With the massive Baby Boom generation poised to don beige sneakers, collect their social security checks, and test the limits of Medicare, health care has become a pressing issue, raising the question of how the United States is going to afford it all, especially in light of the growing call for universal coverage.  In “Securing Accessible Health Care,” conference panelists Stephen Zuckerman, Amy Lischko, and Susan Dentzer, with moderator Barbara Schone (bios), addressed this critical topic, focusing on the current state of, and possibilities for, public and private health insurance.

Zuckerman, a Principal Research Associate at the Health Policy Center of the Urban Institute, opened the discussion with a snapshot of the U.S. population.  The number of insured among children has, he said, increased slightly in recent years, thanks to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), although the picture is not so rosy for their parents.  Among adults, the number covered by public insurance is relatively steady, but the rolls of those relying on private health insurance are decreasing.  One reason for the decline in private coverage, Zuckerman claimed, is that the costs of policies from private providers are growing at a rate faster than most salaries, and to levels higher than many small businesses can afford.  As components of a possible solution, Zuckerman offered options such as expanding the existing public coverage programs and subsidizing insurance for the middle class.  He also raised examples of current experiments in health insurance, among them being Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger’s call for mandated coverage in California and, at the federal level, the Health Insurance Flexibility and Accountability (HIFA) Demonstration Initiative’s waiver allowing states more freedom in designing their Medicaid and SCHIP programs.

Representing a working example of another possible solution – state-mandated coverage for all residents – was Amy Lischko, Commissioner of the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy in Massachusetts.  Massachusetts’ vision for its health care experiment, she said, was universal access to health services for people of all income levels.  Much like Zuckerman’s portrayal of the obstacles hindering such access, Lischko cited exploding insurance premiums as a prime culprit for the present crisis, with smaller businesses dropping coverage for their employees and poorer employees refusing employer-subsidized coverage from firms still offering it.

That costs are sky-rocketing, though, is not the only source of frustration for consumers.  Surrounding the healthcare industry currently is an aura of mystery obscuring how those costs are actually calculated, said Lischko.  Consumers are unable to make informed decisions about their health-related expenses prior to receiving their hospital and doctor bills, or perform the cost-comparison - not to mention quality-comparison - shopping that they would for other purchases of similar financial magnitude.

At the state level, the task of addressing health care costs is no less daunting. In mandating that its citizens take up some level of insurance coverage, Massachusetts still faces numerous challenges in actually implementing such a program.  First, Lischko said, the state needs to define its concept of affordability in order to determine the share of costs that each income level must bear.  Next, the state needs to clarify its position on the amount of insurance that each person must carry.  Then it must address issues ranging from the policy on cross-state employers to the proper mix of public coverage and subsidies and private and employee-sponsored insurance.  As a final step, Massachusetts, a state with a relatively high number of insured residents to begin with, has to delineate how it will measure the success of the program, a benchmark that will communicate to other states and the federal government that Massachusetts’ is a model worth mirroring.

Mandates and the concept of universal coverage are nothing new, said Susan Dentzer, Health Correspondent for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.  The doomed Clinton plan in the early 1990s represents the most recent debate on the issue, although it was “dead all along,” Dentzer claimed, likening it to Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho.  Lawmakers had decided against such government intervention before the full contents of the plan were even revealed.  What has changed to bring universal health care again into the limelight, according to Dentzer, is that ten million more Americans are uninsured than were in the ‘90’s.  In addition, major employers have declared that health care costs are an enormous burden on their profit margins.  The cause is helped further by the experiments at the state, such as that in Massachusetts, demonstrating the possibilities for private/public partnerships in providing insurance.

Will this new environment prove more suitable for action at the federal level?  Will the added pressure of the business community be enough to tip the balance in favor of the millions of Americans without access to regular, quality health care?  According to Dentzer, with a whole slew of candidates vying for public support, the 2008 election may provide the answer.

Karen Beach

After briefly reflecting on his good days as a professor at Georgetown, Andrew Natsios, Special Envoy for Sudan and former USAID administrator, delved into painting a dynamic tapestry depicting the of foreign aid.  He weaved the private donors, whose contributions have surged in recent years, alongside public institutions, whose assistance has persisted over the past several decades.  Threads repeatedly tied the discourse back to the changing environment and global transitions to which foreign aid is exposed, helping Mr. Natsios in underscoring his thesis about changing aid in a changing world.

Mr. Natsios compared the international transitions that aid faces today with those it faced fifty years ago, when the principles of international aid were first established by the United States’ postwar aid vehicle for Europe, the Marshall Plan.  The policies surrounding the Marshall programs, combined with the establishment of multilateral organizations, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, established the international architecture on which foreign aid has operated for the past five decades.

But, Mr. Natsios pointed out, that architecture is changing.  While 70% of foreign aid came from the public sector in 1970, only 15% of capital flows in 1998 were public in origin.  That’s not to say that public spending on aid has dwindled—total aid has increased three fold.  The source of the increase, and the reason for the change in the source of aid is a surge in aid from private donors.

Mr. Natsios attributed the sources of private giving to the United States’ environment of “Toquevillian Democracy,” in which balanced democracy and active civil society spurred the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Gates to establish significant platforms of private giving.  While no other country has a historical analog, this new model of private giving is beginning to take hold worldwide.  The World Bank recently created an office to establish Global Development Alliances based on a model established by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Acknowledging that the international architecture continues to evolve, Mr. Natsios suggested that the importance of the public sector in foreign aid would not diminish provided public institutions stay on their toes and evolve in tandem.  His message was clear: the world is shifting, and aid needs to shift with it.

Jake Ward

This was a dynamic panel discussion that brought together energy experts from various fields. While the state of America’s energy policies certainly lacks cheerful optimism, the discussion proved to be immensely enjoyable – at least by this participant – because of the experts’ naked honesty and candid commentary.

In sharp contrast to the Bush Administration’s rhetoric of American oil independence and the save-all, cure-all ethanol production, the experts all agreed that it was silly to think we could significantly reduce our dependency on Middle East oil. Rather, a realistic solution to our problem is a stable, long-term policy that combines carbon-pricing, diverse energy sources, and recognition of the commercial reality of R&D.

The panel was moderated by Winston Harrington, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. The interplay of the four panelists ensured a comprehensive presentation of all the existing policy options. Tim Brennan, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, gave a brief synopsis of problems facing the electricity market. He argued that varying prices are needed to relieve congestion, and that current policies of cross-subsidization are fostering cost misallocation. Deregulation of the whole industry is not an option because it would give the “wires-side” monopoly an incentive to discriminate. Ultimately, since electricity is a necessary and interconnected energy source with a fragile supply and demand, additional oversight of expansion is needed.

Robert Gramlich, Policy Director at American Wind Energy Association, highlighted the lesser-known details of wind energy in the United States. Wind has the potential to be a long-term energy option because it is cleaner, less volatile, and more abundant than any other energy source. As such, it has become the fastest growing source in the world, and will likely continue to do so if the House passes pending legislation to establish a Federal Renewable Portfolio Standard. But Gramlich warned that if wind energy is going to materialize into a viable policy, it will require a stable carbon pricing policy and transformation of the electrical industry’s transmission grid to ensure delivery of wind energy to the nation’s customers.

David Hunger, one of GPPI’s own, came armed with graphs and charts to show that energy independence was an ill-fitting term. What future policy-makers like ourselves should be more concerned about is creating a sustainable policy, which will require three things: diversifying energy sources, increasing the efficiency in the processes by which energy is used, and conserving energy. Additionally, Dr. Hunger also contemplated establishing a strategic national gas reserve, based on the apparent success of our strategic petroleum reserves.

The most dynamic and colorful panelist proved to be the one with the most pessimistic outlook. Lew Watts is the President and CEO of PFC Energy, and he followed up the other panelists’ recommendations by exposing all the popular myths embedded in our current energy policies. Like Hunger, Watts dismissed energy independence as a silly idea. His take was that energy policy is simply a bubble in a world of insecurity, and that OECD countries cannot survive without OPEC. Watts also deflated the myth of alternative energy sources – there is nothing on the horizon that will change our country’s reliance on oil, gas, nuclear and coal power. This is the result of myopic thinking and the conspicuous lack of goals set for beyond 2012.

Watts also attacked conventional thinking on supply and demand. Supply is less a problem than the issue of production capacity. Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil exporter, faces a break-even cost of $60 a barrel. The industry is only managing to stay afloat because of massive government subsidies; if this continues, Iran will face serious impediments in their oil exporting capacity. On the other end, Watts argues that curtailing demand for oil in the United States can be accomplished by simple policies. For example, reducing the highway speed limit to 50 mph and inflating tires at the right level could reduce our oil demand by 2 million barrels per day.

In the international market, the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market will have to be monitored closely vis-à-vis fluctuations in coal prices. China has a significantly lower supply of coal than the US, and it will soon have to find an alternative source of energy to keep up with its rapid economic growth. Increased coal prices will make LNG more appealing, which will severely constrict US energy options.

Watts’ other big gripe was the poor investment in R&D, which he argued was essentially killing the innovation of the IP process. In the past few years, government R&D spending on vehicle efficiency has made cars faster and lighter but has not done much in the way of increasing fuel efficiency.  In fact, since subsidization has started, weights have increased 29%, mileage 33%, but MPGs only a measly 2%. 

All in all, the panelists were a diverse group, who did not shy away from tackling real problems of prevailing popular opinion. A sustainable energy policy will require a multi-pronged approach that goes above and beyond basic political and economic frameworks.

Holly Sun

This conversation was held in two parts, with each congressman (bios) appearing on their own, as opposed to in a panel format. Surely this was because of scheduling concerns. 

Mark Shields introduced his guest, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry , a Republican from Lincoln Nebraska, representing Nebraska’s 1^st District. Among Congressman Fortenberry’s many accomplishments is graduating from Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute, in one of its first classes of graduates.

Shields’ first question was clearly posed with an eye towards the audience, composed of many graduate students. He asked what advice the Congressman give to those looking to translate a public policy degree into a career in public service?

Congressman Fortenberry responded that he always had a natural inclination towards pursuing public service and long wanted to contribute to the wellbeing of the country. When he read that a policy degree was the “wedding of political science and economics” he was intrigued and enrolled.

Shields then noted the Tax Reform Bill of 1986 as the last, big bipartisan legislative effort (aside from No Child Left Behind, perhaps) and asked the Congressman what it will take regarding leadership to restore bipartisanship in the forging of public policy?

 Fortenberry recalled the writing of the bill and answered by saying that “America is looking for authenticity.”  He noted his fellow Nebraskan Chuck Hagel’s statement that there is a “new center of political gravity in America.” But in terms of answering what leadership challenged lie ahead, Fortenberry was nearly silent. He discussed the constantly shifting political environment, and made reference to some sort of technological determinism as drivers of bipartisanship, but in the end Fortenberry posed more questions. “Who are we? Where are we going?” He noted that the US has clear philosophical divides, which lead to considerable complications in reaching common ground. These comments reflected some shades of political scientist Charles Lindblom’s oft-cited (and oft-required) essay on “muddling through,” essentially asking whether policymakers have the time to reflect on the necessary steps to achieving policy goals.

Shields then asked whether Fortenberry sees encouraging signs on either side of the aisle?

The Congressman responded that Congress has a peculiar dynamic- and that people are yearning for that dialogue. Shields jumped in to note that the Committee on Agriculture stands out as one of the policy areas that tends to transcend these philosophical differences. Fortenberry concurred and added that the foreign affairs committee does seem to have some positive bipartisan leanings. He concluded that the nature of the workings of the institution might make the process of reaching common ground even more difficult.

Shields then switched to an incredibly timely issue, the vote, 218 to 212, to set a timetable for bringing American troops home. Did the vote today surprise you, he asked?

 Fortenberry said that there was a high degree of unanimity on the Republican side for a number of reasons, including the politicization of supplemental items and additional spending.  He noted that the debate was important, and returned to his earlier theme of authenticity. After a brief discussion of American public opinion of the war, and the related security and humanitarian challenges we will face as a result of the war, Shields again turned the subject of conversation towards the policy students in the audience, many of whom are poised to enter the workforce.

Fortenberry concluded that being a Congressman is hard work, and demands a thick skin. While I think this is an important lesson, I also think it’s one the audience could reasonably deduce.

Next, Mark Shields welcomed Joe Sestak to the dais. Congressman Sestak is a member of Congress’ freshman class, and represents Pennsylvania’s 7^th District.

In Shields’ introduction he noted that Sestak, too, holds a policy degree (from Harvard, not Georgetown) in addition to a PhD and a whole lot of Naval experience. Shields recognized that Congressman Sestak quickly became a prominent Democratic voice on the Iraq war and started the discussion by asking about his feelings on the vote today, and its meaning.

Congressman Sestak started his remarks with a quote from the 1600’s, saying that if a line of demarcation is drawn between thinking men and fighting men, the thinking will be done by cowards and the fighting done by fools. This was a powerful way to start the conversation. Sestak continued to say that Americans damage their security every day they remain in Iraq and that the value of the resolution is that it changes the incentives for the forces in Iraq. Sestak said that the only remaining leverage America holds is in a date, a certain date, for withdrawal.

Speaking with a voice more often reserved for the telling of great tales of woe, Sestak said that Americans can have a successful strategy if we pay attention to the more imminent threats to our security. He discussed a trip to Afghanistan and the changes that he had NOT seen there, after a return trip 18 months later. Congressman Sestak said that the resolution is not about ending the war, but about finding a successful conclusion so that we might pay attention to more important strategic issues.

Shields then asked how Congressman Sestak’s naval career prepared him for a career in the Congress.

Congressman Sestak said that overwhelmingly he finds similarities between his naval career and Congress. Organization and process- they were important in the navy and vital to achieving one’s goals- just as it is in the Congress. Sestak also joked that in the Pentagon, you’re one of 20,000, in comparison, the 435 people in the Congress are pretty manageable. Sestak also said that what he liked about military life was a strong sense of team building. This is analogous to working together with people in Congress to “stitch” diverse interests together.

He noted, gravely, that the strongest message from the 2006 elections was to start working together, picking up the bipartisan thread that Mark introduced earlier when he spoke with Fortenberry. He added that the Dems were not given a mandate, but an opportunity.

 Shields then asked, “What has been the biggest surprise to you regarding serving in the House?”

Sestak said that the resources and staffing that was available as a naval person were much greater than the resources and staffing available, and permitted, as a Congressman. Sestak continued that serving in the Congress is not a career, but a passion. He said that overall he has been impressed by the individuals he meets and that, by and large, the representatives are trying to do their best given tough demands.

Shields concluded the session by asking, “What piece of advice would you give to those in public policy given your own experiences, if they want to have an impact in the shaping of public policy?”

Sestak said that first, ideas matter, and that in addition to respecting and understanding the policy process individuals must retain faith that ideas still matter. He then returned to the spirit of bipartisanship saying that someone who can represent the other debate side in a positive way will be served well, particularly if they are able to then dismantle the opposition piece by piece.  This comment would seem to indicate that measured, tempered analysis will long have a place on our national policy stage.

Jennie Sparandara

 

Not only did the Georgetown Hoya's advance to the Elite 8 last night, but the annual Georgetown Public Policy Institute Conference dazzled audiences - with panels ranging from a discussion on our nation's public schools to an honest look at fiscal security!  Keep checking back this weekend, to see updates on all of the panels.

Glenn Kates

Assessing the future were panelists David Walker, Stuart Butler, Alice Rivlin and Maya McGuiness, ably moderated by Joe Ferrara (bios).

Joe Ferrara started the session with speaker introductions and the explanation that the panelists have traveled through over 19 states as part of a “fiscal wakeup tour” to engage citizens and policymakers in a conversation about America’s looming fiscal crisis.  Ferrara posed a number of broad questions to kick off the panel, including:

-          How can we sustain our nation’s future if our current policies are unsustainable?

-          Are all of our promises of future benefits affordable?

-          Who’s going to pay for all of this?

-          Will money be left over for other priorities?

 Ferrara then turned the mic over to David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, who used slides from the fiscal wakeup tour to demonstrate plainly the challenges we will all face (especially those non-baby boomers in the audience) in the future. Walker said, “you’re going to pay the price and bear the burden if policymakers don’t start acting responsibly.” Walker highlighted differences in spending 40 years ago vs. today to demonstrate his points, adding that we’re adding debt at a record pace.

 Walker continued, saying that the fastest growing expense is the interest on the federal debt- that paying for past sins is preventing us from moving forward. Perhaps the most powerful words from the head of the Government Accountability Office were some of his final ones - that “we the people” are the three most important words in the American Constitution and that the fiscal path we are currently on should be unacceptable to everyone – liberals and conservatives. Fiscal irresponsibility is immoral, he said, and you’re going to pay the bill.

Stuart Butler, of the Heritage Foundation, offered to consider some of the options American policymakers face, and weigh them, echoing Walker’s point that this issue encompasses ethical questions as well as economic ones. Examining current law, Butler first demonstrated graphically what would happen if Congress does nothing. This would result in a sharp increase over the next few decades of taxes as a proportion of GDP. According to Butler, even if the Bush tax cuts are renewed, we’re still in the muddy (my words, not his). Butler then walked the audience through a couple of other scenarios, including raising tax levels to meet commitments and making changes to entitlement policies.

Butler offered that one way to induce better policy making would be to force politicians to consider long term fiscal obligations during the policy process, as opposed to the current system whereby pols are effectively dealing with our budget the same way you might deal with a single credit card bill. Paying the bill is just fine, but what of the accruing interest? Butler urged the audience to also consider prioritization of entitlement programs, and the benefits we could reap by increasing the retirement age. Changing entitlement policies- i.e. who’s entitled, is a big change, and not easy, but these are the types of conversations Americans need to have, Butler said.

Alice Rivlin spoke next and offered some good news- jobs for policy analysts are secure for the foreseeable future. She then claimed that what unified the panel is a core belief that citizens should pay for the services they ask the government to provide, and that if Congress and the President can spend, they should be able to budget. Rivlin said that it is immoral and selfish, not to mention risky, to burden future generations with debt. Additionally, borrowing from foreigners makes us vulnerable.

Rivlin also debunked the myth that social security is the biggest challenge out there, citing the two big health programs - Medicare and Medicaid. Rivlin said that health spending per capita has been rising faster than other spending for decades - and has been increasing by approximately 2.5 percentage points faster than other spending. It is not a solution to just try and keep paying, but to try and figure out a way to bring spending into a manageable range. Rivlin concluded with three words (that will most likely haunt me in my sleep) risky - immoral - unsustainable.

Maya McGuiness promised the audience “more gloom” pointing to the long term liabilities that lie just around the proverbial corner. McGuiness said the real problem is the long term- and that indeed the problem may be worse than everything said already by the panel.  All of this is potentially exacerbated as politicians age. Then a fiscal problem is compounded by a political one, whereby baby-boomers are unlikely to vote against changin social security and other entitlement programs. Other political problems include a polarized political environment, which makes getting policy passed, of any type, more difficult as well as a kind of a “free lunch” period that McGuiness lists as a general attitudinal problem. McGuiness identified as a potential component of a solution the alteration of entitlements by a move away from universal middle class programs towards programs for the genuinely needy. McGuiness concluded, saying that, “Hopefully we will move towards a language of responsibility” in the future. 

Ferrara opened the floor to questions, one of which was:

Have there been suggestions made by policymakers (or others) regarding decreasing end of life spending?

Butler pointed out that this is something that people often talk about in the abstract, which is fine, but when you have a conversation about the specifics attitudes change. According to Butler it’s vital to understand that healthcare is highly personal. A way to circumvent this problem to some extent is to talk instead about living wills and making conscious decisions about the future.

David Walker agreed that healthcare is pushing the numbers discussed earlier in the session and reminded the audience that “end of life” can happen not just when individuals are elderly, but at all stages and briefly discussed the growing importance of this question as technology, and medical interventions, improve.

 Anothe question posed to David Walker, asked whether we can make an impact through defense saving.

Walker responded that there is no question that billions of dollars in defense are wasted per year, but defense is also seen as “provided for” in the constitution, and this fact can be used as a justification for defense budgets. Walker stressed that even hypothetically eliminating the Department of Defense (along with a tremendous number of other programs) will not resolve this problem, due to the tremendous nature of the problem.

Butler underscored this point, saying that defense is a roughly fixed portion of GDP, whereas entitlements are just growing faster than the growth of GDP, creating a wedge effect. Eliminating DOD would buy us about 10 years, but doesn’t impact the trajectory due to entitlements. 

 A final question was posed by the audience regarding the transition costs accrued during a transition from traditional social security to a plan consisting of private accounts.

Alice Rivlin reaffirmed the intent of the question noting that the problem with private accounts is not necessarily the accounts themselves, but the mechanism by which you make the switch, which would consist of borrowing multiple, trillions of dollars. As a result she said that she would support the idea of private accounts ON TOP of social security.

Walker added that social security has always been intended as a foundation but not panacea.  Indeed, Walker noted that over 50% of Americans have a private pension plan. Walker challenged the audience to think of social security as solvent, secure, and in addition to a mandatory private account.

Maya McGuiness ended the panel by saying that IF (big if) you are willing to make changes to social security more quickly than you need to, the changes become fairer, at least in a generational sense. Increasing national savings grows the economy, which is always useful, but to make good on its promises, these funds have to be put in a real lock box, a private account.

Jennie  Sparandara

Congress failed again to stop the war last week.  No surprises.  Last Friday’s appropriation bill showed that it costs over 20 billion extra dollars just to get a troop-withdrawal-timetable out of committee in the House. This Friday showed that the money stretched just far enough to win a party-line vote in the House. But the Senate won’t buy it.  And even if they do, the President will veto.  All the money in China’s current account surplus isn’t enough for the Democrats to buy an override. So our story repeats.   

This is my third and final installment in this series on Congress’s War Powers. I’ve tasked my assistant--that amiable Microsoft paper clip with a gift for pantomime—to keep a copy of my lead sentence on the clipboard.  All I needed to get started today was a paste command: <ctrl+v> Congress failed again to stop the war last week. That line is such a truism these days,  I can paste away with reckless abandon and still adhere to the web’s strict standards of accuracy. It’s easy journalism. And like reporters at the big newspapers I could probably repeat this story on slow news days right up until the next election.

But I won’t. This is my last installment because we’ve already learned that Congress’s War Powers are a red herring. Congress can’t influence the war in Iraq. When it comes to a fight, Congress must play by schoolyard rules, and the constitution doesn’t give them enough authority to change that.  So what really matters in this fight is us—you, me, everybody else. We’ve got the influence. But we haven’t used that influence hardly at all. So my last question in this series is why not? Why don’t we act?

Washington seemed too cold for action last Saturday.  The very grounds for action were frozen. Clusters of white snow dug into the national mall and dared the spring sun to do something about it. A crowd of Iraq-war supporters chose to dig in as well as they shouted at Iraq-war protestors who chose to shout back rather than march.  Bundled tourists stood around too and watched the angry mob as if it were an animatronic reenactment of the protests and counter-protests of the Vietnam-era. The event was even staged in front of the Vietnam Memorial where the kids absorbed some history and heard taunts of treasonous hippy! and murderous redneck! in the idiom of the period.  

But last Saturday’s protest was a paradox.  Despite its frozen stillness, some will argue that last Saturday’s protest marked the first real signs of action in four full years of the Iraq war.  That surreal, almost staged, shouting match marked a return to the vocal civic action that defined a generation past. 

Protests
Those who argue for such civic action tend to see protests through the rosy lens of an artistic director on the set of Forest Gump. They believe loud public displays help the nation face down difficult times and achieve resolution.  And for the last four years these people have wondered what’s wrong with the kids these days that they haven’t taken to the streets the way they did in the 1960s? They look at polls that show a majority of American’s opposed to the war in Iraq and they ask where are all the protests?  

Sometimes I wonder too. Even though I never saw a thing of the 1960s or 1970s I still get nostalgic for them because I watched so many Time-Life commercials in the 1980s. Buffalo Springfield, man. Neil Young’s evocative guitar rings out and Stephen Stills complains that young people speaking their minds are gettin’ so much resistance from behind.  And then, in the commercials, this baritone voice says it was a time of peace and a time of war and then the music segues to the The Byrds cover of Ecclesiastes and images of peace signs and soldiers and Volkswagens flash on the screen and the baritone offers a unique opportunity to re-live the defining moments of a generation for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling.  I wish sometimes that I dialed that toll free number on my screen because those were the good old days, man, and I bet they’re even better on cassette. Or on the set of Forest Gump.     

It’s easy to get caught up in the songs and pictures of the Vietnam-era and imagine that we need a similar sort of show to sort our Iraq war. But after what I saw last Saturday, I’m not so sure.  Maybe it was the weather, but the shouts just seemed cold and blank. And the more I reflected on it, the more it all seemed like a reenactment, like a quaint show left-over from a bygone era.   

Back in the days of Vietnam it must have been different.  Protests then had a symbolic power that cut right to the heart of the war effort. Back then, in the global war against communism, America fought communist movements the world over for fear that a revolution left unchecked could cascade right onto our shores and supplant America’s way of life.  Vociferous street displays by a socialist-minded counter-culture contradicted two of the tenets of this rationale: first, the displays evinced sympathy for the revolutionary movements we fought, and second, it showed that a large part of society also sought to supplant America's way of life. These counter-cultural ideas and demonstrations had a corrosive effect on the rationale for the war. Even though President Nixon’s silent majority still cherished America’s way of life, after a while, they began to question what they were fighting for over there with all these problems back here at home. 

Iraq is different. There weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, it’s true. But that wasn’t the rationale for this war. That was the justification. What’s the difference? A justification is an element of present circumstances that compels action.  Justifications enable leaders to act on their broader rationale. Justifications take on particular importance when the broader rationale is an abstract concept such as a global war on communism or terror. In the case of Vietnam, President Johnson used a naval skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify an invasion that fit with the broader rationale of the domino theory. In the case of Iraq, President Bush used intelligence reports about weapons to justify an invasion that fit with the broader rationale that a stable democratic Middle East eliminates terrorist threats to the United States. 

We can protest the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But that does nothing to weaken the broader rationale for the Iraq war.   Instead, today’s protests against the war are often twisted into symbols that support the war’s broader rationale. As President Bush says, he likes protests because they show the difference between us and the turrists—we love freedom, you see, and they hate freedom.   

Protests today will never have the same effect as the protests of the Vietnam-era because our challenge today is much more subtle. No significant contingent of war opponents today advocates the ideology of a Saddam Hussein protégé. No war opponents in this country advocate an ideology of sectarian fundamentalism. Vietnam opponents that waved Ho Chi Minh’s picture had it easier.  Communism was a viable, even preferable, option for some. Iraq is different.

War opponents’ complaints today are more complex. We don’t support a hostile regime in Iraq. But we don’t support the war either. We want Americans in harm’s way to return home. But we don’t want to leave the people of Iraq in greater peril than the terrible peril they suffer today. We want stability in the region. But we don’t want to commit hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of dollars in perpetuity to achieve it.

 All this complexity makes opposition difficult. Just try to chant that list of conditional statements and not sound like John Kerry. And this complexity explains a good part of our lack of action on the war. We sense that protests in the streets are ineffectual but we are uncertain how to influence such a tangled situation.  The old tricks just don’t work anymore and we’ve had to look around for other options. 

Blogs
Anti-war blogs are often derided by Stephen Colbert as the useless tail chase of a generation not affected much by the war and not engaged much in the real world. Ooh, don’t blog about the war, he chides, I’m so scared. But maybe he’s wrong. (Or maybe he’s just an unreliable narrator). Maybe we need blogs to exchange ideas. Maybe blogs and other user-generated media could come to play the role in today’s Iraq war that the symbolic street protest played in Vietnam. 

One thing blogs do well is break-up complexity. The more I read the more I recognize differences in opposition to this war. There’s opponents of our tactical decisions, like John Murtha, who oppose the surge and advocate instead a pull-back to nearby bases in the region, so we can continue to fight in Iraq, but only the fights we pick. These opponents believe we have a military role to play in the region but that our presence in Iraq today only enrages locals and puts Iraqis in more peril than they would otherwise face. Then there’s opponents of our strategic decisions, like Dennis Kucinich, who challenge the notion that the United States military should play a role in the region at all. These opponents still believe we have interests to protect in the region, but they believe we should not use force to achieve them. Diplomacy and engagement. No blood for oil.  

These positions have internal contradictions. If we pull back, and a disagreeable regime comes to power, won’t we just regress to the sanctions and cruise missiles management of the 1990s? If we don’t support force in the region can we still sell weapons and planes to Saudi Arabia and provide military aid to Israel? And if we don’t, what if they buy them from someone else who places conditions on the purchase that go against the interests we want to use diplomacy and engagement to protect?

These are tough questions to answer. But they help lay out the problem.  Blogs and user-generated media offer the opportunity for a vocal part of the population to express concerns that are too complex to convey with symbolic protests. That's why I believe blogs and user-generated tools could play the role that street protests played in the Vietnam-era. They are better suited to challenge today’s war rationale. But before that challenge can materialize, a vocal contingent of America’s society has to decide that they disagree with the rationale. That's a tough decision. Discussions and blogs can break up complexity and help us decide whether we disagree with tactics or strategy. But in the end we still have to face down concerns about internal contradictions. Some issues cannot be resolved by analysis. At some point, we all have to become the decider about the rationale for this war. Are we for it, or against it? I don’t believe we’ve decided yet. 

Deciders
Recent opinion polls reported by the Wall Street Journal suggest that 55% of Americans support a troop withdrawal. But only 33% support Congressional action to force a troop withdrawal.  It seems then that  at least 22% of us don’t support the war enough to advocate troops but neither do we oppose it enough to support a sudden exit. In other words, we can’t seem to make up our minds.

Until we do, make up our minds, I don’t believe there will be any effective action to stop this war. We don't act to stop the war because were not certain of our own convictions. We seem to prefer to wait and see what happens next. Wait and see is, in fact, the action that America seems to have decided on at this point.  And while we wait, some of us undecided folks have chosen to follow Congress’s failures to stop the war and let it reaffirm our political fatalism and relieve our guilt about our own inaction.  Some of us even choose to make a record of our fatalism and post it online.  But this record just fills time until we, the real holders of America’s war powers, decide to exercise our authority.

In a few hours, the Georgetown Public Policy Institute Annual Conference begins.  Notables will include Andrew Natsios, Special Envoy to Darfur, E.J. Dionne, Op ed Contributor for the Washington Post, and Mark Shields, a regular on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  If you can't make the conference, check the blog to see what you missed. 
Glenn Kates

     Despite the Global War on Terrorism, many remain unaware of the US’s ongoing military mission in Africa. Known as Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa and based in Djibouti the organization was founded on October 19, 2002 as a separate unit from US Central Command. The same organization that provides command and control oversight for the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. American foreign policy has long neglected addressing Africa with the same parity of Europe, the Middle East, or Asia. The continents’ lack of export markets for consumption of US goods, many ethnically charged conflicts, and the prolific need for economic aid have proscribed US involvement in the region.
     Ironically, Africa came to occupy a central role in the development of Al-Qaeda as a logistics and operational base. Usama bin Laden moved his terrorist organization there in 1991 to take advantage of support from the Sudanese government. He remained until forced out by US diplomatic pressure in 1996. Africa is also the site of the first direct military confrontation between Al-Qaeda affiliates, the US military, and its coalition allies in Somalia during the United Nations Operation in Somalia II. Al-Qaeda later chose Africa as the operational theater for its 1998 simultaneous bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
     The 9-11 attacks, planned and supported from Afghanistan highlighted the dangers of terrorists exploiting politically weak regimes in failed states. The political and economic situation of many sub-Saharan nations transformed the strategic importance of Africa to US policy makers. The creation of Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa just over a year after 9-11 was in response to the realization of existing risk.
     The Department of Defense’s Unified Command Plan establishes geographic responsibility for US military operations worldwide into distinct theaters. At the start of the Global War on Terrorism, no less than three organizations shared oversight for conducting missions on the African continent. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa is under U.S. European Command, seven Northeast African nations fall under U.S. Central Command, while Madagascar and other islands off the continent’s east coast come under U.S. Pacific Command. Clearly, this does not lend itself to seamless application of US defense policy throughout the region.
     The creation of a new combatant command, US Africa Command, was conceived to address this long-standing strategic shortcoming. The initial formation of the new organization has begun in Germany at a location shared with US European Command at its headquarters near Stuttgart. According to a US European Command press release, initial operational capability will occur by October 1, 2007 with full operational capability by October 1, 2008.
     A unique feature of the US Africa Command will be its organization to facilitate interagency collaboration from inception. This has been a consistently cited area of difficulty for US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Africa Command will be set-up to address such diverse issues as spread of disease, energy access, and agricultural development. For example, it will incorporate representatives from US AID, the State Department, and the Energy Department into its organizational structure. This represents a novel approach to implementing US security policy and recognizes the threats posed by the confluence of such patently non-military factors.
     The creation of the new US Africa Command is an idea whose time has come. For too long Africa was just an ancillary footnote in international geopolitics during the 20th century. The emergence of new asymmetric transnational threats like Al-Qaeda to US security will more effectively be countered by increased interaction, humanitarian operations, and regional security cooperation. The current crises in Darfur and Somalia make a very good case for increased regional US involvement. Chinese investments in East Africa may potentially impact future strategic development of emerging markets for American commercial interests. Establishment of US Africa Command ensures policy makers will have a capable tool for mitigating future crises. This will facilitate a more unified and enduring foreign policy towards Africa to counter decades of policy neglect.

Jason B. Nicholson is a Major in the United States Army and Masters of Policy Management candidate. The closest he has been to Africa is the African Savanna Exhibit at the National Zoo.

Ann Coulter's primary value to conservatives is this: it is degrading to respond to her. Because she is on an apparently ceaseless quest to reduce American political discourse to the level of an AOL chat room populated by 14-year-olds, one risks ridicule merely by stooping to present her with a counter-argument. This is because, although nobody on the right will say so in public, it is widely understood that Coulter does not traffic in political ideas as such. Rather, what she offers is a subversive guerilla theater: a politically-themed performance art in which she, in Andrew Sullivan's memorable wording, resembles nothing so much as a drag queen impersonating a fascist. Or, if you prefer, she is like Stephen Colbert -- but without any redemptive wink. To respond to her in earnest is thus to miss the purpose of her existence; to ignore her, however, risks a kind of passive tolerance for the radically stupid things that she says.

What to do, then, with her by now infamous slurring of presidential candidate John Edwards? Well, actually, hold on one second, this is not technically correct. Coulter didn't explicitly use an epithet to describe the former senator -- what she said was that she "was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.'" Thus she performed a kind of meta-commentary on the word, simultaneously deriding the taboo on its usage while also suggesting that it was the only appropriate term to describe the candidate. This is actually a pretty neat trick -- it allowed Coulter to attack Edwards by implication rather than through any direct statement and it gave her a ready-made retort to critics of her comment: that they are merely reinforcing her point about language taboos. Similarly, if I say that I would be able to describe Coulter appropriately were it not for the fact that polite society generally frowns upon unfavorable comparisons between human beings and members of the horse family, I cannot be said to have slandered her personally.

Lawyerly tricks like these tend to distinguish the Coulter oeuvre and, in her coarse and hateful way, there is always a strategic savvy to her method. Presumably the humor of her recent commentary, anemic as it is, derives from the union of the following three ideas: 1. John Edwards is an attractive man who cares about his appearance, 2. Attractive men who care about their appearances are uniformly homosexual, 3. The taboo on the use of the term in question was recently, successfully and ultimately unnecessarily evaded by Grey's Anatomy star Isaiah Washington by checking into rehab. The last of these composed Coulter's real punch-line and her escape hatch: it allowed her to switch her ostensible focus from Edwards to the tabloid absurdity of the Washington flap and thus to preemptively defuse criticisms of her attack. Furthermore, because this line was delivered half in character, it allowed Coulter to draw a perverse focus on the only one of these ideas that has any merit: that John Edwards is an attractive man who displays concern for his appearance.

To return to my question, then: how does one best respond to an attack so sophisticatedly childish? Coulter has made a small personal fortune off of this sort of casual offense, be it via her use of the same slur to describe Al Gore, her description of all muslims as "ragheads," her insinuation that former president Clinton was "insane" and "a lunatic" or the many other examples that are easily found through Google. One's first instinct would be to starve her of a response to this sort of thing if it weren't so abundantly clear that her tenure at events like the CPAC gathering where she made these remarks or her frequent appearances on talk shows such as Hannity and Colmes were likely to continue in any case. Indeed, the real trouble with Coulter's remarks is not that she sees fit to deliver them, it's that she is so continuously rewarded by members of the political right for doing so. The audience to the CPAC event, after all, was a veritable who's who of prominent Republican politicians and personalities and Coulter's remarks on Edwards were met with laughter and applause.

What needs to happen is for the political right to distance themselves from Coulter; this should be done not only as a matter of principle but also as a matter of common-sense politics. It is good to see Republican politicians begin to do so in the wake of this latest flap, but the simple truth is that anybody who evinces support for her, explicitly or otherwise, is simply unserious about matters of policy. She has been called the Michael Moore of the right, which is not a bad comparison in some regards, but this does not go far enough in my opinion. Ann Coulter is to public policy as the WWE is to olympic wrestling, and she should be treated with the respect that this implies. Political humor, even subversive political humor, has a great tradition in the United States, but rarely before has a humorist been granted so much access and influence for trading so cynically on such little wit and such great prejudice. It is time for liberals to stand up and declare that this kind of politics is out of bounds and for Republicans to distance themselves from Coulter for good.

Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni , former US Special Envoy to Israel/Palestinian Authority and commanding general of Central Command, said in a speech at Georgetown University on February 7, 2007, that, “you can only negotiate when all sides are weak.” Currently, all stakeholders in the Middle East peace process are experiencing a moment of weakness. Recent reports increasingly indicate international and regional political tolerance for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is waning.

Public statements to the contrary the Quartet for Middle East Peace itself appears  wavering in its unitary resolve. Russia says it will work to lift international sanctions on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government and publicly welcomes Palestinian resolve to form a national unity governing coalition. The European Union indicates it will judge the new government on its actions and maintains the possibility of political engagement upon assumption of power. The UN suggests the emergence of a national unity government will challenge currently held convictions by involved parties. A recent visit to the region by Secretary of State Rice produced less tangible results than desired by the US government; which remains polarized by the politics of the Iraq War following the last domestic elections.  The US government's reluctance to embrace the Mecca Accords results from the Hamas-led PA government's continued non-recognition of Israel and failure to renounce violence.

Israel’s government rests on a fragile coalition weakened by last year’s invasion of Lebanon and failure to reduce Hizbollah as a military threat. Prime Minister Olmert’s position remains precarious as many on both sides of the Israeli political spectrum are unsatisfied with current policies. Iran, the other extra-regional actor, is on the diplomatic defensive since the international community showed an uncharacteristic resolve in addressing its nuclear ambitions. The promising negotiation of a new treaty with North Korea allowed focusing worldwide anti-proliferation initiatives squarely upon Iran. This environment has made Iranian interference Palestine or Lebanon much more difficult to sustain. Even Syria, the perpetual wildcard in regional security issues, allegedly engaged in secret negotiations of some type with unofficial Israeli representatives. Previous watershed negotiations in the Middle East have often come about in secret away from the public’s view because of their precarious nature. Maybe some of these rumors and speculations are grounded in reality.

The current lack of a stakeholder possessing an overwhelmingly dominant political position in the region has created opportunity space for a bold initiative to succeed. The time has come for the US to propose a bold imaginative solution that embraces the situation as it exists on ground and emphasizes the profitability of ignoring sunken costs by all sides. Strong leadership now could possibly prevent future conflict and serve to de-internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only the US has the ability to leverage Israel, the PA, and the international community strongly enough to produce concrete results. Renewed international efforts to resolve the conflict should focus on short term attainable goals. The existence of small successes might convince local stakeholders their diverse positions have more in common than not. Only  a substantial and active US role can stimulate the wider international community to seriously consider supporting new efforts at conflict resolution.

Jason B. Nicholson is a Captain in the US Army and Masters of Policy Management Candidate. In addition to his Masters degree, he is aiming to pick up a Nobel Prize while at GPPI because the student lounge needs more décor. 

Few issues in American politics have the ability to unite an increasingly partisan political landscape like environmental conservation by increasing fuel economy standards to provide energy security through lessened reliance on imported foreign oil. This justification for increased conservation measures has become a rallying cry for conservatives of both parties. Rising gas prices, record oil company profits, and petro-dollar sponsorship of terrorist organizations serve to heighten the public’s awareness of the issue’s importance.

            All of these symptoms are indicative of a short-term view to the problem that focuses on the now. Increasing vehicular fuel economy is the most accessible way to lessen problems resulting from current oil consumption levels. It appeals to all points of the political compass because of effects on individual consumers. Far more critical than a temporary world security situation are the long-term effects increased greenhouse gases will have on our environment for subsequent generations.

            Currently the Congress is considering legislative bills S.183, S.357, and H.R. 656; collectively addressing increasing fuel economy standards. This is a good start but proposed standards are not strict enough to produce results within a reasonable timeframe to reduce emissions effectively. Clearly for the health of the environment, not to mention economic and security rationales, government must act. In a representative democracy the voting public relies upon the government to act in its best interest – now is the time and this is the issue.

There is little scientific disagreement Earth has warmed slightly more than one degree Fahrenheit over the past century. The official EPA website says, “Most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” This is due to the dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide. The EPA further states that fossil fuel consumption by cars and trucks, heating and cooling buildings, and power production accounts for 98% of all carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

            Worldwide 10% of all CO₂ production is attributable to automobiles. Of this 10%, the US produces 45% of all emissions. The EU, at 21%, produces slightly less than half the US’s total output. Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union combined only produce 6% of worldwide CO₂ emissions. China and India are emerging superpowers, and economic powerhouses in their own right, but produce only 2% and 1% respectively. These numbers only address automobile emissions; the majority of emissions result from power production.

Growing industrial and consumer consumption in the developing world will increase all emissions to the further detriment of our environment. As more deforestation occurs, particularly in rain-forested regions, less CO₂ gas is naturally cleaned from the atmosphere. The problems from increased greenhouse gas emissions are numerous. Sea levels could rise, plant and animal species are migrating closer to the poles, wildfires are more numerous, large hurricanes are more numerous, and skin cancer continues to affect more people. These global issues must be addressed locally and individually through positive change in consumption habits. As the world’s largest economy and largest consumer, it is imperative that America exercise its superpower leadership role on this issue.

            Americans could lessen the environmental impact of consumption and limit dependence on foreign oil imports with more fuel-efficient automobiles. According to numerous surveys and polls, many support such initiatives. How is it that the most consumption-oriented people in the world do not take a more proactive role in improving vehicular fuel economy, even when most recognize the need and express the desire to do so? Too many consumers and too few incentives on big-oil and the big three automakers conspire together to ensure inaction on this issue. Record profits at the gas-pumps and new car sales ensure corporations maintain their status quo rather than risk their bottom line.

            Legislative efforts do not go far enough towards correcting the problems posed by increased greenhouse emissions. The Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975 instituted the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards for automobiles. According to the NHTSA website, the 1974 goal was to double fuel efficiency to 27.5 MPG by 1985 from 12.9 in 1974. Intermediate goals have fluctuated since establishment of the CAFÉ standards but the 27.5 MPG average remains unchanged since 1990. This was 16 years ago; the original goal of the legislation was set in 1975 – over 30 years ago.

Considering that, most warming over the past century occurred in the last 50 years the previous 30 years take on a new significance. The larger question is that if in 1974 we could improve the average MPG per automobile to 27.5 by 1985 surely progress in design and engineering technology, benefiting from the information age, would allow increasing this value. 

Now is the time to look farther into the future and consider our environmental legacy. According to Environmental Defense, a non-profit environmental group, it will take approximately 25 years for fuel economy averages to reflect in the automobile fleet. A mandated increase to a standard of 40 MPG would decrease emissions by 90% in the first 16 years. It is imperative that we make these changes now. This will ensure a healthier environment for future generations in the long term and in the short term will lessen our dependence on foreign oil. As fuel economy increases domestic oil production market share will increase. Raising fuel economy standards to a more sensible level for our times is not only fiscally beneficial but secures our energy resources for the future and provides good environmental stewardship as well.

Jason B. Nicholson is a Captain in the US Army and MPM Candidate. The views expressed in this article do not reflect those of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.

Congress will fail again to stop the war this week. Will we blame them? Our constitution vests in Congress the power to start wars. But we the people fail to enumerate the power to stop. That power we leave, I suppose, to fate or destiny or divine intervention.  For all the enlightened thought and audacity of Philadelphia’s constitutional delegates, this authority, they seem to imply, is not ours to grant. Congress shall have the power declare a war, they wrote. But who shall stop it?   

Tens of thousands of people on the mall in Washington D.C. Saturday held out hope for Congress.  Perhaps the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus’s maunders about the stage and grounds gave confidence. If so, passes by White House helicopters seemed to have the opposite effect. Protestors lashed out at the President and the power of his office. Jane Fonda won most applause with her scorn for the President’s “mean spirited and vengeful administration.” (link) D.C.’s rag daily  might have summarized: the fitness instructor in Fonda prodded Congress to reach a little higher, while the Monster-In-Law in her sought to foil the Presidents intentions. And the crowds played along.

But what may we infer from this crowd? Thronged multitudes on the mall don’t speak for us all. They’re not very reliable for one. Are they a throng or a multitude? Pick one, really. And then there’s their placards.  Send the Twins, they write in magic marker. The Twins? Sales double at every bar in D.C. where they’re spotted, it’s true. But Baghdad’s economy is a tall order, even for the disposable income of Georgetown’s popped-collar crowd.  That’s not a viable solution. And neither was the solution proposed by the neat laser-printed placards that suggested we text our Congressperson to demand they send the troops home now.

I empathize with the sentiment. (For all the good my empathy does). But shouldn’t we at least acknowledge the troops can-do spirit with a more effectual course of action than text messages to Congress? I don’t mean to belittle text messages—Amnesty International fights tyranny with post cards, and wins. I mean to belittle Congress. And not because everyone on cable television does it, but because Congress in this case has very little will and no clear authority to act. Madame Speaker faces a near impossible task if she wants to use the power of her office to stop this war. What can she do?   

Not much. Her first obstacle is that Congress has no will to exercise the little power it may have.  This reluctance owes to a political rationale that bears an uncanny resemblance to that timeless playground credo: no wimps allowed. I explored the workings of this credo in a parable two weeks ago (link).  I discussed how Congress has been bullied in the past by bold Presidents like Theodore Roosevelt that made them choose between being supporters or being wimps.  Roosevelt, for example, sent a large part of the Navy half-way around the world without congressional approval.  Congress then had to choose whether they wanted to fund the mission or leave the whole Navy stranded in Japan. Congress learned then that the President, as Commander and Chief, has all the war powers that matter, and Congress often has no choice but to go along. In my parable, a young man takes this lesson as a validation of what he has already learned on the playground: that we don’t always choose our own fights, but we better support them, or else we’ll be called a wimp, a traitor, or worse.

This playground wisdom is still ascendant in Washington. Only Congress’s wimpiest leftists—Dennis Kucinich, for example—suggest withholding funds from the Iraq war. Everyone else takes the brave political position that they don’t want to be called names. And so Congress is tied to this war like a school-yard accomplice is tied to the approval of his peers. Real opposition from Madame Speaker would no doubt be neutralized by loud chants of Nancy Nancy scaredy pants. 

Congress’s mature adults do differ from schoolyard kids in at least one respect: they have recourse to official procedures and overpaid lawyers. Since most in Congress are themselves overpaid lawyers, they’ve often availed themselves of this recourse. After the conclusion of the Vietnam War, for example, Congress decided they’d had enough bullying from the President. So lawyers in Congress drafted a mature law that asserted forcefully: you’re not the boss of me, Mr. President. The War Powers Resolution demanded that the President ask Congress’s permission before dragging them into wars. It also asserted that the President should be forced to withdraw troops if ever Congress doesn’t grant permission.      

Critics call some Congresses do-nothings. This is often an unfair over-simplification. I think it more accurate to say that some Congresses do a great deal to no effect. The War Powers Resolution is a prime example. Our nation’s 93^rd Congress examined their inability to stop the war in Vietnam ten years after our 88^th Congress had authorized that war with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and decided that what was needed was not clearer powers to expire such resolutions, but instead a law to make such resolutions mandatory. 

Without the benefit of birth before this period of history I am forced to guess at Congress’s motivation for what seems like such a futile gesture.  My best guess is this: Congresspersons left over from the 88^th regretted their support for the Tonkin resolution, which was extremely unpopular by the time of the 93^rd Congress, and they found political cover in the position that they had been misled by the Johnson administration. From this position they framed Congress’s Vietnam problem as a lack of information and not one of poor judgment. Rather than assert that Congress makes mistakes and needs the authority to revisit its authorizations, they instead asserted that Congress would make better decisions if only the President were required to make full reports. With the War Powers Resolution they demanded that Presidents make such reports and seek authorizations for conflicts within 60 days of deployment. Congress made quite a fuss. But a lack of reports was never the problem, so all the fuss was for nothing.  

Congress’s problem then and its problem today is that it makes poor decisions in the lead up to wars. It gets caught up in a fervor, it gets scared of being called a wimp and it goes along and approves some indefinite authorization for the use of force. Four of five years later things go bad, Congresspersons claim they want to stop the war and they claim the administration misled, but they find themselves without any authority to repeal their approval and no desire to cut off funding and risk unpopularity. Our own Iraq war has showed that Congress still makes poor decisions even with full intelligence briefings and 60 days notice from the President. What Congress really needs today is a second chance to review their authorization. But the War Powers Resolution is no help with this problem. 

I ought not be too hard on the 93^rd Congress for the War Powers Resolution. It was an amazing set of circumstances that allowed them to gain the votes to overcome President Nixon’s veto at all. And they really didn’t have the authority to do even what they did. Every President since Nixon has argued the Resolution is unconstitutional. And no court has been willing to give the Resolution force. When President Clinton began to bomb Serbia in 1999, for example, the Congress voted against an authorization. Congressmen Tom Campbell and Dennis Kucinich and other House members then sued Clinton for violation of the War Powers Resolution—in particular for failure to gain Congressional authorization within 60 days of the deployment of troops. The D.C. District court that heard the case found that the Congresspersons lacked standing to sue the President.  They argued that Congress had the opportunity to authorize or oppose war through appropriations bills. Votes to approve funding were, in fact, an implicit authorization, the court argued, so the lack of an explicit authorization was not grounds enough for Congress to sue.

In the case of Iraq, the War Powers Resolution has even less teeth than it did in 1999.  Congress already granted explicit authorization for the use of all necessary force in Iraq back in 2002. For all the efforts of previous Congresses and all the lessons of Vietnam, Congress is again stuck with the tough choice of being a supporter or being a wimp. So much for procedure and expensive lawyers.  It’s back to the playground credo for Congress.

But is this how its supposed to be? Is this what our founding fathers envisioned? Congress’s War Powers neutralized by name calling? What does the constitution really say about the power to stop a war?

Article One Section Eight lists about seventeen things Congress has the power to do. It lists things like collect taxes and establish post offices and offer patents and declare war. There’s very little elaboration to any of it. Delegates’ assumed, it seems, that the power to declare war or impose taxes warranted no superfluous elaboration.  Delegate’s chose instead to devote extra lines to grant Congress the power to raise armies and maintain navies and organize militias and such. But all these lines about raising and maintaining are moot today with our perpetual military with installations on every continent, massive four-ocean navy, and multitudinous military contractors congesting roadways in most metropolitan areas.  The only part that still matters today—the power to declare war—doesn’t even get those five words in the constitution, it only gets the last three: to declare war. The “the power” part is just listed at the top of the article with syntactical-descriptive punctuation.  And as to the power to stop a war—nothing.

Article Two Section Two lists the President’s military powers. She, or he, gets to call the shots. The delegate’s confer this power through the title of Commander and Chief.  As Commander and Chief, the President can order troops out of a region and end a war in practice.  But is this really the same as the power to end a war on par with the power to declare it? Why weren’t the delegates explicit on this point?        

One possible explanation for the delegates’ omission is metaphysical. Perhaps the delegates, for all their eighteenth century positivism, still ascribed some power to the unknown, to fate, or God. Maybe they observed that man has little power to choose the ends of the wars he begins. Great individuals may influence the course of events,  but to assert that a document could assign to an individual or congregation of individuals the power to stop a war by voice vote, might have seemed too idealistic, even for them.

From the very first, history’s great authors have attributed the course of wars to fate rather than will. When Homer wrote of the Greek King Agamemnon outside the walls of Troy he was clear who would choose that war’s end. “Zeus is a harsh, cruel god. He vowed to me long ago, /  he bowed his head that I should never embark for home / till I had brought the walls of Ilium crashing down.”  For Homer, the power to end a war belonged to a higher power. 

And it’s not only those violent old pagan Greeks with this opinion.  Remember Abraham Lincoln, our own great emancipator, and his words on our civil war from his second inauguration—carved on the north wall of his memorial. “Both sides deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let this nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”  Lincoln’s war has a force all its own. Both sides opposed it. But still it came. And who could choose its end?

            The Almighty has his own purposes…if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

So it seems for Lincoln too that the power to end a war belonged to a higher power.  

Does this reverence for the metaphysical power of war explain our constitutional delegates reluctance to enumerate the clear power to end wars? Maybe. But, the practical critic might ask, weren’t the epic wars that inspired the poet Homer and the poet in Lincoln different? And weren’t the fateful consequences of these wars unique? History is littered with so many other wars—wars without purpose, wars without resolution, wars that just fizzled out—that the constitutional delegates had to know that sometimes a nation may well need to choose when it’s just time for a war to end. 

In light of these other wars, I’ll entertain a second possibility: the delegates were practical. Those laconic characters set terms for our whole country in fewer words than Budget’s rental terms for a Buick Town & Country.  The delegates didn’t manage this brevity by addressing every possible eventuality. If posterity get themselves into a war, the delegates may have reasoned, then let posterity get themselves out. Why should we bother with an extra three words to spell it out for them. Let’s get on to the next order of business: old Mr. Franklin wants to protect his patent on wooden teeth.  

My strict constructionist readers—not you Justice Scalia, thank you for the correction and your kind words of praise—might put a slightly different spin on this practical explanation.  They’d argue that the delegates’ brevity was not flippant, instead, it was how they put their brilliant vision of limited government into practice. In this constructionist interpretation, the delegates’ failure to enumerate the explicit power to stop a war signaled their intent that this power should not be vested in the federal government at all. 

Strange as it is for me to say, this constructionist explanation appeals to me most. It suggests that all of this attention on Congress, all this examination of their procedure and lawyering, all this despondence that a playground credo should guide decisions that entail such hopeless waste and death, all this is misplaced. Congress does not have the power to stop this war. It never did. Our constitutional delegates left that power out of the constitution for good reason. They left that power to us.

President Bush would rather we believed the metaphysical explanation. War is difficult, it’s hard, you see, and it takes resolve. Now that we’ve started this epic struggle against the terrorists we must see it through, god willing, to victory. The end of this war is not for us to choose, he says, and only history can judge. Maybe.  But I’d rather believe that we can judge a misadventure, and that our delegates knew that, and they knew it well enough to know that the power to stop a war is too important for a government to make. So they left that power, not to God or history, but to us. 

Last week on this site, my colleague and friend Colin Buckley presented an estimable defense of the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. “I feel like John Kerry has died for our political sins,” he argued. “Who crucified him? Look no further than your own mirror.”

Well, I guess that I’d like to plead the case for our respective reflections.

Buckley’s argument is that, in “our apathy, our unrealistic expectations, our unwillingness to cut through the political rhetoric of both sides,” we the American people – and especially those of us who reliably vote Democratic – have chronically underrated candidates such as Kerry, who endure risk and sacrifice for the greater good of progressive values. There’s a great deal of truth in this claim, but I worry that Buckley might be overstating his case a bit.

Kerry’s campaign was certainly laudable. For any Democratic candidate to reduce the lead of a sitting Republican candidate during war-time to two percent of the voters in Ohio is certainly no mean feat. But when you add in the number of strategic gaffes that the Kerry team made (full disclosure: I was an early Edwards booster), the 2004 results begin to look, well, miraculous.

In the 2000 Republican primaries, George W. Bush ran against a man with an essentially unimpeachable military record and beat him, however unfairly. Now, unlike Kerry, John McCain’s history with Vietnam is not only unambiguous, but it is also the subtext that he uses to reinforce his foreign policy prescriptions. In contrast, the bulk of Kerry’s political celebrity derives not from his band of brothers, but from the fact that he renounced his experience in the Vietnam War when he returned to the United States. And then, rather than use his military pedigree as a subtext for a decisive position on Iraq in 2004, Kerry essentially used it as a substitute, since he faced an unusually divided electorate.

This is not, of course, to excuse the silliness of the Swift Boat Veteran attacks. But it is to say that Kerry’s people should have seen that attack coming and responded forcefully to it. It’s also to say that Kerry probably leaned a bit too much on his own military experience in general (does anybody else not cringe at the memory of “I’m reporting for duty!”?) when he should have been relentlessly and pointedly on the attack against Bush instead. If I had to nominate the best line of the Kerry campaign, it was when he told Bush, during the second debate, that things were “never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe.” Alas, that would have been a great campaign theme.

So I’m a bit skeptical of the idea that we Democrats are always of insufficient faith; Kerry was, in my view, a very imperfect candidate running an imperfect campaign. However, there is little doubt that Buckley’s larger point is an astute one: Republicans tend to value institutional preservation much more than Democrats do. For instance, is there anybody who worked in the Reagan administration that doesn’t currently have a position in the federal government?

Furthermore, the GOP doesn’t run away from perceived “losers” the way that Democrats do; if anything, George W. Bush seems to have given extra responsibilities to the people who were involved in Watergate or Iran-Contra and he tends to bestow the most prestigious medals upon the most irresponsible government officials.

By comparison, when was the last time that Democrats tasked the Water Mondale commission report?

The Long War against international jihadist Islamic terrorism will not be won in the streets of Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan, or in the shadows where it is violently being persecuted out of the public’s view. The issue of whether or not we can militarily defeat non-state terrorist organizations is indisputable. Al-Qaeda was routed from its base of operations; its members now pursued by military coalition and law enforcement agencies on a global scale. Despite the escalating violence in Iraq the threat of widespread attacks in the West has not come to fruition even with the attacks in London, Bali, and Madrid.

            The number of terrorists captured and killed or the number of attacks thwarted is not the rubric against which we should measure our success. A nation committed to free democratic ideals will never adequately defend itself from every perceived and real threat. Long before 9-11 the foundations for international Islamic terrorism were built in the form of madrassahs and schools funded by largely Persian Gulf and Saudi based ‘charities’ committed to teaching radical Wahhabist beliefs throughout the Muslim world. Many of these are located in Central Asia. This volatile region’s recent transition to

self-government, growing populations, and large segments of poverty stricken areas create an environment ripe for exploitation.

            Greg Mortenson who directs the Central Asia Institute, an NGO dedicated to founding co-educational schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, has personally encountered the surprisingly fast rise of these radicalized madrassahs as he travels the region. Mr. Mortenson, in Three Cups of Tea, writes, “one of the four major Wahhabi proselytizing organizations, the Al Haramain Foundation, had built 1,100 mosques, schools, and Islamic centers in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and employed three thousand paid proselytizers in the previous year.”  Visiting schools the Central Asian Institute founded  throughout Pakistan he often encounters new madrassahs where previously there were none, even in regions largely populated by members of the Shiite sect. 

            Mr. Mortenson further points out that, “the International Islamic Relief Organization constructed 3,800 mosques and spent $45,000,000 on ‘Islamic Education,’ employing six thousand teachers.” The numbers are staggering when one considers the purchasing power of the dollar in these impoverished communities. Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the rise of militant Islam throughout Central Asia says 15%-20% of all students passing through these schools are receiving some sort of military training. The World Bank estimates over 20,000 madrassahs are teaching as many as 2,000,000 students in Pakistan alone. Many of the textbooks used in the schools exhibit the basest stereotypes and characterizations of Jews, Christians, and others deemed Infidel by the Wahhabist movement. Nina Shea of the Washington Post wrote an article on May 21, 2006 quoting several Saudi texts saying, “Every religion other than Islam is false. The apes are Jews …while the swine are the Christians. Jihad in the path of God …is the summit of Islam.” Repeated exposure at a young age to these sorts of teachings gives birth to hatred and bigotry.

            The US government is on its way to spending upwards of $300,000,000,000 on the War in Iraq. Most of these funds finance operational missions. Often unit commanders in both Iraq and Afghanistan can use these funds for projects within their areas of operation. Some of these projects may be improving education through founding of schools, buying textbooks, and other related programs but this is not enough. The amount of money the Wahhabist charities are able to dedicate solely to furthering their agenda is unmatched by any comparable western organization. These organizations are further aided by the tacit support of the ruling elites and governments in many of the Gulf countries. These same governments often profess to the international media and Western allies they are doing all they can to combat the export and growth of radical jihadist ideology. Saudi Arabian funds in particular are often behind such programs. The US, its western allies, and allies in the region must bring more pressure upon their Saudi allies to more effectively curb the phenomenal sustained growth of these organizations.

             These facts highlight the difficulties we must address in directly rebutting the spread of this hateful ideology. Numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations exist that are aiding in the education of many indigent children throughout the Muslim world and Central Asia in particular. The environment is so extreme that logistics for performing aid operations throughout this region can be very challenging. The lack of qualified personnel with the requisite amount of language skills and cultural sensitivity also present a challenge to organizations wanting to help. It would be very difficult for the US government to directly aid these villages where education is needed or to supplement the madrassahs with teachers who are more moderate. Any overt flag waving efforts with a large American or western presence would be rendered ineffective by sympathetic allies of the radical organizations both in the local press and populace.

            The 2005 South Asia Quake caused a lot of suffering throughout the region. The quick response of the US and Pakistani governments working together enabled many remote villages to receive aid. The diversion and deployment of US Army units from the war effort in neighboring Afghanistan to provide critical airlift capabilities and medical facilities was important as the Karakorum winter approached. Working alongside the Pakistani Army the US military forces were able to also bolster the image of the government of Pakistan in the eyes of its own citizens.

            Providing humanitarian aid through military assistance is an easier task than subtly combating the spread of extremist Islam through education. These schools are not solely filled to the brim with wild eyed terrorists looking to die as suicide martyrs, but with impressionable young people who crave an education. If this education allowed to be perverted by adults with a sinister agenda to further a violent extremist ideology the shame is all of humanity’s to bear.

             This struggle will not end with the counting of enemy dead and captured or withdrawal from Iraq. There will always be those who appeal to mankind’s lower instincts of hate through demagoguery. Victory will only come when we wholly engage in the struggle for at-risk impressionable young minds.  This is not easily done, executed, or measured. Certainly our nation and world must work to provide a viable alternative to the biased educations provided in these madrassahs before another generation learns lessons of hate.

Jason B. Nicholson is an MPM Candidate. He recommends  The Central Asia Institute, a non-profit NGO dedicated to building village schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan for both boys and girls, as his charity of choice for bringing education to those who need it most. www.ikat.org