Faith + Reason = Truth

Slobodan Lekic has an AP story about the number of allied troops and security forces in Afghanistan outnumbering the Taliban 12 to 1.  In his words, "it hasn't led to anything close to victory."  Really?  By what definition?  I may be off, but I thought the intent of the mission in Afghanistan was to oust the Taliban from their rule in Afghanistan (check), deny them and Al-Qaeda a safe harbor in Afghanistan from which to conduct operations (check), establish a democratic process for the election of a representative government by Afghans (check), and raise and train an Afghan security force (a 200,000-strong Afghan security force has been raised and is still undergoing years of training - check).

What, exactly, does Mr. Lekic have in mind when he uses the term "victory?"  You'd have to ask him, because I'm stupefied by that opening statement.  The remainder of the article does contain some useful facts and figures, so it may merit a read.  And its closing, coincidentally, contains the figure of 600,000 as a potential correct number for an adequate security force in the country, given its population of 32 million (which is what any force should be based on with a security operation, as opposed to the number of insurgents operating within the population, which cannot be known, and which was used in the calculation of his 12-1 outnumbering ratio).

Readers of this site may recall that I had cited 600,000 as the number of U.S. forces sent to Iraq for the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, and that our current 68,000 troop level is woefully low for the task at hand - if, in fact, we want to be there at all, which I am still not convinced is the right action for these circumstances.  But if we are to be engaged there in a military capacity, then a number on the order of several hundred thousand allied forces above and beyond the 200,000 Afghan security forces is what we ought to be deploying, with a presence to last at least 10 more years and probably longer.

Voice of America News has just reported that "Iran has failed to accept a United Nations-backed proposal for uranium enrichment and has instead offered its own counter-proposal."  Is there anyone involved on either side of the negotiation that is even remotely surprised by this?  Good question.

The offer that was on the table was designed to remove Iran's supply of uranium from the country and, in return, ship them uranium in a form that could only be used for medical purposes, i.e., nuclear medicine.  This would have minimized the threat of Iran using their nuclear plants for non-peaceful purposes.  Instead, Iran has responded that they will go ahead and keep their own uranium, thank you very much, and when they need uranium for nuclear medicine, they will simply buy it from other nations.

Their counter, obviously, defeats the purpose of the whole negotiation, which was to persuade Iran to give up the pursuit of nuclear technology for non-peaceful objectives.  But it does more than that:  it gives Iran yet another victory in its ongoing war with the world.  Their war is not fought with infantry or ships or bombers; it is fought with words.  We are not battling over territory, we are battling over time.  Every hour of every day that goes by, Iran is working on developing nuclear technology.  Every extra minute they gain is a battle won.  When the world issues an ultimatum or an edict, Iran can now comply, refuse, or ask for bargaining time.  With President Bush, who the Iranians knew would never negotiate, they had only two courses:  comply or refuse.  So they refused.  But with President Obama, who is very open about pursuing dialogue, the Iranians are able to employ the third tactic of "negotiation," which is a victory in itself.  This way, they are able to buy themselves more time, which is a victory, and then refuse.

Ahmadinejad's refusal, though, is not presented as such; he is far too masterful for that.  It is instead proffered as a "counter-proposal."  Bush's administration, and every administration before his that had dealt with the Islamic Republic's regime, understood this game.  Obama and his team do not.  All Iran is looking for is time, so the best thing they could have ever hoped for in an American administration is someone who would grant them that gift on a unilateral basis while seeking absolutely nothing in return.  President Obama is the answer to their prayers.  He is the answer to Vladimir Putin's prayers in his similarly unilateral action to expose Eastern Europe to Russia's sphere of influence rather than extending our future missile shield to protect them.

Obama is bending over backward to accomodate Russia, Iran, Wall Street chieftains, and others who really don't need or deserve our assistance.  At what point will the whole of America earn, or shall I say "be entitled to," his good graces?  Good question.

No, this isn't a post about the NBA Playoffs.  It's about Afghanistan.

Right now, there are roughly 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.  Maybe 100,000 total "coalition" forces there.  Military leadership is asking for...a number that's higher than that.  Is it an additional 20,000?  40,000?  No, it's actually 80,000 more, if General McChrystal is to get his way (we think).

Sound like a lot?  That would bring the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan from around 70,000 to around 150,000.  But does anyone recall how many were sent to Iraq for the first Persian Gulf War, back in 1991?

According to Josef Joffe in a piece for Foreign Affairs, "Washington dispatched 600,000 soldiers to fight the first Iraq war -- without reinstating the draft or raising taxes."  How can that be?  How can we have 68,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, perhaps 130,000 in Iraq (or a combined 200,000 for both countries, 1/3 of the the total we sent to just Iraq 18 years ago), and expect to win?  General Norman Schwarzkopf had a philosophy about war:  if you're going to fight one, make dang sure you have the odds so overwhelmingly stacked in your favor that the other guy has no choice but to turn and run (or, as it turned out in Iraq, drop their weapons in the sand and run TOWARDS you to surrender as fast as they can, to avoid being killed during the retreat).

Stormin' Norman had a lot to like about him, but this may have been his most likable trait.  I can picture him telling the first President Bush something along the lines of "I don't want to go there, but if you're telling me I need to go, then I'm bringing a half million of my heavily-armed buddies with me, just to be on the safe side."  And better still, I can picture the President saying in return, "you got it - and while we're at it, why don't we throw in another 100,000 just to make sure?"

Maybe it's me, but I don't see that kind of dialogue taking place now.  Should it?  I think so.  And if not, they need to just pack it up and catch the first Navy boats back to America.

A sitting President of the United States, presiding over ongoing war operations in Afghanistan with military and civilian casualties on both sides of the conflict each and every day, winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  Hmmm...

A prize for which he was unanimously selected - and for which the deadline for nominations was 11 days after he took office.  Hmmm...

A prize that had, as one of its finalists, a true hero working in the midst of war, after having suffered through the brutally oppressive anti-female education policies of the Taliban in the country of - you guessed it - Afghanistan.

Slide shows about global warming, Yasser Arafat doing his utmost in Palestine, a Presidential victory and inauguration based on hope; these are the things that have earned recent Nobel Prizes for Peace.  Not decades of scientific work or literary toil, as are the cases for Nobel prizes in science and literature.  No, just a quick PowerPoint, some campaign posters, and launching rockets at Jews.

Actually, there is one thing that these winners have in common, and that is their shared aptitude for delivering a darn good speech about what OTHER people ought to do.  Their abilities to talk about action, rather than actually acting themselves.  Which is exactly what the world needs more of, if you think about it.  Isn't it?

Hmmm....

If ever a title of a post could make people move along without pausing to read so much as the first sentence, this post's title would be up to the task.  Which is exactly the subject of a lengthy, yet lovingly drawn out essay by Leon R. Kass found in the new quarterly publication, National Affairs.

"Looking for an Honest Man" explores the author's search for truth and meaning (my words, not his; he prefers the term "human being," or better still, "mentsch") through his own exploration of the humanities:  philosophy, religion, and other stuff of the intellectually elite.  But it resonates for a reason, and that reason is that he tried and succeeded at "real life" first.  He went to Harvard, was a molecular biologist, worked for civil rights in Mississippi in 1965, and woke up to the realization that the life well-lived need not include Harvard nor advanced degrees nor the mental snobbery of Boston.  In fact, as Kass would discover, those very things can and do work against real happiness, real living, real life:

"In summer 1966, my closest friend had me read Rousseau's explosive Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, for which my Mississippi and Harvard experiences had prepared me. Rousseau argues that, pace the Enlightenment, progress in the arts and sciences does not lead to greater virtue. On the contrary, it necessarily produces luxury, augments inequality, debases tastes, softens character, corrupts morals, and weakens ­patriotism, leading ultimately not to human emancipation but to human servitude."

Rousseau's work is near the top of my list, but I've first got to finish Thomas Paine's Rights of Man while barely having waded into Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (which Kass admirably expounds upon for a few meaty paragraphs, serving to whet my appetite further).  The author drives home the shortcomings of a society's (our society's) humanities-less education and worldview, which will only drift further afield as it advances along the math and science-based continuum ad infinitum (how's that for mixing advanced mathematics and classical Latin in a single phrase?) as he compares the sagacity of ancient thinkers to the present-day average American mindset:

"We focus on condemning and avoiding misconduct by, or on correcting and preventing injustice to, other people, not on elevating or improving ourselves. How liberating and encouraging, then, to encounter an ethics focused on the question, 'How to live?'...How eye-opening are arguments that suggest that happiness is not a state of passive feeling but a life of fulfilling activity, and especially of the unimpeded and excellent activity of our specifically human powers — of acting and making, of thinking and learning, of loving and befriending."

A long-form quarterly publication launching in this environment may not have a great chance at making it.  Honestly, there may not be a thousand people in America with the attention span to get through an entire issue.  But I will savor it while it's here, and hopefully some of you can find - no, make - the time to do the same.

Ancient Alexandria in Egypt, "birthplace of the modern world," was the new Athens for close to a thousand years.  A place where new ideas held sway over dogmatic beliefs.  A place that America could have become, and in fact was - for about 5 minutes.  Yet once the nation was conceived and debated by brilliant men well-versed in what remained of the classics (many of which originated in Alexandria almost two thousand years before the Founding Fathers), and once its violent birth was complete with the defeat of the British, it quickly descended into just another power grab of the variety that the world has engaged in since the dawn of humanity itself.

The first few Presidents held fast to the ideal of "America," particularly George Washington.  Soon, however, the flow of new ideas, vigorously debated with intellectual fire and brilliance by classically trained citizens, slowed to a trickle, eventually mirroring the fading star of Alexandria herself when the battle of ideas turned into a battle of partisan roles, and attacks once crafted with reason and scholarship morphed into assaults on individuals, peppered with inaccuracies, allegations, and accusations that served to undermine the foe rather than his idea.  In that environment, no matter what merit the idea or proposition may possess, it is immediately relegated to obscurity at the very instant that its champion is discredited.

That is where we find ourselves today with policy decisions, be they domestic or foreign.  The ideas themselves are not debated or discussed; in fact, they are barely even understood.  Instead, the party of whomever advances the position is slandered, libeled, and otherwise disparaged by the opposing group, so that we are now no better than the state to which Alexandria had degenerated almost a thousand years after its founding by Alexander the Great, conqueror of the known world and conceiver of the world's greatest intellectual achievement, the magnificent city of Alexandria.

My wife mentioned last night that our kids, aged 8 and 9, had annual checkups scheduled for today.  Somewhat surprised, I asked if it was "safe" to take healthy kids to the pediatrician's office [an office that would doubtless be full of flu-like symptoms and stricken victims in every corner of the place] for something non-essential like an annual checkup.

She called the doctor, and the assistant advised her to reschedule.  In fact, she suggested rescheduling for JANUARY, after flu season!  She also mentioned that they had no "normal flu" vaccines [and obviously the swine flu vaccine isn't available yet], but normal flu vaccine should be available at drug stores and other locations.

Be smart with your kids (and yourselves):

DON'T go to the doctor if you're not sick, and

DON'T accept "no" for an answer and go without a flu vaccine, if you want one.  Just check someplace else!

- Roy H. Williams

"Every life has a scoreboard and how you choose to keep score is up to you."

- Roy H. Williams (yeah, same dude)

Has your life been auctioned off to the highest bidder?  And what if you had a competing bid denominated in non-$ currency?  Time, for instance?  Or fulfillment?

It's a fact that the majority of Americans (I'm not sure if similar studies have also been done in other nations) feel more strongly about loss than about gain.  Also true:  fear is a greater motivator than reward.  So if presented with the exact same opportunity, but from different perspectives, people will be far likelier to choose one specific scenario over the other [again, even though the payoff is exactly the same], yet make a different choice when the tables are turned.  Here's an example:

You make $5,000 a year at your teaching job.  You are offered $7,500 a year as an accountant, due to a sudden shortage of accountants.  You know you would not enjoy the accounting job at all, that it would require far more hours per week and weeks per year (only 2 weeks vacation?  PER YEAR?  Are you kidding?), and that it would require a 1 hour and 40 minute round trip commute each day, instead of the 10 minute drive to the school.  And you love teaching.

But you would be increasing your salary by 50%!  What would you hypothetically choose?

Teaching.  Not everyone would stick with teaching instead of going to accounting, but under this scenario, the majority would.

Now let's reverse it.  You make $7,500 a year as an accountant.  You don't enjoy it at all, the hours are long, and the commute is bad.  An administrator friend offers you a position as a teacher, due to a sudden shortage of teachers, and knowing that you've always wanted to be a teacher.  But it only pays $5,000 a year.  Do you take it?

For most people, the answer would be no.  They would feel that they could not afford to take such a large income hit, even though they'd love to do it and the quality of life would be far better - not to mention the summers, spring breaks, and winter breaks at home with the kids.

To be sure, a good deal of the decision comes down to sticking with what you know, being a typically risk-averse human.  But if you would make the decision to stay a teacher, due to the high value of the non-$ currency that goes with that sale of your life, why would you stay with accounting for merely extra $ with none of the non-$ currency offered by the teaching profession?  Is your life really valued in $ and nothing else?  If so, then it can have a concrete value assigned to it (pathetic and disheartening, yet still true).  But if not, if it can only be properly valued with a combination of $ AND intangibles, then it could be argued that its value is immeasurable (ask any accountant how impossible it is to value "intangibles" for accounting valuations).

For all the talk about how under-valued teachers are, I think we don't consider the most critical part of the valuation process.  We only account for the $ value of teachers, since that's what we most readily understand and assess.  But the non-monetary value to society, to the kids, to the family of the teacher, and most of all, to the teacher her/himself, is priceless.