ParisTampaBlog

Everyone agrees that we need to create more jobs. Tens of millions of Americans who want to work are not working and this is not good. So far, however, no one seems to know how to do this, although proposals for doing so are out there, for example:

—from Paul Krugman who says more stimulus monies are needed, that the original 2008-9 stimulus was not enough… if consumers are spending less government should be spending more, and now is not the time to be trying to reduce the deficit.

—from those on the other end of the political spectrum who maintain no less repeatedly and insistently than Krugman that only by shrinking the size of government, by government spending less (the original stimulus was a mistake), only then will the entrepreneurs become more active, grow their own businesses, start new ones, and, most important, make new hires.

Who’s right? Someone in the middle?  But new government spending and shrinking the deficit are incompatible, even though this does seem to be our president’s position.

So far the left-right opposition has led only to a national stalemate. Nothing is happening to reduce the numbers of the jobless. And what is worse, as the economists are fond of telling us, the jobs lost during the recent recession are lost forever, are not coming back. So we must look elsewhere.

More and more people, at least those who think about these things, are asking themselves where might new jobs come from? Real jobs, that is, not government jobs which, while they may make work, make nothing that can be sold and turned for a profit leading to new growth and new job creation.

Real jobs come from industries that are growing and thereby creating new wealth. Government jobs may be growing but no new wealth is being created thereby.

In the 19th. century the industry of growth was agriculture. Immigrants flocked to our country to work the new lands of the West. Following close behind came the industrial revolution, the millions of jobs in manufacturing,  and the new wealth and huge new personal fortunes resulting therefrom.

When we now look to the sources of new jobs we no longer look to agriculture or manufacturing. In both industries machines have by and large taken over the work of men with the millions of jobs lost as a result.

Not everyone is willing to accept this. There are those who see manufacturing jobs as being lost abroad where labor costs are cheaper, sent there by uncaring and unscrupulous owners, and that the process can be stopped and the jobs kept in this country.

But they are wrong. No less wrong than the Luddites of 200 years ago. The loss of jobs overseas can’t be stopped.

Nor would we want it to stop, anymore than we would want to destroy the mechanized looms as did the Luddites of the past. Things change, no less now than then.

Furthermore the world is now one world, and will no less benefit from global specialization than did individual countries in the past. Who would want to start paying double or triple for their shoes by putting our own shoe makers back to work? In any case these too costly shoes wouldn’t be sold, accounting for their no longer being made here in the first place.

We need to admit that just as the jobs in agriculture never returned so will the manufacturing jobs not come back.

So where might we turn for new job growth? The question that everyone is asking.

The answer is the same as it has always been and should be obvious. The new jobs will come from those industries that are growing, and right now there are three of these that dominate all the others, all service industries, education, health care, and government itself.

Without for the moment talking about government itself, why, as we might reasonably ask, aren’t education and healthcare becoming the engines of our economy as a whole as were agriculture and manufacturing in the past?

The answer to this is not so obvious. The best answer I’ve seen is that given by Arnold Kling and Nicholas Schulz in a National Affairs essay, The New Commanding Heights.

They argue that there are “commanding heights,” or critical industries that dominate economic activity. And in 21st c. America the new “commanding heights” (Lenin’s term for the electricity generation, heavy manufacturing, mining, and transportation of early Soviet Russia) are education and healthcare.

Here is how Kling and Schulz speak of these new “heights.”

In America today, few people champion government control of the industries Lenin saw as the commanding heights. On the contrary, these sectors have been largely deregulated, and market forces have, for the most part, been permitted to govern their development for decades….

[But] the fight for control over the commanding heights of American economic life is still very much with us. And it is a fight that, at least for now, the free-market camp appears to be losing.

The commanding heights of our economy today … education and health care…are our foremost growth sectors — the ones most central to employment and consumption; the ones that, increasingly, drive our economy.”

Kling and Schulz point out that in both government control is now dominant, and little is left to the free market. And this situation, more than anything else, is why we don’t see in these now dominant sectors of the economy new job creation anywhere near the levels of the past in agriculture and manufacturing.

We must open up [both education and healthcare] to competition and entrepreneurial reform…growth in these sectors is what will get the American economy back to work.

How might this happen, again from the text of Kling and Schulz:

 Imagine what might happen if government involvement in education were restricted to giving school vouchers to households below the median income?

Education [would] be rapidly innovating through new technology.

Entrepreneurs would be free to redesign education completely. Perhaps the very concept of a school would ultimately be replaced by different educational components with entirely different business models.

Some companies might emerge as high-quality math educators and sell their services to individuals or schools or districts. Others might emerge as high-quality developers of social skills and builders of teamwork. Still other enterprises and services would emerge that no one can yet imagine.

[In respect to healthcare] government involvement now  serves to entrench industry incumbents. One of the most important ways it does this is by using licensing laws to protect the incomes of doctors, specialists, and allied health professionals. [Government] work rules serve the interests of healthcare providers, not consumers.

Instead, imagine if state governments experimented by setting up healthcare enterprise zones. These would be areas where entrepreneurs could set up healthcare delivery systems without any rules concerning what license would be required to engage in any particular activity….

Healthcare providers would be accountable for the quality of their work, not for the certificates hanging on their walls.

Instead of forcing work rules on the healthcare system, consumers and the government should hold innovative healthcare organizations accountable for results. If their success rates and error rates compare favorably with traditional hospitals and medical practices, then these alternative models should be free to remain in operation and to continue the process of redesigning healthcare.

What might we conclude from all this, In particular from what Kling and Schulz have to say?

If we want new job creation, we must get government out of its present dominant and stifling position in our two dominant growth industries, healthcare and education. If these industries were to be left to market forces, as were agriculture and manufacturing in the past, the new jobs would come.

Does Obama know this? Does the Republican House or the Democratic Senate know this? Evidently not, because they are doing nothing to make this happen.

In regard to the first of these, the Senate health care reform bill,  Atul Gawande writes, in the New Yorker of April 5, “The major engine of opposition remains the insistence that health-care reform is unaffordable….In 1965, health care consumed just six per cent of U.S. economic output; today, the figure is eighteen per cent.

“[Health care] costs are curtailing all other investments in the economy, and, if they continue to rise as they have been doing—twice as fast as inflation—the reform’s subsidies, not to mention America’s prosperity, will indeed prove unsustainable.”

Are the Tea Partiers right? Should we all be opposed to the Senate Bill? Gawande would say no. Why? He points out that the Bill recognizes what is driving costs up, —a system that pays for the quantity rather than the value of care,—and agrees that this can’t continue without undoing the country’s prosperity.

But, he says, the same Bill has within it the power to change the cost equation. Furthermore, without the Bill, or something like it, health care costs will continue their steep rise.

For the Bill, he says, replaces the present emphasis on quantity of care, that which is most of all driving costs up, on value, and on the quality of care eventually driving out quantity and the associated high costs.

And to this end the Bill creates a new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation that will permit communities and local health systems to promote value, by experimenting on their own with ways to deliver better care at lower costs.  You’d have thought that the Tea Partiers, most of all, would have recognized this.

So that “far from being a government takeover,” the health care reform Bill “counts on local communities and clinicians for success.”

Gawande admits that the assumption that communities and clinicians, that individuals, all at the local level will do the right thing, is a bit “scary,” but at the same time isn’t it common sense that only at the local level, where health decisions are made, or should be made, by individuals and their doctors, can the costs of care be lowered?

What then about the libertarian refusal to accept the evidence for global warming? Why is this? Robert Crease writing in the Wall Street Journal about this year’s annual “Gathering” in honor of Martin Gardner, the author of Scientific American’s “Mathematical Games” column, suggests the reason for this. He says,

“Mr. Gardner’s fans include psychologists and cognition researchers interested in discovering why people regularly and seemingly inexorably fall victim to optical illusions, faulty logic and pseudoscience. … Al Seckel, a former Caltech cognitive neuroscientist, used sensory illusions to demonstrate how humans “map” incoming information to support pre-existing organizational perceptual frameworks, even if the incoming information is contradictory or false.

“As an example, Mr. Seckel noted that global-warming skeptics who lack training in science yet appear to argue on a ‘technical level’ tend to be libertarians. If global warming is correct, that suggests large-scale governmental regulation is needed, contrary to the core beliefs of a libertarian. ‘It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming,’ Mr. Seckel said, ‘than to alter one’s core libertarian beliefs.’

Here again, isn’t it common sense that one often attacks, be it the government takeover of health care or the theory of global warming, that which is at odds with one’s core beliefs, even when the evidence for it, say in the case of global warming, is widely accepted by the scientific community?

For the libertarian to accept global warming (no less than for the Tea Partier to accept the Senate health Bill) would be to accept a dominant role for government, because global warming, if it is in fact a threat, can only be adequately countered, if at all, by world wide government action, anathema probably to Tea Partier and libertarian alike.

I’ve had one comment in response to my previous Blog, “Making too much of and from a public good.” It’s from Alex, who says, “Leonhardt’s statement begs the question, conflating free markets (read capitalism) with anarchy. This is nonsense. Implicit in Capitalism is the social contract, and that includes things like police, courts, defense.”

The capitalist, or free marketer would like to believe this, that public goods are of his own making. It’s comforting, but history and experience hardly bears it out. Whatever “social contract” Alex is talking about ignores the “externalities,” the things that weren’t dreamed of by those producing and exchanging goods and services, in particular the bad things that do happen, like polluted streams and other such, that are as much a part of the factory’s output as the chemicals and microchips.

In fact, of the bad things, there is no end of them, things such as air, water, noise and visual pollution, environmental degradation bringing with it an irrevocable loss of habitats and species, job related injuries due to the failure to provide safeguards, risky bank lending, as resulting in the recent recession, inadequate health insurance, and many more.

I don’t think that Leonhardt is in any way “conflating capitalism with anarchy,” let alone begging the question. He is merely saying, quite reasonably, that there are essential public goods that the free market system, if left to its own devices, will neglect and not provide. I find it hard to disagree with this.

Underneath all this is the legitimate question of what is the proper role of government.  And what is the responsibility of the private sector, of the people themselves, in the promotion and maintenance of public goods.

It has always seemed obvious to me that government alone, or socialism is not the answer. That the government cannot do for people, what they can and will need sooner or later to do for themselves. The President knows this very well. He is not a socialist. The name calling ought to  stop. And in any case socialism is a thing of the past and ought to be left there.

But it is no less obvious to me that the people are in need of government, on the one hand to limit the bad externalities, and on the other hand, and when appropriate, to promote those public goods that, without government, would probably not happen, such as a wildlife refuge or community health center, even a sidewalk. For any number of the things that only governments can do are no less essential to our lives and well being than the things that we alone can do for ourselves.

Governments, not people, not the market economy, have established on solid and permanent footings the civil rights of all our citizens. It did take them some 150 years or more to bring that about, but they did. And governments, not people or the free market, have made us safe and secure in our neighborhoods and communities, in our work places, and in our country. Not General Motors, or General Electric, or even General Hospital.

To say it again the President is not a socialist (or, as on the placards that one sees at the gatherings of the Tea Partiers, a communist). And government is not the enemy. And Leonhardt had it exactly right when he said that, “A public good is something that the free market tends not to provide on its own,” and hence our need for government.

How do I begin my day?  Well like so many other members of my tribe of (idle) idea mongers, I begin it with coffee and the Internet Times, still posted there on the Web, free for the taking.

After a brief glance at the principal news stories, and when there’s nothing on the first page with comparable weight to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, or the still hot passage of HR3200, I turn to the Times Global version of the opinion pages.

Most often for me what’s happening in the world, at least as communicated by the Times, is what the columnists are writing about. And I most often will begin my day with them. We are of the same tribe and therefore have much to say to one another, although the saying is all one way, their saying to me, never my saying to them.

I wonder what it would be like to live in another world, one where all communication was two way, me speaking to those I read as well as they to me? Could there be, say a many to one function, our speaking to them, as well as the one to many function, their speaking to us, as it is now? In the case of all publications communication seems to be only in the one direction. And the numbers prevent it from being any different.

The Times columnist will have an idea, publish it, and be heard or read by millions. But very few if any of those millions out there will ever be heard or read by the columnist.

But how about among themselves? Do the op-ed writers of the N Y Times ever talk to one another? share ideas? get together over a beer or glass of wine? I think they probably don’t. Because their livelihood is having ideas and only first sharing them in print. Otherwise they would be afraid of losing their ideas to someone else before fixing them by copyright in a publication.

I wonder what it would be like to be friends with these writers. To be able to chat with them directly about what they have written? But of course that’s not to be. They will be forever locked in their world and I in mine, and there’ll be no chance at all of our ever coming together.

But at least through their writing I do get a peek into their worlds. On past occasions I’ve emailed some of  these writers (they all have email addresses and probably expect to have reader correspondence that they know they’ll never have time to read) with a comment about something they’ve written, but have never had a reply, with only one exception, —when Roger Cohen did send me a “Thank you for your kind thoughts.” I had told him how much I liked what he had written.

I probably won’t do this again. That is, write a response to what they’ve written, just as I’ll never buy a lottery ticket regardless of the size of the pot, this being another millions to one relation with almost no chance of winning.

There are just some highly desirable things that are never to be. This is one of them of course, my becoming friends with the op ed writers of the Times. This is not as far removed from the realm of possibility as immortality, but almost. They’ll be forever in their world, and I in mine. There’ll be no coming together.

Sure, I know there’s always room for reader comments. Stanley Fish’s occasional musings come with hundreds of these, attached almost from hour one following their posting. And Fish will often write in a new column his own responses to some of the comments.

So what I say about communication never being two way is not quite exact. Some of Fish’s readers do hear from him, his comment on their comments.

Making comments on someone’s Blog is not without interest. Why don’t I do it myself? Because somehow having your comment in a comment column of hundreds of others is not what I mean by “talking” with these guys.

Also, the comment column itself keeps you at a too safe, too correct distance from the writer, and I’ve decided that’s not for me.

The Times does impress by the truly stellar group of opinion mongers writing on its pages and representing the very best of liberal and conservative thinking, as well as much in between. The Times opinion writers may very well be the best single group ever to write for a single publication, at least in my lifetime.

Among them those I almost never fail to read are Brooks, Friedman, Cohen, Douthat, Krugman and more recently in the Times “Opinionator,” Robert Wright and Timothy Egan, and also Olivia Judson, Stanley Fish, and Linda Greenhouse. When I have a little more time on my hands I’ll read Rich, Dowd, and Collins, who are more fun (well that’s not true for Frank Rich, who is anything but fun).

More rarely will I read Herbert, Kristof and Blow, all three of whom are especially good people, but whom I fault, especially the first two, for being too predictable, too often repetitious in their choice of subject matter.

However, in their defense, when one is writing some 2000 words a week for publication in a national newspaper that reaches over a million readers, when one is under that kind of pressure, it’s probably inevitable that one will repeat oneself, take up pretty much the same subject matter time and time again.

The two columnists I read most regularly, probably because I so often think as they do, are David Brooks and Thomas Friedman. Very often the two of them will have put into words things that I have either thought of myself, or were real close to doing so.

Brooks shares my love of the history of ideas, and especially the ideas that have made this country what it is today, and are still alive and relevant. And Friedman’s global and optimistic view of the world, its events and peoples, is pretty much one that I share.

Two columns, written just this week, show these two writers at their best. Let me conclude my piece on the columnists of the Times with a passage taken from each. In both cases they have put into words things that I would have like to have said myself.

First David Brooks, who is writing in the aftermath of the President’s victory with the passage of HR 3200:

Parties come to embody causes. For the past 90 years or so, the Republican Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism. For a similar period, the Democratic Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of fairness and family security. Over the past century, they have built a welfare system, brick by brick, to guard against the injuries of fate….

Yet I confess, watching all this, I feel again why I’m no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party. The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs. This vibrancy grew up accidentally, out of a cocktail of religious fervor and material abundance, but it was nurtured by choice. It was nurtured by our founders, who created national capital markets to disrupt the ossifying grip of the agricultural landholders. It was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances. It was nurtured by Progressives who broke the stultifying grip of the trusts.

And Friedman, who is writing about the importance of the political center, and our need to nurture this current among us.

My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.

The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea.

Barack Obama was sworn in as this country’s 44th president on January 20, 2009. What happened on that day was something that I hadn’t believed possible, at least in my lifetime, that a “Black” would be living in the White House.

Even if he never did anything else as president this in itself, I thought, would go down in history as a huge accomplishment — Barack, Michelle, and their two children, Malia and Sasha, becoming rightful “owners” of the White House. What a thrilling message from a country of one time slave owners this sent to the world.

Also the swearing-in ceremony meant that George Bush was gone. This was good news for the country. While George Bush wasn’t at all a bad man, he was clearly a bad, probably terrible president, perhaps the country’s worst ever.

Bush lacked judgment, of what was possible and what was important. Witness his sophomoric attempt to replace Social Security with private retirement savings accounts. This was never going to happen and he wasted much of his first term of office promoting it.

But most of all Bush, without a realistic vision of his own for the country, quickly fell victim to the persuasive powers of the men about him, men with agendas of their own, in particular Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their neo-conservative mentors, and with their encouragement led us into long and futile warring in the Middle East, much as in Vietnam earlier, war still costing us more than we can afford, both in regard to our soldiers’ lives and our country’s wealth.

In addition, Bush, instead of trying to reign in the country’s increasing entitlement obligations, that which Republicans were supposed to do, created even larger, more unaffordable entitlements by his Medicare prescription drug Act of 2003.

However, the first black family to occupy the White House, while of huge importance, would not be enough to save the country from the wrong turns of the Bush years. Obama would have to do this himself.

For one, he would have to somehow stem the country’s rapidly expanding budget shortfalls while leading the country out of recession. On its face an impossible task in that increased Federal spending in the form of stimulus money seemed to be the only response available to him to stem the recession and accompanying job losses.

But if Obama had just limited himself to stimulus spending, sending hundreds of billions of Federal tax dollars to shovel ready work projects throughout the country, that, even meaning as it would higher budget deficits, might have been acceptable.

But Obama didn’t stop there, and here is where I most fault the president. For one he continued to expend our lives and treasure in futile war efforts, that which Bush called democracy building, both in Iraq and even more so in Afghanistan, in that country growing imprudently to say the least our already heavy commitment of dollars and soldiers.

For two, he put himself fully behind an ill-timed health care reform bill, not even of his own creation but that of Democratic politicians in the Congress. Obama was thereby committing the country to additional hundreds of billions of dollars in new deficit spending.

Needless to say none of the efforts of the first year of his presidency are going well. And worse, he is blaming others, most often the Republican leadership in the Congress for the failures. But is it party politics and party obstructionists that are most at fault?

Isn’t it rather the President’s highly risky commitment to old (war and entitlements) and new (health care reform) expenditures that is arousing the opposition, not just  from the Republicans, but also from some members of his own party, and most of all from large numbers of Independent voters, those who may very well now make up the country’s largest voting block, and who need, therefore, to be listened to.

After a year of passively accepting the will of a politically Left leaning Congress in regard to social welfare programs, as well as the will and positions of the congressional Right in regard to the so-called anti-terrorist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere in Africa and Asia, Obama ought now to turn his back on both groups and lead the country in directions of his own devising.

Clearly it’s just not enough to be the first black in the White House. Obama should follow the examples of earlier presidents, in particular Roosevelt and Truman, Reagan and Bill Clinton, and do what they did and take the country’s problems into his own hands, and stop relying on those whose primary concern is always their own political futures.

No longer should the President give the excuse that the problems he faces were not of his making, no longer should he wait for the leaders of the two parties in the Congress to come to him. He should go out to the people with ideas and plans of his own, plans to change the status quo both in regard to the war on terror (which he should end) and Federal entitlement obligations (which he should reduce), perhaps the two greatest problems that the country now faces. If he does this the politicians, for their own survival, would have to follow.

From The Wall Street Journal’s Review and Outlook today:

“The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck’s entitlement state* for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.”

This position statement raises a number of questions to which there are not yet clear answers. Hence the on-going argument between the political Left and Right.

For one, doesn’t it imply that at one time the “entitlement state” was affordable. And if so why no longer, especially given the fact that developed nations are today so much richer than they were in Bismarck’s time, nearly 150 years ago? Has the “un-affordability” of the welfare state been clearly demonstrated?

Then, doesn’t it also imply that at some point excessively high taxes will slow economic growth, resulting in less wealth out there to be taxed? Commentators on the Right assume that Europe has already reached that point, and that President Obama’s policies, if successful, will do the same for us.

It is true that those who clamor for more, for higher wages, greater benefits, especially those who work in the public sector where profitability is of little moment, act as if there were no point at which taxes become excessive.

This is especially true in France today when hardly a week goes by without a work stoppage of some sort by disgruntled employees. In France these constant strikes seem to be the rule, not the exception, probably since President Truman’s Marshall Plan in the late 40s and early 1950s put an end to the communist vision of cradle to grave security for all.

And a third and final question that this position raises — has it been somehow decided (perhaps I missed it) that it is the state’s and not the individual’s responsibility to assure that everyone is provided for? If people go without health insurance, shelter, jobs and job training (education), not to mention food and clothing, has it been decided that it is the state’s responsibility to meet this lack?

In other words do people’s rights as provided by the state extend to housing, jobs, healthcare, and all the rest? As our great depression president, FDR, would have it?**

A couple of notes:

*Actually this is probably a mis-characterization of Bismarck’s program. The socialists were threatening Bismarck’s own position in the government of Emperor William I. His social welfare policies were probably meant to take the teeth out of his opponent’s, the socialists’,  proposals.
See Otto von Bismarck and German Unification.

**See The Economic or Second Bill of Rights.

Probably not as terrorists. Certainly not as the embodiment of evil out to destroy the good. We actually know a lot about how they see themselves. They speak often of the validity, the rightness if not the goodness of their cause. Here are two examples.

One from the Pakistani Five. Do you remember, those five Americans who traveled to Pakistan and were arrested by anti-terror authorities in Pakistan and accused of plotting terrorist acts? They told a court Monday that they had intended to cross the border into Afghanistan to wage Jihad against Western forces. And they denied any links to Al Qaeda or plans to carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Here is what one of the five, Ramy Zamzam, a 22-year old Egyptian American,  told The Associated Press as he entered the courtroom, “We are not terrorists…We are Jihadists, and Jihad is not terrorism.”

Why were they going to Afghanistan? They said they only intended to help their Muslim brothers who are in trouble, who are bleeding and who are being victimized by Western armies.

Jihad, of course, has several different meanings in Islam. Zamzam seemed to be referring to Jihad as the duty to fight against the foreign armies illegitimately occupying Muslim lands. That may be the meaning of Jihad closest to Al Qaeda’s founder, Bin Laden himself.

According to one Web definition: “Jihad is one of the words that have been misused due to misunderstanding its true meaning. The word “Jihad” is derived from the Arabic word “Jahd” which means fatigue or the word “Juhd” which means effort. A Mujahid is he who strives in the Cause of Allah and exerts efforts which makes him feel fatigued. The word “Jihad” means exerting effort to achieve a desired thing or prevent an undesired one. In other words, it is an effort that aims at bringing about benefit or preventing harm.”

Shouldn’t we at least raise the question whether these people, mostly Muslims, such as the Pakistani Five, who are flocking to those areas of the Muslim world currently occupied by foreign armies, are only trying to free their “brothers,” not principally, in spite of their words and the suicide actions of some to that effect, trying to destroy our Western civilization?

Here is my other example of how these people see themselves, this one in the words of Anjem Choudary, a 42-year-old lawyer and the British-born son of a Pakistani immigrant, and the leader of a protest march planned for the streets of Wootton Bassett, the small English town that has achieved iconic status in Britain for honoring the passing hearses of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

“Our protest march,” according to Choudary, “will be held not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead who have been shunned by the Western media and general public as they were and continue to be horrifically murdered in the name of democracy and freedom, the innocent Muslim men, women and children.”

In his open letter to the families of the 246 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 Choudary goes on to say, “It is worth reminding those who are still not blinded by the media propaganda that Afghanistan is not a British town near Wootton Bassett but rather Muslim land which no one has the right to occupy, with a Muslim population who do not deserve their innocent men, women and children to be killed for political mileage and for the greedy interests of the oppressive U.S. and U.K. regimes.”

Now if this were a debate, and if there were not so many lives at stake, if there were not suicide bombers always waiting in the wings before stepping onto the stage and blowing themselves up, and if somehow the innocent were not dying in such large numbers, well then there would be two readily defendable sides to the question. And in that case the topic for debate might be: Western Forces Should Immediately Leave Afghanistan.

Actually, I happen to agree with that statement, that our forces should leave Afghanistan, and also Iraq. If the actual wars were not such terrible things, if the seemingly endless line of suicide bombers were not almost daily murdering innocent civilians caught in the cross fire, I would gladly defend my position in debate. As it is the two sides are bent on their mutual destruction, not in words, but in blood, and talking is probably quite out of the question.