Second Thoughts

There is another parallel between wars in Vietnam and Iraq, one that has gone largely un-remarked. People who initially supported them, including some who were instrumental in the decisions to go to war in the first place, turned against them when they proved difficult. In the case of Vietnam two of the most famous turnarounds were Daniel Ellsberg and Clark Clifford. Clifford succeeded Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense. Ellsberg was the analyst who helped write and then leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top secret history of Vietnam policy dating all the way back to the Truman administration. It was prepared for McNamara and contained damaging revelations that helped erode public support for the war. Clifford and Ellsberg served in official capacities responsible for the conduct of the war long after they later said they were convinced it was un-winnable. Both became vocal critics after they left office. Ellsberg didn’t leak his secrets until 1971, two years into Richard Nixon’s presidency. They weren’t the only faithless public servants to be found. In 1964 Congress approved the joint Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing military action in Southeast Asia on a combined vote of 504-2. Committee and floor debates totaled less than 9 hours. They repealed it in 1971, shortly before the Pentagon Papers were published and after withdrawal had already begun. The press was just as fickle. They functioned largely as uncritical cheer leaders in the early years. Coverage didn’t really turn nasty until the infamous 1968 Tet Offensive, a military disaster for the North Vietnamese but the beginning of a propaganda war waged by a suddenly cynical American media. Lyndon Johnson withdrew his candidacy for re-election, students rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and five years later Nixon negotiated his Peace With Honor at the Paris Peace Talks. Saigon fell two years after that. Then came the boat people, the killing fields, and the reeducation camps. Whatever one’s views on the Vietnam War, nobody remembers its end as a peace with honor. None of this is to say that it is wrong to question the wisdom of going to war, though it should go without saying that such questions are best asked before war begins. Once it has begun, better questions are how best to end it, and what are the likely consequences. Thirty five years ago those questions got lost in the clamor and millions of innocents paid with their lives. We are still paying. The legacy of our inconstancy in Vietnam is costing the lives of American soldiers in Iraq today. Just asking the questions publicly reminds potential friends as well as enemies that we haven’t always been reliable allies and may not be again. There are important differences between then and now however, and the analogy breaks down. There is no draft. Every American service man and woman in Iraq is a volunteer, though some are National Guardsmen and Reservists who never expected to be called. There have been no student riots. What anti-war demonstrations there have been have been muted. There has been no galvanizing event like the Tet Offensive that could be portrayed as a major defeat. Most important, there has been no invading enemy army and there isn’t likely to be one. A reconstituted Iraqi government has only to be strong enough to take responsibility for its own internal security to claim victory. Saddam Hussein could do that. So can his successors and they will have no need to follow in his footsteps as international pariahs. This time the self fulfilling prophecies of doom sayers may not be enough to lose a war.

Lessons from the Past

My barber thinks we should bring our troops home and let Iraqis kill each other to their hearts content. I suspect he speaks for a lot of people who are frustrated with this war. They are bedrock Americans, they are the salt of the earth, and they are wrong. I think they know they are wrong. We also have one war critic after another insisting we are the problem, Iraqis will settle their differences and get along fine if we will just leave. These people aren’t that naïve. They are that cynical. George Bush is being excoriated in the press for invoking images of boat people, reeducation camps, and killing fields to suggest what will likely happen should we leave Iraq prematurely. The Dallas Morning News calls it a smoke screen. They deconstruct his comment line by line to make the absurd argument that the slaughter in Southeast Asia beginning in 1975 had nothing to do with our troop withdrawal two years earlier. The president made his remarks at a VFW convention. He got his history right and it struck a chord with his audience. Lots of those folks remember what the press did to us in those days, and what they are trying to do again. Mr. Bush didn’t just cite Vietnam in his history lesson. He talked about Japan and South Korea too. Japan’s mid-twentieth century transition from an authoritarian and militaristic society to a modern democracy and economic powerhouse stands as one of the most remarkable stories ever. South Korea isn’t so far behind and their success has been contagious. Much of East Asia today bears little resemblance to the backwater it was in the 1950s. There were plenty of nay sayers 60 years ago, those who said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. There is much good that can come of seeing this thing through. Compelling as the moral issues are however, the strategic issues are even more important. We initially justified going to war in Vietnam with the Domino Theory, the idea that if South Vietnam fell to communists other states would fall too. They did, and the damage was horrific but it was confined to Indo China. Communist takeovers went as far as Laos and Cambodia but no further. Something like the Domino Theory applies to Iraq as well, but with an important difference. As Mister Bush points out, this time we face an enemy who will follow us home. That’s why I don’t think it will happen. Bush has made it abundantly clear he isn’t going to let it happen while he is in office. Any successor who does will be a one term president. Our enemies at home and abroad would like nothing more than to see a withdrawal from Iraq degenerate into an ignominious Saigon Embassy style rout, with a mad scene of helicopter evacuations from the Baghdad Green Zone. No presidency could survive such a scene, or the revival of jihadist enthusiasm which would surely follow. Some of those who think a debacle is inevitable are anxious to have it happen on George Bush’s watch. They are the greatest cynics of all. But we are going to complete the surge as planned. We will probably begin some troop withdrawals as security permits, but we will have a substantial military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. We made a lot of mistakes in Vietnam. The biggest was in not leaving behind a government strong enough to maintain internal order and defend itself from invasion. We aren’t going to make that mistake again. The consequences are too clear. We have been in Korea for more that six decades now. It took four for a genuine democracy to manifest itself. I hope it doesn’t take that long in Iraq, but it might.

Autism and the Fourth Estate

About three or four times a year I see news reports that another team of researchers has found the gene that causes autism, or is closing in on it. They don’t seem to read about each other though, and neither do the reporters who cover them. The articles have a uniformly breathless quality about them with headlines trumpeting breakthrough discoveries without ever mentioning any of the other breakthrough discoveries. Nor do I see much follow up. Each team gets Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. I have begun to see passing mention of the controversy however. And controversy there is. For sixty years now medical and scientific communities have been trying to blame autism on parents, ever since it was first described in the 1940s. The facts keep getting the way but that doesn’t even slow them down. First they said it was caused by “refrigerator mothers.” Nobody ever even tried to support that, they just laid out the theory. Nowadays they make the case for genes, though they really don’t support that very well either. There is little question that genes are a factor but that doesn’t explain an epidemic and there has been an explosion in the incidence of autism since the late eighties. Until very recently almost all research into possible causes has looked exclusively at genetics. It’s prompting what may be the most heated debate in modern medical science. It may also be the most important. With 1 in every 150 American children now reported to have autism almost everyone either has it in their family or knows someone who does. You might think the main stream news would be all over this, asking critical questions and doing serious investigating. They aren’t. They publish an occasional human interest story, report on press releases when a new study comes out, and let it go until something else happens. They might call a professor or two for comments, and maybe balance that with an opinion from an autism advocacy group, but rarely do I see incisive journalism on this subject from the traditional media. There are exceptions. Dan Olmsted from UPI wrote The Age of Autism for several years, 113 columns in all. I think I’ve read every one. He’s tracked down the original autism cases to find out where they lived, their fathers’ occupations, and what ultimately happened to them, being careful to respect privacy. The very first person ever diagnosed seemed to recover miraculously after taking gold salts of all things for the debilitating arthritis that was part and parcel of his illness. Olmsted also inquired into why the Amish and people who practice alternative medicine don’t seem to have much autism. He is one of only a few journalists who consistently make the point that autism is a whole body malady affecting the digestive, immunological, and neurological systems, not just a brain disorder. Unfortunately UPI is reorganizing and Mr. Olmsted is moving on. I guess he’s lost his job. He won’t be writing The Age of Autism any more but will stay in journalism and says he will keep his focus on autism. I hope he does. He’s already made important contributions to a discussion that is really just getting started. It does appear to be getting better. The March issue of Discover had a very well researched and presented article on the nature, causes, and potential remedies for autism. Discover is pretty main stream. The leader - Autism: It’s not just in the head. The article goes on to say that researchers have unexpectedly discovered abnormalities in the gut and immune systems of children with autism. It’s the “unexpected” bit that drives parents up the wall. They have been telling doctors that for years. Still, it is encouraging.

Scarlet Letter

A new study on possible environmental triggers for autism is in the news. A research team from the University of California at Davis will enroll 200 pregnant women who already have at least one child with autism. They will take blood samples from the mother, the fetus, the umbilical cord, and the newborn child. They will collect dust from their homes. They will question them about possible exposures to nail polish, pesticides, and mercury contaminated fish. They will look for every conceivable source of poison save perhaps one. Their news release doesn’t mention vaccines. The study is good news. It is evidence of a sea change in the attitudes of a scientific community that is finally acknowledging autism as epidemic. It cannot be explained away by genetics and improved diagnosis. But this community, and I include the American Pediatrics Society, should have a mark of shame branded on its collective forehead. For years now they have not only refused to investigate potential causes beyond genetics, they have actively obstructed any such attempt. Public funding has been routinely denied. Any scientist who has taken a serious look has been dismissed as a charlatan, his reputation publicly trashed. Any physician who tried to treat autism was ostracized by his colleagues as a quack. Those few who offered hope to desperate parents were themselves almost always parents of children with autism. Reports have experts now beginning to suspect that autism is more than a neurological disorder. It may somehow affect the immune system. Experts my foot; anybody who has ever bothered to notice has known that autism is a whole body disease, if you can call poisoning a disease. It presents itself in digestive and immunological problems as well as nervous system dysfunction. My grandson has all of those issues. Every child with autism I ever heard of has more than one. Specific symptoms differ but they all have multiple problems. Who are these people who come late and only suspect the obvious? Why on earth do we call them experts? That a few more scientists are no longer trying to blame it all on parents is the most positive development in autism research since they stopped using the term “refrigerator mothers,” that horribly offensive term in common professional use a generation ago. But they are going to have to look at the elephant in the room. The startling correlation between increases in the number of vaccines administered to pregnant women and babies in the last twenty years and the rise in incidence of autism is just too marked to ignore. Immunologists continue to insist that studies don’t point to vaccines as the culprit. Partly true, but as logicians like to say, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. The few studies that have been done are subject to challenge on a number of points. That seems to be changing, partly from increased public pressure. When senators like Joe Lieberman start threatening to sponsor legislation relieving the CDC and NIH of oversight responsibilities, as he and a group of colleagues did last year, it’s time to pay attention. It can’t happen fast enough. We need to know what’s causing this so we can do something about it whether it’s PCBs from smokestacks, contaminated food from feed lots, some new ingredient in women’s cosmetics, or a combination of things. We need to know if vaccines are involved and I hope they aren’t. When we do know maybe we can stop it. Maybe we can even find ways to treat it. Until very recently scientific and medical intransigence have been serious obstacles. It’s time to get moving.

Rites of Passage

Thursday was Weston Roberts’ first day of kindergarten. Mom Jenna dropped him off at the carpool line and went home to fret. She needn’t have but of course that’s what mothers do. Everything went fine and Weston had a blast. Grandmother Lynne remembers her own first day. One of the nuns had to carry her in kicking and screaming. There was none of that with Weston. He and Jenna had rehearsed, visited the classroom, met the teacher and her aide, and looked in at the “education support” room the school set aside just in case. Despite a moment of confusion with so many children arriving he found his aide and made it into class without incident. Weston’s autism qualifies him for extra help but he attends the regular class. It’s an all day session but for now he will only go half days. He still sees his therapists who have been working with him for four years now. That won’t change. We are grateful to have them. Weston came home from school and promptly recited Hey Diddle Diddle for Jenna. She has no idea where that came from. He can also count to one hundred ten and say grace for his grandmother over the phone. He plays the piano beautifully, knows his letters, and has begun to read. Except for the music all of those things are new just since we saw him a few weeks ago. Even then we noticed a change. His cousin dumped water over his head in the pool and you could hear a collective intake of breath from the adults nearby. We all thought he would go ballistic. He hates getting his head wet but didn’t bat an eye. Cousins can get away with stuff like that. Jenna and husband Chris couldn’t be happier about the staff at school. Schools are seeing more children with autism, know more about what to expect from them, and are better prepared to deal with it. The people who interact with Weston are quite competent and are obviously taking pains to see that his school experience starts off on a positive note. They know about his music. The teacher’s aide even brought her own keyboard from home in case Weston should need something to calm him down. I don’t mean to imply that Weston is a child prodigy on the piano. He didn’t begin playing Mozart at age three or anything but he does love it. He never banged on the board the way toddlers typically do but always picked out discrete notes. He has an unusually refined sense of rhythm and harmony. He gets that from his mother’s side. It does calm him. We think it will always be an important part of his life and that is a very good thing. Weston will be six next month. He still has a lot of work to do. He isn’t very conversational. It’s much easier for him to repeat something he has memorized than to organize thoughts into words. When he wants something he would rather take you by the hand and show you than ask for it. But he enunciates clearly, has no trouble understanding spoken language, and most of his physical issues seem either behind him or he has learned to deal with them, as with the wet head. He thoroughly enjoys being with other children but he is still easily over excited and can have a lot of trouble when things don’t go well. He recognizes it in himself and you can see him fighting to control it. On big days like Thursday as Chris likes to say, Weston rises to the occasion. We are proud of him.

Image is Everything

From wire reports: The remarkable progress seen over the past eighteen months and especially this summer in Iraq is both cause and effect of a change in perception. For years Iraqi’s have mistrusted Americans for fear of being left to face a terrible fate in a precipitate withdrawal. They’ve had good reason. Americans left Somalia when the going got tough and that wasn’t the first time. Bush Sr. encouraged Iraqis to rebel against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, then looked the other way while Saddam responded with a vengeance. Since the day Saddam fell the American press has been relentlessly pronouncing chaos, impending doom, and defeat in Iraq. The chorus of calls for withdrawal became deafening last month in an all night senate debate on legislation to force the issue. I wouldn’t have trusted Americans either.

But it didn’t happen. Americans didn’t leave. Bush Jr. was reelected in 2004 on a pledge to stay the course. It has become increasingly, some would say painfully obvious he meant just that. American troops will remain at least until Bush leaves office in 2009. That’s eighteen months away. By then there may be no insurgency left in Iraq worthy of the name. More and more Iraqis are deciding the prudent thing to do is cast their lot with the apparent winner, a government growing stronger. That idea has now been reinforced with a temporary increase in force levels. For many in the United States the surge looked like a desperation move. That’s how it looked to me. Iraqis took it as commitment.

Army and police recruiting are both up, in some areas dramatically so. Corruption and militia infiltration are down. Leadership is improved. People are returning to homes abandoned only a few months ago. Sector by sector stabilization and turnover to internal Iraqi security forces has proceeded slowly and with fits and starts, especially in Baghdad, but it has proceeded. The pace is accelerating. Looked at over time the progress is startling. The pentagon published a chart showing areas more or less under Iraqi control in June compared to a year earlier. Take a look.

http://www.defenselink.mil/home/dodupdate/iraq-update/Handovers/index.html

Nay sayers will pick the chart apart but Iraqis are voting with their lives and the lives of their families. They are saying the chart fairly represents conditions on the ground. They are climbing onto the bandwagon that promises security. That has always been the critical issue. Security usually trumps ideology. Al Qaeda in Iraq is trying to recreate conditions that brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. Most Afghans didn’t want the Taliban but anything was better than chaos and no one else seemed capable of restoring order. But al Qaeda in Iraq isn’t a solution to disorder. They are a principle cause of it. Now that they appear to be losing, people who once tolerated them out of fear are turning against them in droves. That’s what we are seeing this summer in al Anbar province, once one of Iraq’s most intransigent. Something like that is happening in other provinces too. Militias and armed gangs are losing their luster. The change in perception is palpable.

None of this suggests the war is won, certainly not that our troops will be home by Christmas. Iraq remains a very dangerous place. There are still daily reports of roadside bombs, rocket and mortar attacks, and the attendant casualties. That will likely continue for some time. Security will be fragile and the politics volatile. I expect American troops may be in Iraq for years. But suddenly the un-winnable war is looking a lot more winnable.

Waning Militancy

The front page of today’s Dallas Morning News contains no mention of war, suicide bombings, or random acts of violence. For years after 911 such a thing would have been a rarity but it is now increasingly common for the Long War to be relegated to less prominent coverage in interior sections of the paper. Has Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations peaked and begun to fade? I think it has.

Professor Huntington wrote his famous essay in 1993, a time when wars and insurrections were in progress, breaking out, or recently ended on every continent. Most of them involved people with differing cultures based at least in part on religious affiliation or language, and not always with Muslims on one side. There were fights between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Irish Catholics and Protestants, and terrible three way campaigns of ethnic cleansing among Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims in what had been Yugoslavia. Within a decade the Clash had pretty much settled out into one between Muslims and their neighbors. Today even Muslims are in conflict mostly with each other and Clash of Civilizations no longer seems the appropriate term.

There may be an occasional terrorist attack in Muslim Southeast Asia but nobody is about to go to war there. Yasser Arafat is dead and Palestinians are caught up in disputes between rival factions. I seldom see references to Intifada any more. Rebels in Chechnya are on the run and that awful place is no longer a popular destination for would be martyrs. Kashmir is calm. Pakistanis are more interested in maintaining internal order than in confrontation with India. Even fragile Lebanon may be climbing slowly back to its feet. Syrian and Israeli troops have all gone home and government forces seem determined not to allow extremists to drive the country back into chaos.

Internal security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are gaining traction at an increased pace and although it does seem likely that American troops will be on the scene for several more years at least, it does not appear in the cards for either Baath party Fascists or the Taliban to return to power. Stable secular governments in those two places will take a lot of wind out of the sails of zealots who believe God is leading them to victory. The triumph of the Afghan Mujahideen and victory over one super power gave that idea credence. More recent Taliban and al-Quaida failures against another super power call it into question. Image is everything.

I don’t mean to suggest the Long War is over by any means. Old conflicts can be rekindled. Some of them are still simmering. After eight decades of hatred and violence between Arabs and Jews it would be wishful thinking to believe that issue will simply subside any time soon. There is still a lot of vituperative being thrown around from the world's Muslim media outlets, schools, and Mosques. That won’t stop overnight either. A lot could still go wrong in Iraq. Pakistan is a potential nightmare. So is Iran. American politics could take a serious wrong turn and jump start the Jihadists all over again.

My sense however is that long term trends are positive. Places that were hot spots 15 years ago have cooled. There aren’t so many new ones. Terrorists have little to show for their efforts. Prosperity is growing in more and more places around the world and that provides a compelling case for maintaining order. It is not good to get into an armed fight with your trading partners. This is a Long War. It need not be a never ending war.

Many will take issue with a number of assertions in this essay. I will try to fortify my case in subsequent pieces.