We live in a freer-market society. For all the shortfalls of capitalism, we’ve embraced its upside- merit-based rewards, innovation, sustainable economic growth, government that relies on society for wealth creation, not society that relies on government for the same.

In the outrage over bonuses paid to executives at companies that received federal loans or investments- “the bailouts”- American politicians are leveling their potato guns and attempting to out-faux-populism each other by indicting the companies that they chose to bail out. They are wasting their time. They are manipulating American citizens who need actual market recovery, not theatrics. And they are damaging much more than simply AIG- they are corroding the concept of the market, merit-based reward system.


An oft deployed 2008 campaign slogan from right of center was that the Obama ticket represented some kind of Marxist Utopian nightmare- even now as the administration attempts to open a discussion about the best way to make sure Americans get adequate health care, the accusation of Socialism is as popular and uninformed as it was pre-November. Stating that it ought to be the responsibility of our nation to ensure the sick receive care is as fundamentally obvious as stating that it is the government’s responsibility to protect our citizens from attack by use of military force. Logic links these arguments together, and only a true Libertarian would be willing to deny them both. But faux Libertarians these days are as popular as faux Populists, and amazingly, despite all the scare about Socialism, you can’t shake a stick without hitting a faux Populist.

Which is why it is altogether bizarre that in spite of the is-it-or-is-it-not-Socialism debate about nationalizing banks or about health care, the Obama administration and both parties in congress have picked a hollow ideological battle with industry and demonized our “free” market entrepreneurs as villains. Komrad?

"It's almost like these guys should have gotten the Nobel Prize for evil," said White House Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee. Senator Chuck Grassley [R–IA] said that AIG executives should “resign or go commit suicide”. Really?


If you want to talk about anger over the finance and housing industries digging a bottomless well of wealth by tunneling under the savings of regular Americans or hoodwinking others into crooked mortgages they couldn’t afford, ultimately imploding our economy from within, show me to the picket lines. I don’t need any more convincing, and I don’t think any Americans do either.

Exhibit pitfall of Capitalism 101: failure to regulate can be hazardous to your health. Wall Street goes gangbusters selling toxic debt, no one understands why and no one wants to ask because “a rising tide lifts all ships”. All of a sudden your house is worth less than what you’ve paid into your mortgage and your IRA has lost half its value. “Wall Street got greedy”, Tavis Smiley said on Meet the Press this week. Got greedy? What is the finance industry if other than a vocation for greed? It’s a business that makes money out of money. It’s the definition of greed. No shocker there.


But those are the crooks that ripped us off.

Maybe. These people get paid to manage risk for their stakeholders. If the market did well, do they deserve their bonuses? What if the market did terribly, and they were able to limit losses? Do they deserve bonuses then? I have no idea what the AIG contracts stipulated, and I couldn’t care less. When a company enters into an agreement with its employees, those employees are entitled to what they signed up for, unless it was illegal.

But the taxpayers bailed out AIG.

So what? The Fed bailed out AIG because AIG was considered an essential part of the apparatus that keeps credit and capital moving through our economy. Broadly speaking, it benefits the credit-seeking taxpayer but not necessarily the bailed-out companies to have been bailed out.

What is our endstate from the bailout- what change do we want to effect? What we want is for these companies (in which we taxpayers are now stakeholders, i.e. investors) to do well. We want to rebuild confidence in the financial industry. And Republicans and Democrats alike want Americans to loosen their grips on their wallets and push money back into the economy. To do that, we need the right mix of ingredients, and one of those ingredients is talent.


Right now we’ve got the heads of the biggest banks in America working for free despite the magnificently miserable nature and high risk of said job. We’ve got the heads of the car companies car-pooling to DC for hearings because some congressman thinks that day-long journey is worth the symbolism. We’ve got AIG executives getting death threats, along with recommended suicide from a US senator. We’ve got a bill passing the House yesterday (328-93) that will tax the AIG bonuses at 90%. Does any of this sound American to you?

Leadership is about making hard decisions and having the discipline to implement them effectively. AIG and its peers screwed up. If we wanted them to fail, we should have let them go bankrupt, and kept our tax dollars in the Fed. If we wanted them to succeed, then we should have had the willpower to forego this bogus Wall Street punishment catharsis and the wherewithal to recognize that they will need talented people to get them back on track- talent best engaged through free market, merit-based rewards.

Capitalism needs to be regulated. Not dismantled.


Further reading: Friedman at NYT Nocera at NYT

A brief note to our readers- some of you may be wondering about the decrease in the frequency of our articles. Simply put, we have a policy of only writing when there is something to say. Over the last year, we've covered many of the big-ticket items that we have wanted to address and today we find ourselves consumed by the global economic crisis.

We will continue to post relevant articles about war, policy, and veterans' issues, so stay tuned.

It is often said that Afghanistan was Russia’s Vietnam and this is a fair comparison: the USSR invaded a third world country in the middle of a revolution and attempted to bolster a friendly government of shared ideology in the face of fierce foreign-supported insurgent resistance, creating a long, bloody war that lost popularity at home almost immediately but was nevertheless sustained for over nine years.

But as quaint as that adage is, it is doubly bitter, because while Afghanistan was indeed Russia’s Vietnam, Afghanistan is also becoming America’s Afghanistan.


Last month, during Hilary Clinton’s confirmation hearing, Senator Kerry opened a line of discussion about Afghanistan that was more frank than that I've heard from any other delegate of prominence. In his comments, Kerry discussed his concern that the US has been on autopilot in Afghanistan and more importantly, that we have allowed our basic tactical objective to inflate into an impossible nation-building exercise:

“Our original goal was to go in there and take on Al Qaeda. It was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. It was not to adopt the 51st state of the United States. It was not to try to impose a form of government, no matter how much we believe in it and support it…”

A recent political cartoon showed President Obama looking proudly at a portrait of Lincoln while behind him, a portrait of LBJ, physically mired in the Vietnamese mess he created, reached out of the canvas as if attempting to warn Obama. You could take the cartoon many ways, and about either of our current wars, but I took it specifically about Afghanistan- that the war is at a tenuous Vietnam-esque spot where "victory" seems impossible even while the desire to escalate is widely espoused.

If Obama begins to deepen our involvement in the war and embrace the mission-creep Kerry alluded to- or simply fails to reorient our definition of success to the original mission or new feasible goals- Afghanistan will surely become another Vietnam.


In William Malley’s well-researched book on the subject, The Afghanistan Wars, he describes the events that precipitated the Soviet invasion and the kind of war that transpired as a result. To review, a Marxist coup overthrew the revolutionary government of Mohamed Daoud Khan in 1978 and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a flailing communist government that was rife with factionalism. Unable to govern effectively, besieged and relying on repression and violence to keep the capital under control, the DRA soon requested support from the Soviet military. The Soviet army deployed across its mutual border into Afghanistan in 1979, beginning a long bloody war against the resistance, commonly referred to as the Mujahideen (holy warriors or strugglers), disparate groups of various sizes, goals, tactics, and even religions (Shia vs. Sunni).

The Mujahideen found ready support from many western nations, particularly the US which supplied money and weapons and helped bring the issue to the forefront of Russian negotiations. NGO aid flowed into Afghanistan (from the ICRC, Médecins Sans Frontières, etc.) who operated in rural areas, caring for refugees and often treating Mujahideen. International opinion condemned the Soviet invasion and facilitated wide operating room for support of the resistance.

And while current Afghan president Hamid Karzai is far more popular than Babrak Karmal was at the time of the Soviet invasion (and the Taliban is also less popular now than it once was), Karzai’s regime nonetheless retains substantial patronage from the US, his mere existence as executive enabled by a foreign invasion, and his military run, in effect, by the US Central Command.

Technically, the political conditions have reversed- the Soviets were fighting to sustain a repressive socialist regime in Afghanistan while the US labors, ostensibly, to implement a self-sustaining representative democracy. But the pure concept of a foreign power invading and protecting a nascent regime, fighting a persistent local resistance in an effort to institute an ideologically preferred social and governmental system, is identical to that of the Soviet Afghan war.


Today, politicians and pundits appear constantly on our television screens declaring that we must fight extremism, militant Islam, and the forces of evil throughout the world (“to the gates of hell”). The main target is Al Qaeda and its network, to include its most recent facilitators, the Taliban. With ire and incredulity, the pols and pundits decry the ungrateful Pakistanis- on whose security we spend billions of dollars- but whose soldiers are attacking our troops across the Afghan-Pak border, and whose government, either unable or disinclined to seal that border, is allowing active support of the Taliban and Mujahideen through clandestine networks and even the ISI, the national intelligence agency, a prime asset and ally in the “war on terror”.

A rereading of recent history is helpful in placing these concerns in perspective.

In the 1980s, the United States had a policy of supporting the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, many of whom were bona fide extremist holy warriors. The US spent over $2 billion on the Mujahideen, supplying them with weapons- from classic Enfield rifles to Chinese-made AK-47s and RPG-7s and US Stinger missiles. Furthermore, the way the US moved its aid into Afghanistan was through a network it constructed with its ally, Pakistan, specifically through the ISI itself. In effect, the relationship between extremist rebels in Afghanistan and the Pakistani ISI was developed with the explicit consent and desire of the United States, so that the US could get its gift weapons into Mujahideen hands.

Today those Mujahideen, under a new name, are still fighting a regime they reject, still waging an insurgency against an invading infidel army, still operating freely in the would-be Pushtunistan, still supported unrepentantly by a fractured Pakistan and the Pakistani ISI. I argue that Afghanistan is likely to become our Afghanistan but it could easily be countered: it always was.


I often ask people what they think is the endstate for the American/NATO war in Afghanistan, and so far, no one has been able to give me an answer. Has it become, as Sen. Kerry inferred, a war to establish a functioning democracy there? Let’s think this through to a logical, even ideal conclusion: In some magical way, Afghanistan becomes a secure state, free of violence, and is able to develop a functioning democratic system. But, in their first elections as such, the people elect the Taliban to a majority position. What then? Denounce the elections? What if Afghans actually embrace Sharia law the way the British embrace secular government? The constant projection of our own philosophies onto other peoples is inefficient and damaging. How Afghans want to live should be up to Afghans to decide and our policy should react to those decisions, not manipulate them.


Before the US government sends one extra battalion to Afghanistan, or takes one home, it needs to announce to the American people what the objectives in Afghanistan are, what the feasibility of those objectives is, and what the expected timeline will be.

In 2007, Gen. Petraeus told the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "We're not after the Holy Grail in Iraq; we're not after Jeffersonian democracy. We're after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." This should be our goal in Afghanistan as well. Now, let’s set immediately to defining what those conditions are.

Lest we allow Afghanistan to become our Afghanistan.


Further Reading: The Afghanistan Wars Kerry at Clinton Confirmation via CFR Petraeus on Iraq (Wash Post)

Two weeks ago I wrote an article about the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, an operation that preceded the current ground offensive there. The bombardment was a declared effort to destroy Hamas’ capability of shooting rockets into neighboring Israel, the practice of which indeed, Hamas has prolific experience.

I criticized Israel for what I described as disjointed objectives and means: their goal to destroy Hamas through the medium of bombing Gaza, I claimed, would not be met, and their actions would serve only to empower Hamas as literally hundreds of bodies piled up in the apartment buildings the IDF razed. I further criticized the US and other Israeli sympathizers for stating that the responsibility for the dead Palestinian civilians rested solely on Hamas’ shoulders. While that might be a tenable position in an academic debate, I suspect it is not on the streets of Gaza.

Finally, I made a reference to the fact that around the world, moderate Muslims are infuriated with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the ghettoization of Gaza, and now, the lopsided bombing of the latter. Would the latest events there set off a spate of violence around the world, from Damascus to Paris, I inquired?

Perhaps in Paris. In an article titled “France Wary of Strife Spreading From Gaza” published last Wednesday, the Washington Post discussed an increase of anti-Semitic violence that included a burning car being crashed into a synagogue in Toulouse. This week, vandals threw nine Molotov Cocktails at a synagogue in suburban Paris. Anti-Semitic graffiti- “We must kill the Jews”- was found on the wall of a social center in the Puy-en-Velay, and in Schiltigheim, Molotov Cocktails were thrown at an Israeli community center.

Apparently, the violence is even more widespread: an internet search returns additional reports of synagogues and schools vandalized in Chicago, California, Florida, and set on fire in Brussels and London.

To review my opinions on violence: no excuses. Not for Hamas, not for American or French Anti-Semites, and not for the Israeli military. Still, I reject the American storyline. I found an editorial on The Examiner which asserted that “under cover of criticizing Israel, antisemitism has become trendy”. On the surface, I agree with the article, particularly given some of the language (“Jews back in the ovens”) used in the latest acts of vandalism. But there is another level to these dynamics that needs to be explored.


Anti-Zionism vs. Antisemitism

Noam Chomsky, in his book Fateful Triangle, describes the origins of what he calls the “special relationship” between America and Israel. In his exploration of the many influences, he discusses the efforts of Zionist lobbyists, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he asserts specializes in suppressing criticism of Israel in America, under their mandate to fight antisemitism. Broadly, Chomsky argues that Anti-Zionism (the criticism of Israeli policies) is made out by Israeli advocates, both inside and outside of Israel, to be synonymous with antisemitism. That is, to criticize Israel is to be inherently anti-Semitic. In America, we’ve seen this philosophy in action elsewhere in varying degrees: to oppose affirmative action was to be a racist, to support immigration reform was to be a xenophobe.

But in few quarters has the rhetoric been as compelling as that from the Jewish lobby, and I believe that much of it was originally conceived in earnest. Since WWII, American Jews have been traumatized by the Holocaust and believed that it could happen again, anywhere. During WWII, the US stayed out of Europe as long as possible and famously denied access to Jewish refugees immediately before the war. It seemed to many survivors and their children that a homeland where Jews would finally be safe from persecution was a humanitarian entitlement thousands of years overdue. That it had to be in the heart of the Arab world, on one of the most contested pieces of geography on earth, seems to be a separate, divided issue.

What has been the impact of this attempt to combine anti-Zionism and antisemitism? In America, I believe it has resulted in the curtailment of objective discussion and criticism of Israeli policies for fear of being labeled a bigot. From talking to Israelis and friends I know who have lived and studied in Israel, the American media appears to be far less critical about Israeli policy than even that of Israel, where there is legitimate disagreement among citizens over the appropriate way to handle the Palestinian détente. American politicians have learned to criticize Israeli policy at their own peril, and American citizens have little access to see it from any other perspective. If they question, they might be labeled anti-Semites, just like to question the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 was to be designated unpatriotic- “you’re with us, or you’re against us”.

The Examiner asserted that the recent violence was antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism. I think that in many ways, the recent anti-Jewish violence is a result of the pro-Israel propaganda effort to make antisemitism and anti-Zionism indistinguishable. If, in common terms, “Gentiles” are conditioned to believe that one is the same as the other, then it follows logic that to object to one is to object to the other. Without making excuses for the reprehensible acts of vandals, I believe that this paradigm nonetheless explains why some legitimate Palestinian sympathizers have chosen to voice their anger in this way.


What Israelis and Americans tell me

In graduate school, I met a lot of Israeli students, and found myself incapable of steering clear of the Israeli/Palestinian topic. In the late 90s, I had met Israelis who believed vehemently in Israeli defense policy, and I expected the same out of my new friends. But I got something different when I asked their views- they had broad, informed opinions and did not deny the Palestinian plight, but in fact sympathized with it and agreed that Israel should remove itself from the occupied territories.

Conversely, I rarely meet Americans who feel this way. Jewish Americans often argue bitterly about the necessity of Israel as a safe-haven for the world’s Jews and that it be defended at all costs. Non-Jews often see it simply as a fight against terrorism, a fight in which there are “good guys” and “bad guys” and the American government and media have hammered this scenario home. Of the Jews I do know who are critical of Israeli policy, they render their opinions with a sense of acquiescence: the Zionist lobby feels stifling, immovable. One of my friends, a scholar completing his PhD in foreign policy told me recently: “I’ve steered clear of this topic. If I were to make this my career focus, I’d spend my whole life fighting critics trying to discredit me as a self-loathing Jew.”


The recent Israeli invasion of Gaza has taught me more about how Americans see Israel than anything else. What is remarkable is that those opinions are in fact where much of Israel’s power to make war stems from; Israel gets its weapons from the US, is the recipient of more foreign US aid than any other country, (10% of the US 2008 foreign aid budget), and is supported by the US as an advocate and patron in the world media, at the UN, and beyond.

Because Americans are unable or unwilling to look at Israel with as objective an eye as even Israelis themselves, America stays locked into its thoughtless support for Israeli policies that stir up anti-Zionist (and anti-Semitic) sentiment worldwide and label the US firmly as an impediment to the peace-process instead of an unbiased facilitator.

Instead of thinking about Israel emotionally and distorting it into a fiction about the purity of democracy fighting the evil of terror- or accepting the proposition that to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic- Americans must demand objective, analytical thought on Israeli policies and arm themselves with the information needed to battle ideologues who continue to subvert open debate.


Further Reading: Le Monde (French) Washington Post The Examiner Ha'Aretz Critical Op-Ed Anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews Fateful Triangle

Last night, my friend walked into the room and said: “They’re starting World War III in Gaza.” I think he may be right.


Al Qaeda likely expected America to attack Afghanistan, but couldn’t have hoped for the boon of Iraq. In Iraq there have been over 90,000 documented civilians killed, and in Afghanistan, estimates range from 10,000 to 25,000. What could be greater for turning Al Qaeda from a bunch of fringe lunatics who speciously claimed that America was out to persecute Arabs and take their resources, than America invading and occupying Iraq on faulty motives, culminating with Abu Ghraib, and nearly 100,000 dead civilians?

This is a storyline we borrowed from Israel, and now they seem to have taken it back. Indeed, Hamas’ endstate- its key to success and survival- is to keep the casualty rates of innocent Palestinians high, as this adds a veneer of circumstantial credibility to their activities, and increases international hatred of Israel and the countries who support Israel among Muslims worldwide.


ROE

In the military, on the tactical level, we have “Rules of Engagement” (ROE). ROE are criteria for engaging targets during war, usually in the form of orders which detail restrictions or requirements for what, when, and how to shoot. For example, ROE may prohibit shooting at mosques, or require non-lethal deterrents be used on approaching cars before shooting bullets. Usually, ROE are contentious because tactical commanders rightly want as much latitude as possible to protect their troops and accomplish their missions. But the ROE are put in place to preserve the political or strategic intent of military action by preventing violence that would actually undermine these broader objectives. In most wars, ROE are quickly modified to increase freedom to engage the enemy, but this can have an indirect effect on higher-level strategy.

This is why fighting insurgencies is such exhaustive and expensive work that requires total commitment and a long-term vision. If Afghan villagers are told by the Taliban that they will be killed for betraying them and protected for supporting them, and if the Afghani military or US forces cannot offer credible alternatives, the village will choose to support the Taliban. Any indecision over this dilemma will end rapidly if the US bombs a suspected Taliban meeting and in doing so kills 90 local villagers- as actually happened this summer. Then, that village will not be won; the counterinsurgency will have failed there, by uniting the villagers with the Taliban in common grievance, and validating the Taliban propaganda.


To what end?

Hamas is not an insurgency inside Israel, but in a way, Israel is battling for hearts and minds- both those of Gazans to convince them not to support Hamas, and of the international community, to help bring Hamas to its knees and build support for Israeli policy. But in both of these goals, Israel is failing.

What has been Israel’s objective in Gaza this week? I would submit that a smart objective would have been to subvert the rocket and mortar attacks against its own citizens while preventing any action that might engender additional support for Hamas.

Militarily, I would develop a long-term infiltration program, insert commando teams in disguise to raid Hamas, and use unmanned surveillance drones and satellite observation to locate rockets, launch sites, and Hamas teams in action. Then I would kill those guys with as little peripheral damage or threat to civilian life as possible; I would develop and enforce strict ROE to meet these requirements, accepting any resulting degradation in the lethality of my military program.

I would restrict aerial bombardment except in the protection of troops on the ground or against geographically isolated and hardened targets, and I would never target universities or apartment buildings a priori. Because to do so, as this week has shown, is to kill hundreds of civilians without remorse, drastically disrupting the equality of grievance.

However, Israel’s objective seems, to this outsider, to be internal political gains. Put succinctly by Pennsylvania senator William Maclay in 1794: “War is often entered into to answer domestic, not foreign purposes.” What does Israel gain from this gory attack on Gaza? Domestically, perhaps it gets kudos from right-wingers. Internationally, it suffers huge losses, as America did in Iraq.


WWIII

Unfortunately, as I have written before in 2 Dinar, Israel’s problems are our problems as well, because American politicians have decided to play to, and cultivate further, the lobby for the defense and ideological support of Israel at all costs. The official response from Washington? Rice said that the US holds Hamas responsible for the violence in Gaza.

But back to World War III: The aggression and violence wrought on Gaza this weekend by Israel has a distinct feeling of an action without restraint. I have no trouble imagining an Arab nation stepping into the conflict and being followed by others perhaps emboldened by the US’ overextension of military power in Iraq and Afghanistan, eventually lighting off an international spate of violence over anti-Israel sentiment that has been bubbling at the surface from Damascus to Paris.

Israel is taking cues from the US, but could stand to take a lesson instead. Shun the short term domestic gains that attacking your rivals can bring at the polls and consider the long term losses that result when you destroy your reputation and isolate yourself from moderates. As Steven Erlanger of the NY Times put it succinctly: "Damage to the popular perception of Israel may be more lasting than any strategic gains or losses."

Warfighting is best done without restraint against military targets. But Israel doesn’t need a war in Gaza; it needs a joint Arab-American intervention that compels, not requests, the killing to stop. Hamas: Israel will never be destroyed. Israel: Bombs will empower, not destroy Hamas.

[Edits made 17 Jan]


Further Reading: NY Times Washington Post Al Jazeera Economist interview with Rami Khouri Economist interview with Yossi Mekelberg NY Times Video (Gaza)