OurFuture.org Blogs: Norman Solomon

Biggest State Party to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan

Norman Solomon — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:35:07 -0800

This week begins with a significant new straw in the political wind for President Obama to consider. The California Democratic Party has just sent him a formal and clear message: Stop making war in Afghanistan.

Overwhelmingly approved on Sunday by the California Democratic Party's 300-member statewide executive board, the resolution is titled "End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan."

The resolution supports "a timetable for withdrawal of our military personnel" and calls for "an end to the use of mercenary contractors as well as an end to air strikes that cause heavy civilian casualties." Advocating multiparty talks inside Afghanistan, the resolution also urges Obama "to oversee a redirection of our funding and resources to include an increase in humanitarian and developmental aid."

While Obama weighs Afghanistan policy options, the California Democratic Party's adoption of the resolution is the most tangible indicator yet that escalation of the U.S. war effort can only fuel opposition within the president's own party -- opposition that has already begun to erode his political base.

Participating in a long-haul struggle for progressive principles inside the party, I co-authored the resolution with savvy longtime activists Karen Bernal of Sacramento and Marcy Winograd of Los Angeles.

Bernal, the chair of the state party's Progressive Caucus, said on Sunday night: "Today's vote formalized and amplified what had been, up to now, an unspoken but profoundly understood reality -- that there is no military solution in Afghanistan. What's more, the vote signified an acceptance of what is sure to be a continued and growing culture of resistance to current administration policies on the matter within the party. This is absolutely huge. Now, there can be no disputing the fact that the overwhelming majority of California Democrats are not only saying no to escalation, but no to our continued military presence in Afghanistan, period. The California Democratic Party has spoken, and we want the rest of the country to know."

Winograd, who is running hard as a grassroots candidate in a primary race against pro-war incumbent Rep. Jane Harman, had this to say: "We need progressives in every state Democratic Party to pass a similar resolution calling for an end to the U.S. occupation and air war in Afghanistan. Bring the veterans to the table, bring our young into the room, and demand an end to this occupation that only destabilizes the region. There is no military solution, only a diplomatic one that requires we cease our role as occupiers if we want our voices to be heard. Yes, this is about Afghanistan -- but it's also about our role in the world at large. Do we want to be global occupiers seizing scarce resources or global partners in shared prosperity? I would argue a partnership is not only the humane choice, but also the choice that grants us the greatest security."

Speaking to the resolutions committee of the state party on Saturday, former Marine Corporal Rick Reyes movingly described his experiences as a warrior in Afghanistan that led him to question and then oppose what he now considers to be an illegitimate U.S. occupation of that country.

Another voice of disillusionment reached party delegates when Bernal distributed a copy of the recent resignation letter from senior U.S. diplomat Matthew Hoh, sent after five months of work on the ground in Afghanistan. "I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan," he wrote. "If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons."

Hoh's letter added that "I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan." And he wrote: "Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made."

From their own vantage points, many of the California Democratic Party leaders who voted to approve the out-of-Afghanistan resolution on Nov. 15 have gone through a similar process. They've come to see the touted reasons for the U.S. war effort as specious, the mission as Sisyphean and the consequences as profoundly unacceptable.

Sometime in the next few days, President Obama is likely to learn that the California Democratic Party has approved an official resolution titled "End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan." But will he really get the message?

The War Stampede

Norman Solomon — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:44:49 -0800

Disputes are raging within the Obama administration over how to continue the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. A new leak tells us that Washington’s ambassador in Kabul, former four-star general Karl Eikenberry, has cautioned against adding more troops while President Hamid Karzai keeps disappointing American policymakers. This is the extent of the current debate within the warfare state.

During a top-level meeting Wednesday afternoon in the White House, the Washington Post reports, President Obama “was given a series of options laid out by military planners with differing numbers of new U.S. deployments, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 troops. None of the scenarios calls for scaling back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan or delaying the dispatch of additional troops.”

No doubt there are real tactical differences between Eikenberry and the U.S./NATO commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, the ultra-spun brainy spartan who wants to boost the current U.S. troop level of 68,000 to well over 100,000 in the war-afflicted country. But those policy disputes exist well within the context of a permanent war psychology.

What’s desperately needed is a clear breakaway from that psychology, which routinely offers “kinder, gentler” forms of endless and horrific war. But predictably, in the days and weeks ahead, some progressives -- from the grassroots to Capitol Hill -- will gravitate toward Eikenberry’s stance.

Fine-tuning the U.S. war in Afghanistan is no substitute for acknowledging -- with words and with policy -- that there will be no military solution. Adjusting the dose and mix of military intervention is a prescription to do more harm on a massive scale.

A recent spate of media stories has focused on soldiers, veterans and family members struggling with PTSD and other heartbreaking consequences of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the key messages is that the government must do a better job of caring for battle-scarred veterans.

To the great extent that such stories don’t question continuation of the warfare, they’re part of the stampede. As long as the only options put forward have to do with finding better ways to cope with ongoing war, the men and women in the military are framed as people who are most admirable as participants in their own suffering (and, implicitly, as people who are willing to inflict suffering on others).

The suffering of Afghan people, meanwhile, gets short shrift in the USA’s media and political discourse. While we hear -- though not enough -- about traumas that continue to plague Americans many months or years after being in war zones, we hear almost nothing about the traumas that the U.S. military visits upon people living in the occupied country.

After 30 years of war, Afghans do not need more ingenious war efforts by the latest batch of best and brightest in Washington.

Thundering along Pennsylvania Avenue, the stampede for war is hard to resist. It’s a stampede that few members of Congress have been willing to directly challenge. So, the “serious” policy arguments, from the White House to Capitol Hill, have remained bullish on war -- and eager to find better ways to wage it.

The November 12 edition of the Post reported that Ambassador Eikenberry “has expressed frustration with the relative paucity of funds set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war.” The newspaper added: “Earlier this summer, he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress, but the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending billions of dollars on new troops.”

The Obama administration is spending upwards of 90 percent of all U.S. funds in Afghanistan on military operations -- and what Eikenberry is seeking would add up to mere drops in the bucket compared to what Afghanistan really needs for “development and reconstruction.” Nor is the U.S. government in any moral or logistical position to effectively supply such aid.

Right now, the paltry aid from Washington is largely disbursed in Afghanistan as an adjunct to the Pentagon’s military operations -- and it is widely recognized as such. That’s why the resulting projects are so often blown up or burned down by insurgents.

In war-ravaged Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, effective aid is possible. While woefully underfunded, the National Solidarity Program and the Aga Khan Foundation are prime examples of successes -- if the goals are genuine humanitarian aid and development rather than providing “hearts and minds” photo-ops and leverage for the occupiers’ military campaigns.

The current dispute over how to continue the war in Afghanistan should not be mistaken for an argument over basic assumptions. And what’s wrong with U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is fundamental.

The Next Phase of Healthcare Apartheid

Norman Solomon — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:50:38 -0800

In Washington, “healthcare reform” has degenerated into a sick joke.

At this point, only spinners who’ve succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word “robust” to describe the public option in the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.

“A main argument was that a public plan would save people money,” the New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry -- claiming to want a level playing field -- has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. “After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up.”

At its best, “the public option” was a weak remedy for the disastrous ailments of the healthcare system in the United States. But whatever virtues the public option may have offered were stripped from the bill en route to the House floor.

What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a new phase of healthcare apartheid.

People who scrape together enough money to buy health insurance will discover that they’re riding in the back of the nation’s healthcare bus. The most “affordable” policies will be the ones with the highest deductibles and the worst coverage.

We’re hearing that large numbers of lower-income Americans will be provided with Medicaid coverage in the next decade. Translation: If funding holds up, they’ll get to hang onto a bottom rung of the healthcare ladder. Many will not be able to get the medical help they need, from primary care providers or specialists.

Not long ago, we were told that the Obama administration was aiming for a public option that could provide coverage to one out of every four Americans. Now the figure is around one out of every fifty.

Not long ago, the idea was that taxpayer-funded subsidies were to be used only for the public option. But now the entire concept has been hijacked by and for the private insurance industry. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it on October 8, private insurance companies “are going to get 50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers.”

Pelosi was making the argument that the least the insurance industry could do, in return, would be to accept a higher level of taxation. But her comment was a telling acknowledgment that all the “public option” proposals now provide a massive funnel from the U.S. Treasury to the insurance conglomerates. The individual mandate is a monumental giveaway to private insurance firms.

The specter of “healthcare reform” that requires individuals to stretch their personal finances for often-abysmal insurance coverage is the worst of all worlds -- government intrusion for corporate benefit without any guarantees of decent health coverage.

In effect, the individual-mandate requirement tells people that obtaining health coverage is ultimately their own responsibility -- and the quality of the coverage is beside the point. In essence, when it comes to guaranteeing quality healthcare for all, the gist of the policy is: “Let’s not, and say we did.”

The predictable result is reinforcement of vast -- and often deadly -- inequities in access to healthcare.

With Washington making such a corporate mess of “healthcare reform,” the best way to get what we need -- healthcare for all as a human right -- will be to enact single-payer healthcare in one state after another.

But the House Democratic leadership has not been content to serve up a grimly pathetic “healthcare reform” bill. Speaker Pelosi has used her political leverage to quash Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s amendment -- approved months ago by the Education and Labor Committee -- that would grant waivers so that states could create their own single-payer system. Pelosi removed the Kucinich amendment from the House bill.

The California legislature has twice passed a strong single-payer bill, both times vetoed by the state’s current execrable governor. The official position of the California Democratic Party is unequivocally in favor of single-payer healthcare. And yet Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, did what she could to sabotage the single-payer position of her own party in her own state.

Sickening.

Uncle Sam in Afghanistan: Good Help Is Hard to Find

Norman Solomon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:04:32 -0700

Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip. But it’s not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan’s last election is shadowing the next.

Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from Washington. But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the roof -- with all the elements for massive fraud still in place -- what’s the point of throwing together the same ingredients?

This time, the spinners in Washington hope to be better prepared.

Unless the best and brightest who oversee Afghan war policy can rig up a coalition with the top two contestants, a runoff between Karzai and his rival Abdullah Abdullah will happen November 7. What’s on the bill between now and then is a pantomime of electoral democracy.

After such a show, the predictable encore will be further escalation of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

The runoff election has not been scheduled for the benefit of Afghan society. Many millions of people in Afghanistan are now bracing themselves. Every factor that boosted the crescendo of violence last time, cresting with several hundred insurgent attacks on election day, is still present.

The days between now and the scheduled runoff will bring heightened fear, more violence, more killing. And for what?

As with the last election, the intended beneficiaries are far from Afghanistan. In Kabul, shortly after the August 20 vote, I heard many Afghans comment that the purpose of the election was to satisfy North America and Western Europe.

Meanwhile, who is this guy Abdullah, often hyped but rarely scrutinized by the U.S. news media?

At the end of August, when I interviewed the courageous Afghan antiwar feminist Malalai Joya in Kabul, she put it this way: You can give a warlord a shave, a haircut and an expensive suit, but he’s still a warlord.

The most grisly years in Afghanistan’s capital were from 1992 to 1996, when dueling warlords mercilessly rocketed and shelled Kabul. Slaughter of civilians in the city was routine. Estimates of deaths among Kabul residents during those years range from 50,000 to 65,000. Abdullah was one of the warlords most directly engaged in ordering the carnage.

Now the Obama administration and congressional leaders -- with Sen. John Kerry playing a starring role in recent days -- are making a determined effort to legitimize the Afghan government as a prelude to further U.S. escalation of the war.

This kind of thing happened so many times during the Vietnam War that people lost count. The assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in early November 1963 was an especially dramatic delivery of a pink slip from the White House. What followed was a procession of corrupt human-rights abusers who led South Vietnam’s government.

Some, like bit player Nguyen Khanh, are barely remembered. Others, notably Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, had staying power as Uncle Sam’s servants in Saigon. And the Pentagon machinery kept revving its gears.

“We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality," freelance American reporter Michael Herr observed in Vietnam. "Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop."

In the midst of military escalation, the hopeful stories we tell ourselves -- and the tales that top U.S. officials and mass media keep tweaking and repeating -- are whistling past other people’s graveyards.

Doing some whistling themselves, many progressives have exaggerated the extent of recent concerns about this war among Democratic leaders in Congress and the White House. Tactical disputes and strategic reviews should not be mistaken for willingness to move away from a basic policy of endless war.

While the absence of democracy in Afghanistan is glaring, the failure of democracy in the United States is pernicious. At the grassroots, we have yet to grasp the magnitude of this war’s momentum -- or to exercise our capacities to stop it.

Men with Guns, in Kabul and Washington

Norman Solomon — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:27:52 -0700

For those who believe in making war, Kabul is a notable work product. After 30 years, the results are in: a devastated city.

A stale witticism calls Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai “the mayor of Kabul.” Now, not even. On block after block in the Afghan capital, AK-47s are conspicuous in the hands of men on guard against a near future. Widely seen as corrupt, inept and -- with massive election fraud -- now illegitimate, Karzai’s government is losing its grip along with its credibility.

Meanwhile, a war-stoking mindset is replicating itself at the highest reaches of official Washington -- even while polls tell us that the pro-war spin has been losing ground. For the U.S. public, dwindling support for the war in Afghanistan has reached a tipping point. But, as you’ve probably heard, the war must go on.

Kabul’s streets are blowing with harsh dust, a brutal harvest of chronic war that has destroyed trees and irrigation on mountains around the city.

Visiting Kabul in late August, I met a lot of wonderful people, doing their best in the midst of grim and lethal realities. The city seemed thick with pessimism.

In comparison, the mainline political discourse about Afghanistan in the United States is blithe. A familiar duet has the news media and the White House asking the perennial question: “Can the war be won?”

The administration insists that the answer is yes. The press is mixed. But they’re both asking the wrong question.

More relevant, by far, would be to ask: Should the U.S. government keep destroying Afghanistan in order to “save” it?

All over Kabul, men are tensely holding AK-47s; some are pointing machineguns from flatbed trucks. But the really big guns, of course, are being wielded from Washington, where administrative war-making thrives on abstraction. Day to day, it can be easy to order the destruction of what and who remain unseen.

Truly, the worst enemy in Afghanistan is poverty. But the U.S. government keeps waving a white flag.

Does anyone in the upper reaches of the Obama administration actually grasp what it means that Afghanistan’s poverty is very close to the worst in the world?

The current version of the best and the brightest should ponder the kind of data that can be found in the CIA World Factbook, such as Afghanistan’s infant mortality rate -- defined as “the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year.” The current number is 154.

Last year, while the U.S. government was spending nearly $100 million a day on military efforts in Afghanistan, an Oxfam report put the total amount of humanitarian aid to the country from all sources at just $7 million per day. Not much has changed since then. The supplemental funding measure that the White House pushed through Congress a few months ago devotes 90 percent of the U.S. spending in Afghanistan to military expenditures.

Dimes to nurture life. Dollars to destroy it.

I hate to think of the kind of future that the U.S. war escalation foreshadows for the very thin children I saw in Kabul, flying ragged little kites or playing with toys like an empty plastic soda bottle with a rope tied around its neck.

Echoing now is a speech from Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967. If we replace the word “Vietnam” with “Afghanistan,” the gist of his message is with us in the autumn of 2009:

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Afghanistan. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Afghanistan. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”

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Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

Norman Solomon — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:42:55 -0700

This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media’s insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.

This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time, a fairy tale so widespread that it routinely masquerades as truth. In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington -- insisting for the longest time that the war must go on.

In early 1968, after several years of massive escalation of the Vietnam War, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. daily newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were actively demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily papers -- including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.

A similar pattern took shape during Washington’s protracted war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies have been much more supportive of the U.S. war effort than the American public.

In mid-spring 2004, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was showing that “one in four Americans say troops should leave Iraq as soon as possible and another 30 percent say they should come home within 18 months.” But as usual, when it came to rejection of staying the war course, the media establishment lagged way behind the populace.

Despite sometimes-withering media criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, all of the sizable newspapers steered clear of calling for withdrawal. Many favored sending in even more troops. On May 7, 2004, Editor & Publisher headlined a column by the magazine’s editor, Greg Mitchell, this way: “When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?”

Today, the gap between mainline big media and the grassroots is just as wide. Top policymakers for what has become Obama’s Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation’s mighty newspapers -- at the same time that opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war.

While a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting, the savants who determine big media’s editorial positions insist on staying the course.

Recycled from the repetition-compulsion department, a spate of new hand-wringing editorials has bemoaned the shortcomings of Washington’s allied leader in the occupied country. Of course the edifying pitch includes the assertion that the Afghan government and its armed forces must get their act together. (Good help is hard to find.)

“President Obama has rightfully defined success in Afghanistan as essential to America’s struggle against Al Qaeda,” the New York Times editorialized on Aug. 21. Yet Al Qaeda, according to expert assessments, is scarcely present in Afghanistan any more. There are dozens of countries where that terrorist group or other ones could be said to have a much larger presence. Does that mean the U.S. government should be prepared to wage war in all of those countries?

Paragraph after paragraph of the editorial proclaimed what must be done to win the war. It was all boilerplate stuff of the sort that has littered the editorial pages of countless newspapers for many years during one protracted war after another -- in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

When congressional leaders and top administration officials read such editorials, they can take comfort in finding reaffirmed support for their insistence on funding more and more war. If only public opinion would cooperate, there’d be no political problem.

But, increasingly, public opinion is not cooperating. While the media establishment and the political establishment appear to belong to the same pro-war affinity group, the public is shifting to the other side of a widening credibility gap.

In a word, the problem -- and the threat for the press and the state -- can be summed up as democracy.

Now, one of the pivotal questions is what “liberal” and “progressive” online organizations will do in the coming months. Many are led by people who privately understand that Obama’s war escalation is on track for cascading catastrophes. But they do not want to antagonize the leading Democrats in Washington, who contend that more war in Afghanistan is the only viable political course. Will that undue deference to the Obama administration continue, despite the growing evidence of disaster and the sinking poll numbers for the war?

A cautionary note for those who assume that the impacts of public opinion will put a brake on the accelerating U.S. war in Afghanistan: That assumption is based on a misunderstanding of how the USA’s warfare state really functions.

Under the headline “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over,” the New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote: “A president can’t stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won’t stay with him.” That was way back in August 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html

(The next day, I wrote a piece headlined “Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over.”)
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0815-24.htm

The war on Vietnam persisted for several horrific years after the polls were showing that most Americans disapproved. The momentum of a large-scale and protracted U.S. war of military occupation is massive and cataclysmic after the engine has really been gunned.

That’s one of the most chilling parallels between the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The news media are part of the deadly process. So are the politicians who remain hitched to some expedient calculus. And so are we, to the extent that we go along with the conventional wisdom of the warfare state.

When the Dead Have No Say

Norman Solomon — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:19:56 -0700

Official Washington is buzzing about “metrics.” Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?

Don’t ask the dead.

Days ago, under the headline “White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success,” a New York Times story made a splash. “As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.”

Don’t ask the dead. They don’t count.

The Times article went on: “Those ‘metrics’ of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working.”

Don’t ask the dead. They won’t have a say.

“Without concrete signs of progress, Mr. Obama may lack the political stock -- especially among Democrats and his liberal base -- to make the case for continuing the military effort or enlarging the American presence.”

Don’t ask the dead. They can’t hear you.

“We all share the president’s goal of succeeding in Afghanistan,” said Senator John Kerry. “The challenge here is how we are going to define success in the medium term, given the difficult security environment we face.”

Don’t ask the dead. You can’t hear them.

The White House “struggles to gauge Afghan success.” People in the middle of the Afghan war struggle to survive.

A new ceiling of 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan hasn’t been reached yet, but leaks are now telling us that the Pentagon’s top commander there will soon request 45,000 more. Apparently, escalating the warfare is much more attractive to Washington’s policymakers than actually challenging the main supporters of the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the Pakistani government.

“With the U.S. relationship with Pakistan still locked in a cold war embrace that accedes to Pakistani demands at the expense of Afghanistan, establishing a metric for anything is useless without reassessing the underlying assumptions,” Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald said last week. They’re authors of the new book “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” published after nearly 30 years of research.

“With Pakistan’s creation of the Taliban, America’s concept of ‘winning’ entered a complicated phase that continues to haunt American decision-making to its core,” Gould and Fitzgerald added. “Pakistani intelligence knows full well the American political system, its history of compliance with their wishes and the lack of appreciation for Afghan independence. America’s war in Afghanistan is an ongoing bait and switch where the U.S. fights against its own interests and Pakistan plays the Beltway like a violin.”

Gould and Fitzgerald contend: “The only metric that matters is how far Pakistan’s military has moved from supporting Islamic extremism. With the insider relationship the United States has with Pakistan’s military intelligence, that should not be a difficult metric to establish.”

Meanwhile, few Democrats with high profiles can bring themselves to challenge President Obama’s military escalation in Afghanistan. But an important statement has just come from John Burton, chairman of the California Democratic Party.

“Enough is enough,” Burton wrote in an August 11 email blast that went to party activists statewide. “It’s time we learned the lessons of history. The British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world, could not subdue Afghanistan. Neither could the Soviet Union, the second most powerful country at that time and next-door neighbor to Afghanistan. Two of the great militaries in history found Afghanistan easy to conquer but impossible to hold. It’s time the people of Afghanistan assumed full control of their own country. It’s time for American troops to come home -- not only from Iraq, but from Afghanistan too. And the first step is an exit strategy.”

Burton made a key connection between the soaring costs of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and the domestic economy: “Already, $223 billion that could have gone to things like health care reform has been sunk into this war. . .”

Routinely, the dominant political and media calculus renders the dead as digits and widgets, moved around on spreadsheets and news pages. The victims of war are hardly seen as people by the numbed sophisticates who can measure just about anything but the value of a human life.

The dead can’t speak up. What’s our excuse?

The Incredible Shrinking Healthcare Reform

Norman Solomon — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:46:11 -0700

Like soap in a rainstorm, “healthcare reform” is wasting away.

As this week began, a leading follower of conventional wisdom, journalist Cokie Roberts, told NPR listeners: “This is evolving legislation. And the administration is now talking about a glide path towards universal coverage, rather than immediate universal coverage.”

Notions of universal healthcare are fading in the power centers of politics -- while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.

Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign’s 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: “health insurance reform.”

The difference between the promise of healthcare for everyone and the new mantra of health insurance reform is akin to what Mark Twain once described as “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

The “health insurance reform” now being spun as “a glide path towards universal coverage” is apt to reinforce the huge power of the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries in the United States.

President Obama says that he wants “things like preventing insurers from dropping people because of pre-existing conditions.” Those are not fighting words for the present-day insurance industry. Behind the scenes, massive deals are taking shape.

The president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Karen Ignagni, “noted that the industry had endorsed many of the administration’s proposed changes, including ending the practice of refusing coverage for pre-existing conditions,” the New York Times reported on August 3. A couple of days later, in a profile of Ignagni, the newspaper added: “Rather than being cut out of the conversation, her strategy has been to push for changes her members can live with, in hopes of fending off too much government interference.”

This year, no more significant news article on healthcare politics has appeared than the August 4 story in the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Obama Gives Powerful Drug Lobby a Seat at Healthcare Table.” http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2009-08-04-12-46-58-news.php

It’s enough to make you weep, or gnash your teeth with anger, or worry about the consequences for your loved ones -- or the loved ones of people you’ll never meet.

During his campaign last year, Obama criticized big pharmaceutical firms for blocking efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. But since the election, the LA Times reports, “the industry’s chief lobbyist” -- former Congressman Billy Tauzin -- “has morphed into the president's partner. He has been invited to the White House half a dozen times in recent months. There, he says, he eventually secured an agreement that the administration wouldn’t try to overturn the very Medicare drug policy that Obama had criticized on the campaign trail.”

The story gets worse. For instance, “Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe.”

Meanwhile, with a “mandate” herd of cash cows on the national horizon, the health insurance industry is licking its chops. The corporate glee is ill-disguised as the Obama administration pushes for legal mandates to require that Americans buy health insurance -- no matter how dismal the quality of the coverage or how unaffordable the “affordable” premiums turn out to be for real people in the real world.

The mandates would involve “diverting additional billions to private insurers by requiring middle class Americans to purchase defective policies from these firms -- policies with so many gaps and loopholes that they currently leave millions of our insured patients vulnerable to financial ruin,” says a letter signed by more than 3,500 doctors and released last week by Physicians for a National Health Program.

Days ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed an emerging “consensus” and “common ground” on Capitol Hill. In passing, the article mentioned that lawmakers “agree on the need to provide federal subsidies to help make insurance affordable for people with modest incomes. For poor people, Medicaid eligibility would be expanded.”

It’s a scenario that amounts to expansion of healthcare ghettos nationwide. Medicaid’s reimbursement rates for medical providers are so paltry that “Medicaid patient” is often a synonym for someone who can’t find a doctor willing to help.

But what about “the public plan” -- enabling the government to offer health insurance that would be an alternative to the wares of for-profit insurance firms? “Under pressure from industry and their lobbyists, the public plan has been watered down to a small and ineffectual option at best, if it ever survives to being enacted,” says John Geyman, professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington.

A public plan option “would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers’ dominant role,” according to the letter from 3,500 physicians. “Even a robust public option would forego 90 percent of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public option would quickly fail in a healthcare marketplace where competition involves a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by NOT paying for care.”

While the healthcare policy outcomes are looking grim, the supposed political imperatives are fueling the desires of Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to produce a victory that President Obama can tout as healthcare reform. Consider this quote from “a prominent Democrat” in the August 10 edition of Time magazine: “Something called health-reform legislation will pass. The political consequences of not passing anything would be too great.”

The likely result is a glide path to disaster.

Spinning Healthcare: A Bad Case of Vertigo

Norman Solomon — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:10:27 -0700

“I want to cover everybody,” President Obama said at his news conference Wednesday night. “Now, the truth is that unless you have a -- what's called a single-payer system, in which everybody’s automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual. . .”

The same conventional wisdom keeping single payer off Washington’s table has been spinning for various “reform” plans with such accelerated RPMs that at this point the nation’s “healthcare debate” is suffering from a severe case of vertigo.

“The overwhelming majority of Americans want healthcare, but millions of them can’t afford it,” Obama told the assembled journalists. “So the plan that has been -- that I’ve put forward and that -- what we’re seeing in Congress would cover, the estimates are, at least 97 to 98 percent of Americans. There might still be people left out there who, even though there’s an individual mandate, even though they are required to purchase health insurance, might still not get it, or despite a lot of subsidies, are still in such dire straits that it’s still hard for them to afford it. And we may end up giving them some sort of hardship exemption.”

That may sound good. But it’s in the service of an agenda for “healthcare reform” that’s seriously flawed.

_________

Days ago, buried in a chart under the headline “How the Health Care Bills Compare,” the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information in the category of “Public Plan.”

A key Senate committee had just approved a bill with a public plan that would “compete with private insurers,” the Times chart explained on July 18. The public plan “would provide ‘only the essential health benefits,’ as defined by the bill, ‘except in states that offer additional benefits.’”

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, “Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan.” Under that plan, “Different levels of coverage -- ‘basic, enhanced and premium’ -- can be offered through the public option.”

Those few grainy sentences, quickly swept beneath the waves from oceans of media, referred to a disturbing aspect of “public plan” scenarios. If the ostensible goal is healthcare for all, then -- at best -- some of the “all” would end up being much more equal than others.

The Republican Party is coming from such a right-wing place that any government action to improve healthcare access is ideologically unacceptable. In contrast, the broad outlines of a Democratic “public plan” at least embrace the precept that the not-so-tender-mercies of the market are insufficient to fully provide for the population’s medical needs.

But as a practical matter, a “public plan” coexisting with the private health insurance system -- generally touted by U.S. media as the pole of real options farthest from the Republican “free market” fixation -- is inherently reconciled to major inequality in access to healthcare.

Even while straining to put forward a “public option” as some sort of stunning government intervention to level the healthcare playing field, media coverage rarely comes to terms with the situation that would actually remain under such a scenario.

How does “healthcare apartheid” strike you?

For the government to offer the public a multi-tier set of options for health insurance -- in the words of the New York Times, “different levels of coverage” such as “basic, enhanced and premium” -- is to imitate the approach of the corporate healthcare establishment.

After all, isn’t it implicit that the government plan’s “different levels of coverage,” offered to the public, would be based on ability to pay?

Missing from the dominant healthcare debate -- not only along Pennsylvania Avenue but also along media row -- is a principle that could be debated and should be debated.

In a few words: Healthcare is a human right.

And a human right should not be contingent on ability to pay. Nor should it be divided into “basic, enhanced and premium.”

_________

Media accounts keep telling us that the current political debate on healthcare is unprecedented and groundbreaking. But an article in the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, by seasoned healthcare reporter Trudy Lieberman, makes a convincing case that little has changed within the frames of media parameters.

The press “has mostly passed along the pronouncements of politicians and the major stakeholders who have the most to lose from wholesale reform,” Lieberman writes. “By not challenging the status quo, the press has so far foreclosed a vibrant discussion of the full range of options, and also has not dug deeply into the few that are being discussed, thereby leaving citizens largely uninformed about an issue that will affect us all.”

What we’re seeing now is a slightly freshened version of a timeworn tap dance that ranges across a constricted media stage. As Lieberman notes: “Absent from the debate are not only single-payer systems like the ones in England and Canada, but other systems with multiple payers, like ones in Germany and Japan -- or, for that matter, any discussion of why a system that relies on competition among private insurers in The Netherlands hasn’t resulted in lower prices for consumers, as advocates claimed.”

The variety of healthcare delivery systems abroad, in industrialized countries, spans a common assumption -- healthcare as a human right -- an assumption that doesn’t cut the mass-media mustard in the United States. “What’s common to all these systems,” Lieberman points out, “is that everyone is entitled to healthcare and pays taxes to support the system, and medical costs are controlled by limits on spending. The specter of a system that takes a significant bite out of stakeholder profits in the U.S. is the real reason the debate is so restricted.”

As Trudy Lieberman puts it, “Reform efforts have danced around this impasse for decades.”

That helps to explain why so much media coverage of healthcare reform proposals is apt to be so baffling to most readers, listeners and viewers. When the big elephant (or, if you will, donkey) in the national newsroom is dependent on the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries for financing, there’s a distinct shortage of candor about the consequences of such ongoing intrusions. Newsgathering, media debate -- and, of course, healthcare -- suffer the consequences.

In the mid-1960s, Medicare became law with the stroke of a presidential pen. Lyndon Johnson was able to sign the measure despite a huge onslaught of opposition from right-wing politicians, their corporate backers and professional groups like the American Medical Association.

These days, the AMA may be somewhat more circumspect in its continuing opposition to progressive measures, but the overall balance of political power remains heavily tilted against healthcare for all.

“In the Senate,” columnist Gail Collins noted in the July 23 New York Times, “everyone is waiting on Max Baucus of Montana. Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus,” the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. As the Washington Post reported days ago, he “has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus’s political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008.”

Today, the kind of arguments heard during the early ’60s against guaranteed healthcare for the elderly can now be heard against establishing a comprehensive single-payer system -- also known as Medicare for all. But now, the healthcare debate is trapped between a political establishment that doesn’t want a single-payer system and news media that insist on ignoring its real potential.

Beyond the Hype: Cronkite and the Vietnam War

Norman Solomon — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:26:34 -0700

Media eulogies for Walter Cronkite -- including from progressive commentators -- rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968. This obit omit is essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller.

But facts are facts, and history is history -- including what Cronkite actually did as TV’s most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite’s February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war “a stalemate,” the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite’s protracted support for the war.

In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm.

“B-57s -- the British call them Canberra jets -- we're using them very effectively here in this war in Vietnam to dive-bomb the Vietcong in these jungles beyond Da Nang here,” he reported, standing in front of a plane. Cronkite then turned to a U.S. Air Force officer next to him and said: “Colonel, what’s our mission we're about to embark on?”

“Well, our mission today, sir, is to report down to the site of the ambush 70 miles south of here and attempt to kill the VC,” the colonel replied.

Cronkite’s report continued from the air. “The colonel has just advised me that that is our target area right over there,” he said. “One, two, three, four, we dropped our bombs, and now a tremendous G-load as we pull out of that dive. Oh, I know something of what those astronauts must go through.”

Next, viewers saw Cronkite get off the plane and say: “Well, colonel, it’s a great way to go to war.”

The upbeat report didn’t mention civilians beneath the bombs.

That footage from CBS Evening News appears in “War Made Easy,” the documentary film based on my book of the same name. Routinely, audiences gasp as the media myth of Cronkite deconstructs itself in front of their eyes.

Also in 1965 -- the pivotal year of escalation -- Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded “the courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged.”

Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar -- as if reporting that a war can’t be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.

The biggest and most important lie about an aggressive war based on deception is not that the war can’t be won. The biggest and most important lie is deference to the conventional wisdom that insists the war must be fought in the first place and portrays it as a moral enterprise.

From the “War Made Easy” film transcript:

NORMAN SOLOMON: “A big problem with the media focus is that it sees the war through the eyes of the Americans, through the eyes of the occupiers, rather than those who are bearing the brunt of the war in human terms.”

WALTER CRONKITE: “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.”

SOLOMON: “In early 1968, Walter Cronkite told CBS viewers that the war couldn’t be won.”

CRONKITE: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

SOLOMON: “And that was instantly, and through time even more so, heralded as the tide has turned. As Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said when he saw Cronkite give that report, ‘I’ve lost middle America.’ And it was presented as not only a turning point, quite often, but also as sort of a moral statement by the journalistic establishment. Well, I would say yes and no. It was an acknowledgement that the United States, contrary to official Washington claims, was not winning the war in Vietnam, and could not win. But it was not a statement that the war was wrong. A problem there is that if the critique says this war is bad because it’s not winnable, then the response is, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll show you it can be winnable, or the next war will be winnable.’ So, that critique doesn’t challenge the prerogatives of military expansion, or aggression if you will, or empire.”