Have you seen the list at TPM Café of Iraq-related votes by Clinton and Obama?
It’s an interesting exercise. As of now they show 69 bills of varying degrees of importance that relate to the conflict in Iraq. On 68 of those, Senators Clinton and Obama voted together. They disagreed last month over whether to confirm Gen. Casey as Army Chief of Staff, Obama supporting the General and Clinton opposing.
The posters spend some effort assuring readers that they were not, repeat not, belittling Obama’s all-important stance against the war from the start. Obviously that will be critical for many voters. For example, me: I might be able to hold my nose and vote for Obama, but I wouldn’t vote for Clinton under any circumstances.
At this point I’m most interested in Edwards. In particular, he has a health-care plan, as opposed to generic unobjectionable goals. This makes me think he might actually be trying to get something done, while the other candidates seem, on this issue at least, to be keeping their options open.
Despite his vote for the war, he’s also got Clinton and Obama beat hands down on Iraq now, in my opinion. Clinton has triangulated until she’s dizzy, and Obama hasn’t freed his mind from the quagmire. Edwards, on the other hand, was asked for a one-sentence summary of his position, and replied, “Let’s start getting out now.” He argues for the symbolic withdrawal of 40,000 to 50,000 troops immediately, and the rest over the next 12 to 18 months.
The argument is often made that even if the war was wrong, we still have an obligation to help get Iraq back on its feet. I agree that we owe the Iraqis something for having destroyed their country, caused a civil war, and provoked ethnic cleansing. But what we owe them cannot be paid in military scrip.
An approach that seems clearly better was widely discussed after its publication last October in Harper’s. George McGovern, for whom I proudly cast my first vote, combined with William Polk to list the damages done to Iraq, and to consider what might be done to alleviate them. They begin by acknowledging the obvious.
As many retired American military officers now admit, Iraq has become, since the invasion, the primary recruiting and training ground for terrorists. The longer American troops remain in Iraq, the more recruits will flood the ranks of those who oppose America not only in Iraq but elsewhere.
So we have to leave. But won’t there be a bloodbath? Well, of course; there’s one now. There isn’t much reason to expect that will change.
Let us be clear: there will be some damage. This is inevitable no matter what we do. At the end of every insurgency we have studied, there was a certain amount of chaos as the participants sought to establish a new civic order. This predictable turmoil has given rise to the argument, still being put forward by die-hard hawks, that Americans must, in President Bush’s phrase, “stay the course.” The argument is false. When a driver is on the wrong road and headed for an abyss, it is a bad idea to “stay the course.”
Of course, we were never “stay the course”.
For those who are allergic to dramatic tension, here’s what the article proposes we do to fix things: give Iraq money. There are some excellent suggestions on how to distribute the money so that it benefits Iraqis rather than carpetbaggers, and to guide it toward intended ends. Sure, some graft will take place; but we’re not really in a position to preach on that issue. At least the beneficiaries would tend to reside in country.
The projects the article proposes to fund are clearly worthwhile; actually funding them would go a long way toward restoring the world’s view of the US as an honorable country. In addition, the plan would save us a lot of money.
Even if the estimated cost of building and equipping hospitals turned out to be five times too low, even if the American government had to cover the bulk of salaries and operating costs for the next four years, and even if additional hospitals had to be built to care for Iraqis wounded or made ill by the invasion and occupation, the total cost would still be under $5 billion. It is sobering to think that the maximum cost of rebuilding Iraq’s public-health system would amount to less than what we spend on the occupation every twenty days.
It seems to me that the top issues in 2008 are likely to be:
- The war in Iraq, which Bush will prolong to avoid admitting another failure, and the Democrats won’t be courageous enough to stop
- Health care and how universal it will be
- Energy policy and who it benefits
- Economic inequality and what should be done about it
At least, that’s what I think the top issues should be. It’s only foolish optimism, but I like it.
Among the Democratic candidates, Edwards seems to be well to the left of everyone other than Kucinich. He might even be trying to reassemble something like a modern New Deal coalition, courting labor, environmentalists, seniors, minorities, anti-poverty campaigners, and Hubbert Peak worrywarts alike. Special interests? Yes. As Chomsky likes to say, special interests means senior citizens, minorities, women, gays, labor, the poor, in fact nearly everyone. The national interest means corporations and the super-rich.
Obama starts from the moral high ground on Iraq, no doubt. But his votes since, and his stance on what to do now, are hardly better than Clinton’s. As Jerry pointed out, Edwards is extremely well positioned on the health-care issue; he’s pledged a carbon-neutral campaign, a worthwhile slogan even if it fails; and this is the Two Americas guy, who’s got poverty like Gore has environment. “Poverty is the great moral issue of our century.” That’s assuming, of course, that we survive that long.
Edwards/Obama, Edwards/Richardson? Anyone?
Well written post, Chuck. Sometimes I wish you were on our side. Just a couple of things for you guys to consider, though. Isn't it odd that Edwards made himself a millionaire by attacking/suing the very corporations that have given us the best health system in the world, and that he now seeks to destroy it?
And second, simple but unarguable: the poor are always with us. Nothing government can do has ever changed that, or ever can. The answer, Chuck my friend, is not blowing in the wind and it is not collectivism. It lies in the individual, possessing that little thing called free will.
Posted by: Nugatory on April 4, 2007 6:56 PMThanks for your kind words, Nugatory.
But I'm on the side I'm on because I accept facts and I don't support corporations.
First, we clearly don't have the best health care system in the world. We don't even have the fifteenth best. This is confirmed by many measurements done by many groups over a long period. Ours is great if you're super-rich; otherwise it lags far behind all other so-called industrialized countries. Cuba, poor as it is, beats us in areas like infant mortality, and of course in universal coverage.
As for the poor being always with us, that's a choice we make, or rather a choice some of us make. Like aggressive war, it is an immoral choice. Somehow those most in favor of making it, and those who claim to follow the book from which those words are taken, are also most in favor of ignoring the commands that book gives, namely to sell what you own and give the proceeds to the poor. You can't really call yourself a Christian if you choose to ignore what Jesus supposedly said.
This is a great example of the problems that come from theism: if God made the world with sick, poor, and hungry people, he must have wanted it that way. So I can sit on my couch and feel holy.
But the most important area in which we disagree is love of corporations. Of course Edwards is not trying to destroy our health care system, he's trying to make it work for people instead of corporations. Corporations make extra profit every time they deny health care to an individual. I don't see anything weird about suing the crap out of 'em, and I have far less problem with paying an attorney who beats the corporations than I do with paying the CEOs who use the corporations to steal from their shareholders, customers, and employees.
Our health care system is far from the best, but it is easily the most profitable. Those who believe corporations have society's best interests in mind, or who are convinced that the invisible hand of the marketplace has its own invisible heart, seem to me to be innocent of the leavening provided by knowledge of history.
Corporations, to paraphrase Cato, must be destroyed.
Posted by: Chuck Dupree (Belisarius) on April 4, 2007 8:05 PMI've been meaning to write a post about the Keith Olbermann show. My liberal friends all say Olbermann has a great show and it's the only news show left on television worth watching, yada, yada, yada. Only thing is, the show never covers economic issues.
I was a member of the Trial Lawyers for about twenty years. Every month they send out what I call "the brag book". Reading it is like reading a book with the names of lottery winners. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need corporations and we wouldn't need lawyers either. Justice by lottery isn't justice. Many trial lawyers worship the almighty dollar as much as or more than the worst corporate CEO's. Let's not even talk about the number of class action settlements in which the only winners are the lawyers. I clerked many years ago for a a lawyer who is now a former President of the American Trial Lawyers Assn. so I do speak with some degree of experience.
Edwards may be the best of a truly sorry lot of front runners but that's about it.
My reaction is to encourage checking into the public positions Edwards has taken, and his actions to support those; e.g., he didn't just loudly support the recent bill to make it easier to unionize, he was actually on picket lines for photo ops.
Of course he's both a lawyer and a politician, which I admit looks like two strikes from the start. But everyone else in the Presidential race also starts out 0-2. How could it be otherwise? What, a non-lawyer running for President — how would you get yourself off (legally, I mean)? You're 0-1 as soon as you enter the race: you're a politician.
I'm sure Buck's right about most trial lawyers being less than shining examples of humanity, but there are clearly counterexamples, though we might not agree on who they are.
Many of those of us who grew up with Vietnam saw the lawyers for the defense in the Chicago trials (William Kunstler, Leonard Weinglass) as heros, who put their careers on the line for what they believed, and helped in their way to end the war. Many young people have studied public-service versions of the law, inspired by the example of Ralph Nader and all the safety features that came from his defiance of the corporations. My initial Google search didn't prove it, but I think it's at Brown University that there's a project among legal students to exonerate death-row inmates with DNA techniques that didn't exist at conviction time.
As Theodore Sturgeon responded to the assertion that ninety percent of science fiction was crap, sure, ninety percent of everything is crap. The great thing about life is, it's not like quantum mechanics, where everything's about probabilities; people are conscious, and can change the future, themselves, and each other.
The stipulated fact that many trial lawyers worship the dollar above all does not directly relate to Edwards ipso facto. Certainly he made a fortune suing corporations. Now what we need is for him to do for his country what he did for his clients. The opponents are largely unchanged.
Posted by: Chuck Dupree (Belisarius) on April 7, 2007 9:35 PMIn hindsight, perhaps my comments were rash about Edwards. He may be a fine, honest upright trial lawyer. I've been a lawyer on both the trial lawyer and the corporation side, and I've got to say, it's a dirty rotten business. The only business worse, as I see it, is the what the clients on the corporation side do to the average American every day.
Lawyering is, though, part of the flowing river of money where all one has do is go down to the river and slurp it up. (a la' Vonnegut)
Personally, I'd rather be at a cockfighting match than continue on in the business. At least there, everything is out in the open and you know what you're dealing with.
Don't get me wrong though, there are real heroes in the world of lawyers. Thousands of them. Morris Dees for example. (but Ralph Nader is off the list permanently IMO).
As Chuck says from "[now] ow what we need is for him to do for his country what he did for his clients." Well, I don't know what he did for his clients, but if it turns out to be a free run on the money for the trial lawyer lobby, we might be better off than with the grand theft we've got going on by much of corporate America right now, but I'm not sure it's going to be by much.
But Chuck is right, for one thing, the Justice Department could sure need a clean up right about now.