Djelloul Marbrook

The Bush-Obama strategy for rooting Al Qaeda from its various rat holes is analogous to tying our boots together and careening towards bankruptcy.

It’s based on the simplistic notion that Al Qaeda’s mission is to kill us, whereas Al Qaeda thinks that killing us is at all times wonderful but ruining us is better and easier, because it has our wholehearted cooperation.

The recent uptick of insurgent violence in Fallujah and Baghdad underscores the folly of the Bush-Obama fall-down-and-break-your-neck strategy. Nobody but defense contractors wins in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is only the utter exhaustion of our resources and the sacrifice of our children.

The Arab world’s dead-dog act has captivated us. The Arab League includes some of the wealthiest nations on earth, nations we have made wealthy by our profligate consumption of fossil fuels. Why isn’t it their responsibility to maintain law, order and prosperity in their part of the world? Why isn’t Al Qaeda their responsibility? They have collaborated in our profoundly paternalistic and condescending conviction that they can’t behave as mature nations ought to behave without our policing and our meddling. They have had their cake and eaten it too, and we have encouraged them. They have said that on the one hand they don’t want our interference and that on the other hand they’re incapable of behaving in an orderly and peaceable way without us.

And we have behaved just as crazily, saying that Iran is part of an axis of evil and then handing Iraq over to Iran’s baneful influence. Our actions have dumbfounded the Sunni world, delighted the Shia world, and  earned the contempt of both. Quite a feat.

At home, we can’t improve our deplorable health care or our equally deplorable schools as long as we insist on policing remote parts of the world. Or look at the same conundrum from the opposite pole—we can’t keep on policing overseas while at the same time sustaining a socialist state for insurers, developers and HMOs. Something must give or we’ll go bust. The people know this, but the politicians think the people should not be let out at night without adult supervision. The people overwhelmingly want health care with a public option, but the politicians and their insurance buddies think the people are communist pigs. The question of just who the pigs are should be broadly debated.

We can’t fix health care and the schools if our major industries continue to be war, insurance and unsustainable development. We have become a war and insurance nation, and Al Qaeda knows that we have do not have a policy that makes sense. Al Qaeda is most happy when we least make sense.

George W. Bush wasn’t kidding when he said our mission had been accomplished: he just omitted the fact that the mission he had in mind was making his rich cronies obscenely rich at the cost of our economy and our children’s lives. Whenever his right-wing admirers talk about the high cost of keeping us healthy they fail to mention that their hero’s misadventure in Iraq could have paid for universal health care. The trouble is it wouldn’t have made their pals as rich as war has. It also wouldn’t have bankrupted us the way war has.

When the villagers of Waziristan turned on their Taliban guests recently they were telling us something we seem determined not to hear. They were telling us they don’t want us or the Taliban, they just want their old lives back. So who are we to tell them that we know better? Didn’t we just bring the world’s economy to its knees because we knew finance better? Why should they believe in our superior wisdom? More important, why should we believe in it? A little humility might do more for our economy than Milton Friedman.

We must stop kidding ourselves. What we preposterously call our health care system is the care and feeding of insurers. War is for the care and feeding of a dangerously narrow economy—weapons, houses and vehicles. That three-legged stool will not support our future. We need to pay our debts, widen our economy and thereby our job base, and lift the burden of health care from the businesses that can least bear its costs.

We can’t do that while fighting a war in Afghanistan and policing Iraq, tasks neither our allies nor the neighbors of those countries want to help us with. Why should they tank their own economies as long as we’re so willing to tank ours?—DM