“Rank Hypocrisy”: We Should Negotiate With Terrorists, We Always Have
I’m sure by now you have heard someone on TV say, of the five Taliban returnees, that we were going to have to give them back anyway, on cessation of hostilities. What you may not have heard said quite so often is why that is the case. But the reason is crucially important, because it brings to the fore one of the great hypocrisies under which the United States is forced to—or has chosen to—labor, and one we should do away with posthaste: this ridiculous idea that “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
With respect to the release of the hirsute quintet, here’s the deal. We declared war on the Taliban in 2001. “We,” the Bush administration, did this, although I confess I supported that war (never Iraq, though). Once we declared war on them and invaded their country, the rules of war applied. That means prisoners taken aren’t hostages. They are prisoners of war. And prisoners of war are accorded certain rights, some of which we violated but never mind that, and they are returned, usually at war’s end but sometimes before, through a process of… well, negotiation. It’s been this way since warfare began. And aside from prisoner exchanges, there is of course the matter of ending hostilities in the first place. That also must be negotiated.
“We” also—that is, President George W. Bush, by executive order—declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2002. The group is not on the State Department list, but a presidential declaration has the same legal standing and force.
And so, the conundrum of illogic that these two declarations created: The Taliban are both an enemy combatant with which we absolutely must negotiate, and a terrorist group with which we absolutely must not negotiate.
Obviously, those two realities exist in tension. How do we resolve it? You might say “by not declaring war on them,” and it has to be said, in retrospect, that sounds like a damn good idea. It should never, ever, ever be forgotten, while these Republicans bang on at President Obama for everything he does, that he was put in this position only because we started fighting this 14-year war—the longest in our history; we defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo in less than one-third the time—with fewer than 2,000 soldiers on the ground. And we—excuse me, “we”—did that because our brilliant leaders knew at that point that they wanted to save the bigger numbers for taking out Saddam Hussein. So yes, in hindsight, no war in Afghanistan, at least as it was waged by the geniuses who created this world-historic catastrophe, sounds a good thought.
But at least in warfare, there are certain rules that go back millennia. The United States’ fight against terrorism is only about 40 years old, and it largely coincides with the years of right-wing backlash. And so, just as we had to start getting “tough on crime” domestically in the late 1970s with a series of policies that are in fact bankrupting states and municipalities and are plainly racist, as even America’s greatest conservative (and evangelical Christian!) criminologist acknowledged before his premature death, we also had to be “tough on terrorism” abroad.
It’s hard to place exactly when “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” entered the political lexicon. It’s pretty clear that it was Ronald Reagan who first said it, maybe during the 1980 campaign, maybe later. What matters is that it was rank hypocrisy from the moment it flew out of his mouth. His transition team negotiated the Iranian hostages’ release behind Jimmy Carter’s back. That was certainly negotiating with terrorists. And what was the Iran-Contra affair? The overture was made to Iran (a terrorist state in American eyes, then and now) in the first instance in an effort to free some American hostages being held in Lebanon. The president who didn’t negotiate with terrorists negotiated a deal that gave the terrorism-sponsoring state more than 2,000 anti-tank missiles, maintaining in his mind the fiction that he hadn’t negotiated with terrorists through the belief that his people were dealing only with Iranian “moderates.” What these “moderates” were going to do with 2,000 anti-tank missiles except give them to the non-moderate, terrorism-sponsoring regime then engaged in a war with Iraq is one of the puzzles of the Reagan mind, but let’s press on.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 6, 2014
“Chicken Hawks”: The Despicable Republican Attack On An American Prisoner Of War
It is hard to fathom. Major elements of the once-proud Republican Party have stooped so low that they are systematically attacking an American prisoner of war because they believe it discredits their political adversaries.
Only one word serves to properly describe such behavior: despicable. And the mainstream media outlets that have enabled this attack by taking it seriously are not much better.
Here are the facts:
On Friday, President Obama announced the release of the last American POW in Afghanistan — Bowe Bergdahl. In exchange, five Taliban prisoners were released from Guantanamo Prison into the custody of the Qatari government that had helped broker the prisoner exchange. The Qataris agreed to prevent the Taliban prisoners from returning to Afghanistan for a year, by which time America’s combat role in Afghanistan will have ceased.
Almost immediately, the deal was attacked by Republicans as “negotiating with terrorists” — an act that they say would encourage more “hostage taking.”
In fact, of course the deal was a traditional prisoner exchange — the kind that combatants do regularly at the end of — and often during — wars. Both sides released prisoners of war that were taken by the other on an active battlefield.
The president negotiated the exchange because his overwhelming responsibility was to fulfill his commitment not to leave any American soldier behind when America’s combat role in Afghanistan ends later this year. What would the Republicans have done — let him live out his life in the hands of the Taliban?
You bet this exchange was in the national security interests of the United States, because it sent a message to all of the men and women in the American military — people who have volunteered to risk their lives for their fellow Americans — that our country has their back — that we will not forget them and leave them to die in some far off place once a conflict is over.
In fact many of the critics of the exchange never saw a day of combat in their lives. They stayed safely at home — having dinners at their favorite restaurants, enjoying a round of golf on the weekends — while they demanded that other Americans go to war in the Middle East. And now they have the audacity to question whether it is worth it to exchanging some Taliban prisoners to free one of the people who actually went to fight in their wars?
Many of the loudest critics are precisely the same “chicken hawks” who were the architects of the Iraq War — the greatest security and foreign policy disaster of recent history — premised entirely on intentional lies to the American people. In fact, many of them should have lost the right to be taken seriously on any matter of foreign policy, much less the right to be taken seriously when they — in effect — advocate that an American soldier be left as a POW for the rest of his life.
But the right wing’s attacks did not end with assaults on the prisoner exchange itself. Now they have turned to attack the character of the POW himself and the circumstances in which he was captured.
The bottom line is simple. If Bergdahl’s violation of a rule made him an easier target for capture by the Taliban, it is up to the American military to decide the facts of the case — not the right-wing pundits. And if he should have been disciplined, that’s up to the American military as well — not the Taliban.
Whatever the circumstances, Bergdahl suffered five years of deprivation and hopelessness that is unimaginable to the sanctimonious “chicken hawks” who sat safely by state-side while others fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In fact their attacks are reminiscent of the shameful way America treated returning Viet Nam veterans almost half a century ago.
This time, the “Obama derangement syndrome” that infects the right-wing pundit class has led them into a dark place that is simply over the top — even for them. Their Republican colleagues who are not so deeply infected by this disorder should restrain and silence them for their own good — and to protect what is left of the reputation of what was once a respectable political party.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, June 3, 2014
“Fake Political Outrage Is The Real V.A. Scandal”: Voters Should Blame Hypocrites And Deficit Hawks In Washington
Since the Afghanistan war began in 2001, over 2,700 veterans have taken their own lives. Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that in 2010 alone, 22 veterans committed suicide each day — that’s another wounded warrior gone every 65 minutes. Luckily for Army Reserve veteran Kye Hardy of Ashland, Kentucky, who served for a year in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, none of the soldiers he fought alongside have taken that drastic step yet.
“I was lucky to join a unit of men who knew how to keep younger veteran soldiers safe even after coming home,” Hardy said. “I don’t go a week without calling or receiving a call from someone I deployed with just to chat for a bit.”
Hardy, an E-4 specialist, is diagnosed with muscle damage and potential spinal damage, and qualifies for VA services. However, the years-long backlog has kept him from applying, as he wants those with more serious injuries to get the treatment they’ve been waiting for rather than adding to the backlog. Hardy doesn’t believe politicians’ outrage over the VA backlog is genuine. Rather than the resignation of top VA officials like the recent exit of General Shinseki and a continued top-down bureaucratic structure, Hardy instead wants to see a more community-based, veteran-led approach to VA services.
“Wounded warriors who are on disability for the remainder of their lives oftentimes have serious trouble readjusting to civilian life,” Hardy said. “[They] seem to improve when they’re communicating with other veterans.”
However, the Republicans feigning the most concern for veterans are the ones most at fault for the crisis in veterans’ health care. Paul Ryan, author of three separate GOP-approved budget plans that severely cut VA services, has made no bones about his plans to privatize Medicare and turn it into a voucher system. He’s also called for changes in VA services that would cut off care for 1.3 million vets. Outrage over the VA scandal could also be manipulated by Ryan and his ilk to force a similar privatization over veterans’ health care.
The extreme rightists who control the House of Representatives don’t want to privatize the VA to help veterans – if the Republican majority truly cared about veterans, they wouldn’t have repeatedly voted against bills providing jobs, homes, and health care to veterans and their families. The budget deal that Ryan and Senator Patty Murray approved last year cut veterans’ pensions by $6 billion. The GOP actually wants to see the VA fail to score more political points.
By continuously cutting VA services, the far-right wants to reinforce their anti-government narrative by cementing the idea into people’s heads that government is bloated and inefficient, and that private companies unaccountable to voters should seize control of public assets. This is why GOP leaders in Congress don’t seem to mind that the approval rating of Congress has slipped consistently in the polls – they’re counting on voters to blame the president and his party in the months before the next Congressional elections. They’re also counting on voters to grow increasingly mistrustful of government and public services in general.
When Republicans held the White House between 2000 and 2008, they demanded that everyone stand with the troops that they sent overseas to fight a costly war waged on false premises. As President Bush stated, Americans could either stand with the president and his war or be considered sympathizers with the enemy. But now that troops have left Iraq and are soon to be leaving Afghanistan, veterans coming home with multiple physical and mental health issues have been left by the Republican-led House and a relentlessly-filibustering Senate minority to fend for themselves. It’s similar to the GOP’s belief in fighting for children while they’re still growing fetuses in a womb, but cutting off their Medicaid, WIC, and food stamps once they’re born. They’re pro-war, but anti-vets. They’re pro-life, but anti-children.
The American public must not allow themselves to be fooled by the GOP’s blustering over the VA backlog. It’s certainly a tragedy that 40 vets died while waiting for health care in Phoenix, but instead of blaming overworked and underpaid medical staff and an administration dealing with an uncooperative Congress that’s trying its best to make the government fail the people, voters should blame hypocrites and deficit hawks in Washington who have allowed a longtime crisis to turn into a scandal. When someone runs for office on a platform of cutting government services to pieces, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that government services under their leadership have been cut to pieces.
By: Carl Gibson, The Huffington Post Blog, June 2, 2014; (This article originally appeared on Reader Supported News.)
“Will Congress Be As Brave As Shinseki?”: Will The Honorable Politicians Please Stand Up?
If you want a prime example of what’s wrong with our politics, study the response to the veterans’ health-care scandal. You would think from the coverage that the only issue that mattered to politicians was whether Gen. Eric Shinseki should be fired.
Shinseki is a true patriot, and his resignation as Veterans Affairs secretary on Friday calls Congress’s bluff. He played his part in a Washington sacrificial ritual. Will the politicians now be honorable enough to account for their own mistakes?
Thanks to Shinseki’s latest selfless act for his country, you can at least hope that we will move on to the underlying questions here, to wit: Why was the shortage of primary care doctors in the VA system not highlighted much earlier? Why did it take a scandal to make us face up to the vast increase in the number of veterans who need medical attention? And why don’t we think enough about how abstract budget numbers connect to the missions we’re asking government agencies to carry out?
It’s an election year, so it’s not surprising that the Republicans are using the scandal against President Obama and the Democrats, though there is a certain shamelessness about the ads they’ve been running, given the failures of the previous administration.
Shinseki and Obama might have averted this by pushing Congress much harder, much earlier to give the agency the tools it needed to do right by vets. And as a general matter, I wish Obama spent more time than he has on fixing government and improving administration. Progressives rightly assert that active, competent government can make things better — which means they need to place a high priority on making it work better. This would include, as The Post editorialized, a serious engagement with civil service reform.
It’s also fair to ask why Shinseki did not move faster elsewhere, notably on what the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America called the department’s “egregious failure to process the claims of our veterans” in a timely and effective way. (For what it’s worth, I raised this concern in a column in November 2012.)
But this is where the story gets more complicated. Shinseki eventually made real progress on the claims issue and other inherited messes. He got little public credit, though many friends of veterans saw him as a reformer and refused to join the resignation chorus. Both House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi deserve praise for insisting to the end that Shinseki’s departure wouldn’t solve the system’s problems.
The most important of these is not that VA employees falsified data about the excessive waiting times for veterans seeking appointments with doctors, as outrageous as this was. It is, as the New York Times reported last week, “an acute shortage of doctors, particularly primary care ones, to handle a patient population swelled both by aging veterans from the Vietnam War and younger ones who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Dealing with this isn’t sexy, just essential.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee who wanted Shinseki to stay, is trying to push the discussion in the right direction. A Sanders bill to expand VA funding across a wide range of areas went down in a Republican filibuster in February. The new bill he hopes will come up for a vote this week focuses specifically on the health system.
It would authorize private care for veterans facing emergencies, which is similar to a House Republican idea. But Sanders would also broaden veterans’ access to other forms of government health care, fund 27 new VA facilities, and use scholarships or loan forgiveness to entice medical students to serve in the VA program.
Shinseki himself proposed other reforms in a speech he gave just before he quit, among them an end to incentives that have encouraged agency supervisors to produce fake information on waiting times.
If there is any cause that should be bipartisan, it’s care for our veterans. But too often, what passes for bipartisanship is the cheap and easy stuff. It tells you how political this process has been so far that so many of the Democrats who joined Republicans in asking for Shinseki to go are in tough election races this fall.
Now that Shinseki is gone, there are no excuses for avoiding the administrative challenges that Obama needs to confront and the policy errors for which Congress must also take responsibility.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 1, 2014
“Ignoring The Bigger Picture”: Shinseki’s Resignation Doesn’t Change The VA’s Daunting Problems
The resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki was a foregone conclusion by the time it happened on Friday morning. After shocking problems at a VA hospital were revealed in an election year (in Arizona, no less, represented by Senator John McCain, one of the administration’s most powerful foils inside the Beltway) and the heavy suggestion that more mismanagement across the country will soon be made public, Democrats in what promise to be razor-thin House and Senate races had virtually no choice but to call for his resignation as a tide of desperate, angry veterans flooded cable news airwaves and local newspapers.
There was then no way Shinseki could have stayed on in the face of these calls from the very party to whom he owed his nomination; his resignation was the only way to simmer down the scandal that filled up most of the news hole over the past few weeks. (Note that the two most powerful people in Washington not calling on Shinseki to resign were John Boehner and Eric Cantor. They knew that every day he stayed was a good one for Republicans.)
It doesn’t mean his resignation was the right thing to do in practice—in fact, it very well may delay implementation of solutions and make the VA’s problems worse—but it was simply a fact of nature in the political ecosystem.
Now the VA will be set on a new course, and it’s crucial that attention is paid to the true scandal: the overwhelming medical and mental burden suffered by thousands of young men and women returning from largely elective wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our continuing inability to fully care for them.
Last year, the Institute of Medicine released a Congressionally-mandated 794-page study outlining the challenges facing these veterans. Though the findings didn’t result in the same media firestorm, they should have:
More than 16,000 troops were wounded in Afghanistan and 32,000 in Iraq.
In contrast with virtually every previous American conflict, “the all-volunteer military has experienced numerous deployments of individual service members; has seen increased deployments of women, parents of young children, and reserve and National Guard troops; and in some cases has been subject to longer deployments and shorter times at home between deployments.”
Scientific literature shows as many as 22.8 percent of these returning vets—nearly a quarter—suffer from mild traumatic brain injuries, while as many as 20 percent suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder. Up to 37 percent struggle with combat-related depression, and 39 percent for problematic alcohol use.
For many recent years, the unemployment rate for returning vets was nearly double that of the civilian population, which of course isn’t particularly low. (It has been coming down some recently).
As many as 45 percent of female troops experienced sexual trauma in the military, which is driving quite a bit of PTSD in those troops above and beyond what they would have experienced because of combat.
The unfolding VA scandal involves unacceptable cover-ups of coverage problems at VA hospitals, but that is not mutually exclusive with a system that is fundamentally unable to deal with the problems at hand. In fact, the latter may have fostered the former. We don’t fully know yet, and the upcoming investigations should shed light on these issues.
But over the coming weeks, the politicians that have been rushing to appear on camera along with the outlets eager to cover this story should focus on the bigger picture: the crisis facing returning veterans and the current inability of the federal government to help them. There are many reasons why this has happened. And at the heart of all this is yet another scandal, one that continues to echo through American politics over a decade after it began: the decision to commit, and keep, American troops involved in two messy ground wars with unclear goals and uncertain, at best, benefits.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, May 30, 2014
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