The Battle of the Uterus

The hits just keep on coming. I am gobsmacked at how quickly and virulently the war over women’s health has blown up over the last two months. Although the issue of abortion, contraception, and other medical care was always present to a lesser extent, it didn’t erupt into a major political issue until the Obama administration attempted to mandate that all employers include birth control in their health care plans.

The Catholic Church, forgetting that it is no longer a respected paragon of moral leadership, led the counterattack by screaming that the requirement was an attack on religious liberty, and incidentally making common cause with the very evangelicals churches who until recently blasted Rome as the whore of Babylon. They also lied, and I’m pretty sure lying is still a sin. The Catholic Church crossed the River Jordan into the political world years ago. Any church that wants to play politics on the national level has given up any pretense of being the neutral, benevolent and charitable influence on society that deserved a tax exemption, and should pay taxes just like any other corporation.

The disgraced senator and now presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a paleo-Catholic who was humiliated in a 2008 reelection contest after being caught waist-deep in lobbying and corruption scandals, fanned the flames in order to score political points against his opponents in the Republican primary contests.

The backlash against the Susan G. Komen foundation’s defunding of Planned Parenthood—an ill-considered move instigated by a fanatical Republican on the Komen board—didn’t help things either, since the fuss only highlighted how much Planned Parenthood does in addition to providing abortions, such as pregnancy care, cancer screenings, and the like. Two-thirds of Americans support Planned Parenthood.

In recent months, the legislatures of the state and federal governments have also been the scene of laws that might have been taken from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (except, as many have recently noted, the book was intended as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual).

For example, an Arizona law now encourages doctors to lie to their patients in the expectation that the doctors would try to talk the patient out of an abortion.

Congress is considering legislation that would ban the use of federal funds to aid women needing emergency medical care if that medical care could include an abortion or the death of the fetus. Let’s just call it the Let Women Die On The Floor Act of 2012.

Texas just sacrificed an entire women’s health care program, funded by $34 million from the federal government’s Medicaid program, after the legislature and Governor Perry decided to ignore fifty-year-old laws against discriminating against health care providers and to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving state funding. It probably won’t reduce the number of abortions in Texas, but it will keep over several hundred thousand women from receiving services like breast cancer screenings, and ultimately result in some of them dying of cancer. I hope it was worth it, Rick, but you’re not running for president anymore, and don’t have to keep burnishing those Christian Coalition credentials quite so bright.

Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and several other states have enacted or are considering laws that would give a fetus more rights than the woman in whose womb it lies, and obliging the government to defend every fetus at the expense of the mother. To miscarry for any reason would become a crime in some states. Women pregnant as a result of rape would have to bear the rapist’s child—nine months of legally-mandated hell. A stillborn baby would have to be carried to term—nine months, and delivered ‘naturally,’ even if it had died in the first trimester and disintegrated into a rotting mass of slime. How exactly is that a natural delivery? Women in Arizona could soon be fired at-will for using contraception, if that offends the company management’s moral position. Unfertilized eggs may receive ‘personhood’ status in some states, thus making any contraception that could prevent their fertilization an abortion. The “Plan B” emergency contraception pill, which can prevent conception but not terminate conceived zygote, is under siege.

This legislation comes overwhelmingly from the hard right wing of the Republican party, and would do nothing more or less than strip women of their human rights.

The insanity of these Handmaid’s Tale laws is borne out by several laws proposed as parodies. For example, a law proposed in Georgia by Representative Yasmin Neal, a Democrat, called for a ban on vasectomies. A similar law, proposed in Oklahoma, would have banned the deposition of semen anywhere but a woman’s vagina, thereby criminalizing several major male pastimes.

And yet, the Republican chair of a Congressional hearing on women’s health would not allow a Georgetown law student named Sandra Fluke to speak, preferring instead to listen only to men. Ms. Fluke was subsequently vilified as a slut by an obese abuser of prescription painkillers and impotence medication who just happened to have a widely-broadcast radio program. To the credit of the business community, many of the program’s advertising sponsors promptly terminated their advertising contracts with the show.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people in other countries look at the US and see some sort of Strangelove scenario, with our government overrun with General Rippers afoam at the mouth about a vast conspiracy seeking to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

This just shows you how schizophrenic and intellectually bankrupt conservatism is these days. The religiously-motivated social conservatives and the small-government fiscal conservatives are tripping over each other like the Three Stooges, panicked by a primary contest that has deteriorated into bad reality TV, an economy that seems to be on the road to recovery despite their best efforts, and a Democratic (And black! How dare he!) president who seems invincible.

The result is that we have presidential candidates, senators, governors, and state legislators thumping copies of Atlas Shrugged or Adam Smith and demanding that the government stay out of the finances of people (and ‘people’ includes multibillion-dollar corporations now) because more than token taxation of the wealthy is unconscionable, socialist, and totalitarian.

Many of the exact same people, maybe only sentences later, can be found thumping the a copy of the Bible and demanding legislation that drastically prunes away women’s civil rights and reproductive rights be passed under the sort of hell-for-leather deadlines that usually involve other countries bombing our naval bases.

So it’s blackest tyranny for the government to tax citizens to pay for services that the citizens enjoy, but sound, essential, and godly policy for government to regulate the microscopic workings of women’s internal organs, never mind the bedroom? What sort of small and limited government is that? Even Ron Paul, who looms largest of the Republican presidential candidates when it comes to small government, has tied himself in a knot on the issue.

Why is the uterus fair game when capital gains tax is off limits?

William F. Buckley would weep.

I don’t expect any of these laws to stand for very long, even if they become law. The legal arguments and precedents supporting them are tenuous in the extreme, and they attempt essentially to write discrimination and inequality into state or federal law. The affront to the civil rights of half of this country’s population will not withstand even the lightest judicial review. Most of the legislators who vote for these laws, cynically, likely expect them to be overturned in short order, but they can use the fuss thus created to win the support of those evangelical Christians who expect the government to throw out the Constitution in favor of the Bible, a population probably including the 52% of Mississippi Republicans who believe President Obama is a Muslim.

That’s one reason that abortion will never actually be made illegal. It’s one of the ultimate laws of Republican hypocrisy. If they ever actually followed through with it, and they probably could have during the first George W. Bush administration, they wouldn’t have that flag to rally the troops around during the next election.

We have wars going on, economic turmoil, the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refuses to take his boot off the neck of the housing mortgage market because it would make it harder for him to balance the books, and a Senate Minority Leader whose sole goal for the last four years has been to keep President Obama from being reelected.

We have more important concerns.

This artificial battle over women’s health is a stupid waste of time.

Women’s health care does not need to be open to this sort of debate and bogus legislation. It should be as simple and easy to obtain as it is for men. No more, no less. The fact that women require different services, some of which involve pregnancy and childbirth, should matter not one bit.

More to the point, the state and federal government should just give up any pretense that it knows more about what is good for a woman than the woman herself. If she wants to have an abortion, it should be safe, legal, and entirely up to her. Any financial, ethical, or spiritual consequences should also be borne by her. It’s her body, it should be her choice. If we respect the freedom of the individual, ok, let’s carry it all the way through, educate her without indoctrinating her, and let her make an educated choice based on her own physical, mental, spiritual, and medical situation.

This will never happen, of course, because as long as there are politicians willing to make an issue of it, abortion will be used as a club to beat the other side. That’s no reason to stretch the issue to include breast cancer screenings which could save you’re mother’s, daughter’s, sister’s, or wife’s life.

A response to Meghan McCain

Hi Meg, I’m Tom.

We’ve never met, but I’m a regular reader of your posts on the Daily Beast. I saw your August 10 piece on the ‘Obamaclypse,’ and the return of ‘politics as usual’ to Washington. You complain that “we’ve traded hope and unity not only for politics as usual in Washington, but for something far worse. We’ve entered a new chapter in government selfishness, new levels of disillusionment and public distrust of elected officials, something that the Twitter world has dubbed the “Obamaclypse” or “Barackalypse.”

Since I actually have a regular job and a part-time job, and am not a talking head and incipient professional celebrity—really, Meg, why are you hanging out with the Perez Hilton set?—who can blow off work to party in Vegas, it took me a couple days to find the time to write you a response.

I was a bit puzzled by the time frame you used. Apparently the problem is that you feel anxious because two and a half years after being elected, President Obama hasn’t fixed everything. You’re worried that the people who supported him in 2008 are going to feel angry and disappointed.

Now, I’m no fortunate one, no senator’s daughter (hat tip to John Fogerty), so things have looked pretty grim to me for a long time. It’s true, we’re totally bummed out that the economy is still creaking along, but our generation—yours and mine, since I’m only a few years older than you—is a pretty tough-skinned bunch sometimes. We kinda have to be. We’ve had a lot of disappointments over the last ten years, and the American Dream is pretty much a hallucination now. This country already has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, and the middle class is sinking fast.

Yes, our generation saw Columbine and 9/11, as you mentioned—and a nice bit of sentimental appeal that was, too. Remember, though, that we also saw President Bush deliberately lie for six months and then lead the nation into a pointless war that has seen tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded. We saw oil industry lobbyists practically write the administration’s energy legislation. We saw the results of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that Republicans rammed through Congress in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, as one bank after another crashed and burned in a cloud of debt. I saw a large number of the people I graduated from college with lose their jobs when the economy tanked during one of the several downturns we had between 2001 and 2008.

I’ll be honest. I voted for President Obama in 2008 because his vision was as close as we could get to the opposite the Bush Administration’s goals and track record. We had just had eight solid years of government by a political machine that fostered crony capitalism, deficit spending on a scale never seen before or since, and one Congressional scandal after the next; John Boehner handed out checks from lobbyists on the House floor! Jack Abramoff, anyone? CEOs from Enron to AIG were partying like the worst of the Roman emperors while laying off hundreds of workers, and running their companies into the ground. Wages didn’t budge after 2001, but inflation kept on going, so your salary bought you less every year. The baby boomers “dropped the ball on their burden of responsibility”—you’re absolutely right there. By the time the primary season ended in 2008, millions people were willing to believe in change precisely because the country obviously needed it.

So it’s no wonder that we’re a little burned-out and cynical. Nothing new there. I list the above not for the sake of blaming the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, or conservatives in general—though they bear responsibility for much of what’s currently wrong with this country—but to show you why the current mess isn’t a deal-breaker for me as far as President Obama. I’m used to stuff like this. Most people my age don’t look to leaders like President Obama for inspiration. We look to them for substance, and the ability to get things done. Some people are going to be disappointed or heartbroken, yes, but the rest of us are just going to have to keep calm and carry on, because we’re stuck in this situation.

I distinctly remember another inspirational figure. In fact, I campaigned for your dad, Senator McCain, in New Hampshire in 1999 and 2000, back when he was the maverick he’s now just pretending to be, the McCain of McCain-Feingold. Your dad and President Obama had a lot in common—they wanted to reach young people, they called for a wholesale change in the way Washington functions, and they wanted a new era of government transparency and accountability. Unfortunately the Republican leadership kicked your dad to the curb in favor of George W. Bush after the South Carolina primary, the first of several new low points for political smear campaigns.

Senator Obama was an inspirational in 2008 and he’s still an inspirational figure now. One of the most appealing things about him (and your dad too, for that matter) was that he wasn’t just ladling out pie-in-the sky solutions (Ron Paul), the tired crap that every Republican has recycled since 1980 (your dad) or bogus homespun wisdom (Sarah Palin). At the same time, though, give the man credit for being substance as well as style. Starting in the fall of 2008, President Obama has over the last three years consistently given probably the most candid assessment of the nation’s economy that any president has offered; even before he was inaugurated he was warning that recovery would take time.

He seems a bit different now, yes, but really, what president hasn’t had to trim his sails a bit after two and a half years in office? Still, he’s accomplished far more than he’s given credit for.

Let’s look briefly at some of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments (not in order of importance):

• The rescue of the automotive industry. Whether you like the idea of bailouts or not, it saved a lot of peoples’ jobs and most of the money has been paid back to the government.
• The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus program) worked. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the February 2009 stimulus bill had put over 800,000 people back to work by the third quarter of that year.
• In the process, the stimulus managed to accomplish a lot of too-long-deferred necessary work on the nation’s roads and bridges.
• Terminated the Bush Administration’s practice of overruling scientific findings for political concerns.
• TARP—the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program inherited from the Bush Administration—worked. Once again, billions spent, but billions repaid. Ironically, the reason Wall Street is still around to crash in 2011 is because the federal government rescued it in 2009.
• A significant CUT in spending, which Fox News never talks about because it doesn’t fit in to the right wing’s mental universe.
• Berzerk protests at town hall meetings aside, ‘Obamacare’ actually works, and fixed many of the problems created by the Bush Administration’s health-care legislation, including allowing governments to negotiate drug prices and eliminating the ‘donut hole.’
• Fumigated the White House and Capitol Hill of the lobbyists that had infested them during the Bush Administration, imposing stringent new requirements on lobbyists and bans on gifts to politicians. Boehner’s Santa Claus routine is now illegal.
• Scrapped the Bush Administration’s financial chicanery by actually counting the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the federal budget, rather than continuing to hide it in off-budget spending.
• Shut down the Bush Administration’s programs of waterboarding and extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists in favor of handling them with actual laws.
• Started getting us out of Iraq.
• Killed Osama Bin Laden.

That’s quite a track record for two and a half years, especially given the scale of the mess President Obama inherited from President Bush. I’m sorry you’re still not happy, Meg.

I have to call you out on some other stuff too.

We’re disappointed, yes, but we’re not blind. Anyone who’s kept up on current events knows that the cynicism hasn’t returned to Washington—it never left. President Obama is a breath of fresh air, yes, but that only goes so far when the rest of the room smells like a sewer. Really, the root cause that some of President Obama’s campaign promises (climate change, some banking reform regulation) have failed to live up to expectations is because the Republicans in Congress have done everything possible to gut them. In fact, the reason the President’s promise to being a new civility to Washington failed is because the Republicans took their ball and went home. I can’t really blame the president for this; all through 2009 and 2010, every time the administration offered compromise, the Republican leadership refused to play nice. John Boehner sure talks a line about spending cuts, but not when they effect the General Electric plants in his district. I keep mentioning Speaker Boehner, by the way, because he makes such a good example of what’s wrong with Washington.

When you said “The last election was all about hope and change and ushering in a new beginning and phase in America. Not only have we not been given hope and change, but generation Y is feeling disillusionment and asking ourselves what exactly we have to look forward to,” I think you forgot that there was an election in 2010, too, which for a variety of reasons put the Republicans in charge of Congress again, and gave the hard-line Tea Party group a disproportionate say in what happens in Congress. Your dad’s old colleague, Russ Feingold, one of the most respectable senators of the last twenty years, lost his seat to a wealthy Republican hack with no political experience and a cloud of ethics problems. That’s the problem of 2010 in a microcosm.

So now it’s 2011, and what’s bugging me just now? It’s not the president. It’s not even cynicism, which is at least predictable. It’s Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and his comment that “We weren’t kidding around, either. We would have taken it down.” The ‘it’ he’s referring to is the national economy, which Chaffetz and his allies in Congress would happily have crashed during the debt ceiling dispute. Now really, that’s a crisis of leadership right there— elected officials willing to wreck the country’s already fragile economy over a point of political ideology? These are the people who howl that President Obama is a radical? What is this, Opposite Year? This isn’t cynicism; it’s stupidity. The worst of the trouble over the debt ceiling came from the Tea Party scuttling every idea the Republican leadership came up with; it’s a bit embarrassing when your party can’t even keep itself together enough to even put something up for a vote, while the President sits there waiting for you.

So it’s no wonder that while the President is still pretty popular, Congress’ approval ratings could hardly get lower. John Boehner, the would-be kingmaker with skin the color of an Oompa-Loompa, is now less popular than the widely-vilified Nancy Pelosi. The Tea Party is turning into the Albatross Party, especially among mainstream Republicans because of how they repeatedly cut Boehner’s legs out from under him during the debt ceiling negotiations.

I’m not really certain how to end this response. Urging you to think positive would be a bit trite and pointless. “Buckle in for a bumpy ride” would be just as bad. Since you generally write interesting and thoughtful stuff, though, I think I’ll just suggest you keep up the good work, and not turn into someone like Sean Hannity, who essentially gets paid not to like President Obama, without regard for whether what he’s saying can be supported by facts.

Have fun,

Tom

My take on what's going on in the Middle East and what we should do about it.

These are tumultuous times. The Middle East is in worse chaos than usual; a popular uprising overthrew the dictatorial government of Tunisia. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak lost the battle for Tahrir Square in the heart of his own capitol city. Protests and riots have rattled Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan. This is the largest upset to the world’s status quo since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-odd years ago.


Now the attention is on Libya, where the mentally maladjusted Muammar Gaddafi is in the process of being overthrown. The ‘neoconservative’ wing of the United States political establishment—for example, former Bush apparatchik Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Joseph Lieberman -- has issued loud and numerous calls for the US to immediately intervene in force in the Libyan upheaval, while also criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the uprisings that have shaken the region over the last two months. Even Christopher Hitchens (who is by no means part of the establishment but who is a self-styled radical with a penchant for interventionism) weighed in with a typically sarcastic but insubstantial opinion piece.


This is what guys like Wolfowitz and Lieberman always, always, always get wrong. They look at the last sixty-odd years of US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and see that we’ve always got ourselves involved. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Yom Kippur War, for sixty years the White House has had every ruler or other politician of note in the region who would speak to us on speed-dial. The last time there was a major incident in the Middle East and the US didn’t immediately barge in was the Suez Canal crisis in 1956—when Wolfowitz, now 67, was 13 years old—and we stepped in only at the end.


Lieberman, Wolfowitz (whose alleged foreign policy credentials should be forever revoked for his involvement in Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq), and the rest of the hawkish neocons take it as a matter of faith that just because we’ve always jumped into the pool right at the start, that it’s the right thing to do and that’s what we should keep on doing.


This is a very dumb assumption to make. If we have an unfavorable position in the Middle East, it would be a particularly dumb thing to keep doing what put us in that position—Einstein’s definition of insanity is, after all, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting differing results.


First, consider our general favorability rating among the peoples of the Middle East – the ‘Arab street.’ The US is a very unpopular brand in the region, largely because we have been meddling in it since the Eisenhower administration, and treated its nations and peoples as pawns on a chessboard during the Cold War. Over the last six decades, the US did a lot of unpleasant things in the Middle East, and for most of that time it was done out of calculated and cynical realpolitik. Put in the simplest possible terms, the US would prop up any autocratic bastard and give him a nearly unlimited line of credit if he would toe the line on certain policy issues. Human rights violations, corruption, and other issues didn’t even enter into the equation; after all, this was war, albeit a Cold War, and for several successive presidents, beating the USSR required the US to compromise its principles by supporting ostensibly reliable dictators instead of self-willed democrats. We burned the village in order to save it, to paraphrase the slogan from the Vietnam War, and we did on a scale of nations rather than just villages. Guess what? The Arabs remember.


The term “blowback” is one of the more pungent terms of art in the intelligence and foreign communities, referring to the unforeseen negative consequences of one’s actions. The US’s status on the Arab street has been eroding steadily over the last forty years by a steady stream of blowback from things we did during the Cold War. Even aside from what many in the region see as our ultimate sin in supporting Israel, for three or four decades we supported a seemingly endless list of tyrants who brutalized their own people and looted their countries simply because Washington could count on these dictators to toe the US’s line against the USSR, just as we did in Latin America. The scale of the brutality used is appalling-- Hafez al-Assad of Syria, tyrant and father of tyrants, leveled most of the city of Hama in 1982 in response to an uprising by Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, killing up to 20,000 people. Saddam Hussein was our boy in Baghdad until he ended his war with Iran and turned on Kuwait, at which point he stepped outside of his box and became persona maximum non grata.


This behavior continued during the Bush administration’s War on Terror—the US even reached an accommodation with Muammar Gaddafi’s Orwellian regime in Libya in the early 2000s in order to pry him away from publically supporting international terrorist groups, and we quite probably absolved him for his role in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing as a cost of doing business. The UK apparently released the Libyan intelligence operative who planted the bomb in exchange for oil concessions from Gaddafi’s state-owned oil company. Egypt and Syria became valuable subcontractors to the Bush administration precisely because they were brutal dictatorships with horrible human rights records—the US shipped prisoners there to be tortured because we couldn’t do it ourselves.


One of the most important figures I can quote on the subject is none other than Osama bin Laden himself. His notorious ultimatum to the west, delivered in 1998, was essentially a cease-and-desist demand for a lengthy list of things he wanted the US to stop doing, including support for corrupt and brutal despots like Hosni Mubarak and the al-Saud dynasty, maintaining garrisons in Saudi Arabia, and the starving of the people of Iraq with sanctions aimed at the Hussein regime. Granted, bin Laden is a terrorist, the worst sort of a murderer, the most wanted man in the world, and couched his ultimatum in terms of a “crusader-Zionist alliance” between the US and Israel, but in this instance he simply articulated what many Arabs across the region want—for the US to stop manipulating the region like a rigged poker game.


Second, most of the Middle Eastern nations are self-consciously post-colonial. The ordinary people in the street know their countries have been manipulated by foreign powers for a long time, have struggled by the congenital economic and social deficiencies left by their colonial origins, and they don’t like it when foreigners try to meddle or order them around. Old people in Egypt still remember when the Union Jack flew over Alexandria, Cairo, and the locks of the Suez Canal. Even when Gamal Abdel Nasser threw off British control in the 50s, he immediately cut a bargain with the USSR because he needed a powerful ally to play off against the UK and France. This proved to be an object lesson in poor judgment because the USSR proved a far less benevolent master than the British Empire, and for two decades treated Egypt as little more than a garrison base on the Suez Canal. The Soviets were displaced in turn by the US, who propped up a tyrannical and corrupt police state for three decades because that was the cost of keeping Egypt out of another Arab-Israeli war, which meant the oil would keep flowing.


If the US jumped into the Egyptian revolution—let’s call it what it is, every bit as much a revolution as the one that started at Lexington and Concord—it could have been the worst possible thing to do. The Mubarak regime has never had a problem being two-faced, and could quite easily have permanently ruined the Tahrir Square protestors’ credibility with the Egyptian people by labeling them as agents of a foreign power. That it would have been the same foreign power that backed the Mubarak regime wouldn’t have mattered.


Third, last, and most important, these are popular and nationalist rebellions—“Egypt for the Egyptian people” and all that—fueled by popular concerns. What the US wants is generally irrelevant to the people who gathered for weeks on end in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Big matters of global foreign policy simply don’t matter there. What matters to them is the decades of grinding poverty, government corruption, and a tyrannical regime that drags grandfathers from their beds and smashes their bones with hammers to intimidate the population into fearful obedience. In other words, what the Egyptian people were protesting against was the status quo maintained by the regime we supported. That is blowback, yes, but in this case everyone except the Mubarak regime benefited from it. When they want help from the US, they’ll ask for it.


The Obama administration, in my opinion, did an excellent job with its hands-off approach to the Egyptian revolution. The White House watched carefully, but did not take an official position on the matter until the Egyptian people had made it clear that they were ready, willing, and able to throw Mubarak out themselves. Doubtless there was a lot of high-level, high-tension stuff going on behind the scenes and the telecom lines between Cairo and Washington were humming nonstop, but the Egyptian people needed an opportunity for self-determination, and letting them do things themselves was the best thing we could do. Now we’re doing the same thing with Libya, and again it seems like the right thing to do.


The US needs to think less like Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger, and more like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt—stop trying to manage the world’s foreign policy like it’s a giant spider web, with us the spider rushing to every little disturbance. It’s true that the developed world now suffers from a 24-hour news cycle, and that American interests span the globe, yes, but they are not so delicate that but not every crisis demands an immediate response from the White House.


Remember the Fourteen Points Wilson offered during the First World War—the most important of these was the right of self-determination—or Roosevelt’s ‘good neighbor’ policy, which put a stop to a half-century of constant American meddling in Latin America. The Egyptians are people, too, and they deserve a chance to try to work things out for themselves. For our own part, the US should take the opportunity to mend fences and genuinely win new friends in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other countries. This is 2011. The Cold War is over, and the dictators we took advantage of then are inexcusable now.


The only thing that stops the US from embracing this calmer and more rational foreign policy is our collective national ego, particularly the belief that the world can’t function without the US, and the presumption that America is always right. This is where jingoism, bumper-sticker patriotism and right-wing sneers about the “blame America first” crowd have to give way to a fearless moral inventory of the last century’s history. The original context of the ‘my country, right or wrong’ epithet was, after all, Commodore Stephen Decatur of the US Navy’s after-dinner toast "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"


While the Obama administration’s hands-off approach may look like indecisive lethargy to a quick-on-the-trigger interventionist like Lieberman or a ‘let’s start a war and see what happens’ guy like Wolfowitz, (Hitchens called it “pathetic and dithering”) it’s a pleasant change. The last thing the Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Yemeni, Bahraini, or Libyan people want or need is another superpower telling them what they should get without listening to what they want. I wouldn’t expect either Lieberman or Wolfowitz to understand popular movements—the last time the US experienced this sort of popular upheaval by ordinary citizens in the streets was the early 1970s, and neither of them strike me as the sort to stare down Bull Connor or protest at Kent State. Lieberman, in one of the stranger episodes of the 2008 election, even managed to ignore the popular sentiment of his own Democratic party by running for reelection as an independent.


In summary…. President Obama shouldn’t be listening to Lieberman, or Wolfowitz, or Hitchens, or Gaddafi, or Prince Bandar Al-Saud, or even me. He should be listening to the people in the streets in Cairo and Tobruk, since they’re the ones who matter.