Debate: On

You campaign with poetry, but you govern with prose.

– Hillary Rodham Clinton

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Watching the debate for a second time – the first time on the elliiptical, this evening. Thought – like every other blogger out there, I’m sure – that I’d post some thoughts. My (caustic) thoughts in green. Comments that grabbed my attention in blue.

Full transcript here.

In my opinion, McCain won this one – but not by much. Also, I liked how many details were covered; names and places came up that I’m sure 90% of all voters have never even heard of … I’m watching NPR, and they just made the point – this sounds a lot more like a Kennedy School debate than the usual battle of the dueling soundbytes …

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In any case: Here goes:

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LEHRER: What I’m trying to get at this is this. One of you is going to be the president of the United States come January … in the middle of a huge financial crisis … How [will this] … affect the approach to take as to the presidency?

MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.

LEHRER: Spending freeze?

Yeah, I’m with Lehrer. What? Warning, warning, Maverick at work. … I want a sign that says “Caution: Maverick thinking!”

MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under funded. I went to increase early childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn’t make sense.

Let me tell you another place to look for some savings. We are currently spending $10 billion a month in Iraq when they have a $79 billion surplus. It seems to me that if we’re going to be strong at home as well as strong abroad, that we have to look at bringing that war to a close.

And Obama responds “No, we can’t stop spending - what about the children?! Let’s stop spending on the war…”

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LEHRER: (…but seriouly, folks…) How will the financial crisis affect your choices as the President?

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OBAMA: There’s no doubt it will affect our budgets. … The only point I want to make is this … if we are spending $300 billion on tax cuts for people who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them, and we are leaving out health care which is crushing on people all across the country, then I think we have made a bad decision …

So Obama replies, we’ll raise taxes on the wealthy. Oh, yeah, and stop fighting in the Middle East!

MCCAIN: …I want to make sure we’re not handing the health care system over to the federal government … I want the families to make decisions between themselves and their doctors. Not the federal government. Look. We have to obviously cut spending. …

… I also want to say again a healthy economy with low taxes would not raising anyone’s taxes is probably the best recipe for eventually having our economy recover.

And spending restraint has got to be a vital part of that.

And McCain says, no, we’ll have to cut government funding – and one place we’ll have to cut spending is in Healthcare.

Seems to me, Obama’s playing to his supporters – most of whom (I bet) are idealistic, and too young or too green to be making enough to be in that tax bracket. McCain’s talking to the Baby Boomers, who’re much more worried about debt on every front . . .

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LEHRER: … What do you see as the lessons of Iraq?

McCAIN: I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict. … basically, he says you have to have a good strategy, and be willing to commit to it.

OBAMA: …The first question is whether we should have gone into the war in the first place.

Now six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at…We hadn’t caught bin Laden. We hadn’t put al Qaeda to rest, and as a consequence, I thought that it was going to be a distraction. … And I wish I had been wrong for the sake of the country and they had been right, but that’s not the case. We’ve spent over $600 billion so far, soon to be $1 trillion. We have lost over 4,000 lives. We have seen 30,000 wounded, and most importantly, from a strategic national security perspective, al Qaeda is resurgent, stronger now than at any time since 2001.

We took our eye off the ball. So I think the lesson to be drawn is that we should never hesitate to use military force, and I will not, as president, in order to keep the American people safe. But we have to use our military wisely. And we did not use our military wisely in Iraq.

So, what, the lesson is “don’t make bad decisions? … Oh, and, I was right about Iraq…” ?? Great.

And, McCain with the response:

MCCAIN: The next president of the United States is not going to have to address the issue as to whether we went into Iraq or not. The next president of the United States is going to have to decide how we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind. That’s the decision of the next president of the United States.

At this point, I started laughing. (Good point!) Yes, laughing while on the elliptical machine…

And I’ll tell you, I had a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and a woman stood up and she said, “Senator McCain, I want you to do me the honor of wearing a bracelet with my son’s name on it.”

He was 22 years old and he was killed in combat outside of Baghdad, Matthew Stanley, before Christmas last year. This was last August, a year ago. And I said, “I will — I will wear his bracelet with honor.”

(McCain plays the sympathy card)

And this was August, a year ago. And then she said, “But, Senator McCain, I want you to do everything — promise me one thing, that you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that my son’s death was not in vain.” … And [these mothers] all say to me that we don’t want defeat. … we won’t come home in defeat and dishonor and probably have to go back if we fail.

And now, the “Don’t Tread On Me!!” card — Stack ‘em up!!!

OBAMA: Jim, let me just make a point. I’ve got a bracelet, too, from Sergeant [his pause here was way too long...] - from the mother of Sergeant Ryan David Jopeck, given to me in Green Bay. And she said to me, make sure another mother is not going through what I’m going through.

This one got me. Obama’s response to “we can’t give up”: Hey, I’ve got a souvenir, too! More elliptical giggling. The trick is to come up with a different story with the same emotional impact.

Negative ONE to Obama for lack of creativity.

And it is not true you have consistently been concerned about what happened in Afghanistan. At one point, while you were focused on Iraq, you said well, we can “muddle through” Afghanistan. You don’t muddle through the central front on terror and you don’t muddle through going after bin Laden. You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.

I think that is something we have to take seriously. And when I’m president, I will.

Obama: Seriously, folks, it’s all about Afghanistan…

He does have a point.

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LEHRER: Senator McCain, what is your reading on the threat to Iran right now to the security of the United States?

MCCAIN: My reading of the threat from Iran is that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the State of Israel and to other countries in the region because the other countries in the region will feel compelling requirement to acquire nuclear weapons as well.

… existential threat?? what does that even mean…

But the point about a regional arms race is valid. He goes on to point out that Iran is encouraging chaos in Iraq, passing out weapons, etc.

So obviously, our policy over the last eight years has not worked. Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran. It would be a game changer. Not only would it threaten Israel, a country that is our stalwart ally, but it would also create an environment in which you could set off an arms race in this Middle East.

Now here’s what we need to do. We do need tougher sanctions. I do not agree with Senator McCain that we’re going to be able to execute the kind of sanctions we need without some cooperation with some countries like Russia and China that are, I think Senator McCain would agree, not democracies, but have extensive trade with Iran but potentially have an interest in making sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.

But we are also going to have to, I believe, engage in tough direct diplomacy with Iran and this is a major difference I have with Senator McCain, this notion by not talking to people we are punishing them has not worked. It has not worked in Iran, it has not worked in North Korea. In each instance, our efforts of isolation have actually accelerated their efforts to get nuclear weapons. That will change when I’m president of the United States.

Without Precondition?!?!

Then they go tête-a-tête over talking with Ahmadinejad (McCain mispronounces his name – which i’d be harder on, if he hadn’t said the name first, and gotten it right first, some four sentences earlier…).

They seem to agree we have to start talking to people. That dialog is good. That the president can talk to people. That having secretary-level dialoge is good. They throw a lot of names around – Kissinger, especially – to no avail. I think McCain’s trying to say that anytime the President of the US meets face-to-face with someone, it’s a world-scale political legitimization movement. That you have to do what you can to minimize that, or to drive it. And Obama’s trying to say that we may have to recognize dictators we don’t like, to get what we want – that we have to prepare, but we can’t just ignore dictators we don’t like . . .

And I think this is all obvious. Can’t we just go back to the whole fix-the-economy thing???

When we talk about preconditions — and Henry Kissinger did say we should have contacts without preconditions — the idea is that we do not expect to solve every problem before we initiate talks.

And, you know, the Bush administration has come to recognize that it hasn’t worked, this notion that we are simply silent when it comes to our enemies. And the notion that we would sit with Ahmadinejad and not say anything while he’s spewing his nonsense and his vile comments is ridiculous. Nobody is even talking about that.

No, no, go back to that – the Bush administration did something right???!?!?!

MCCAIN: So let me get this right. We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, “We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,” and we say, “No, you’re not”? Oh, please.

Right. So no diplomacy where we don’t have leverage? Since that makes sense… Someday, we’re going to have to realize we don’t get to drive all the time, any more . . .

Then things get really fun. Check this out:

MCCAIN: And Senator Obama is parsing words when he says precondition means preparation.

OBAMA: I am not parsing words.

MCCAIN: He’s parsing words, my friends.

OBAMA: I’m using the same words that your advisers use.

(to Lehrer) Please, go ahead.

LEHRER: New lead question.

Gotta give him this. Lehrer knows when it’s time to move on…

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LEHRER: Senator Obama. How do you see the relationship with Russia? Do you see them as a competitor? Do you see them as an enemy? Do you see them as a potential partner?

OBAMA: Well, I think that, given what’s happened over the last several weeks and months, our entire Russian approach has to be evaluated, because a resurgent and very aggressive Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region.

Their actions in Georgia were unacceptable. They were unwarranted. And at this point, it is absolutely critical for the next president to make clear that we have to follow through on our six-party — or the six-point cease-fire. They have to remove themselves from South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

It is absolutely important that we have a unified alliance and that we explain to the Russians that you cannot be a 21st-century superpower, or power, and act like a 20th-century dictatorship.

And we also have to affirm all the fledgling democracies in hat region … And to countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the requirements, and they should have a membership action plan immediately to start bringing them in.

Now, we also can’t return to a Cold War posture with respect to Russia. It’s important that we recognize there are going to be some areas of common interest. One is nuclear proliferation.

They have not only 15,000 nuclear warheads, but they’ve got enough to make another 40,000, and some of those loose nukes could fall into the hands of al Qaeda.

So, we can’t get mad at them, ’cause we can’t actually insist they back down . ..

… You deal with Russia based on, what are your — what are the national security interests of the United States of America?

Interesting. So we have to return to a selfish strategy. Anything to do with national debt, an overstretched military, and a failed international reputation…?

And we have to recognize that the way they’ve been behaving lately demands a sharp response from the international community and our allies.

This is nice to say. I think it’s kinda weak, in the face of the international whine-and-shrug performed post-Georgian invasion…

LEHRER: Two minutes on Russia, Senator McCain.

MCCAIN: … I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three letters, a “K,” a “G,” and a “B.” And their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior.

This line would’ve been more effective, if McCain hadn’t then spent some time chuckling at his own joke . . .

I don’t believe we’re going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster our friends and allies. And that wasn’t just about a problem between Georgia and Russia. It had everything to do with energy.

… It’s not accidental that the presidents of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine flew to Georgia, flew to Tbilisi, where I have spent significant amount of time with a great young president, Misha Saakashvili.

<insert massive name-and-place knowledge-dropping here. > Even I was impressed. He does \ know the playing field. He’s been there, and as an adult.Check on experience, check on commanderishness.

…. and I’m tired, so jumping to the very end:

OBAMA: Well, let me just make a closing point. You know, my father came from Kenya. That’s where I get my name.

(yes, we know)… McCain made some age jokes, too. They know their bad-publicity spots . . .

And in the ’60s, he wrote letter after letter to come to college here in the United States because the notion was that there was no other country on Earth where you could make it if you tried. The ideals and the values of the United States inspired the entire world.

I don’t think any of us can say that our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States, is the same.

And part of what we need to do, what the next president has to do — and this is part of our judgment, this is part of how we’re going to keep America safe — is to — to send a message to the world that we are going to invest in issues like education, we are going to invest in issues that — that relate to how ordinary people are able to live out their dreams.

And that is something that I’m going to be committed to as president of the United States.

MCCAIN: Jim, when I came home from prison, I saw our veterans being very badly treated, and it made me sad. And I embarked on an effort to resolve the POW-MIA issue, which we did in a bipartisan fashion, and then I worked on normalization of relations between our two countries so that our veterans could come all the way home.

I guarantee you, as president of the United States, I know how to heal the wounds of war, I know how to deal with our adversaries, and I know how to deal with our friends.

shadowplay

Doing research on modern terrorism (under Soviet war in Afghanistan), I came across this photo in Wikipedia:

Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, 1988. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

Found myself thinking about light and shadow, about all the contrasts inherent in war. Soldiers giving peace signs to small children. A baby-faced 19-year-old screaming for his mother and trying to hold one arm on with the other. Silence before a mine explodes or a bomb strikes. Smiles on politicians’ faces as they proclaim victories we may never achieve.

A thousand shades of gray:

The study of policy is confusing, enlightening, embittering. Sometimes I get so far above the fray, into the theory, that I have a hard time coming back down to earth. There are so many ways to look at everything, it’s easy to get lost in ideology, or in points of view – as much value as each has, the older I get, the more I feel you have to see all the angles before you have any idea what something looks like …

The Vietnam War, for example:

• A “proxy” war - a way for the great powers/ideologies (USSR/Communism vs. US/Democracy)
• A rebellion/freedom struggle – the Vietnamese had been struggling to repel foreign invaders since the late 1800’s – the French, the Japanese, then us Estadonidenses…
• A massive terrorist action -I’m not saying this in an incendiary way, just as a way to look at it. Here’s a definition of modern terrorism:
  • “Terrorism is the capricious and illegal application of politically-motivated force or violence by a clandestine individual, small groups or cells claiming to represent larger bodies or communities, independent of the accepted conventions of the rule of law and international conflict.” (It’s from an article on the birth of modern terrorism, but I left the essay at work; I’ll drop the title in here on MondaySo “Terrorism” comes from the French, from the governmental massacre of dissidents, called “terrorisme.” (Now that I think of it, you might liken that ‘terrorisme’ to the killings by the Argentine Junta in the 70’s and 80’s … In any case, before modern terrorism, there was state terrorism, which basically involved killing a lot of innocents to frighten or intimidate the guilty (or the dissenters) and/or to get the citizenry to rise up against the guilty (as denoted by the state) in order to make the killings stop. This, of course, generally works best when the government is considered so strong as to seem unstoppable …) So: politically-motivated violence against the citizenry; that might fit the definition, eh?
• A ‘just’ war - this one’s easy. All U.S. wars are ‘just’ wars, wars considered ‘justified’ by the general public when initiated. In Afghanistan, we were chasing terrorists. In Iraq, WMD’s.
  • Please to note that this is not a normative statement. Term usage, not judgement made.
• A war to maintain U.S. internal stability – I don’t know enough about the Vietnam war to say for sure, but one could easily argue that this war, the Iraq war, came to exist, initially, due to a combination of factors including one president’s wish to remain in office, a U.S. economy that is largely a war economy (we need an excuse to power through on economic stupidity as we do)… anyone know it was the same w/the Vietnam War?

… and now i’m into the present …

• To give the army practice/To flex our muscles for the rest of the world/to say, “don’t step on me”/to gain a foothold in the Middle East
• To boost our national self-esteem/see if anyone wants to knock the chip off our shoulder …
• To divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’…/to show how bad ‘they’ were/to defeat evil in our time
  
• A war for religious freedom
• A war over resources
• A war to maintain control
  
• A war against religious intolerance
• A clash of ideologies/cultures/languages/traditions
• YourPointOfViewHere

Annnnd the bad guys and the good guys switch sides, depending on your starting point, your angle of view.

Shadowboxing.

To be or Not To Be (human); Iraq War Taxation, Networking Detriments

(to skip to the “point” of this article, drop down to the paragraph beginning “I’m not so far afield as I appear…”)

If you read the end of my October 5th post titled “Networking, On-Demand Software, Disaster Scenarios,” you know I’m concerned about our increasing dependence on infrastructure/technology networking. I also have reservations about our dependence on technology in general (“Your Cyborg Future is Here“).

It may then come as a surprise to you that I really liked Thomas L. Friedman’s** op-ed in the NYT today (“Charge it to my Kids,” October 7, 2007).

A brief overview: The Republicans are ragging the Dems, who want to increase taxes to pay for the war (this will, of course, only bolster public condemnation of our Middle East “involvement,” which is bad for the Reps). Friedman, sarcastically, replies:

Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.

We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow… (emphasis mine)

That last part is important; we can’t have it all any more. Either we can have an advanced infrastructure, or we can have more fighter jets. We can provide social security benefits or we can revamp our transportation network … I’m honestly not sure what the economies of scale are here – i.e. what types of either/or comparisons are valid – but I do know the great steam engine of the U.S. economy is slowing down, or perhaps we’re running out of track. The landscape is coming clear, that green blur outside the window turned to grass, weeds, the fallen blocks of bridges and hiss of 50 year old phone lines. We’re getting passed by passenger cars, ladies and gentlemen, and most of them have Asian license plates.

On one hand, I’m not a huge fan of complete technology dependence; I’m not comfortable with the idea of individual humans living like spiders at the nexuses of a technology web. (the OED says “nexus” is the more common plural, but I prefer archaisms…) At some point the question will be whether it is us running the technology, or us serving as foci in/of/for a vast dataweb.

Perhaps the next step in human evolution is brains in cans (Alastair Reynolds’ Redemption Ark etc), or maybe, as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the physical world will merely be one’s ticket into a better, higher plane of existence; the loss of one’s ability to function on that plane, a hell;

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-pace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Neuromancer, Ch. 1)

I feel that sensuality – touch, sensation, pleasure, even pain – are all very much a part of what it means to be human. Don’t want us to lose touch of that. What have we become when flesh itself is a prison?

We humans have a way of turning everything into an art form – like a Dan Simmons character says, satirically, in in Hyperion, “even elimination must become pure poetry” – but this may not always work to our benefit. Art is a way of dramatizing experience; of pushing experience into overdrive. Like most media, it’s to help us appreciate the everyday, not an end in and of itself. Technology, I think, should work the same way.

Technological networking – yes, I know, I’m aware, this is an online blog after all! – has so many benefits; it’s just important imo to remember there are negatives, as well, and that we often don’t have good predictive methodology for large-scale consequences…

I’m not so far afield as I may appear; here’s the question: Do we really want to revamp our infrastructure just yet? We have so many social problems, one could easily and effectively argue they need to be solved first before we move on to things like replacing telephone networks and data cables. Maybe we should work on the physical network (bridges, roads, subways) before the technological, the mental, the elite.

It might do us some good, after all, to be a little behind, to have to play catchup, to be forced to take the time to stop, smell the roses, whatever it is - because we don’t have the ability to do otherwise. We have the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, after all, thousands of miles of ocean and a damn good army to protect us. We might gain immeasurably from holding ourselves back, just a little.

This is where the logic takes me: Perhaps we should therefore support the war in Iraq without promoting a tax increase, because we wish to leave ourseves even farther behind in the networking race. (Perhaps we’re doing this already, unintentionally…?)

Bottom line: what’s more important – winning a war, or creating a peace, being technologically advanced, or being more fully ourselves - whatever that means?

**Thomas L. Friedman (author “The World is Flat” and “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”) writes an interesting column for the NYT. I don’t always agree with him, but do visit it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07friedman.html