Budget Mendacity From the Washington Post

Have you ever seen Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory? Recall Gene Wilder's "protests" when the various naughty children engaged in acts that he knew would lead to very unpleasant consequences? Somehow Fred Hiatt's gang brought that image to mind with their argument that their acceptance of massive deficit spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is consistent with their insistence that healthcare reform be revenue neutral.

In principle, all wars should be paid for, just like all other federal spending. We criticized President George W. Bush for sticking with tax cuts rather than calling for national sacrifice after Sept. 11, 2001, and for failing to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So we start with a general statement of principle, with no indication that the Post has any interest in standing behind that principle. Hiatt's editorial board protested, Willie Wonka-style ("Oh! I wouldn't do that... I really wouldn't"), at some point in the past and, having given lip service to their principles, proceeded with full-throated advocacy of the wars and their escalation.

If Mr. Obama were to propose offsetting the cost of additional troops in Afghanistan with a gasoline or carbon tax, we would support it.

But not if he proposed such taxes to fund healthcare reform - for that, Hiatt and his crew want new taxes on the middle class. But take a step back in history to the budget surpluses G.W. inherited and frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthy and a ruinously expensive war of choice in Iraq - why not let some of those tax cuts expire to fund the war? Or to fund healthcare reform?¹

Hiatt and his crew then argue that the budget games they're using to avoid funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are analogous to arguments that future savings in healthcare costs should be considered when calculating the cost of a reform bill. An obvious flaw in this argument is that, at least in any modern western society, the state cannot avoid healthcare costs. It's perfectly appropriate in that context to consider how reforms might bring about savings, and how that will relate to future expenditures. When the government chooses to spend vast amounts of money on a war of choice, the baseline for spending is $0 and (unless you endorse some modern form of loot and plunder) there's no way to achieve "savings" by making that number negative.

Further, the Post combines spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suggesting that "savings" that may be achieved from possible troop reductions in Iraq could be applied to the increased budget for the war in Afghanistan, thus bringing about a net "savings". If the Post believes this argument, then it has justified in spades what it deems to be the "creative accounting" behind the healthcare reform bill. Further, money is fungible - why not apply the Post's imagined "savings" from Iraq to healthcare reform, and pass the Post's proposed new taxes to fund the war in Afghanistan? ("Did we just say we opposed sticking with the Bush tax cuts for those wars, so that we wouldn't run up huge deficits? Well, that was so five minutes ago.")

The Post continues with a similar quality of logic:

All this assumes that defense and health care should be treated equally in the national budget. We would argue that they should not be, for two reasons. One is that wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end. A guarantee of health care for all, particularly in the context of steadily rising costs, will bankrupt the nation if not matched by a steady stream of revenue.

Sure, wars end... Even the Hundred Years War came to an end. I suspect, though, that the Iraq war would have wrapped up sooner or perhaps not been launched at all if G.W. had told the wealthy, "Sorry, you won't be getting those tax cuts after all, and estate taxes will not be reduced." The Post's tax proposals are consistent with this - they're big on picking the pockets of working Americans, but in relative terms the proposals they're presently endorsing will have a small impact on the wealthy.

Since wars do end, it's reasonable to ask "When will these wars end, and how much will they cost?" The best answer we're likely to get from Hiatt and his boys is probably Jackson Diehl's² "Nothing's anything like Vietnam" argument - a shrug. Who knows, who cares, it's probably best not to even ask - and don't mention long, costly wars we entered with no vision of how we would achieve victory or an exit strategy, because they're nothing like what will soon be our longest war ever with no end in sight."

The Post's slippery slope argument on healthcare costs is amusing, given the Post's strong opposition to the cheapest alternative to the status quo - a robust national healthcare plan, even a single payer plan. I find it childish to suggest that the inevitable consequence of providing health insurance to every U.S. citizen will be that the nation is bankrupted. It's not at the level of "death panels", but it's still a dishonest, fear-based argument.

The point hidden behind the hypocrisy and logical fallacy is actually a good one - when we're committing to an indefinite expenditure we should consider how we are going to pay for it. But the Post's definition of what expenditures are of a limited nature is reminiscent of how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution's provisions on copyright - anything that's less that indefinite in duration is "limited". When there's no end in sight to war spending, and no plan or strategy that will bring an end to that spending, the open-ended nature of the commitment makes it little different than entitlement spending - infinity is not so much different from "infinity minus one".

The Post's last argument is that wars are necessary to defend our nation and its people, while healthcare reform is not. Again we have dubious logic - that any money spent on wars and the military, no matter how spent, is necessary to the defense of the state. Would Fred Hiatt expand that "reasoning", Candian Bacon-style, to a war of choice against Canada? Some wars aren't all that important to our defense. Jackson Diehl just got through suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are less important "in its consequences for the United States" than was the Vietnam War - we ended the war, the North took control of the country, it's still a communist nation, and... Americans can easily and safely visit Vietnam as tourists, and we have normalized diplomatic and trade relations. How would that have been improved by giving the Vietnam War an indefinite³, deficit-funded blank check?

Combining the Hiatt crew's assertion, "the nation's security must be the president's first priority", with Diehl's insistence that our current wars are less important than Vietnam, would the Post endorse a decision to end both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on the ground that they're less important than Vietnam and we did pretty darn well despite having ended that war with an outcome falling far short of victory? Or would we hear Diehl shriek, "Any analogy to Vietnam is imperfect - continue the war forever (less a day) if necessary to win!" With Hiatt chiming in, "At any cost... to the middle class and future generations."

Since we're focusing on the question of what bankrupts a nation, potentially leading to collapse, it seems reasonable to ask this question: In the history of the world, how many nations or empires have collapsed under the weight of healthcare costs (or any other public benefit), and how many have collapsed under the weight of costly wars and imperial overreach? Sometimes wars end because they bankrupt the proponent.

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1. Here, they may be channeling Lionel Hutz. It says we argued "No New Taxes'? They got that all wrong. It's supposed to say 'No! New Taxes!"

2. Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

3. Limited only by the Post's assertion that all wars eventually end.

Peace Is At Hand....

One of Henry Kissinger's finer moments:

In October [of 1972] Kissinger euphorically reported to the world that "peace is at hand" in Viet Nam. Then, as it has so many times before in America's longest and strangest war, the peace proved once again elusive. As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the bombers north again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger labored at a new global design, a multipolar world in which an equilibrium of power would ensure what Nixon called "a full generation of peace." But at year's end, the design remained dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seemed no early exit.

If you don't study history, or even if you do, you may find that it repeats itself - today, Henry Kissinger "has McCain's back", and argues that peace is at hand in Iraq.

This is an example of a smart man, even one whose foreign policy mistakes are something of legend, lowering himself to writing a base, simplistic diatribe - something one might expect in an undergraduate speech class, but that somebody of Kissinger's background and intelligence would have to know is an unadulterated heap of crap. But Kissinger's not trying to convince himself. He's trying to convince people at the margins of the Republican party who are sick of the war that they should back McCain. And he's counting on them not to think very hard about his claims and assertions.

Kissinger opens with one of the famously nebulous "They say"-type assertions, that allow you to fabricate a claim that you put into the mouths of people who don't actually exist.

Above all, [supporters of a deadline for withdrawal] argued, the war was lost, and withdrawal would represent the least costly way to deal with the debacle.

I'll grant that you will be able to find isolated individuals who took that position, but they're exceptions. Which of course is why Kissinger fails to identify any actual people who hold this position - to do so would only serve to highlight how exceptional it is. He's also conflating two issues - the question of whether the war is lost, and the question of whether withdrawal is the "least costly" (and here it's not clear if we're talking lives, dollars, political influence, something else, or some combination thereof) option. It's possible to believe that we're winning, but that we should still get out of Iraq on a short timetable.

Kissinger attempts to argue that there are three reasons why "events" have overtaken arguments in support of withdrawal. He claims that al-Qaeda (and here he seems to mean the real thing, not "al-Qaeda in Iraq") "seems on the run"; the Sunni insurrection "has largely died down"; and the Shiite dominated central government has "at least temporarily" suppressed Shiite militias that challenged its authority. In other words, even in pitching this as a great success, Kissinger can't bring himself to claim any concrete achievements. He couches his claims in appearances or as temporary. He continues, "Of course, we cannot tell now whether these changes are permanent or whether, and to what extent, they reflect a decision by our adversaries, including Iran, to husband their forces for the aftermath of the Bush administration." That's kind of important, don't you think? If we're going to be declaring that "peace is at hand", we don't want to be in a situation where "at year's end, the design remain[s] dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there seem[s] no early exit" - do we?

Kissinger apparently has forgotten the mantra of the past five years, "Iraq is not Vietnam". He quickly resorts to the standard, Vietnam War line that we must try to mind read our enemies, and we can't do anything that could potentially make our enemies see us as weak.

Any appearance that radical Islamic forces were responsible for a U.S. defeat would have enormous destabilizing consequences far beyond the region.

This may sound incredibly empowering to our enemies - they get to dictate our foreign policy. Except, of course, that it's not really about what our enemy might want - it's about Kissinger. If the shoe were on the other foot, and somebody were telling him "Your policies strengthen the enemy" - for example, "Staying in Iraq provides terrorists with a powerful recruiting tool, in attracting people to plot against us, kill our soldiers, and potentially attack civilian targets," he would be dismissive. If the enemy flat-out said something like, "I'm trying to draw you into a protracted, unwinnable war in the Middle East in order to weaken your military", they would presumably be deemed to be lying. Facts, schmacts - the enemy never benefits from Kissinger's policies, but always benefits from the policies of those who oppose him.

Kissinger paints a portrait of how he sees things magically unfurling from this point forward, concluding,

American deployment is transformed from abdication into part of a geopolitical design. Its culmination should be a diplomatic conference charged with establishing a formal peace settlement.

Hey - let's hold it in Paris!

Kissinger imagines himself clairvoyant, presenting a parade of horribles that a deadline would supposedly create:

• "It will encourage largely defeated internal groups to go underground until a world more congenial to their survival arises with the departure of American forces." We're supposed to assume this hasn't already happened? Or that the factions presently paid for cooperating and working with the U.S. won't turn their backs on our interests (if not take up arms against us) the moment the payments stop? How is this changed by the presence or absence of a deadline?

• "Al-Qaeda will have a deadline against which to plan a full-scale resumption of operations." Again he seems to be playing the cheap parlor trick of conflating "al-Qaeda" with "al-Qaeda in Iraq". The former group wasn't in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, and seems perfectly happy with us stayin in Iraq forever. But if Kissinger's describing the latter group, and if it's truly about to pop up like a jack-in-the-box the moment any pressure is taken off the lid, this argument belies Kissinger's claims about the success of the surge and how ready the Sunni factions are to join a unity government. Even if he means that Sunnis might again invite and support foreign fighters from al-Qaeda proper, his claim speaks ill of his notion that the nation is ready to reconcile.

• "And it will give Iran an incentive to strengthen its supporters in the Shiite community for the period after the American withdrawal." Who are Iran's supporters in the Shiite community? I mean, other than people like Maliki and Chalabi? Really, we're going to have to deal with the fact that Shiite-controlled Iraq is going to be close with Shiite-controlled Iran, and continued occupation isn't going to create a magic separation barrier between the two states.

• "Establishing a fixed deadline would also dissipate assets needed for the diplomatic endgame." For instance? (But making conclusory statements is more fun than, you know, making substantive claims.)

Kissinger goes on to explain that with a timetable, you might not have sufficient combat forces in place if things go to Hades in a handbasket. But he ridicules the notion that the withdrawal of forces could be measured against any new insurrection or resurgence of violence, with troops kept in place for longer if needed. He then proposes that McCain is going to withdraw a secret number of troops - presumably just the right number to keep anything bad from happening while giving us more manpower for fighting in Afghanistan - but that this mystical troop withdrawal won't threaten the stability of Iraq. Wonderful - not only is "peace at hand", we are now counting on McCain's secret plan to deliver it!

Toward the end, he delivers a real gem:

These considerations explain Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's conduct on the occasion of Obama's visit to Iraq. Maliki is negotiating with the Bush administration about a status-of-forces agreement for the residual forces to remain in Iraq. Given popular attitudes and the imminence of provincial elections, he probably wanted to convey that the American presence was not planned as a permanent occupation. The accident of the arrival of a presidential candidate, who had already-published views on that subject, reinforced that incentive. To reject the senator's withdrawal plan in front of a large media contingent would have been to antagonize someone with whom Maliki might have to deal as president.

At least it's not a repeat of the absurd "Maliki was ambiguous" argument raised by other McCain shills. But get this - Kissinger concedes that Iraqis want our forces out on a timetable, meaning that the Iraqis apparently see none of the dangers proposed by Kissinger or see them as a good thing. (If it's the former, it's classic Kissinger narcissism - nobody could know the situation better than him, even if they're living through it. If it's the latter, it undermines his entire thesis.) But beyond that, he's arguing that Maliki was happy to spit in the eye of the sitting President, and undermine the position of the Republican presidential candidate, because the Democratic candidate might win. Why wasn't Maliki concerned about antagonizing the President, or the other person "with whom Maliki might have to deal as president"? Kissinger's rationalization is insipid.

As you would expect, for his closing statement Kissinger falls back on Vietnam.

Thirty years ago, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam and Cambodia two years after American troops had been withdrawn and local forces were still desperate to resist. Domestic divisions had overcome all other considerations. We must not repeat the tragedy that followed.

Of course it could be that but for our war in Vietnam, that country would not be one of the five remaining communist nations in the world (Vietnam, Laos, China, Cuba, North and Korea). It could be that, but for the illegal war Kissinger supported in Cambodia, Pol Pot would never have come to power. It could be that a continued war in Vietnam would have resulted in a worse outcome than we presently see - a nation that is still communist and oppressive, but which has become our trade partner instead of our military adversary.

If the worst case scenario for Iraq was that it would end up, after twenty-five or thirty years, looking like modern Vietnam, would Kissinger truly want to roll the dice on endless war? (I suspect so, but he should at least have the honesty of admitting that he's gambling, and could bring about a much worse outcome.)

Lessons from History

I find it interesting that people in various pro-war factions, right up to the President, take such umbrage at even the slightest comparision between the war in Iraq and Vietnam. It doesn't much matter whether the comparison is on a broad scale, or in relation to the finest of points - pro-war factions declare such comparisons to be false, unfair, and even that the comparison (in the President's words) "sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy".

It is also interesting that similar objections typically are not raised when comparisons are made between Iraq and other conflicts, such as Lebanon or Algeria. (In fact, the Pentagon military saw enough parallels between Iraq and the French experience in Algeria, that it was reportedly screening the film "The Battle of Algiers" as a cautionary tale.) And anybody who recalls Lebanon, including the short-lived U.S. intervention and barracks bombing, and Israel's ultimate withdrawal after eighteen years of occupation, should be concerned by the thought that the Iraqi occupation may turn out the same way.

So why the consternation about Vietnam, and not other wars - particularly where the comparison to a different war may ultimately be more damning? In my opinion, it is because the popular conception of Vietnam is "The U.S. lost", whereas there is little popular understanding of the other conflicts which are mentioned. There is no instant message to a comparison between Iraq and Lebanon, or Iraq and Algeria, but a comparison to Vietnam sends the message, "We might lose" - or perhaps even, "We are losing". If understood, comparisons to Algeria and Lebanon might seem more damning than a comparison to Vietnam, but absent a popular understanding the pro-war factions apparently see no reason to try to shout down those comparisons.

Ultimately, the "we might lose" subtext, and not the validity or invalidity of any particular point of comparison, is why the pro-war factions are so pained by mention of Vietnam.

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The Fog Of War

Back when I was in law school, a classmate challenged a professor about a long-standing rule of law, suggesting that it was bad policy. The professor wrote the number "50" on the blackboard, and commented, "When fifty states, fifty jurisdictions...", then added a "1" below the "50", "and the District of Columbia", paused momentarily, added another "1", "and the federal courts disagree with you, you have to ask yourself if the problem is with their reasoning or with yours." (The professor took some comeuppance in good graces a couple of weeks later, when he proposed his own rather unique legal theory and the classmate asked, "How many jurisdictions agree with you on that, Professor?")

Last night, I saw The Fog of War, which outlines various lessons Robert S. McNamara learned through his life, particularly in relation to his wartime experiences and mistakes. The film was perhaps a bit soft on McNamara, permitting him to cast his past pretty much as he saw fit, and permitting him to avoid some tough questions or areas of inquiry. However, I was left with the impression of a very bright and capable man who has now spent decades analyzing mistakes by his nation - mistakes in which he played a central role - and has drawn a set of conclusions which should be heeded by world leaders. I can't imagine Rumsfeld sitting through this film as, despite the comparisons between his and McNamara's management styles, Rumsfeld does not appear to have the type of mind that is capable of introspection and of learning from history. But I wish he would at least try.

McNamara has recently expressed dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration's approach to Iraq:

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."

Having viewed the film, salient rules that the Bush Administration is breaking include:

Failure To Listen To Our Allies - McNamara, like my law professor, believes that we need to be cautious when our allies disagree with our actions, as they did in Vietnam. He argues that if we cannot convince nations with similar values to support our cause, we need to take a step back and examine our own reasoning. The Bush Administration has proudly taken the opposite approach - expressing open contempt for our long-term allies when they disagree with it, and insisting upon unilateral action even where it might be possible to achieve multilateral action with a bit more time and diplomacy. When you insist upon going in a direction your allies view as foolish, you may end up holding the bag. We need our allies' support for the post-war reconstruction and democratization of Iraq, yet Bush's tactics have frustrated our efforts to bring our allies on board. (And we're now in danger of seeing the withdrawal of nations from our so-called "coalition of the willing".) In McNamara's words:

And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq.

Failure to Empathize with the Enemy - McNamara recounted how the Vietnamese believed their war against the U.S. was a war to end a century of colonialization and, while dismissing that belief as absurd from our standpoint, observes that the Vietnamese perceptions played an enormous role in their willingness to fight and die in staggering numbers. We believed that we were fighting for their freedom, yet they believed we were fighting for their enslavement to a brutal colonial master. We believed we were blocking the influence of communism, particularly through Vietnam's neighbor, China. They had been fighting China for, in the words of one former leader, 1,000 years, and had no intention of living under China's influence. Similar misconceptions appear to exist between what we intend through our occupation of Iraq, and what many of the locals (and people in neighboring nations) believe we intend - and absent our breaking through the misconceptions, we will continue to fight a difficult and often uphill battle.

Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.

The film also recounted Lyndon Johnson's position on appeasement versus war - and his observation that (whenever possible) we didn't want either. Isn't that still true?

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