.

But that said, to suggest that there is no rationale for the Obama candidacy, as Krugman did this morning, begs a single word response: Iraq. Not once did he mention that word in his column. Not once did he mention foreign affairs. He only says that the Democrats need to position themselves as the party of prosperity in the fall, and that Clinton is the best candidate to do that.

What he ignores is going to be the main text of this year's fall campaign: What is America's approach going to be moving forward in its relations with the rest of the world? What face are we going to show a world where resources are increasingly constrained yet expectations are rising in its once-poor and still-poor precincts? Over the next couple of weeks, as these two excellent candidates engage in the final rounds of this long campaign, the debate should turn to who is best suited to turning the page on the failed policies of the recent past.

In November, Americans deserve a clear choice on how this country is going to handle Iraq, terrorism, oil, clean energy, and our relations with the developing world. Then, if they choose McCain, at least we will have walked eyes wide open into a future where there are even greater failures and more deaths and squandered treasure to come.

The Iraqi Death Toll Revisited

The controversy continues over how many Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation. Yesterday, Sheldon Rampton, who runs the indispensable PR Watch from Madison, Wisc., wrote this analysis in a comment to my earlier post. I thought his insight into what may have accounted for the differences in the two studies in question worth bringing to the fore, so here it is:

The Lancet study's figure of 600,000 cannot be directly compared to the 150,000 figure just reported in the study conducted by the WHO and the Iraqi government. The Lancet study used a different methodology and attempted to calculate the TOTAL number of people -- including both civilians and combatants -- killed as a result of the war, whereas the WHO/Iraqi study came up with an estimate just of the number of CIVILIANS killed by VIOLENCE.

As the WHO/Iraqi researchers stated in a Q&A summary accompanying their study, "The non-violent mortality rate increased by about 60%, from 3.07 deaths per 1000 people per year before the invasion to 4.92 deaths per 1000 people per year in the post-invasion period. This was not further addressed in this analysis, which focused on mortality due to violent deaths."

Since Iraq has an estimated population of 27 million people, an increase of 1.85 deaths per 1,000 people per year from non-violent causes would add another 50,000 deaths per year, or another 150,000 deaths during the three-year period of the study. That's a very crude estimate, and someone with a more careful look at the data could probably refine it further, but it suggests that if we really want to compare the two studies, the difference is between the Lancet's 600,000 deaths vs. about 300,000 deaths according to the WHO/Iraqi study. That's still a significant difference, but not as large a difference as the popular press is making it out to be.

In addition, there are also some methodological differences between the studies which may account for some of the difference in results. First, the WHO/Iraqi study didn't visit some areas of the country due to concerns for the safety of their field researchers, and instead instead relied statistical extrapolations for those areas based on numbers compiled by Iraq Body Count, an organization that tallies deaths reported in newspapers and other public sources. If the areas most dangerous to field researchers also happen to be the areas where journalists are least likely to report, this extrapolation from IBC's data may have produced an undercount.

A second methodological difference is that the WHO/Iraqi study was conducted later than the Lancet study. In the interim, I believe something on the order of 2 million people fled the country to escape violence. Of course, if a family flees the country after a member of the household has been killed, there will be no one home to report that person's death to the field researchers when they come knocking, thus producing an undercount (which would be exaggerated further if people who had family members killed were more likely to flee the country than people who stayed).

I don't have any way of quantifying the possible effect that these two factors may have had on the study's results, but I think it's jumping the gun to assume that the two studies are in huge contradiction with each other.

The Iraqi Death Toll

The point isn't whether its 600,000 deaths in a population of 24 million since the war began, as claimed in a previous Johns Hopkins study, or 150,000, as reported yesterday in a study conducted by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government. Both are well beyond what has been admitted by the Bush administration (30,000), and social disaster for that relatively small country. And given that we're now approaching year six of the war and the estimate only covered the first three years, it's likely the more conservative estimate would be near 300,000.

Much has been made of the long-term costs of the war in Iraq for America -- now well over one trillion dollars. Add to that the inevitable and justifiable demand by the Iraqi people for reparations for what was done to them. At just $1 million per life, that would total $300 billion. And if we add in the physical destruction caused by the war, a demand for a half trillion dollars in foreign aid would not be unreasonable.

Kenya in Flames

Kenya, historically one of the more prosperous and stable countries in Africa, is in flames. These extraordinary photos by local blogger/journalist Joseph Karoki reveal the depths of the chaos enveloping that country. I was especially struck by this picture of Barack Obama calling for calm and reconciliation in his father's native land.

Apocolypse Now?

President Bush last week says he wants to prevent Iran from "having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

Over the weekend, Our Kurdish allies in the northern part of Iraq harbor a terrorist group that stages a cross-border raid that kills 17 soldiers of our NATO ally, Turkey.

In Baghdad's Sadr City, U.S. warplanes bomb an Shiite neighborhood as soldiers kill 49 "fighters" as military planners bunkered in the Green Zone hatch a full-scale offensive against Shiite militias.

Meanwhile, the Taliban/al Qaeda -- the real terrorist threat in the Middle East -- shows its muscle by killing 130 on the streets of Karachi as Benazir Bhutto, a close ally of the U.S., returns from political exile.

This is American foreign policy in action: ignoring the real threat in the hilly hinterland of Afghanistan/Pakistan while launching a hot war of Us against All in Iraq. In today's Washington Post, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria -- a centrist if ever there was one -- says "the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality" before launching into a discussion of the wisdom being offered by Norman Podhoretz, who has declared that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler" and is seeking to impose a "new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamo-fascism" on the Middle East.

And what order is the Bush administration, whose ear Podhoretz has, trying to impose? A democracy that sends warplanes against schools and neighborhoods, Kurdish terrorists against allies, and our own soldiers into an endless quagmire against Shiite militias?

It seems to me that we're on the brink of a much wider war in Iraq. Is there no one in Congress that can rein in this out-of-control presidency?

Addendum to Greenspan's War-for-Oil Quote

Addendum to yesterday's posting: Today, the Associated Press carried a news story that prominently featured Alan Greenspan war-for-oil quote. I don't know if my mailing yesterday deserves credit for that (there are some AP folks on my email distribution list), but I'm glad it is gaining wider distribution. I heard it in a "top of the hour" radio newscast this morning while driving to see my mom at the nursing home.

Greenspan: "Iraq War Is Largely About Oil"

Former Federal Reserve Board chief Alan Greenspan's memoir hits the bookstores on Monday, and the weekend papers are filled with excerpts. The big story, all the accounts agree, is Greenspan's criticism of President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress' fiscal profligacy. He also gives high praise to the fiscal responsibility exhibited by President Bill Clinton, whose mind for details mirrors his own. "Republicans Deserved to Lose, Greenspan Writes" screamed one headline, referring to the 2006 Congressional elections.

But the Washington Post story by Bob Woodward contained the most damning revelation. Alas, it was buried five paragraphs from the end of a very long story.

Without elaborating, he writes, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Now there's a headline that deserved to be bannered across every front page in America: Greenspan: "Iraq War Is Largely About Oil." I wonder if his failure to elaborate includes a failure to discuss the fiscal implications of the war, since they will haunt this country for the next 50 years. Caring for tens of thousands of crippled veterans, the failure to invest in our own infrastructure, failing to even address, much less reduce our dependence on oil, scrapped social programs, a less generous retirement for millions of Americans without private savings -- the list of reasons why average Americans will take a step back and spit on the sidewalk when Bush's name gets mentioned a quarter century hence goes on and on.

Sadly, neither the Wall Street Journal nor New York Times accounts mentioned the telling paragraph.

Monument to the Bush Years

Over the past several months, craftsmen on scaffolds hanging from the semi-circular wall surrounding the cavernous stairwell at the DuPont Metro station near downtown Washington, DC have been diligently carving a poem, which, if you crane your neck, you have just about enough time to read before the escalators descend into the darkness. They completed the project last week by carving "Walt Whitman, 1865" into the curving, gray, granite wall. President George W. Bush hasn't even left office yet, but in Washington, it's never too early to start building monuments:

"Thus in silence,
in dreams projections;
returning, resuming,
I thread my way
through the hospitals;
the hurt and the wounded
I pacify with soothing hand;
I sit by restless
all the dark night --
some are so young,
some suffer so much --
I recall the experience
sweet and sad. . ."

-- Walt Whitman, 1865

Chafee's Timely Reminder

Former Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, now at a think tank, in today's New York Times offers a timely reminder of the political debate leading up to the 2002 resolution authorizing war in Iraq; the political choices available to all Senators at that time; and the votes of all the presidential candidates who were in the Senate at that time (Biden, Clinton, McCain, for instance). Read it and weep.

Occupation "to Last Years"

Like most Americans, I await President Bush's speech, probably Wednesday night.

Here's how the media will report the story, which has already been well-leaked to the press. "The president last night called for a "surge" of 20,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize Iraqi's major cities while the Shiite-led government builds an army and police force capable of maintaining order."

Here's honest language: The president last night escalated the U.S. occupation of Iraq, ordering 20,000 to 40,000 more soldiers to take up foot patrols Iraqi neighborhoods controlled by warring religious sects. Military officials on the ground say the occupation will last for years.

Must Reading on the War in Iraq

Thomas Powers, our best chronicler of the nation's intelligence services, has a must-read op-ed in today's New York Times. Anyone who thinks that the peoples' voice on election day sealed the deal on U.S. withdrawal should read this piece.

Sachs' Unfashionable Rx for Third World Aid

Jeffrey Sachs drew nervous titters last week when he told a Washington meeting of neglected tropical disease researchers and advocates that a comprehensive campaign for combating malaria would cost “only” $3 billion a year, about three times more than what donor nations currently offer. Visibly taken aback by the audience reaction, Sachs tried to put the number in perspective. “I’m the last macro-economist in the world dealing with single-digit billions,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s a rounding error.”

For this crowd, though, $3 billion seemed unimaginably huge. Neglected tropical disease (NTD) researchers deal with maladies like hookworm, trachoma, and elephantiasis, which in aggregate devastate nearly as many lives in the developing world as HIV/AIDS and more than malaria or TB. Even when they don’t kill, they stunt growth, impair intellectual development and permanently disable millions of people, dooming them and the villages that must support them to grinding poverty. Yet campaigns against these diseases over the years have been given short shrift by the global health community.

That may be about to change. Under the leadership of Peter Hotez of George Washington University, who is working to develop a vaccine for hookworm, non-profits that focus on 13 neglected tropical diseases recently banded together in the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Disease Control, which sponsored last week’s conference. They plan to press official aid agencies like the World Bank, U.S. AID and the World Health Organization to incorporate treatment for NTDs into the same outreach campaigns that are now spreading treatments for AIDS, malaria and TB around the globe. It’s a piggyback strategy that could have a rapid impact on reducing the incidence of these poverty-inducing illnesses.

While new drugs and vaccines are needed (once again the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has taken the lead on the technology front with its recent announcement of nearly $70 million in grants for NTD researchers), safe, effective and cheap drugs for treating more than half the 13 diseases already exist. Unfortunately, most never reach the people who need them.

For once, the global pharmaceutical industry hasn’t been a roadblock to wider deployment. Companies like Merck (Mectazin for onchocerciasis, which causes river blindness), Pfizer (Zithromax for trachoma), GlaxoSmithKline (albendazole for lymphatic filiarisis, which causes elephantiasis) and Bayer (praziquantel for schistomiasis, one form of intestinal worms) have generously made their products available at low or no cost to any non-profit agency or government that can successfully deploy them in the developing world. “The drug companies are the good guys in this story,” Hotez said.

So where’s the roadblock? The conference featured a number of non-profit partnerships that have succeeded in making inroads against these diseases in some countries. The African Program for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC), working with Merck to fight river blindness, appears to have done an especially effective job in the 16 countries where it operates. “It’s a ready-made network for distributing drugs for the other NTDs,” said Uche Amazigo, director of APOC. “If you want to distribute your ITN (insecticide-treated nets for malaria control), bring them to APOC. We know how to do it,” she declared.

However, overall distribution of newly available disease treatments, whether for HIV/AIDS, malaria or NTDs, has been poor across sub-Saharan Africa and the other developing countries. Rural health outposts in these countries simply are not set up for it. One conference attendee, a public health administrator from Uganda, complained that in his country all of these newly launched programs wind up on the desk of a single health outreach worker, who is often responsible for several geographically dispersed villages. “Who will support the health care systems in our countries,” he asked.

When several panelists suggested the non-profit partnerships could take the place of concerted government action, especially in areas plagued by civil strife or government corruption, Sachs, now sitting in the audience, leaped to his feet to give the conversation a dose of economic reality.

“These are countries that have per capita incomes of $200 to $500 a year,” he said. “That means there is, at best $45 per person a year for all government services, police, defense, water, education, health,” he said. “Health might be able to get $6 to $10 per year per capita at most, versus $3,000 per year in rich countries.” That countries somehow don’t have the will or are incapable of tackling these problems “is nonsense and a deep misunderstanding.”

He was especially dismissive of World Bank programs, which demand even the poorest countries repay their loans. He condemned social marketing schemes that operate on the premise that poor people will put more stock in remedies that they have to buy at subsidized (and theoretically affordable) rates. “I’ve seen people stand outside a clinic because they can’t afford the dollar for a donor-supported program,” he said. “Most of the people in these communities don’t earn money. User fees are an abomination in low-income countries.”

Sachs, who turns 52 this week, recently received a $50 million grant from George Soros to develop, through his Earth Institute at Columbia University, economic development initiatives to end poverty in selected rural African villages. It is in essence a pilot project for a massive ramp up in outside aid. Though he meets with ex-presidents and foreign leaders and is habitually mentioned as one of the 50 most influential people on the planet, he cuts a less than imposing figure in a conference setting. He travels with a backpack stuffed with notes and books, and his Powerpoint slides contained no fancy graphics.

But he was treated like a traveling rock star by the neglected tropical disease researchers and advocates, and not just because Bono wrote the introduction to his recent book, The End of Poverty. A decade ago, Sachs was widely vilified for advocating free market “shock therapy” to jumpstart the post-Communist economies of the eastern bloc (he rejects the shock therapy label). In some countries, at least, it worked. Now, in contemplating how to jumpstart economies in the poorest regions of the world, he’s come up with the opposite prescription: massive government aid.

But how massive is it, really? To spend $40 per capita for health in the developing world would cost $35 billion or one-tenth of one percent of GNP in the rich world, he says. “It’s easily affordable. Don’t beat up on poor countries that aren’t doing it because they can’t afford it.”

Sachs is one of the nation’s leading macro-economists and something of an intellectual bellwether. Should the political winds continue to shift, a U.S. establishment in desperate need of help on foreign affairs may once again look to him for a fresh approach in its dealings with the developing world.

The Permanent Bases Question

I highly recommend the latest issue of the American Prospect for its excellent investigative article by Spencer Ackerman exposing the U.S. military's plans -- or non-planned plans as it turns out -- to build permanent bases in Iraq.

In the 2004 presidential debate, Democratic candidate John Kerry pressed President Bush to disavow the notion the government had plans to build permanent bases. The president never responded directly, and the press never followed up. (I'm proud of the fact that I saw this as the major news event coming out of that debate, which no one in the press reported the next day.)

Ackerman interviewed former State Department aide Larry Diamond, who is a card-carrying member of the conservative Hoover Institution and a former Stanford colleague of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She brought him into the administration as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, yet ignored his memos "implor(ing) the administration to renounce any long-term presence in Iraq."

In Ackerman's story, Diamond wondered:

It baffles me. Why is the White House press corps not confronting the president, saying, 'Mr. President, are we seeking permanent military bases in Iraq or not, and if not, why not take the issue off the table?' It's appalling. It's no less a scandal that the press has failed to pin the administration down on this, and the administration has failed to come clean to the American people as we bleed and die there."

Given that the permanent presence of foreign troops on Arab soil is one of the main issues goading terrorists into action, you'd think the press would demand that the administration provide an answer. You'd think Congress would hold hearings. You'd think the military brass would raise questions. But none has, and the military has simply stumbled along, building the permanent bases without, if we're to believe Ackerman's reporting, specific authorization from the White House or the Pentagon. They're still in what President Nixon's men used to call "plausible deniability" mode.

It has often been said that the genius of the American political system can be found in the system of checks and balances created by the nation's founders. Alas, when no one checks, there is no balance and the nation teeters perilously off course.

9/11 Five Years Later

This is a day of remembrances and I had to smile this morning as I listened to historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Kennedy on the radio asking an interesting series of "what if" questions. High on their list: What if President had actually united the country by taking some concrete steps to reduce our oil consumption, which remains the primary financial prop for Middle Eastern terror?

Their comments reminded me of my own first reactions to the terrible events of five years ago. Sitting in my home office, cut off from my students in lower Manhattan (I was teaching at New York University at the time), I penned these words for Marketplace Radio. The commentary aired on September 18, 2001:

America is in a war against terrorism and people on the home front want to help. But what should they do? Progressives like myself wring our hands about defending civil liberties and stemming hatred during these perilous times. But that’s not enough.

If we want to catch the hearts and minds of the American people, we have to say more. I propose that we use this moment of national grief and unified purpose to advance a positive agenda.

First, let’s immediately wean America from its depends on foreign oil. As Daniel Yergen wrote in “The Prize,” oil has fueled both economic growth and great conflicts in the 20th century. But in the 21st century, it has become albatross around the advanced industrial world’s neck.

It is the primary source of not only air pollution and global warming, but of geopolitical instability. Isn’t it shocking that so many of the terrorists came from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producing state? The technology is there today to end our oil dependency. If it wanted to, the automobile industry could within five years have every vehicle rolling off assembly lines using clean technologies like fuel cells or battery-powered hybrid engines.

Second, America is now faced with a crisis in the airline industry. Let’s build a high speed rail system. That would solve two problems. It would reduce our appetite for oil, and take the pressure off the airlines by eliminating most flights under 300 miles. We’re dreading that airport gridlock and long lines for security checks. We could entangle that mess by shifting government investment into high speed trains. And by building a high speed rail system, it would create tens of thousands of jobs, just what the economy needs right now. And don’t forget: the Interstate Highway System was built in the name of national defense.

Ending our dependence from foreign oil; a high speed rail system; jobs from a major public works project – these home front programs are practical, they are progressive, and they would give the economy a boost. And most importantly, it would unite the nation in the home front war on terrorism in a way that doesn’t sacrifice our basic freedoms.

In Washington, this is Merrill Goozner for Marketplace.

What can we say about the Bush administration's response to 9/11 five years later? It still hasn't begun work on this crucial agenda. Instead:

By every objective measure on the one issue that even the President says he should ultimately be judged, George W. Bush has been a total failure.

"Military Intelligence And You"

The disastrous foreign policies of the Bush administration have spawned a generation of satiric filmmakers that should enlighten and enliven our lives for years to come. I was just sent a promotion piece for filmmaker Dale Kutzera's new satire, Military Intelligence And You!, which he hopes will be playing soon in a movie theater near you. Watch the trailer, and I think you'll agree, when it comes to movie satire, this incoming round is too close for comfort.

Hillary's Sister Souljah Moment

The progressive movement held a massive pep rally at the Washington Hilton over the past two days. They gather every year around this time and it is testimony to the angry mood among at least part of the nation's electorate that all the leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination showed up. I went last year, and got to hear a few backbench Congressmen from Illinois, California and Ohio. Today, it was Hillary.

And what she had to say wasn't encouraging. On the war in Iraq, she offered the Democratic centrist view that we must "stay the course" in Iraq. No timeline for withdrawals. The centrist "wisdom" is to project toughness. We'll prosecute the war (is this really a war?) better than President Bush. She got booed for her efforts. I'm sure her handlers were pleased. What better way to cement your centrist credentials than to get booed at a leftist confab.

Sen. John Kerry, to his credit, finally saw the light and admitted he was wrong to vote for the war resolution because, as he put it, he was lied to by the administration. Him and 300 million others.

Iraq isn't Vietnam. The insurgency there is not broad-based or motivated by an ideology that can win widespread backing. But the two situations do have one thing in common. The U.S. has irretrievably lost the good will of any Iraqi who cares about his country.

I found a piece on NPR today enlightening. It recounted the various stories told by differing government officials over time about the permanent bases the military is building in Iraq. Sen. Clinton's embrace of a semi-permanent presence in Iraq is her effort to show the military that she is tough enough to be commander in chief. To my ears, that means that if she is elected, she will continue to prosecute the war, or whatever it is you want to call the steady drumbeat of drive-by bombings and shootings that are taking place in Iraq.

Vietnam? Got rid of Johnson and got Nixon. Iraq? Get rid of Bush and get . . . ?

Terrorism Stats -- the bitter truth

This just out from Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) office:

Rep. Waxman issued a Flash Report examining data released by the State Department and National Counterterrorism Center that shows that the number of reported global terrorism incidents has increased exponentially in the three years since the United States invaded Iraq--an increase of over 5,000% in the number of terrorist attacks and over 2,000% in the number of deaths in three years.

The Administration claims that the 2005 data is not comparable with data from previous years because the rise in attacks is due to increased surveillance and better methodology. These are the same arguments the Administration made in 2003, when attacks rose to a 20-year high, and in 2004, when the number of attacks tripled in a single year.

When preparing this year's report, the Administration consulted with global terrorism experts who recommended that the Administration release data that could be compared to previous years. Professor David Laitin of Stanford University recommended that if the Administration changed its methodology, it should "recalibrate" data from previous years so "we do not lose a sense of the time trends." Not only did the Administration reject this recommendation, but officials denied the recommendation was ever made.

In response to the Administration's actions, Rep. Waxman stated: "For the third year in a row, the Bush Administration is playing games with the numbers to hide the truth: global terrorism has skyrocketed since the invasion of Iraq."

L.A. Times scoop: CIA duped by Iraqi visa seeker on chemical/biological weapons threat

The bulk of the pre-war case for invading Iraq rested not on the threat Saddam Hussein might use nuclear weapons (the “mushroom cloud” made famous by Condolezza Rice), but on the administration’s claim that he possessed chemical and biological weapons (CBW). Ex-New York Times reporter Judith Miller staked her reputation on reporting those threats and embedded herself with the special units searching for CBW in the early days of the war. At one point, she even reported the unit uncovered a chemical weapons cache – a report that later turned out to be false.

That’s why Sunday's Los Angeles Times report by reporters Bob Drogin and John Goetz (a freelancer) is so significant. They revealed that German intelligence agents repeatedly told their U.S. counterparts BEFORE THE WAR that their source for information about Iraq's CBW program – an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball – didn’t have a clue and was completely unreliable.

From the article: “CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called ‘water cooler gossip’ into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks. Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.”

Why did the Bush administration believe him? Near the end of the lengthy story, the Bush administration is castigated for never correcting the President’s comments in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq harbored chemical weapons or his subsequent statement that some had been found. But the story’s upshot is that this bit of false pre-war intelligence was largely the CIA’s fault. Perhaps when Congress investigates this element of the story during hearings next week on prewar intelligence, they’ll find out whether folks in the White House (or, more likely, in the Vice President’s office) were ordering up the intelligence they wanted to hear. Thanks to Curveball, the CIA had the goods to deliver.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell, who delivered the now infamous February 2003 speech at the United Nations justifying the U.S. rush to war, was once again left out on a limb defending his honor by claiming he was out of the loop. He said that he was unaware of a debate within the intelligence community about the veracity of Curveball’s claims.

There have been huge domestic ramifications to the false claim that the U.S. faces a significant threat from bioweapons experts abroad (most accounts of the still unsolved anthrax murders of October 2001 suggest the perpetrator isn't a foreigner, but someone who had access to U.S. stockpiles of weaponized anthrax). The failure to find and arrest the real perpetrator has left the American people fearful and politically vulnerable. The CIA report, based on evidence from serial fabricators like Curveball, gave the Bush administration the ammunition it needed to play to those fears and take the country to war.

It also gave the President and Congress the political capital needed to channel billions of dollars into researching drugs and vaccines for bioweapon threats like anthrax and smallpox, which, from a public health point of view, pose no threat to Americans. And, it would now appear, that research was equally meaningless from a national security point of view.

What a waste of human capital. Over the past four years, scientists sidetracked into studying anthrax could have been addressing the infectious diseases that actually pose a threat to Americans and the developing world – like tuberculosis, malaria and avian flu.

Iraq update: Time for an exit strategy

Adil Shamoo, a professor of ethics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, has collaborated with me on a number of pharmaceutical-related issues. But he is also a native of Iraq. Today, he posted a heartfelt commentary on the Foreign Policy in Focus website. You can also read it here:

Despite increased U.S. military operations and the stepped-up training of Iraqis, the Iraq insurgency continues to be deadly—nearly 3 U.S. soldiers died per day in August. Dwarfing that number are Iraqi deaths as a result of the fighting which average 34 every day.

Iraqis, the U.S. public, and now even members of the U.S. Congress are calling for an exit strategy. It’s time for President Bush to hear these calls of the people and explain what the plan is and when U.S. troops will come home.

Permanent U.S. Bases in Iraq? An Update

I'm not the only one who picked up on John Kerry's pledge not to establish permanent bases in Iraq. For a complete discussion, including an excellent review of the media's lousy coverage of this critical issue, see TomDispatch.com.

One overlooked point from the debate

John Kerry sent an important signal to the Arab world and the Iraqi people last night. Unfortunately, it was largely overlooked by the commentariat. He pointed out that the Bush administration is already building long-term military bases in Iraq. Kerry pledged to end that program if elected to office.

Kerry looked presidential. Bush looked worried. Instant polls declared a winner. The most readable parts of the morning press focused on style, not substance.

I think Kerry's pledge to eliminate the permanent base option was the most important thing to come out of last night's debate. It tells the Iraqis, the Arab world and the American people that at least one of the two candidates on stage last night has a vision for how to end our long national nightmare Iraq.

Islam's Long Twilight Struggle and Us

During the war in Vietnam, alternative papers connected to the antiwar movement occasionally dipped into conspiratorial mode by printing a map of the South China Sea showing how Mobil, Esso (in those days) and the other oil giants wanted to carve up South Vietnam’s coastal waters.

The war wasn’t about oil, of course. Vietnam evolved into America’s greatest foreign policy blunder of the 20th century for ideological reasons. Americans were misled by leaders whose rigid anti-communism blinded them to the true nature of the Vietnamese people’s nationalist yearnings. Peasant nationalism, to use Chalmers Johnson’s formulation, had united under the banner of Communism, just as it had two decades earlier in China.

What we should have learned from that debacle is simple. People do yearn for democracy, but it can’t be imposed from outside. It certainly can’t be imposed by force of arms. Under those circumstances, democracy has about as much chance of putting down roots as an alien religion spread by the same means.

I couldn’t help but think about Vietnam last night while listening to President George Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The first half of his speech, devoted to his domestic agenda, sounded flat. Even the delegates seemed uninterested.

But when he turned to his war in Iraq, the speech and Madison Square Garden came alive. “Our mission in Afghanistan and Iraq is clear: We will help new leaders to train their armies and move toward elections and get on the path of stability and democracy as quickly as possible. And then our troops will return home with the honor they have earned.”

He then made the obligatory (and false) link to the war on terror by offering an emotional quote from a soldier. This valiant if misled young man said that his opponents in Iraq were terrorists, and if he were not fighting them there, he (and the American people) would be fighting them here at home.

A few minutes later, John Kerry gave a rambling speech in Springfield, Ohio. I stayed up to listen. Lord, the man is a poor public speaker. But he hit on the two themes that in starkest terms best illustrate the choice confronting the American people this fall.

First, he said that Bush and the neo-conservatives around him have “misled” us into Iraq. This is objectively true (note that Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most notorious outlaw still at large, did not get mentioned by the president even once last night).

The other significant theme was his tying the Bush administration’s Middle East policy to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Kerry attacked the Saudi royal family while pledging to put this country on track to the environmentally necessary shift to a non-oil based energy system.

Unlike Vietnam, this war really is about oil. In the past week, several Republican leaders have admitted they foresee a permanent and very large military garrison in that part of the world. They point to our military presence in Japan and Germany after World War II. Do they not recall Osama’s stated reasons for attacking the U.S.? The number one reason on his list was the 5,000 U.S. soldiers based in Saudi Arabia – the home of Islam’s most holy shrines.

Over the next several decades, the Middle East’s oil reserves will become more crucial to those parts of the world economy still dependent on oil. At the same time, the corrupt regimes that now control those reserves will be engaged in a long, twilight struggle to hold onto power. What has happened over the past few years (really going back to the Ayotollah Khomeini’s ousting of the Shah of Iran) are nothing but battles in the long civil war raging throughout the Islamic world.

The American people have a clear choice this fall. Do we want to permanently intervene in this civil war? Do we want to garrison several hundred thousand troops smack in the middle of that conflict? Do we want to perpetuate our dependence on their resources that makes such unwinnable military folly inevitable?

Or do we want a world where our children and grandchildren at least have a chance of growing up under something that you or I might recognize as peace?

If we reelect Bush, the American people will in essence be throwing our support behind the most reactionary elements of our society – religious fanatics in league with oil barrons fighting against the environmental imperative – who have forged an alliance with some of the most reactionary elements of their societies – oil-soaked sheikhs, CIA collaborators and faction fighters in religious garb.

In the long run, I can’t believe that’s the winning side.

Nuclear Blackmail

The growing North Korean threat -- and why containment may still be our best means of staving it off.
(This article first appeared August 8, 2003 in The American Prospect Online)

About a year ago, the Bush administration began laying the groundwork for war in Iraq with a propaganda offensive based on what now appears to have been a deliberate manipulation of faulty intelligence reports. In recent weeks, there have been a slew of news reports based on leaked intelligence suggesting that North Korea -- another charter member of the president's "axis of evil" -- is galloping full speed toward developing nuclear weapons. Contrary to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card's dictum, August is the month for new product rollouts.

The media offensive has been accompanied by the usual theatrics. The State Department's top arms negotiator is firing off inflammatory rhetoric on a tour of the Far East. Well-placed former officials are pounding war drums along the Potomac. So forgive me for bringing up the fable about the little boy who cried wolf, but is there any reason to heed the drums this time?

Evidence of how seriously official Washington is taking the possibility of opening a northeast Asia front in the hot war on terrorism arrived last Monday in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and three-star-Gen.-turned-FOX-News-commentator Thomas G. McInerney. These two gentlemen, who presumably have a stake in maintaining their professional credibility, lamented "the reflexive rejection in the public debate of the use of force against North Korea."

Even though six-sided talks to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula are about to get under way, the United States should begin planning now for massive air strikes to take out Pyongyang's nuclear facilities and the 11,000-plus artillery pieces along the demilitarized zone, they wrote. Their battle plan after this preemptive air strike includes sending in a couple of U.S. Army divisions alongside the South Korean army to decisively defeat North Korea "in 30 to 60 days." With President Bush off on a 30-day vacation that will be punctuated by the occasional campaign fund raiser, and one to two Americans dying a day in Iraq, you'd think the armchair generals would be a bit more circumspect about condemning the Korean peninsula to what Pyongyang promises will become a "sea of fire" if the United States attacks.

Woolsey and McInerney's avowed goal in writing the article was to get China to flex its muscles and boot North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il from power. They even raised the specter of a nuclear Japan, South Korea and Taiwan unless China moves decisively to end North Korean blackmail.

There's no question that North Korea is a bad actor in this rapidly evolving drama. Kim Jong-Il runs the Hermit Kingdom like a criminal enterprise. His 22 million people are starving. At the end of last year, desperate for renewed aid from the West, he announced to the world that he was reprocessing the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods at the Yongbyon nuclear complex and threw inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) out of the country. Blackmail isn't too strong a word to use for his tactics.

But it's important to remember that we've been here before. Nearly a decade ago, Kim Jong-Il's father, Kim Il Sung, pulled the same trick with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter to negotiate a temporary truce. North Korea put its nuclear ambitions on hold in exchange for food and energy aid, which it received throughout the 1990s in fits and starts.

However, that shaky agreement collapsed early in the Bush administration when the new president's advisers forsook containment and deliberately snubbed former South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung because of his rapprochement policy toward North Korea. When Bush included the North Korean regime in the axis of evil in the wake of September 11, Kim Jong-Il decided his best chance for survival was to once again play the nuclear card.

So what evidence is there that North Korea is moving decisively to develop nuclear weapons and export weapons-grade plutonium? During the 1994 crisis, intelligence reports suggested that Pyongyang had enough plutonium to build two or three bombs. But there is no hard evidence that the bombs exist, and North Korea has never demonstrated its capabilities with a full-blown nuclear test.

Intelligence analysts raise the specter of North Korea exporting nuclear materiel in a suitcase to terrorist groups. But no one has alleged that a terrorist group has put its hands on nuclear materiel, and such a weapon would be almost impossible to catch, even with the quasi-blockade of North Korea that the Bush administration is trying to organize. (The Washington Post reported that 11 nations have signed onto the U.S. interdiction effort, but not China, Russia or South Korea -- the three countries that border the impoverished and isolated North Korea.) Of course, this is a problem that applies to every country with a nuclear-energy program that has surplus fissile materiel sloshing around. The only solution is a beefed up IAEA and aggressive inspections -- precisely the multilateral solution the Bush administration abhors.

Meanwhile, North Korea's greatest export may be its engineers, who are probably anxious to get a decent bite to eat. According to Monday's Los Angeles Times, an entire community of North Korean scientists is now working in Iran on that country's nuclear-energy program, which Western intelligence analysts believe is also moving toward nuclear capability. In addition to its people, North Korea has exported its short- and medium-range missile technology to raise hard currency.

Last month, Pyongyang announced it had completed reprocessing the fuel in its 8,000 spent rods and officially declared its nuclear ambitions. That would be enough plutonium for an additional six to eight bombs. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that sophisticated chemical monitors along the demilitarized zone had picked up wisps of telltale krypton gas, a byproduct of reprocessing. But computer analysis of the prevailing wind patterns suggested that the gas had come not from Yongbyon, the site of North Korea's current reprocessing facilities, but from another reprocessing plant somewhere else in the country. Still, as Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst James Wolfsthal pointed out in an article on New Scientist.com, the krypton "is a red flag, not a yardstick." It is entirely possible that North Korea deliberately released the gas to mislead American sensors.

Does North Korea's nuclear blackmail and gas in the wind add up to casus belli? Not if the Japanese, South Korean and Chinese governments have anything to say about it. What they fear most of all is the rapid collapse of North Korea, and the economic hardships that that would impose on their economies. So they continue to push the Bush administration down the path of negotiations, where it has reluctantly and belatedly agreed to go. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry pointed out in early July, containment remains the best hope of keeping Kim Jong-Il in his box. It worked throughout the Clinton years, and it might be working still if the Bush administration had not deliberately deep-sixed the policy.

But for a president whose approval ratings are slipping because of the botched postwar situation in Iraq, that's probably not such a bad state of affairs. Prolonged and occasionally belligerent talks with a rogue regime that may or may not have nukes may be just what Karl Rove needs. Early next year, FOX News commentators like McInerney will be outlining war scenarios under a news logo that claims, "You Cringe, We Decide." In an election year, it sure beats talking about the economy.

What's Needed Now: Economic Security

(This article originally appeared in The America Prospect Online. It has been widely reprinted and delivered as a Marketplace Commentary on National Public Radio.)

Over the next few weeks, America will be consumed by debate about how life in this beacon of freedom may have to change to confront the terrorist threat. Liberals will have to think creatively about how to protect civil liberties in an era when it has become apparent that there are cells of people within the U.S. who are willing to engage in indiscriminate mass murder to further their insane politics.

But we have to do more. We must use this moment of national grief and unified purpose to advance a positive agenda that speaks to all Americans, who are desperate for a way to contribute to the war effort. Issues of economic security and policy have not gone away --they have only been upstaged for now by the terrorist threat. Here are a few questions that should not be overlooked:

First, the nation must immediately embark on a crash program to wean itself from dependence on foreign oil. That means substantially weaning itself from oil itself.

The most fitting memorial to the dead of September 11, 2001 will come if, decades from now, the assault is recalled as the event that triggered the end of the era of oil. Oil, as Daniel Yergin wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book "The Prize," fueled both economic growth and the great geopolitical conflicts of the 20th century.

But in the 21st century, it has become an albatross around the advanced industrial world's neck. It is the primary source of not only air pollution and global warming, but of geopolitical instability. The nations that, through the fluke of geography, are the source of much of the world's oil, have largely squandered the patrimony that flowed into their wallets. Their spiritually and economically impoverished peoples have become the seedbeds of the fanaticism that has needlessly taken so many lives.

The technologies already exist to accomplish the goal of eliminating half of our oil usage over the next decade. The automobile industry must be given generous tax incentives and subsidies to ensure that every new car that rolls off assembly lines within five years uses clean technologies like fuel cells that are either oil-free or are hybrids. Car fleet fuel efficiency standards should be doubled with generous financial awards for date-certain completion. And then they should be doubled again.

The government should also jump start massive new investments in non-polluting and non-oil using technologies for producing electricity. Solar, wind, geo-thermal and biomass -- these are the energy sources of the 21st century, not oil and natural gas from politically unstable regions.

The debate over changing our travel habits in the U.S. in response to the horrific hijackings cannot be limited to adapting new security precautions at the nation's overburdened airports. There were undoubtedly many ways the terrorists could have eluded our slapdash airport security precautions. Long lines of harried travelers brushing past the underpaid rent-a-guards at x-ray checkpoints pose almost no deterrence to the determined mass murderer.

Yet the outlook for the nation's airports in the coming decades promises even bigger crowds and longer lines. Moreover, as long as the current economics of the airline industry are in place -- with their thin operating margins in good times and massive losses in bad times -- improving the quality of airport security could prove very difficult to finance.

But there's a way around this dilemma. The nation should resolve now to end gridlock at its airports by eliminating all flights of up to 300 miles. How? By building a high-speed rail system in this country that will get people to their business and pleasure destinations just as fast, if not faster, and at less cost and with more comfort than current air travel.

A crash program now could have a modern, high-speed rail system in place in ten years that would largely eliminate the Washington-New York and New York-Boston shuttles; link the cities within Florida and Texas; hub-and-spoke the checkerboard-patterned cities of the Upper Midwest; run up and down the West Coast. It's a crash program that would create tens of thousands of new jobs in every section of the country.

Then, the airlines could adopt continental schedules that fill up their planes. Do competing airlines really need to send planes from Boston to Los Angeles every hour that are only one-third filled?

Businesses can adapt by altering their business schedules, and airlines can drop their ruinous competition for the limited trans-continental market. High-speed rail and full planes will mean less frequent aircraft departures and less crowded airports. That will give the airlines and airport authorities time to carry out the sophisticated and appropriate security measures that must be adapted in the wake of this week's terrorist assault. Those flights may cost more, but it's a small price to pay.

These are just some of the home front programs that the American people can unite behind now to combat terrorism within our borders. They're practical. They're high-tech. And they will give the economy a boost.

And most important, they will unite the home front in the war against terrorism in a way that doesn't sacrifice our basic freedoms.