Rove & Plane
Thursday, July 21, 2005, 12:02 PM - Politics
Josh Marshall links to this letter from former CIA intelligence officers. Well worth the read.Judith Miller
Thursday, July 14, 2005, 01:07 PM - Politics
I've read a bunch of comments that we should ignore Judith Miller's pimping for Chalabi and the Iraq war and support her First Amendment situation vis a vis Plame and Rove. However, it's hard to get up in arms when there lurks the question of what smoking gun is she hiding.Health Insurance
Wednesday, June 15, 2005, 10:51 PM - Politics, Economy
Just heard about another self-employed person who had to go back to work for a large company to get health insurance. What a mess. Affordable access to health care is considered a necessity, and rightly so. Yet honest sweat of thine own brow isn't enough to cover the necessities.The marketplace doesn't seem to be handling this one very well. In a culture where money is the prime measure of things, there is little respect given to non-monetary qualities, such as the financial selflessness of a dedicated teacher.
This cultural attitude negatively affects the health care field. Nurses and Physician Assitants aren't respected. Even doctors, excepting the superstars, are falling into chumpdom. Why would smart, caring people want to go into medicine under these conditions?
One wonders how to build an American civilization where many measures of success are properly respected. Where a successful businessman and a successful and a successful family doctor are all accorded respectful status, recognizing that the yardstick of success in each case is different.
Openness
Thursday, March 10, 2005, 08:38 PM - Politics, Tech
I just finished listening to this podcast from the Gillmor Gang (yep, just got an iPod, for that extra 20 minute walk to work). Towards the end, the Gang riffs on openness - open source, open standards, open formats, open economics, and open systems.This got me to thinking about priorities. The normal hierarchy of these opennesses seems to be:
1. Open systems: this is the utopia of complete interoperability with little or no external constraints, what the Gang talked about with the constraints of proprietary silos; akin to the radical democracy of one person, one vote without the influence of money and influence peddlers.
2. Open economics: this is the free beer ideal, where prices are directly tied to costs of production and their is no extra margin due to proprieatry control on processes.
3. Open standards: similar to a standard legal code, where the everyone plays by the same rules.
4. Open source: allow the free examination and modification of the code which drives the applications.
5. Open formats: keep the data free of constraints so it can be ported to any system without impediment. This extends to the metadata, too, such as the formatting data of a word processor.
Practically, in the management of an IT organization, my priorites run in other directions:
1. Open formats: the foundation of my job is to protect the data. If the data is constrained, then someone else has control over my data.
2. Open standards: to reduce the constraints in communication between applications.
3. Open source: this cuts two ways - reducing the cost of licensing and allowing examination of what the application is doing to my data.
4. Open systems: keep focusing on open interoperability of all components. This becomes a decision factor when all else seems equal - Red Hat or Suse?
5. Open economics: most consumers, both business and individual, are dealing with the same economic conditions, so the field, while not ideal, is relatively even. Sometimes that $150 proprietary app doesn't muck with my data and is certainly cheaper than having a developer toil for three days.
Social Security and TSP
Thursday, March 3, 2005, 01:56 PM - Politics
From the Washington Post, this article discusses the comparison with the federal Thrift Savings Plan:For most federal employees, the TSP serves as one leg of a "three-legged stool" of retirement income; the other two are the traditional Social Security benefit and a government pension. But because many businesses no longer offer defined-benefit pensions, many employees in the private sector have only a two-legged stool -- their 401(k) plan plus Social Security.The article goes on to discuss possible hidden costs to employers, particularly small businesses:
The money that workers divert to Bush's personal accounts, plus 3 percent interest, would come out of their guaranteed Social Security benefit. So, in effect, the president would be shaving down one of the legs and hoping that a new one -- the individual account -- would grow at least enough to compensate for the loss.
...diverting a portion of Social Security payroll deductions into TSP-style accounts could be an expensive and logistically difficult task, experts say. A 2001 Social Security Administration study concluded that "infrequent wage reporting . . . could delay the time between when IA [individual account] contributions are withheld from pay and when they are credited to individual IAs." Such delays could be minimized, the report said, but only through higher administrative costs. Running such a system would cost the government between $700 million and $3 billion annually, the report's authors wrote, adding that there would be unspecified costs to individuals and employers that they did not study.People are going to howl if their set aside isn't creditted to their private account immediately. Congress will then shift the burden to business, requiring more detailed reporting on a more frequent basis, thereby adding another administrative cost above their current contribution to Social Security.
Liability Reform
Wednesday, February 23, 2005, 02:06 PM - Politics
Yet another Bush "belief" crumbles under the scrutiny of fact. The NYT has an article today about the impact of malpractice lawsuits on the cost of medical insurance premiums. Bush's own Health and Human Services Department reports that in the past year malpractice claimes dropped 8.9%.Lawsuits against doctors are just one of several factors that have driven up the cost of malpractice insurance, specialists say. Lately, the more important factors appear to be the declining investment earnings of insurance companies and the changing nature of competition in the industry.I doubt these facts will change Bush's rhetoric because his real target always has been the money trial lawyers contribute to Democrats.
The recent spike in premiums - which is now showing signs of steadying - says more about the insurance business than it does about the judicial system.
Echo Chamber Government
Tuesday, January 18, 2005, 03:39 PM - Politics
Most of the media reaction to Seymour Hersh's latest piece in the New Yorker has been about the purported secret missions into Iran. I find Hersh's main discussion about the growing non-accountability of Pentagon black operations to be much more troubling. Here's my synopsis:The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. ... The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.Great, so we're going back to the old El Salvador protocol, which has already proven ineffective on so many levels, but this time it's on a global scale and without even the appearance of Congressional oversite. Compound that with the new mandate for CIA to provide politically correct analysis, and we've got a recipe for disaster.
[snip]
The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A.
[snip]
The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. "It’s a very, very gray area," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.'s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. "Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, 'No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to 'prepare the battlefield.'"
[snip]
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys."
[snip]
... in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began "coming down critically" on analysts in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded to see more support for the Administration’s political position."
[snip]
"...The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, 'Why are you doing this?' or 'What are your priorities?' Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it."
1. Too few people making decisions in an environment where they will hear only what they want to hear. This is never a Good Thing, no matter what the philosophical orientation, be it business or government. It tends to lead to disasters.
2. Too much power in the hands of a non-elected official. This structure that the Bush administration is setting up invites the overstepping of Constitutional boundaries. The scenario of a future Secretary of Defense leading a "cleansing" of the "corrupt" political system is now much closer to being possible. Because it has happened so often before throughout history, it's is pollyannaish to ignore the possibility. Remember, that's why the Founding Fathers insisted on separation of powers and a citizens' army.
Then there's this choice bit:
"Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.And just like it happened in Iraq? Again, it seems they're being told only what they want to hear. The conditions leading to the collapse of the communist bloc are not equivalent to the conditions in the Middle East and predicating a strategy on a purported equivalence is just dumb.
Unfortunately, the machinations of the Bush administration seem to be creating a government of echo chambers: one with too few voices and too few ears.
Blaming the Military
Thursday, January 13, 2005, 07:17 PM - Politics
Andrew Sullivan is touting this article by Michael O'Hanlon on the lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq. I disagree with Andrew's assessment. O'Hanlon's piece is a mish-mash of contradiction and his conclusions, taken to an extreme, are potentially dangerous.The core of his argument is:
The standard explanation for this lack of preparedness among most defense and foreign policy specialists, and the U.S. military as well, is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the rest of the Bush administration insisted on fighting the war with too few troops and too Polyannaish a view of what would happen inside Iraq once Saddam was overthrown. This explanation is largely right. Taken to an extreme, however, it is dangerously wrong. It blames the mistakes of one civilian leader of the Department of Defense, and one particular administration, for a debacle that was foreseeable and indeed foreseen by most experts in the field. Under these circumstances, planners and high-ranking officers of the U.S. armed forces were not fulfilling their responsibilities to the Constitution or their own brave fighting men and women by quietly and subserviently deferring to the civilian leadership.O'Hanlon then proceeds to bounce back and forth between justifying the position that "Phase IV" was unplanned; listing past examples of good and bad planning; and praising generals who did back-channel contingency planning in other situations. He ends with this:
So in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, Powell was right, and Clark was right, and the CINC's (sic) were effective instruments of American foreign policy. They were prepared to challenge their civilian superiors — not on direct orders, but in ongoing policy debates where the civilian authorities would have preferred silence but had no political or legal right to insist on it. Alas, the uniformed military did not do as well in recent times. Had General Franks or General Myers acted similarly when the Iraq war plan was devised, the country would have been better served.The central failing of O'Hanlon's article is that it ignores to take into account the climate of the time.
1. The Bush administration was dead-set against nation building. Our military was not to be used as a security force, especially in internal disputes such as Bosnia. The message to the military was loud and clear when it was announced that the Institute for Peace (or whatever it was/is called) would be shut down. No more soft missions. No more molly-coddling. Just straight up kick-ass force deployment. Post-planning was for others.
2. All post-invasion planning efforts, other than the Chalabi fantasy, were squelched. The State Department was continually marginalized. Again, the message was clear. While the Powell doctrine sounded great on paper, Powell was actively prevented from implementing it.
3. From the beginning, Rumsfeld & Co. were on a mission to reform what they saw as a bloated, Army/labor-centric military. The emphasis was on high-tech and special forces. They had an agenda, and this was going to be their test case. Objections were nothing more than reactionary stonewalling.
4. Some generals did object, such as Gen. Shinseki, and were promptly shunted aside. Rumsfeld promoted those who would play ball, like Tommy Franks. Whether those promoted agreed with the Secretary or kept quiet because they saw what happened to the objectors is beside the point. The message from Rumsfeld was clear: my way or a ruined career. He was not willing to listen to other views, something that O'Hanlon admits in his conclusion was properly done in the Clinton administration.
Given all this, O'Hanlon's criticism of the military leaves a sour taste. It's the same kind of argument where the blame, and punishment, for atrocities is laid on the grunts and the officers giving the orders are excused.
Taken to extreme, O'Hanlon's argument asks for an involvement in the public sphere by the military that is unwarranted and potentially dangerous. The military in a democratic society must be subservient to the will of the people's elected representatives. The military should not be allowed a substantive role in the formation of policy other than as directed by the elected representatives. This may not lead to the strongest or most focused military organization, but that's the cost of democracy.
O'Hanlon suggests that our military leaders in some way failed their Constitutional duty in their lack of planning. I strongly disagree. First, the essential mindset of a proper military organization is adherence to the chain of command. Let's keep it that way so that an elected representative remains the Commander-in-Chief, both in fact and in name. Second, there is no Constitutional duty of voice an opinion. There is a protection for those who desire to, but there is no requirement to do so. And third, (unfortunately) there was significant Congressional and public support for an invasion of Iraq. Granted, there was significant second-guessing about Rumsfeld's plans, but his plans did not rise to the level of dereliction.
If O'Hanlon's thesis is correct that the military failed a constitutional responsibility, then that's saying that the military has some independent status outside of the established chain of command. That, to me, is a very dangerous road to go down.
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