The Military

The United States is clearly willing, but the Iraqi people and, more problematically, Iraq's Council of Representatives, must take the steps necessary to allow some U.S. forces to remain.

It is definitely in their interest and ours ... A half-century later we maintain thousands of troops in South Korea, and one must question the logic of not maintaining a similiar partnership with Iraq —- especially in the next five years.

With an ever-expanding Iran and a seemingly endless number of nefarious extremist elements operating in the Middle East — if we abruptly close up shop in Iraq, how does this play out?

The United States still has questions to answer on the death of Osama bin Laden, as it no longer controls the shifting narrative. A counter-narrative has emerged from witnesses at the scene, in particular from the terrorist’s 12-year-old daughter, who has said that her father was captured alive at the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, before being shot.

When Obama took office, it was with a pledge to restore the reputation of the United States in the world, after the thuggish “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists” worldview of George W. Bush. That meant restoring respect for international law.

Things would have been different if, back in April 1980, the helicopter hadn’t crashed; eight went into a desert sandstorm to rescue 52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. One crashed and another had to turn back. Desert One was a dismal failure on the heels of Vietnam, telling the world that we, the Americans, could not do things well anymore. The helicopter wrecked in the desert became the symbol of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but it would have been different if the rescue attempt were successful. Carter would have been a great hero and America would have been renewed because all that matters in war is whether the spear hits the lion. Had he been successful there would have been no “morning in America” just ahead — no need for it, no Reykjavik Summit, and probably no Ronald Reagan. So there was a moment of anxiety when the one helicopter went down on Sunday on the way to the compound at Abbottabad. But this time it was different. This time the spear hit the lion.

The folks at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs center are doing a great job, now using Facebook for social media outreach to local vets, to provide more services for returning troops.

Check it out at Facebook.com/vapahcs. They’re getting high scores here and here and for that matter, on Yelp. I also just read that Lisa Freeman, who’s director of the Palo Alto VA center, was cited as one of Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Women. I’ve met her and staff and veterans at VA Palo Alto, very impressed. Bay Area folks should know that they have one of the best VAs in the country and that couldn’t happen without outstanding leadership.

As rebel fighters flee under fire from a key town in eastern Libya, it’s now apparent that the Obama administration will not forcefully remove Gadhafi from power. Whew. Guess who’s resting easy in Tripoli! Sure, the Obama administration wants the tyrant tossed. Why else would U.S. warplanes be pounding his military? But dropping a hint and showing him the door are two different things. While allied forces convening in London today insist Gadhafi must go, they are clueless as to how they can achieve this end goal.

Hello out there?

The Romans twice ran Libya.

The first time, they brought the Libyans a “Golden Age.” As Wikipedia puts it: “As a Roman province, Libya was prosperous, and reached a golden age in the 2nd century AD, when the city of Leptis Magna rivalled Carthage and Alexandria in prominence. For more than 400 years, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were wealthy Roman provinces and part of a cosmopolitan state whose citizens shared a common language, legal system, and Roman identity. Roman ruins like those of Leptis Magna, extant in present-day Libya, attest to the vitality of the region, where populous cities and even smaller towns enjoyed the amenities of urban life — the forum, markets, public entertainments, and baths — found in every corner of the Roman Empire. Merchants and artisans from many parts of the Roman world established themselves in coastal Libya and the province was greatly 'Romanized' ... "

There is a vision fixed in the mind of power that America is a North/South country and the rest over there is just bushes. And of the two, the North is superior, as per the conquest of 1865 and the conditions of surrender at Appomattox. It is a purely colonial vestige that has injured our progress as a nation and injured especially national institutions like the Army, the Foreign Service and the Supreme Court.

We have, since Reagan, since Carter, even since Watergate, when Tennessee’s Sen. Howard Baker and the venerable North Carolinian Sam Irvin rose as folk heroes, culturally and politically awakened west of the New River, yet the Supreme Court today looks like something cobbled together around 1865: all from Harvard and Yale, most from New York or the Northeast. Some few friends of politicians. (Could we see those law board scores again, please?) I guess U. Michigan, U. Texas, Vanderbilt or Washington U. grads are just too rusticated to be Supremes. But youth wants to know: How exactly do you graduate from Yale Law School and flunk the D.C. bar exam? And after that get to be secretary of State? Friend of Bill is what. Helps to join the Supremes as well.

A principle of Open Government is that workers can build solutions to real problems and get the attention of top management.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been doing a lot of this recently, providing better customer service for vets, and providing better return for the taxpayer dollar.

We have a new example of that, where a VA employee, Renford Patch, wrote some software which helps determine if a vet has hearing loss, how much loss, and feeds that into the claims process. It greatly simplifies and accelerates what was a complicated paper process.

This kind of thing is fairly novel in Washington, but we’re seeing it starting to happen a lot there, particularly in those areas that have embraced Open Government. I’ll try to surface more examples of this.

For more information regarding this example, check out a VA employee-developed hearing loss calculator that has 100 percent accuracy.

From the new Jane Fonda workout video to WikiLeaks, there has been for those who lived through the ’60s and ’70s that sensation Yogi called “deja vu all over again.” But there is a fundamental difference between the war in Iraq and Vietnam. This war we won.

Maybe we’re not used to it. But however one feels about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it cannot be denied. Our soldiers will win.

And America feels it, even if MSM trails in the nihilist nostalgia of the ’70s. We have today a different attitude to our soldiers and vets. Everyone in our town is proud of our men and women in uniform. I wasn’t like that in 1968 for those of us who arrived home from Tan Son Nhut to a country, in Henry Kissinger’s words, on the verge of civil war. The ambiguity of the war in Vietnam and the scorn many experienced on return left a scar on a generation of soldiers. But that was almost 50 years ago. Time to move on.