FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010 CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Obama: The vision thing B
arack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see
that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitiga- tion accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis- go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task. Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr.
Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal. How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exact- ly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Oba- ma proposes to give us a new industri- al economy.
But is this not what we’ve been try- ing to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boon- doggle, economically unviable and en- vironmentally damaging to boot? As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions. Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary sub- sidies of a blossoming new clean en- ergy industry. That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneco- nomical photovoltaic industry. There’s a reason petroleum is such a
durable fuel. It’s not, as Obama fat- uously suggested, because of oil com- pany lobbying but because it is very portable, energy-dense and easy to use.
But this doesn’t stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate into be- ing a superior substitute. His argu- ment: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this? Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of cliches comes from a president who is canceling our pro- gram to return to the moon, it is utter- ly meaningless. The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly
MICHAEL GERSON
moving an uncertainty of his own creation. Promoting abortion with international family planning funds is one of “a thousand things we shouldn’t be spending money on.” The policy, which was implement- ed by President Ronald Reagan and overturned by President Obama last year, banned the use of federal funds for family-planning groups that of- fered abortions abroad. Yet days earlier, when asked if he would return to that family planning rule as president, Daniels had re- sponded: “I don’t know.” It is a meas- ure of Daniels’s standing as a possible Republican candidate in 2012 that his answer caused a considerable stir. So- cial conservatives criticized his idea that a “truce” on divisive, culture war controversies might be required to deal with “survival issues” such as ter- rorism and debt. Daniels’s clarification on Mexico
City shows his realism. But his contin- ued insistence on the idea of a truce shows his stubbornness — a defining characteristic. “If there were a WMD attack, death would come to straights and gays, pro-life and pro-choice,” he told me. “If the country goes broke, it would ruin the American dream for everyone. We are in this together. Whatever our honest disagreements on other questions, might we set them aside long enough to do some very difficult things without which we will be a different, lesser country?” This is the paradox of Mitch Dan-
iels: He is a uniter with an apocalyptic message, a genial Jeremiah. “I start with a premise that not everyone agrees with — that the republic is threatened as it has not been before, if you don’t count the Soviet nuclear threat. . . . It is the arithmetic of debt. If unaddressed, it makes national fail- ure a certainty. Beyond some point, you can’t come back.” Daniels’s appeal is not ideological; it is mathematical. The passions aroused by ideology, in his view, ham- per the ability of political adults to deal rationally with disturbing budg- et numbers. But if Daniels de-empha- sizes ideology, he elevates moral vir- tues such as thrift, realism and humil- ity.
The vivid contrast to President Obama’s expansive, undisciplined, ex- pensive public ambitions has elevated Daniels to prominence. This is not a pose. I was a colleague of Daniels when he was director of the Office of Management and Budget. It was his job to say “no” to splendid policy pro- posals, which he did with good-hu-
The Mitch Daniels paradox “I
would reinstate the Mexico
City policy,” Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told me Wednesday, re-
KLMNO
R
A29 EUGENE ROBINSON
sold. They remain unwon. Why? Be- cause we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it. Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon land- ing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty. Similarly, we don’t know how to
make renewables that match the effi- ciency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our depen- dence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deep-water) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama de- cried in Tuesday’s speech. “Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Obama, is “because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.” Running out of places on land?
What about the Arctic National Wild- life Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope, near the exist- ing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum develop- ment — that have been shut down by the federal government? Running out of shallow-water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That’s been off-limits to new drilling for three decades. We haven’t run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environ- mentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.
Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.” Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which. That’s why Tuesday’s speech was re- ceived with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destina- tions. That passes for vision, and vi- sion is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Our must-keep deadline
ED WRAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
An Afghan boy looks out from a wall damaged in a U.S. airstrike that reportedly hit a wedding in the village of Kakarak in September 2002.
Sorry ’bout that How not to win hearts and minds
by Henry Allen W
e were putting up the tents when Pakistani police pulled up and told us we might get killed if we
camped there. Four guys in a British lump of a car,
they’d driven out from Peshawar to warn us. No “fees” or “permits” were demand- ed, though doubtless they worried about the political implications of a dozen or so British and American corpses showing up between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, where we were headed in our decrepit lit- tle Mercedes bus. “Very dangerous to camp here,” one
said. “Why?” I asked. It looked okay to me — farmland and trees, green in April but turning dusty as the rains got further be- hind us. A lovely evening in 1969, a peaceful year in that part of Asia. “This area is not under government control,” he said. What an amazing notion, I thought — not under government control. “Tribal territory. Very dangerous. Much
fighting.” What were they fighting about? “They fight.” I paid attention. In Vietnam I’d learned how easy it was to get killed in some of the most beautiful landscape on Earth. The Brits on the bus did not pay atten- tion. With the confidence — defiant na- ivete, really — that had once conquered the world, they began muttering: Prepos- terous . . . rubbish . . . to think we’d strike the tents on the basis of some rumor . . . So we stayed. That night, I woke to the
mored enthusiasm. Raining on pa- rades was both a profession and a hobby. There is a reason why OMB is not a
typical steppingstone to high political office; the same reason that accoun- tants generally don’t become sex sym- bols. But Daniels became a highly suc- cessful Indiana governor, combining a motorcycle-driving, pork-tender- loin-eating populism with coura- geous budget cutting, a solid record of job creation and a reputation for com- petence. If responsibility and auster- ity are now sexy, Daniels and New Jer- sey Gov. Chris Christie are center- folds.
When asked his political influenc- es, Daniels cites Charles Murray, the author of “What It Means to Be a Lib- ertarian.” Daniels speaks of taxation as a form of coercion that can be justi- fied only by narrow and necessary public purposes. But unlike, say, liber- tarian Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, Daniels has actually run a state, forcing him to define govern- ment’s necessary purposes in a more realistic manner. “Building excellent public infra-
structure is an appropriate role for government,” he explains, on the theory that it “enables the private sec- tor to thrive. . . . Maybe this makes me more of a Whig.” It has certainly made him a tenacious reformer of govern- ment itself. Asked about his achieve- ments in office, he notes that average wait times at the Bureau of Motor Ve- hicles have fallen to under nine min- utes. “Actually,” he says, “eight min- utes, 16 seconds.” Daniels’s rigorous, detail-oriented
focus on economic issues has earned him a favorable buzz among conser- vative intellectuals and commenta- tors. Social conservatives have been more skeptical, feeling their deepest commitments might be set aside for the duration of a culture war “truce.” In fact, Daniels’s pro-life record is strong. The main problem with his truce proposal is not its moderation but its naivete. Just how would avoid- ing fights on unrelated social issues make Democratic legislators more likely to vote for broad budget cuts and drastic entitlement reforms? Daniels admits, “No one may take the offer. . . . But I’m not prepared to give up on the idea we can address this thing. If we can’t — well, the cynics were right. But somebody has to try.” It is difficult to imagine Daniels’s
rejection of uplift, ideology and activ- ism appealing to the country at most times. But maybe, at this particular time, we are a nation in need of fewer messiahs and more OMB directors.
michaelgerson@washpost.com
venerable music of a firefight — rifles, machine guns, grenades — maybe 500 yards away. It went on for a while but came no closer. It ended. I went back to sleep. The next evening we arrived at the
Khyber Pass, where a sign warned in English: “Do Not Enter the Pass After Sundown — Bandits.” Clearly, not under government control. It was sundown, and in a teahouse by the road weathered men in robes were on the floor saying their evening prayers, but not before taking their rifles off their shoulders.
Our British companions insisted we enter the pass. We got through. In Kabul the next day I noticed rifles on pedestri- ans, as common as briefcases on K Street, old bolt-action .303 Enfields the British had carried before they lost their domin- ion over palm and pine. I concluded that the Afghans got into a
lot of firefights and suspected it was a way of life, much like lack of government control. When the Russians invaded Af- ghanistan in 1979 I predicted they would get their balalaikas handed to them. They did.
Aha! you say. But the Russians never tried a counterinsurgency strategy like America’s, winning hearts and minds, building bridges, building what smart guys in Washington — the ones in charge of losing our wars — call “infrastructure.” I’d done some counterinsurgency work
THE PLUM LINE
Excerpts from Greg Sargent’s blog on domestic politics and debate on the Hill:
voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line
GREG SARGENT
The furor over Joe Barton
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) has retracted his ill- considered apology to BP and his claim that the company’s escrow fund for victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill constituted a White House “shakedown.” But the resulting dust-up — with Republican leaders distancing themselves from the remarks and Democrats seizing on them — may have already done major damage. It gave the White House its first real opening to shift the narrative away from the Obama administra- tion’s inability to stop the spill. Small wonder that the White House jumped all over the story Thursday — and rather than focus only on Barton’s remarks, it seized on them to make a broader case against the Repub- lican Party and its embrace of deregulation on multiple issues. “It’s hard to tell what planet these people live
on,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said when asked about the attacks, from multiple Repub- licans, on the White House’s treatment of BP. “It’s hard to understand their viewpoint, but it
may explain their votes on financial regulation,” he continued. “It explains how they view wheth- er or not the banks ought to be able to write their own rules and play the game the way they played it several years ago that caused our econ- omy to crash.”
Gibbs ripped BP for doing untold damage to our economy, environment and “way of life,” and added that if you listen to Barton, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and other Republicans, “you’d think somehow BP was a handkerchief, a crying shoulder.” Before Thursday,Republicans had been confi- dent that Democrats would be hard-pressed to make the oil-spill story about anything other than the president and his impotence. But Bar- ton’s apology to BP gave the White House its best opening yet to use the spill to make the global case against the GOP and ensure that its ap- proach to governance is part of the national con- versation about the disaster.
as a corporal in the Marine Corps. This was in 1966, three years earlier. I
was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was under- standable. We’d gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong worked with him too, by cutting off his head. I think of him when I read of Taliban reprisals against Afghans who work with Americans. One day our 105mm howitzer battery was particularly noisy, taking out a Viet Cong hamlet. Then came a cease-fire or- der. It seemed it wasn’t a Viet Cong but a friendly hamlet. We’d leveled it. Sorry ’bout that, as we’d say when things got especially ugly. The colonel asked us to smooth it over,
get those hearts and minds back. Ce- ment? Flour? Roofing tin? Never happen, colonel. I think of that day every time I hear about a drone lighting up a number of Af- ghan women and children, about our fighter planes taking out a wedding par- ty.
Try counterinsurging that one, I say. When I went back to Chu Lai as a jour- nalist in 1999, my guide told me that the coolness I’d noticed might have been more than fear of reprisal or resentment at the leveling of a friendly village. In this area during the war, he said,
“very high revolutionary spirit, very high.” His face seemed to imply there was a
joke, and he pitied me because I was the butt of it. Indeed, local legend had it that the Viet Cong used our cement and roofing tin to build not houses but underground launchers for the rockets they fired back at us. Even so, it was nice when two wom- en thanked me for our long-ago generosi- ty with our medical care. Hearts, minds, rockets. We paid off one village chief with an
old French sedan, a Panhard.We had to deliver it by ship because the village had no roads. The chief couldn’t drive it any- where, of course, but we were there to oblige. I think of that Panhard when I read about the money and goods we use to buy the Afghans — the crane and gasoline we gave, for instance, so they wouldn’t attack us while we were evacuating the Koren- gal Valley after spending years there win- ning no hearts or minds. How many sui- cide bombs could Taliban cars deliver with that gasoline? Sorry ’bout that. Every day the news from Afghanistan
suggests that our empire, dominion, in- frastructure and counterinsurgency are having another hard time, along the lines of Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia and Iraq. Having been in both Vietnam and Af- ghanistan, I’m not surprised. Those Pakistani policemen knew what they were talking about.
Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.
pledged that U.S. troops “will begin to come home” in the summer of 2011. Discouraging reports from the war zone should make him more determined to keep his promise — and Americans more insistent on holding him to it. In his Capitol Hill testimony this week, Gen. David Petraeus — the godfather of Obama’s 30,000- troop Afghanistan surge — sought mightily to carve out some wiggle room. “We have to be very careful with timelines,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The July 2011 deadline for beginning a troop withdrawal depends on the assumption that “conditions” are favorable, Petraeus said.
W
But wait a minute. Another way to describe a withdrawal deadline that is based not on the calendar but on an amorphous and elusive set of “conditions” would be to call it an open-ended commitment. This is precisely what Obama said he was not giving to Afghanistan’s corrupt, feckless and increasingly unreliable government. There were basically two rea- sons for establishing a firm time- line in the first place. One was to mollify skeptical U.S. public opin- ion, which had begun to associate the war in Afghanistan with such concepts as “quagmire” and “Viet- nam.” The other was to apply maxi- mum pressure on Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s mercurial president, to shape up and get with the program.
Which he has not done. Karzai, who seems not to have gotten the memo on how a U.S. puppet should behave, alternates between grudging cooperation and petu- lant defiance. Most alarming is that Karzai is effectively sabotag- ing the effort to win hearts and minds in Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency, by leav- ing the local power structure in the hands of his thuggish and corrupt half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. In Washington, the hawkish in-
terpretation of events is that the timeline itself is now the problem — that, in the words of Sen. John McCain, it tells “the key actors in- side and outside of Afghanistan that the United States is more in- terested in leaving than succeed- ing in this conflict.” This sounds like a reasonable ar- gument until you think about it. Karzai, the Taliban, the warlords and the Afghan public already know that U.S. and NATO forces will leave someday. The only way to make them think otherwise would be to announce that we in- tend to stay forever — and clearly that’s not the case. From the Af- ghan point of view, it doesn’t make much difference whether the in- terlopers depart in one year or in five. It might make a difference, of course, if there were an honest, ca- pable Afghan government that could use more time to build its ca- pacity and earn the people’s trust. Everyone knows, however, that such a government does not exist. McCain complains that all the
competing Afghan factions are “making the necessary accommo- dations for a post-American Af- ghanistan.” But this outcome is not only inevitable, it’s what we claim to want. Sooner or later, there will be a “post-American Afghanistan,” and some measure of power and influence will be held by Afghans who now consider themselves loy- al to the Taliban. Corruption will not vanish, nor will the poppy and marijuana fields, nor the system of clan-based loyalties that has sur- vived a millennium’s worth of for- eign invasions. It’s not that Afghanistan is some
sort of hopeless case. It’s just that thinking that a U.S.-led experiment in nation-building — and that’s what we’re attempting, even if we call it counterinsurgency — can impose a whole new organization- al template on the place in a year or two, or even 10, is pure fantasy. Whether or not Obama adheres to his announced deadline matters less to the Afghans than it does to us. U.S. casualties are increasing, as was anticipated; Obama has tri- pled U.S. troop levels since he took office; and the battle for Kandahar will be bloody. Our European allies are squirming, balking, complain- ing and looking for the exit. As time goes on, this will become even more of a primarily American war. The question is how much more the war will cost in precious young lives and scarce resources. Obama won the nation’s forbearance by making a promise that the inevi- table withdrawal of U.S. troops would begin next year. Americans should expect him to keep his word — and insist that he does.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
hen he ordered his escala- tion of the war in Afghani- stan, President Obama
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