Edwards Gets It Right: PAUL KRUGMAN - Health Care

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Edwards Gets It Right

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 9, 2007

Senator John Edwards has put forward a smart, serious health care proposal.

What a difference two years makes! At this point in 2005, the only question seemed to be how much of America’s social insurance system — the triumvirate of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the Bush administration would manage to dismantle. Now almost all prominent Democrats and quite a few Republicans pay at least lip service to calls for a major expansion of social insurance, in the form of universal health care.

But fine words, by themselves, mean nothing. Remember “compassionate conservatism?” I won’t trust presidential candidates on health care unless they provide enough specifics to show both that they understand the issues, and that they’re willing to face up to hard choices when necessary.

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People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea?

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Stuck in Single Frames of a Terrorism Movie

by Rami G. Khouri

Released: 30 Jan 2007

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Boston -- The United States broadly as a whole -- citizens, government, media and academia -- has had a difficult time coming to grips with the terrorism phenomenon that struck its shores so traumatically on September 11, 2001. A two-week journey throughout the United States this month suggests that the pendulum is not shifting decisively towards better or worse analysis, but rather that American society in general is polarizing on this issue.

Some Americans have generated some first-class analysis on why various groups around the world use terrorism more frequently as a means of political expression, resistance or offensive warfare. Other quarters of American society -- especially popular media and politicians -- have slipped into panic and racism mode. They focus almost exclusively on terror committed by Arab-Islamist groups, and wildly tar all Islamist political groups as mortal threats that have stealthily penetrated American society, without differentiating between criminal terror, legitimate resistance and peaceful political action.

The worst news is in the public arena -- at airport and center-city bookshops, in the mass media, in conversations with officials and ordinary people. Here the prevalent image is of evil Islamic and Arab terrorists who work hard to undermine and destroy American and Western civilization, or “the civilized world,” (contrasted to the 'barbaric' Arab-Islamic realm).

The proliferation of books and television specials with this theme is particularly worrying. They build expansive, frightening scenarios on the basis of small facts or the deeds of a handful of individuals. Of course, there are individuals and some very small groups of Arabs and Muslims who speak evil of the United States, and a few of them have attacked American targets. Rather than being treated as the exceptions to the rule of rather passive, non-violent Arabs and Muslims, who make up the vast majorities of our societies, these handfuls of freaks and criminals are exaggerated into a global conspiracy that is a direct, immediate, mortal threat to the United States.

Such scare-tactics journalism and political nonsense allow otherwise reasonable people and rational institutions to dwell in a manufactured world of fear, ignorance, hysteria and racism. This is not new. The same ugly side of American culture did this in the early 20th Century, when the target of their ignorance and hatred was the Jews, who were portrayed as planning to control American society and then the world.

The good news in the United States is that more thoughtful individuals and institutions have started to generate some high quality, accurate research and analysis about terror groups. I was fortunate to absorb some of this at a two-day conference last week at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Excellent papers were presented by a range of mostly American scholars and analysts, including Robert Pape, Peter Bergen, Fawaz Gerges, Steve Simon, Mia Bloom, Ian Lustick, Richard Shultz, John Esposito, Ayesha Jalal, Sumantra Bose, As’ad Abukhalil, Hisham Melhem, and others. I mention many of the authors simply to highlight the availability in the United States of so many good, honest scholars and journalists who grapple with this important issue.

The main conclusion of their presentations is precisely that there is no single theme or causal reason that explains the different kinds of terrorism that assorted groups employ all around the world. Nuanced, comprehensive and fact-based analyses of the individual, social and strategic motivations of terrorists provide a clear picture of a movie that is made up of many individual frames. Understanding the individual frames allows us to make sense of the entire movie.

Terrorists are variously motivated by many different issues that often mesh together in varying patterns across the world -- in sharp contrast to the simplistic, one-dimensional, quasi-racist gibberish about America-hating, hostile Islamic terrorists that dominates popular and political culture in the United States.

Some of the motivations of terror groups that emerged from the Tufts conference were: foreign military occupation of their homeland, domestic political repression and humiliation, revenge, religious interpretations, social prestige and status, alienation at home and in Western societies, aggressive foreign policies of Western powers, “civil war” within Islamic societies, charismatic leaders like Osama Bin Laden who mobilize their followers, assorted temporal political concerns that are perceived through the lens of religious obligations, issues of lack of dignity and hope for a better future, and weaving together national, historical and emotional narratives while appealing to domestic, regional and global audiences simultaneously.

The more honest debate about America's actions in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East seems now to be joined in places by a deeper, more analytical examination of why terrorism has expanded around the world. Let's hope the policy-makers in the United States, Russia, Israel, the Arab world, and Europe read and absorb some of this material, so that we can start to wind down the terror cycle that has only grown in recent years.


Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

650,000 dead given voice in Congress

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Representative Kucinich is preparing to launch a formal bid for the Democratic Party nomination as candidate for president.
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December 11th, 2006

I just watched the Congressional briefing on the Lancet Iraqi casualty study: “650,000 excess deaths in Iraq”. Speaking were Gilbert Burnham, Les Roberts, and Juan Cole. The briefing was organized by Rep, Kucinich, with the support of rep. Ron Paul.

The briefing was to discuss the October 2006 study Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, which appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet. This study estimated that 655,000 more Iraqis had died (”excess deaths”) since the invasion than would have died if the prewar rate of death (mortality) had continued. It further estimated that about 600,000 of these had died from violence.

I have great respect for Rep. Kucinich, who kept the entire briefing focused on the effects of the fighting on the Iraqi people and on Iraqi society. It is the first time I’ve seen anyone from the U.S. government focus on Iraqis and what they have experienced and what they are suffering. For example, he asked about the effects on Iraqi society of the loss of so many young men. He also asked about the creation of Iraqi orphans. Unfortunately, none of the three scholars had any real information on these topics, a sign of how little we really know about what is going on in that unfortunate country.

I thought Burham and Roberts did an excellent job of presenting the study. While this was not a methodological seminar, Burham said that they were well aware of the potential for bias and spent months designing the sample design so as to include all households. This declaration constitutes an explicit statement that the so-called “Main Street Bias” proposed by British scientists is not present to any meaningful degree. One may question the honesty of the Lancet study authors, but speculation about a massive MSB after such a definitive statement does require questioning their integrity.

Juan Cole, of the Informed Comment blog, presented various evidence from the media and other sources that supported the Lancet authors’ position that the vast majority of deaths are not presented in the press, making the results of this study less surprising. Roberts pointed to the statements in the new Iraq Study Group report that the US military had radically underreported the extent of violence in Iraq. In particular, as the Associated Press put it, the report stated:

“The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. ‘Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence,’ it said.”

If, on average, one Iraqi died in each such attack, the mortality rate would be greater than that in the Lancet study. Thus, the reported rates are not implausible, as many critics claim.

Of course, the fact that the mortality rates are not implausible does not mean that they are therefore correct. While many epidemiologists and others have defended the study, some experts in this area, most notably the eminent Norwegian researcher Jon Pedersen have criticized the study. Like all studies on important matters, this one does deserve careful scrutiny. But it does not deserve to be dismissed by the press in a way that similar studies with results more comfortable to the United States government are not dismissed. The existence of “controversy” should not be an excuse to ignore that, as a consequence of U.S. government action, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have needlessly died.

Les Roberts again made the point that their data implies that the majority of deaths in Iraq are from violence, whereas alternative accounts from Iraq Body Count, the Brookings Institution, or the Iraq Ministry of Health imply that only a small percentage, perhaps 10%, of deaths in Iraq are from violence. He again, as he has done since the study came out in early October, has called upon the press to visit graveyards and ask if the majority of deaths is from nonviolent or violent causes. Roberts again called, as these authors did after their 2004 study, for another research group to investigate the Iraqi mortality rate and confirm or invalidate the Lancet study. It is disturbing that, in the two years between theses researchers’ 2004 and 2006 studies, no other group did attempt such a replication. Given the numbers of surveys conducted in Iraq on other controversial issues, such as attitudes toward attacks on Coalition troops, it should he relatively easy for this study to be replicated. Perhaps all of us, whatever our evaluation of this study, can echo these calls to the press and to other survey researchers.

Movingly, Rep. Kucinich ended the briefing by emphasizing “the imperative of human unity” “that we recognize the imperative of human security,… that each of us has a right to survive.” And: “It is an imperative to focus on the imperative of peace. War is not inevitable.”

Kucinich seems among the very few in the public arena who realize what is truly at stake for the human race in an era of modern technology. Given the nature of this technology of warfare, either Rep. Kunich’s call will be heeded or one of the continual conflicts will spark an all out war that will destroy us all.

Entry Filed under: War and Peace, Research Methods, Iraq, Social Issues, Public Health, Science, Electoral Politics, Politics, Middle East, Mortality