Change
© 2009 by H.B. Koplowitz
Amid sorrow there is hope. Congress' historic vote on healthcare reform, the President's pause on Afghanistan, the Attorney General's decision to try the self-proclaimed Mastermind of 9/11 in New York, and the Secretary of State appointing a former hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran to become our Iranian unAmbassador. All are baby steps toward the "change" that people who voted for Barack Obama were hoping for. Even the massacre at Fort Hood, horrific as it was, appears to have been less international terrorism than traditional American workplace violence.Yes, abortion rights took a hit in the House healthcare bill, and the public option got watered down, but it survived. Moderates may say the public option isn't essential to healthcare reform (the President has certainly said it), and conservatives may say it's communism. But it wasn't the new rules on private insurance companies involving pre-existing conditions and dropping coverage that made the House action historic. It wasn't even the new mandates placed on employers. Rather, it was a provision for a new government healthcare program. Just like Medicare is a healthcare program for old people, and Medicaid is a healthcare program for poor people, the public option is a healthcare program for uninsured people, which at last count was on the order of 30 million Americans.
The public option is still a long way from reality. Next stop is the Senate, where spurned former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman has found the perfect moment to play spoiler and stick it to all the liberals who abandoned him after he abandoned them for John McCain. Now he can end his flaccid senatorial career with a real flourish -- he could sink the public option. What a putz. But that's for tomorrow. The bottom line is that despite bullying from the right, massive lobbying by the healthcare industry, and a mainstream media consensus that a public option would never fly, Congress, and especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did their jobs, and how often do you get to say that?
Even before the euphoria over the healthcare reform vote could fade, there came another stunning development -- President Obama decided not to decide, yet, to put more troops in Afghanistan. After listening to the generals and his war council, the bullying right and the mainstream media, he could have taken the easy way out, which would have been to follow General McChrystal's advice to pour 40,000 more American bodies into a growing quagmire to prop up a corrupt regime.
He also could have taken the advice of those who recommended shifting tactics to counterinsurgency, staying the course, or even escalating more, to earn his commander-in-chief chops. But he didn't. At least not yet. Odds are Obama won't be bringing the troops home any time soon, just as he hasn't brought them back from Iraq, yet. But the pause may have signaled that Obama really wants to avoid another Vietnam, and he's serious about winding down the so-called war on terror.
While President Obama was out of the country, his controversial Attorney General, Eric "Nation of Cowards" Holder, announced that he was going to take the mastermind of 9/11 and several of his cohorts to a courthouse in Manhattan and try them for murdering 3,000 people, most of them New Yorkers. Although any admissions that came from waterboarding should be inadmissible, one would think there's enough evidence to win the case based on what got Khalid Sheik Muhammad et. al. thrown into Gitmo in the first place.
But the right immediately blasted the Obama administration for endangering national security by allowing a terrorist on American soil, for jeopardizing decade-old intelligence secrets, or for wanting to put the Bush administration on trial. Talk about a nation of cowards. Some say the perpetrators of 9/11 don't "deserve" American justice. But instead of giving them "special treatment," don't they deserve to be treated like common criminals, like Timothy McVeigh? In fact, don't they deserve to be in American prisons a lot more than some of the people who are already there, like nonviolent drug offenders?
Lost in all the headlines was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's appointment of a professor of International Affairs at the U.S. Naval Academy as the State Department's top-ranking diplomat for Iranian affairs. John Limbert is a veteran diplomat, and one of the few who can speak Farsi. He would be the ambassador, except that America hasn't had diplomatic relations with Iran since he was among the American hostages there 30 years ago.
A lot of the Obama administration's appointments have been impressive, starting with Clinton as Secretary of State. But Limbert's was inspired and inspiring. It signals that Obama doesn't just want to talk with America's rivals, but to engage on a psychological level. If nothing else, the Islamic state owes Mr. Limbert a certain amount of hospitality. A video floating around the Internet shows Limbert as a hostage in 1979, having a strained photo op chat, in Farsi, with one of his captors, a young Iranian "student"/cleric named Ali Khamenei, making Limbert one of the few Americans who has actually met the Supreme Leader of Iran. But in a new low for swift-boating -- at least John Kerry was a war hero -- right wingers are accusing the former hostage of being an apologist for Iran because of his work with an Iranian-American public interest group, and even of having Stockholm syndrome. Despicable.
And then there's Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychotic psychiatrist who went postal at a military base in Texas, mowing down 12 soldiers and a civilian, many of them his coworkers, and wounding 29 more. Allegedly. Right wingers and conspiracy theorists like good ole Joe Lieberman are calling for investigations into his terrorist ties, but the only links that will be found are in his twisted mind. Certainly his Palestinian heritage and Muslim religion played a role in his paranoid delusions. But Nidal Hasan is as much a typical Muslim as McVeigh was a typical Christian.
Muslim organizations went into full defensive mode, condemning the violence while chiding Americans not to be prejudiced. Considering the magnitude of the carnage, and who we are currently at war with, a certain amount of backlash against Muslim Americans was to be expected. What was unexpected was how little backlash there has been. And when the investigations are completed into how an armed, Palestinian-American, Muslim, could waltz onto the largest military base in the United States, when he had been exhibiting all the classic symptoms of being a ticking time bomb, one of the conclusions will be that the military, his coworkers, friends and neighbors were so concerned about not "profiling" Hasan that they ignored the obvious. While in this case the results were tragic, if Americans are becoming color blind to a fault, we've come a long way.
Hasan did not succeed in his jihad against America -- by not dying, he won't get his 72 virgins. Instead, he also will stand trial for murder -- or sit, as he is reportedly paralyzed from his wounds -- and likely end up pleading insanity. It's little comfort for the victims or their families, but Hasan's family is suffering as well. His father made no excuses and did not ask America to be tolerant. He said his only solace was that his wife had died before she could see what their son had done.
