TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010 RICHARD COHEN


A war we fought before


regor Samsa, the general counsel of an exterminating company, was in New York on business when he was hit on the head by a flowerpot (geraniums) being watered by one Dorothy Ob- dean three floors above street lev- el. This happened in 1970. Samsa went into a coma from which he awakened only last week. Almost immediately, he read the major newspapers with astonishment. “For some reason, they’ve changed the name of Vietnam to Afghani- stan,” he said.


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Samsa read on. Other than the name change and some other mi- nor differences, he noticed that ev- erything else was the same. Some military officers he had never heard of, preternaturally trim and so smart that he had to wonder why they had chosen the business of killing in the first place, were predicting the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning or some such thing. He looked for the phrase “light at the end of the tun- nel,” but inexplicably it was gone. Samsa turned the page. There,


as he expected, he found that the battle of Marja, which was once go- ing to be the “turning point” of the war, was now seesawing back and forth. Both The Post and the New York Times had reported — in the words of The Post’s Rajiv Chandra- sekaran — that the Taliban has “re- gained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of suc- cess by U.S. Marines.” Samsa vis- ibly relaxed. Now he was sure they were talking about Vietnam. Samsa kept reading. Elizabeth


Rubin reported in Foreign Policy that the leader of the former Viet- nam was acting bizarrely. The leader had an odd name for a Viet- namese person: Hamid Karzai. He had fired his director of intelli- gence and his interior minister not, as he had said, because they had failed to prevent a recent rock- et attack but because he thought they were in cahoots with the Americans. Karzai believed the Americans were trying to intimi- date him. Maybe Westmoreland can settle him down. The president’s brother, mean- while, apparently objected to a long-planned assault on Kandahar and it has been delayed for that reason. The brother — actually the half brother, and we all know from Psych 101 what that means — is a very powerful warlord or some- thing. He is also as corrupt as your average Chicago alderman or, as Samsa was quickly learning, virtu- ally any member of the New York state legislature. For literally years, there had been reports that the Americans or his (half) brother or maybe the Mossad would get rid of him, but he was still in power. The fact that nothing had changed was oddly reassuring to Samsa. The war, Samsa was learning, was now in its eighth year. My God! How had this happened? LBJ was always promising an end to it all. Nixon said he had a secret plan. Samsa had once supported the war, but eight years seemed to him to be enough. What had gone wrong? It seemed the more troops the United States put into this place now called Afghanistan, the more casualties it took and the less progress it made. The New York Times was report-


ing that military intelligence was spending an increasing amount of time ferreting out corruption as well as trying to determine what the enemy was up to. Corruption appeared to be rampant. No one could be trusted. It seemed that yes meant no and no meant yes and it all meant maybe. This was the way it always was in Vietnam. Call it Afghanistan, call it Ishmael for all Samsa cared. It was still good old Vietnam. Samsa read that every month this year had produced more American casualties than the same month a year earlier. He read that additional troops were on the way. He read that Karzai reportedly doubted that America would win and wanted to make peace with the Taliban, which was what the Viet Cong was now apparently calling itself. He read that the United States was going to start pulling out anyway in a bit more than a year. Meanwhile, Amer- icans would die. All the enemy had to do was wait. They’re already “in country.”


Samsa appreciated Karzai’s con-


cern. The enemy was ruthless, bar- baric. In 1996, the enemy had tor- tured and castrated a former presi- dent of the country before killing him. Still, if the war could not be won — not that anyone much knew what comprised winning — then it ought to end. The situation sad- dened the newly awakened Gregor Samsa. Then he brightened. “A Democratic president would end it all,” he thought. cohenr@washpost.com


EUGENE ROBINSON Gulf war syndrome I


t’s great that President Obama and his advisers finally seem to understand the atmospherics of responding to the


Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Now if they’d only get the policy right. Whether Obama has been demonstra- tive enough in his public handling of the catastrophe is a legitimate question, but it’s somewhat beside the point. Yes, there is an aspect of theatrical performance in- herent in the presidency, and no, Obama doesn’t seem to relish that part of his job. But the man is who he is — he doesn’t shoot from the hip, doesn’t thump tables or pound podiums, and would strike a glissando of false notes if he suddenly tried to pretend otherwise. How well Obama learns to communicate empathy and passion while staying true to himself is relevant to his long-term effectiveness as president and, ultimately, to his legacy. No amount of scenery-chewing, however, can begin to ameliorate what the White House calls the worst environmental dis- aster in U.S. history. The issue isn’t what Obama is feeling,


it’s what he’s doing. Why haven’t skim- mers been brought in from around the world to scoop up more of the oil? Why isn’t the defense of the coastline being run like a military campaign, with failure not an option? Why is the answer to every question essentially the same — “We’ve repeatedly asked BP to get that done” — when we’re dealing with a crisis that has to be seen as an urgent matter of national security and the public welfare? Enough of asking BP. The company is responsible for the spill and must be made to pay dearly. But BP management answers to the company’s shareholders, not to the American people. And even if BP’s gaffe-prone chief executive, Tony Hayward, and his lieutenants had only the purest and noblest of intentions, the problem they have created in the gulf is far beyond their capacity to solve. This is, essentially, a war that is partly being fought one mile beneath the sur- face of the gulf, where crude oil continues to gush out of the highly pressurized “Ma- condo” deposit — which carries the name of the fictional town in Nobel laureate Ga- briel Garcia Marquez’s magical-realist masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Soli- tude”— at a calamitous rate. The administration had no choice but to leave the initial response on the sea-


ANNE APPLEBAUM This isn’t Obama’s Katrina I


n the Gulf of Mexico, plumes of black oil are gushing into the ocean, coating the wings of seabirds, poisoning shell-


fish, sending tar balls rolling onto white Florida beaches. It is an ecological disaster. It is a economic nightmare. And there is absolutely nothing that the American president can do about it. Nothing at all. Here is the hard truth: The U.S. govern- ment does not possess a secret method for capping oil leaks. Even the combined wis- dom of the Obama inner circle — all of those Harvard economists, silver-tongued spin doctors and hardened politicos — can- not prevent tens of thousands of tons of oil from pouring out of hole a mile beneath the ocean surface. Other than proximity to the Louisiana coast, this catastrophe has nothing in common with Hurricane Katri- na: That was an unstoppable natural dis- aster that turned into a human tragedy be- cause of an inadequate government re- sponse. This is just an unstoppable disaster, period. It will be a human tragedy precisely because no government response is possible.


Which leads me to a mystery: Given that he cannot stop the oil from flowing, why has President Obama decided to act as if he can? And given that he is totally reliant on BP to save the fish and the birds of the Gulf of Mexico, why has he started pretending otherwise — why is he, in his own words, looking for someone’s “ass to kick”? I sus- pect that there are many reasons for this recent change of rhetorical tone and that some of them are ideological. This is, of course, a president who believes that gov- ernment can and should be able to solve all


problems. Obama has never sounded par- ticularly enthusiastic about the private sec- tor either, and some of his congressional colleagues — the ones talking of retroac- tively raising the cap on BP’s liability, for example, or forcing BP to pay for the lost wages of other oil companies’ workers — are downright hostile. Alarge part of the explanation, however,


is cultural: Obama has been forced to take a commanding role in a crisis he cannot control because we expect him to — both “we” the media and “we” the bipartisan public. Whatever their politics, most Amer- icans in recent years have come to expect a strong response — an invasion, massive legislation — from their politicians in times of crisis, and this one is no exception. We want the president to lead — some- where, anywhere. A few days ago, the New York Times declared that “he and his ad- ministration need to do a lot more to show they are on top of this mess” and should have started “putting the heat” on BP much earlier — as if that would have made the remotest bit of difference. But Mitt Romney, who last I checked is right of center, sounded almost exactly the same note: Obama, he said, should be “leading this entire effort to bring together the experts, the various oil company exec- utives, the engineers from various oil com- panies as well as from the various aca- demic think tanks.” This comment re- minds me of the time the European Union solemnly decided to form a committee to fight unemployment, as if that were an ac- tual solution. I also love the idea that all of those offshore oil engineers twiddling their


thumbs at think tanks — the Heritage Foundation? the Brookings Institution? — are only waiting for the president’s phone call to spring into action. In truth, the organization most likely to


have the phone numbers of the “experts” is BP. The organization that will get them to Louisiana fastest is BP. I am writing this not because I like, admire or even have an opinion about the company formerly known as British Petroleum but because BP’s shareholders have already lost billions of dollars and BP’s executives are motivat- ed to find solutions faster than anyone in the White House ever could. Bashing BP or seeking to punish BP is pointless. This is not only because we will soon learn that many companies — American, Japanese, even Halliburton — were responsible for that rig but also because whatever the solu- tion, BP has to be part of it. Paradoxically, “talking tough” about this oil crisis also makes both Obama and America look weak internationally — just as “talking tough” about Iran made the Bush administration look weak. Harsh rhetoric is fine if it reflects a real will to do something, a real plan of action and the ex- istence of a Plan B, for when the first one fails. But when angry words — anti-BP, anti-British, anti-oil company — reflect the absence of any alternative policy whatsoev- er, they sound pathetic. It’s right for Oba- ma to be concerned about the consequenc- es of this disaster, but wrong — and dan- gerous — for him to pretend he is capable of controlling it. We should stop calling on him to do so.


applebaumletters@washpost.com


POST PARTISAN Excerpts from The Post’s opinion blog, updated daily at washingtonpost.com/postpartisan


CHARLES LANE


Myths about the teacher layoff crisis


By now, you’ve probably heard about the


urgent teacher layoff crisis threatening America. Because of shrinking state and local budgets, as many as 300,000 teachers could be laid off, with devastating educational con- sequences for our children. The only cure is $23 billion in fresh federal deficit spending, rushed through Congress as part of a bill to fund U.S. overseas military operations. “The urgency is high,” President Obama warned congressional leaders in a June 12 letter. Don’t believe the hype. Start with that number being bandied about: 300,000 teacher layoffs. The sources for it are interested parties: teachers unions and school administrators, whose national organizations counted layoff warning notices sent out this spring and extrapolated from there. Notably, however, even these sources usually describe the threatened positions as “education jobs.” That’s because the figures


include not only kindergarten through 12th- grade classroom instructors but also support staff (bus drivers, custodians, et al.) and com- munity college faculty. And 300,000 is the upper end of a range that could be as low as 100,000. Nationwide, there are about 3.2 mil- lion K-12 public school teachers. Moreover, springtime layoff notices are a notoriously unreliable guide to job cuts in the fall because many public school systems require administrators to notify every person who might be laid off. As the New York Times recently reported: “Everywhere, school offi- cials tend to overestimate the potential for layoffs at this time of year, to ensure that ev- ery employee they might have to dismiss re- ceives the required notifications.” Given this, it’s unclear how the bill’s sup-


porters came up with its $23 billion price tag. It works out to about $77,000 per job saved in the 300,000-layoff scenario, but $230,000 per job if only 100,000 jobs are at risk. Maybe that’s why the bill’s fine print allows states to spend funds left over from education hiring on other state employees. By the way, the bill distributes funds to states according to how many residents they have, not how many threatened layoffs.


But what about class size? Well, 300,000 teacher layoffs would increase the national student-teacher ratio in public schools from 15.3-to-1 to 16.6-to-1 — roughly where it was in 1997. And 100,000 teacher layoffs would increase it to 15.6-to-1 — the 2005 level. Nei- ther number portends educational apoca- lypse given how uncertain the links are be- tween class size and student achievement. Student-teacher ratios shrank roughly 10 percent nationally from 1996 to 2008, but reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress stayed essentially flat. Newark, for example, has a student- teacher ratio of only 10.7 to 1 — and the poor- est test-score results of any public school sys- tem in New Jersey. The Obama administration argues that the bill would pay for itself in part because teach- ers who are retained would continue to pay taxes and not collect unemployment ben- efits. But the same could be said for spending on any category of employment. Beyond its totally unquantified claims of long-term edu- cational benefits, the White House has no evidence that there’s something especially economically stimulative about keeping schools fully staffed.


floor to BP. The government simply doesn’t have the equipment or the exper- tise to stanch the flow. This unfortunate situation may reflect bad policy choices in the past, but that’s the reality. One smart decision was to order BP to begin drilling a second relief well, in case the first one misses its target — but neither will be completed until August, and there’s noth- ing anyone can do about it. A second battle is the effort to contain the tens of millions of gallons of oil that have already polluted the gulf and its coastline. Here, too, the administration has gone by the book and pressured BP to honor its responsibilities. It should be clear by now that this has been a mistake. The Post reported Monday that the ad-


ministration has received offers of assis- tance from 17 nations. Sweden has volun- teered to send three ships that can each collect about 15,000 gallons of oil an hour. Norway has offered to send nearly a third of its oil-spill response equipment. Japan has offered to send some boom, which au- thorities on the scene complain is in short supply. The Swedes, the Norwegians, the Japa- nese and most of the other would-be Sa- maritans are still waiting to hear from the


KLMNO


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A15


A president too friendly


by Saad Eddin Ibrahim JIM YOUNG/REUTERS President Obama speaks at a briefing on the oil spill in Gulfport, Miss., on Monday.


U.S. government or BP. Last week, accord- ing to The Post, the administration did ask the European Union to help with any specialized equipment it might have. But meanwhile, oil has penetrated the marsh- es of southern Louisiana and is lapping onto the beaches of Alabama and Florida. The main spill is spreading, and hurri- cane season is upon us. Every available piece of equipment in the world that can vacuum, skim, scoop or sop up oil ought to be in the gulf by now, deployed under a central — probably military — command structure. The beaches should be defended as if from a threatened enemy invasion. This is a time for overkill, for the Powell Doctrine, for “decisive force.” There’s no silver bullet that can defeat this bloblike enemy, but each drop of oil that gets removed from the gulf and its shores is a victory — and each drop that doesn’t is a defeat. It’s that simple. This is war.


The writer will answer questions at 1 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.


com. His e-mail address is eugenerobinson@ washpost.com.


a picture of George W. Bush and the words “Miss me yet?” the irony was not lost on many in the Arab world. Most Americans may not miss Bush, but a growing number of people in the Middle East do. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain un- popular in the region, but his ardent support for democracy was heart- ening to Arabs living under stalled autocracies. Reform activists in Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait and else- where felt empowered to press for greater freedoms during the Bush years. Unfortunately, Bush’s strong support for democracy contrasts sharply with President Obama’s re- treat on this critical issue. To be sure, the methods through which Bush pursued his policies left much to be desired, but his persis- tent rhetoric and efforts produced results. From 2005 to 2006, 11 con- tested elections took place in the Middle East: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Egypt and Mauritania. These elections were not perfect, but the advances sparked unprec- edented sociopolitical dynamism and unleashed tremendous pent-up desire for democratic choice. Photos of jubilant Iraqi women proudly dis- playing the indelible ink on their fingers after voting were followed by images of Egyptian opposition voters using ladders to enter polling stations when regime officials tried to block the doorways. Peaceful opposition groups prolif-


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erated in Egypt during the Bush years: Youth for Change, Artists for Change, Egypt’s


Independent


Judges and, perhaps the most well- known, Kefaya. That Iraq has held two genuinely contested and fair multiparty elections, on schedule, indicates that democracy is indeed taking root again there after 60 years of the most oppressive dicta- torial rule. To be fair, Bush did back away from his support for Arab reform in his second term. But the image of his support stuck. Why has Obama distanced himself from his pred- ecessor’s support for democracy promotion? One unsurprising out- come is that the regime in Egypt has reverted to wholesale imprison- ment and harassment of political dissidents.


Despite his promises of change when speaking in Cairo last June, Obama has retreated to Cold War policies of favoring stability and even support for “friendly tyrants.” Far from establishing an imagina- tive policy of tying the substantial U.S. foreign aid to the region to po- litical reform, the Obama adminis- tration has given a free pass to Egypt’s ailing 82-year-old autocrat, Hosni Mubarak. Last month when Mubarak’s regime extended the “emergency law” under which it has ruled for 29 years, prohibiting even small political rallies and sending civilians to military courts, Wash- ington barely responded.


Apparently the Obama adminis-


tration thinks that strengthening ties with Mubarak will encourage Egypt to become more proactive in the Israeli-Palestinian peace proc- ess. But Mubarak has not advanced Israeli-Palestinian peace beyond what his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, accomplished in the 1970s, and the Egyptian leader has tightened his crackdown on Egypt’s brave young pro-democracy bloggers. Egypt is scheduled to hold two important elections over the next 18 months, votes that could well shape the fu- ture of democracy in the Middle East’s largest country and the re- gion itself. What tone does Presi- dent Obama want to see established in this volatile neighborhood? Democracy and human rights ad-


vocates in the Middle East listened with great anticipation to Obama’s speech in Cairo. Today, Egyptians are not just disappointed but stunned by what appears to be out- right promotion of autocracy in their country. What is needed now is a loud and clear message from the United States and the global com- munity of democracies that the Egyptian people deserve free, fair and transparent elections. Congress is considering a resolution to that effect for Uganda. Such a resolution for Egypt is critical given the im- mense U.S. support for Egypt. Just as we hope for a clear U.S. signal on democracy promotion, we must hope that the Obama administra- tion will cease its coddling of dictators.


The writer, an Egyptian sociologist and democracy activist living in exile, is a distinguished visiting professor at Drew University in Madison, N.J.


hen a billboard appeared outside a small Minnesota town early this year showing


with tyrants Obama must get tough on Egypt’s Mubarak


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