Contemplating 2008

It amazes me how many people are lining up to try to become the next president of the United States. I understand that the lack of any “heir apparent” makes this a wide-open race, but these candidates are presumably grown-up people and they must understand that they are vying for a job that is going to be horrendously complicated because of what has transpired over the last 7 years. Their prize for winning in 2008 will be the burden of guiding this nation out of a very deep hole in a hostile world where we have few remaining friends.

Without attempting to know anything about the candidate’s motives or to analyze their positions, I would like to think-through the type of candidate I would like to see or hear. As I have said before, after 34 years of voting I am still waiting for the first time when I can vote “FOR” a candidate at the national level. Its always been a matter of who I wanted to vote AGAINST by picking the other one (and sometimes shuddering).

Yes, I know I’m whining, so let me take a more positive approach. The following is a mythical speech by a mythical candidate that would make me feel great about my vote in ‘08:

“My fellow Americans. I am throwing my hat into the ring to run for president in 2008, but to be honest I do this with a significant degree of trepidation. These are difficult times and no rational person could take this step without some concern about whether they are really up to the task – we must question whether anyone is up to it. If we are not scared, we must wonder about ourselves!

I know its not politically wise to start off by talking about what is wrong. I do have ideas for what is positive and hopeful, but to jump to those without confronting our grave difficulties would be wrong.

We Americans have a number of problems, but the most pressing is the war in Iraq where we have gotten ourselves into a morass from which there is no easy exit. The time is long past since this mistake was something any political figure should exploit for political gain (though many are still trying). We need to get beyond blame.

Again, it is politically dumb to say so, but I believe that virtually all Americans have some responsibility for getting us to this point. Some 70% of us supported the idea of a pre-emptive attack in 2002 and those who didn’t approve of the attack did not engage in a sufficiently vigorous or articulate opposition to stop it (I count myself in that later group).

I don’t think that any political party is any more or less to blame for what has happened either. One party largely supported the idea and the other either did the same or was intimidated by the threat of looking “weak on terrorism” in the aftermath of 9/11. Its not pretty, but its all “water under the bridge” by now.

With hindsight, even a cursory review of the religious/social history of Iraq should have given us pause about the idea of “planting a democracy on the banks of the Euphrates”. Our good friends and former rulers, the English set up this artificial state of Iraq during the Age of Imperialism, full-well knowing that they had combined incompatible sectarian and ethnic elements so that English rule would not be opposed by any unified force. That was a crafty calculus for Imperial rule. It has proven to be a disaster for our misguided vision of democratizing the Middle East.

If we look back at the idea that we “bought” in 2002, it contained much laudable optimism. People love freedom and a voice in their governance. We Americans loved the idea of freeing people from an unquestionably brutal dictator. I don’t question our nation's good intentions leading up to the war.

Unfortunately, our idealism was accompanied by some less noble attributes. We stayed largely ignorant of the history and religious/ethnic complexity of the nation we were about to destabilize. This was not a necessary ignorance as there were plenty of sources of information about these realities.

Worse, we were arrogant. We were not willing to wait until we had international consensus as we did in the Gulf War. We were not willing to let the UN inspections give their final answer. We bought into ideas like “Shock and Awe” or the idea that the “bad guys” of Iraq could be enumerated as a pack of 52 cards. We believed that we would be “welcomed as liberators.”

Idealism is laudable, but idealistic-ignorant-arrogance is not something to be honored.

I know that some of you are thinking, “I never believed that crap!” I know, but I would say to you as I would say to me, what did we do about it? Clearly not enough. We can say that we were mislead by faulty intelligence gathering or even by faulty and selective hearing of that information – but at the end of the day, we all let ourselves react from fear. Historians will eventually sort this out, but for today who exactly bears how much fault is an academic question. We screwed up. We got ourselves mired in a mess in Iraq. It’s our collective problem.

So here is the reality that we have to live with. We, the American people have a noble, over-taxed, and extremely expensive military tied down in a country that seems to have an endless supply of mass-murderers, bombs and deep-seated animosities.

Yes, the “people of Iraq” bravely came out for an election, but it was essentially an exercise of counting sect membership and was largely boycotted by the minority, Sunni sect. Democracy is a tricky deal even where it flourishes. The voter can only pick from among the available options and if there are no unifying statesmen/women among those choices, you can’t exactly blame the voters. I don’t think we should get down on the people of Iraq. They were in a bad situation before this war and they are in a bad one now.

Too often we have been told that our only options are to “stay the course” or withdraw (or "re-deploy" to make it sound better). If only it were that easy.

President Bush has belatedly decided to take a “new” course in Iraq which is most often characterized as the “surge”. I’m sorry, but I don’t share the President’s optimism about this course of action. Congressional noise aside, this surge is going to happen anyway. It might even seem to work for a while. I would be thrilled if by the time of the 2008 election it had become clear that the “surge” strategy had really worked. If it did, I would happily withdraw from the 2008 contest because my instincts had been proven wrong. That would be a wonderful outcome for all of us.

In the mean time, Congress really has very few real options. Until there is a new commander in Chief it will be politically impossible to do much but watch and posture. The truth is that we are sitting on a powder keg because we have destabilized a fractious nation in the middle of a volatile area.

So, the obvious questions for me, a 2008 candidate, is “what the heck would you do?” It’s a fair question, but what I would do today is just another academic issue. I don’t have the power to do anything and Congress has very limited power as long as our military is committed and President Bush is unwilling to work with anyone.

But to be transparent, if I were in President Bush’s shoes today, I would probably be pursuing a temporary partitioning of Iraq into ethnic/sect-specific regions – a Kurdish North, a Shiite South and a Sunni center. Baghdad is obviously problematic, but it is already sorting itself out in an ugly way and I’m not sure anyone can stop it.

I would put Iraq’s oil resources under our military control but put their revenues into internationally supervised escrow until each region was stable enough to receive it. I would move our troops to defensible locations along borders and around key oil fields.

I know that Iraq’s neighbors hate the idea of partition, but that is what is already happening as we talk. You can’t fight gravity. If that is the way things are going to go anyway, why not try to make that happen in a way that minimizes violence. Honestly, we need to give-up our dream of a unified, democratic Iraq. We could rely on our military to keep the lid on during a difficult transition to three or more states. I don’t think we can ask our military to birth a unified Iraq that was never legitimately conceived in the first place.

So what about the “war on terrorism?” I would submit to you that there can be no such thing. I know that is a radical thing to say, but let me lay out 5 reasons for that assertion:

1. “Terrorism” is not our enemy so we cannot fight a war against it.

2. Terrorism is only a tactic used by certain enemies as a tool because they have no other option. It would be better to clearly identify the real enemies and talk about a struggle with them

3. The only power available to enemies that use terror is the creation of fear. They have no hope of prevailing militarily or politically

4. The best response to terrorism is to reject the fear they seek to generate. That means courage

5. Fear motivates you to compromise your ideals in reaction. Courage motivates you react in ways that are compatible with your principles and ideals (Unfortunately this is not what we have done since 2001)

We Americans do have real enemies. Whether we deserve some of their animosity is a separate question, but the reality is that we have plenty of enemies and the chief among them is the radical edge of people who claim to speak for Islam. They cannot prevail against us because they lack the political/military force to do so. All they can do is to create fear by random attacks. By putting our military in Iraq we have made this much easier for them to do.

Unfortunately, we allowed the fear generated by the 9-11 attacks to lead our country into a pre-emptive war against Iraq . It was a war for which we never doubted our ability to win militarily, but a war that would ultimately leave us in the role of occupier. Some argue that we could have done that successfully if we had poured in far more troops, but we will never know if that is true or not. In any case we are now trapped in a role that is extremely expensive in terms of the lives of our people on the ground, and the funds we tax payers have to supply. We do not seem to be getting anything for this great expenditure and neither do the people of Iraq.

We have to move beyond this. If America is going to remain a strong and positive force in the world, it has to move beyond Iraq and also beyond the threat of Islamic terrorism. But here is the problem. We can’t just leave Iraq and say, “sorry, ‘our bad’, now sort this out yourselves.” If we were a less idealistic people, perhaps we could do that on one level, but on another we couldn’t take that path no matter what.

Unfortunately, we and the rest of the developed world are highly dependent on a certain black, energy-rich fluid that is found in great abundance in Iraq and in the neighboring nations who would most likely devolve into regional war if we just left a power vacuum in Iraq. Even President Bush, the Texas Oilman has acknowledged that our “addiction to oil” is a problem. We have no choice but to do whatever it takes to bring this sad nation of Iraq back to some level of stability so that the world-wide supply of oil is not disrupted, sending the world economy into chaos. The risk of leaving Iraq the wrong way isn’t that “the terrorists will follow us home.” They will do what they will regardless of how Iraq turns out. The risk is that a regional war or even a broader Shiite/Sunni war breaks out and the world is thrown into economic depression because the oil supplies are disrupted..

This is why I favor the idea of partition for Iraq. If we take away the possibility of any one sect controlling the oil wealth and facilitate the separation of the people of Iraq into territories where they won’t feel the constant need to kill each other, there is some hope of stability and security. In the process we will also have to be positioned to prevent any of Iraq’s neighbors from military adventurism.

Now, back to the issue of radical Islamic terrorists. Their agenda against us is not tied to the result of the Iraq war. The idea that we get to decide where the “fight” will be, Iraq or here, is absurd. In Iraq we are particularly exposed to attack, but it doesn’t mean that Al Queada wouldn’t want or try to attack us elsewhere or at home if Iraq goes one way or the other.

Again, if courage is the best response to a weaker enemy that wants to seed fear, then our response to these enemies needs to be something that makes us proud – not some fear-driven compromise.

I seriously doubt that our “terrorist” enemies can be defeated militarily. Our direct response to them must be much more of a espionage and policing effort. If we don’t think that international law or our own legal processes are adequate for dealing with these issues, we need to reform those processes. Instead, the present administration has chosen to do “end-arounds” or to simply ignore long-term concepts about how to pursue justice.

This is not good. If we let fear drive us to abandon our long-held principles about freedom and equitable treatment of people, then we have yielded far too much to our enemies. I don’t in any way mean to diminish the pain of the families effected by 9/11, but would those victims feel good about the abandonment of hundreds of years of American ideals as a response to their loss? We have had “extraordinary rendition” and NSA monitoring without any court oversight. We have prisoners in a corner of Cuba that have been held for 5 years without charge. Who knows what else we have been doing that has not been discovered.

Once again I would ask, if we don’t think our legal systems are up to the challenge of modern terrorism, why don’t we modify those systems instead of by-passing them? Immediately after 9/11/01 you could justify something like this. We are now in 2007. There is no excuse for continuing to do things that completely violate our most cherished values.

Enough of the negative side. What can we Americans be doing that is positive?

I think the single most positive thing we can do is to commit ourselves to a path to energy independence. We Americans have been blessed with a vast amount of land that is rain-fed during the growing season and we have the enviable problem of being able to grow too much food, feed and fiber (too much if you are a farmer getting low prices). We can take a good deal of that land, much of which we aren’t even using efficiently today, and use it to grow a great deal of our energy needs. This has multiple benefits. Its means we are spending those energy dollars at home instead of abroad. It means that we are getting energy that is far more “carbon neutral” so that we are doing something helpful vs global climate change. It also means that we are less dependent on nations that are actually our enemies or which are unstable or which use some of that money to fund our Islamic extremist enemies. In the process we will also be helping our rural economies.

I know that many have realized that getting bio-energy like this from corn is problematic. I agree, but that is only a transitional phase. The real promise is “cellulosic ethanol” (or perhaps butanol) that is going to come from new energy crops like Miscanthus, switch grass, poplar, alder and many others. This is a vision that can unite us and motivate us like the effort to get to the moon except that the pay-off is far greater. When there is a challenge that is all about innovation, good science and gutsy entrepreneurship, that is where America can shine!

There are other positive things we can do. We can stop being hypocritical and set up a guest worker system that is fair, that doesn’t hurt any American workers and that will keep our economy working well. We have to separate that from the issue of what to do about the millions of immigrants that came here during the decades where we failed to put a realistic system in place.

We can stop playing politics with the Social Security system. We can acknowledge that some sacrifice is going to be required from all of us to prevent a train-wreck in the near future as people like myself get old and possibly retire.

We could have a civilized discussion about our health care system and try to figure out what parts of it are best managed by the efficient but unfeeling genius of market forces and which require some other, more humane oversight.

We could review the many experiments that have been going on to find new ways to educate our children and decide how best to improve this process for all. If we want to maintain our lifestyle, we cannot ignore this issue.

We can start re-building the bridges we have recently burned with our friends, allies and even our sometimes enemies around the world. I’m not saying that they are always right or noble or anything, just that we will do better to start over with a more humble and realistic stance.

If you have been patient to listen to this speech this far, I am sure you can see why I offer my candidacy with some hesitation. The challenges ahead of us are imposing. Many of the solutions I am proposing are controversial. Only the broad support of my fellow Americans would convince me that these are possible. I would never want to be in the role of pursuing these goals without that backing. All too often our national elections are decided by margins that are too small to be convincing. I know that some politicians have been able to rationalize a “mandate” from a 51-53% vote. I would hate to govern under that scenario.

As I said, I believe that as a rational person it is appropriate for me to seriously question whether I am the right person to lead America at this critical juncture. I’m not going to try to test the waters and to speak to what Americans want to hear. I’m not going to trial ideas or follow polls. I’m not a polished enough politician to do that. I only want to talk about what I believe and if you don’t like it, that is cool, please don’t vote for me. If you like many things I am saying but not all then write me with your reasons and maybe I will be convinced. I’m not afraid to change my positions based on good logic.

I’ve laid out my thinking. Let me know if it makes sense to you.”