Knight's Reading List II: February 2007

In February 2007 I finished reading the following books:

Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate. 2002. xxiv + 1167 pages. Includes Selected Bibliography, Notes, Index. Volume 3 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Drake, David A. Other Times than Peace. 2006. 331 pages.

O’Brian, Patrick. H. M. S. Surprise. 1971. 379 pages.

Other Times than Peace is a collection of Drake’s stories in various warlike settings, going back nearly 30 years. For those who don’t know, David Drake is a lawyer and Vietnam veteran who has written a very large amount of fantasy and science fiction. His sensibilities are stark. His imagery is informed by his personal experience of war. I am pleased to be able to count Dave as a friend. Those of you who read the eleven stories in this volume may discern some of the reasons I value Dave as a friend, and as an author of solid, engaging prose.

I spoke of Patrick O’Brian in the context of one of the books in my January 2007 list, Post Captain. Although H. M. S. Surprise follows in the series – O’Brian did no flashbacks: the publication order of the books and the ostensible chronological order of the events described in them are the same, it certainly stands on its own as a novel. O’Brian doesn’t waste a lot of time recounting what has occurred in previous works.

Someone commented that O’Brian was better than C. S. Forester at putting himself into the mind of an eighteenth-century man. Indeed, having read both the Hornblower and the Aubrey-Maturin novels complete, I can attest that Hornblower is a 20th century man – someone Forester might have known, placed in scenes of the early 19th century. Jack Aubrey, the commander of H. M. S. Surprise, has much more of an 18th century mind. This is probably due to O’Brian’s reliance on the journals and letters of contemporary sea officers as a source for language and incident.

Looking at these two books as fictional presentations of men at war, the main difference between Drake and O’Brian, in my opinion, is that Drake’s characters tend to be haunted by the expedients to which they are forced. O’Brian’s have a greater ability to sit down with some wine, music, and toasted cheese, and let bygones be bygones.

Master of the Senate is the third volume in Robert Caro’s amazing biography of Lyndon Johnson. The project has already taken a few decades of Mr. Caro’s time, and I don’t know if he will outlive its completion. I had read the first two volumes – The Path to Power* and Means of Ascent** – years ago, when they were published, but I re-read them both before starting Master of the Senate. I was reading Robert Caro for a year, from February 2006 until February 2007. By the end, I felt as if I knew Lyndon Johnson as well as it is possible for one human being to know another. Caro is both critical of Johnson’s weaknesses, and some of his strengths, but in Master of the Senate he is portraying Johnson as a man in the perfect milieu. Had Johnson not been driven to become President, his mastery of the people and the institutions that are the United States Senate would have been the hallmark of his career.

This is, by the way, more than a biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro brings together a number of strands to form this story. He gives a brief, but very informative, history of the Senate itself, and the manner in which it had become a very powerful obstacle to social change. He provides a summary biography of Richard Russell of Georgia, a complex and powerful man. And, by using the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as the focus of the work, he reveals much about American society and its institutions at a time when it was under great pressure to change. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, for all its faults, showed Lyndon Johnson's ability to understand the forces at work in the Senate, and beyond, and to bring about a surprising result, and one with implications beyond the apparent.

* The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume I: The Path to Power. 1981, 1982. 882 pages.
** The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume II: Means of Ascent. 1990. 522 pages.

Knight's Reading List I: January 2007

I read quite a lot, and quite a variety, as well. Some of the books I read are well-known - some are even regarded as classics. On the other hand, some are pretty obscure, and many of those deserve their obscurity. Still, I get something out of almost every work I read, and I'd be happy to share my impressions of any book with others who find the title of interest. In these reading lists, I provide basic information on books which I finished in the month in question.

In January, 2007, I finished reading the following works:

Nevins, Allan. The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume II: Prologue to Civil War 1859-1861. 1950. viii + 524 pages, including Appendices, Bibliography, and Index.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales. 2006. xliv + 338 pages.

O'Brian, Patrick. Post Captain. 1972. 496 pages

Appleyard, Dennis R. and Alfred J. Field, Jr. International Economics. xxvi + 822 pages, including Index.

Not my most productive month, January, though I could note that I was also reading four other books, which, however, I did not finish. (In fact, I have yet to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.) I read a total of 1272 pages in eight books during the month.

Now, which would I recommend? On the fictional side of the ledger, Post Captain is an expertly composed and very entertaining, as well as thoroughly-researched, novel of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Melville's style, on the other hand, is not likely to be to everyone's taste, and some of the stories miss the mark. "Bartleby the Scrivener" makes very little sense, but "Benito Cereno" is pretty good. Unfortunately, Melville uses the denseness of his viewpoint characters to build suspense (but Conan Doyle has the same fault.)

International Economics is a textbook, and I would only recommend it to someone who really wants to gain a technical understanding of that field. Economics is a subject matter which relies on recent examples to demonstrate its currency (no pun intended.) I would buy something newer if I wanted to begin study of this subject.

Allan Nevins is, I think, one of the great historians of the 20th century, who wrote a long, multi-volume history of the origins of the Civil War and the war itself. (I have four of the volumes and have read three; I need to read the volume that comes before this one.) He tends to stress the economic side of the conflict and, with regard to the war, the North's advantage in material factors. This book provides really wonderful background to two others I'll mention later: Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and Gore Vidal's Lincoln.

My Trip to Las Vegas

My wife Helen and I visited Las Vegas over the weekend. We left Colorado Springs on Saturday, November 10, and returned on Tuesday, November 13. We drove from Colorado Springs to Denver, and flew between Denver and Las Vegas on Southwest Airlines.

There are a number of reasons we fly from Denver more often than from here in Colorado Springs. On the one hand, while it is only a 40-minute drive to the Colorado Springs airport, it is only about 75 minutes to Denver International. In fact, made it home Tuesday night in just about an hour, counting from the time we left the Bennigan's on Tower Road where we ate dinner. The long-term parking is cheaper in Denver, too. Mostly, however, we find a larger selection of flights at convenient times, especially non-stop flights, and (in general) better prices out of Denver.

Let me continue with some notes from my journal:

Las Vegas deals in the outsize. Each of the larger casinos we've seen is like a small city, a shopping mall, a cruise ship. There are two million residents of Las Vegas, and God knows how many tourists, and all of them were on the Strip Saturday night. (Really! We were outdoors on the sidewalk to see the pirate ship act at Treasure Island, and the crowd was so dense I could hardly breathe.)

Like a cruise ship, each casino has accommodations for many people - thousands at the MGM Grand, Mirage, Venetian, etc. And, like cruise ships, they are essentially self-contained. One could live in Caesar's Palace for years without every going outside. That's because they share the cruise ship philosophy of providing something for every taste. Each hotel has multiple restaurants, in various price ranges, themes, and cuisines.

Some of these are - or seem to be - incongruous. At the Venetian, they tout a Chinese themed restaurant called Tao, with its own nightclub, gift shop, and other spin-offs. At the Mandalay Bay there is a House of Blues.

At Caesar's there are eight restaurants, plus eight more in the Forum Shops, plus the Cafe Lago buffet.

The Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace and the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian are quite large-scale, high-end shopping malls under artificial skies. Versace, Gucci, Kenneth Cole, and upscale retailers of all sorts rub elbows with shops purveying the most meretricious of souvenirs. (Probably the grossest T-shirt prize goes to one I saw at Harrah's: the slogan Danger: Choking Hazard surmounts a drawing of an erect penis and testicles.)

My sister Nancy pointed out that many, though by no means all, of the clothing items cannot be worn anywhere but in Las Vegas. If she bought a resortware dress or top, she would never find an occasion to wear it in Bellevue or Seattle.

Las Vegas is its own little world. The scale is so large, so grandiose, that one is returned to the old tales of the desert - the mountains that seem to recede as one approaches them. The Mirage is so large and brightly lit that one underestimates the distance to walk there from Treasure Island.

While we were there, they demolished the New Frontier in the middle of the night. Helen woke up to the sound of the explosions going off, and then heard the prolonged rumble of the building coming down.

Perhaps there's an irony in the fact that, while traveling, most of my reading was in Paul Theroux' The Old Patagonian Express, a travel book.

Commentaries on Foreign Affairs: "Iraq's Civil War"

Let me start by quoting the third paragraph, which seems to me to be the real lead, of James D. Fearon's article, "Iraq's Civil War," in the March/April 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs.

"In fact, there is a civil war in progress in Iraq, one comparate in important respects to other civil wars that have occurred in postcolonial states with weak political institutions. Those cases suggest that the Bush administration's political objective in Iraq - creating a stable, peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops - is unrealistic. Given this unrealistic political objective, military strategy of any sort is doomed to fail almost regardless of whether the administration goes with the "surge" option, as President George W. Bush as proposed, or shifts toward a pure training mission, as advised by the Iraq Study Group." (Pages 2-3)

Mr. Fearon, a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, goes into considerable detail in this article about the nature of recent civil wars, the likelihood of a military coup, and the failure of power-sharing arrangements. One interesting statement is this: "To avail itself of more attractive policy options, the Bush administration (or its successor) must break off its unconditional military support for the Shiite-dominated government that it helped bring to power in Baghdad." (Page 13) In line with this argument, he concludes:

"The more likely scenario is that the Bush administration's commitment to the 'success' of the Maliki government will make the United States passively complicit in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. Standing back to adopt a more evenhanded policy in the civil war already in progress is a more sensible and defensible course. To pursue it, the Bush administration or its successor would first have to give up on the idea that a few more U.S. brigates or a change in U.S. tactics will make for an Iraq that can, in President Bush's words, 'govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself' once U.S. troops are gone." (Page 15)

Readers will note that a number of events have occurred since the publication of Mr. Fearon's article. First, the "surge" has taken place, and is continuing. At some point the numbers of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq will begin coming down, but that point is not yet. Second, whether the U.S. has become more "evenhanded" on the political level in Baghdad, U.S. forces have undertaken to cooperate with a number of Sunni tribal leaders on the local level. Third, I think it is becoming evident that there is a contradiction between our all-out support for a Shiite government and our hostility to Iran. And, finally, the Democrats in Congress have failed to force the Bush administration to make any major change in its "strategy" in Iraq. (I would prefer the word "tactics" because, as far as I can tell, the Bush administration has no strategy at all.) Moreover, the leading Democratic candidate, while committed to "ending the war," has no intention of pulling the U.S. out of Iraq in one fell swoop on January 21, 2009.

Now, given my criticisms of Mr. Bret Stephens and Mr. Arthur Herman for their positive fews of the military (and, to a degree, political) situation in Iraq, it may surprise my readers to discover that I think Mr. Fearon's argument has very little going for it. In fact, I think that his conclusion is entirely incorrect.

Indeed, as I stated in another place, the Iraqis have acquired the trappings of a democratic government, without an understanding of the need to share power, to tolerate differences, and to protect the rights of minorities while exercising the will of the majority. However, Mr. Fearon's argument is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he says that powersharing arrangements, however well-intentioned, have seldom worked in modern civil wars. (I might say that I find this obvious: If a group has geared itself up to the point of going to war, it is unlikely to consider its objectives so unimportant, or its enmities so trivial, that it can sacrifice both friends and principles in a trice.) Consistent with this, he says that U.S. efforts to encourage powersharing have been failures. Obviously then, he would support the U.S. backing one side or the other, and not trying to make them kiss and make up.

On the contrary, he then attacks the U.S. for the probability that support of the Shiite regime will involve us in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. And he then advocates that we "step back" from the Maliki government and "adopt a more evenhanded policy."

Here's the way I see it. The reasons that we have a civil war in Iraq are many and complex but, at bottom, the reasons that the minority Sunnis are willing to risk all in openly fighting the government are two-fold: 1) they believe that they will be badly treated by the Shiites and, 2) they also believe that they, with superior military traditions, can at least hold their own against the government. The only way to disabuse them of this fantasy is to back the Shiites to ensure that they achieve a decisive victory over the Sunnis, as soon as possible, so that the Sunnis will realize the necessity of entering into the political process. Weakening the Maliki government, opposing the Shiites, and arming the Sunnis, will merely prolong the violence and postpone the day of reckoning. Moreover, the longer it takes for the Shiite government to subdue the Sunnis, the more a thirst for vengeance is likely to lead to ethnic cleansing.

In this case, Mr. Fearon has it just backwards.

I would encourage you all, by the way, to read Mr. Fearon's article. I find it interesting that a man who is obviously intelligent and well-informed could be both illogical and wrongheaded on a matter to which he has devoted quite a bit of thought.

Commentaries on Commentary: "How to Win in Iraq - and How to Lose"

Arthur Herman, in "How to Win in Iraq - and How to Lose," Commentary, April 2007, pages 23-28, takes the familiar position that the war in Iraq is being won militarily, but that the politicians may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As Herman puts it, "if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over."

Herman then takes up an extended discussion the war in Algeria (1954-1962), and the work of David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. I have, by the way, just finished reading Alistair Horne's classic history of the Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace, which was first published in 1977, and which was reissued in 2006 with some new notes and material. Many of the details of the incidents to which Herman alludes in this article are described at length in Horne's work.

Herman is quite correct that the French army, with the use of such principles as concentration of force, defeated the FLN (Front de Liberation National), and its military arm again and again. In particular, the Morice line, named after a French Minister of Defense, closed the border with Tunisia, and prevented the ALN from reinforcing the suffering cadres in the wilayas.

Some of these principles are, as Herman says, important in the context of Iraq. Some of the steps taken by General Petraeus have applied some effective measures to the problems of defeating and eliminating certain anti-government or anti-American forces. The fact that Iraq lacks an equivalent of the Morice line to prevent infiltration of personnel and weapons from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, is the source of many of the problems the American forces face in Iraq.

Herman takes the position that the war in Algeria was, in the end, lost because left-wing politicians in France forced the government to abandon a victorious army just as the war was won. He also mentions the similar example of Vietnam. And so, he concludes, there is a terrible danger that "feckless politicians" may pull the plug on the Army's latest initiative in Iraq before it has had a chance to work.

I have a couple of problems with this sort of article. The "stab in the back" theme has been trotted out ever since the American Revolution. (Cornwallis had the war just about won, but the Ministry wouldn't send any more troops after he suffered a temporary setback at Yorktown.) The most famous "stab in the back" was that administered to the German army in 1918 by the liberal (and Jewish) politicians, who betrayed the soldiers and the Kaiser. The story of the stab in the back gained a certain credibility from the fact that the German army surrendered while still occupying large sections of France and Belgium. The German public did not see how shattered the military was after the ultimate failure of the last great German offensive in March, 1918, and the Allied attacks later that year. Moreover, Germany's allies had gone under, the blockade had driven the German population to near-starvation rations, and the increasing numbers of American soldiers and Marines, who could not be matched by fresh levies of Germans, all meant that the Germans must inevitably lose.

Vietnam is an interesting case. There are many people who feel that political interference caused many problems during the war. Certainly a case can be made that the Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a defeat for the Viet Cong. I would argue that Tet was a terrible defeat for the U.S. military in Vietnam, and its political leadership on the following counts: First, it was obviously a terrible surprise to everyone in Saigon, betraying the failure of military intelligence after seven years of continuous presence in the country. Second, the Vietnamese forces were must stronger than any of the MACV estimates would have led one to believe. This was not only another intelligence failure, but cast doubt on (at least), previous reports of numbers of the enemy killed, of the success of the interdiction of reinforcements and supplies through Laos, and of the reliability of South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces. Third, it demonstrated that the Vietnamese were not going to give up.

It has always been the case in warfare that, under certain circumstances, the winner is the side that refuses to concede defeat. In the days when the winner of a battle was determined by which side controlled the battlefield at the end of the day, the side which was too stubborn to retreat could end up claiming a victory. One can argue, for example, that, had General Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker not retreated after the battle of Chancellorsville, that fight would have been recorded as a Union, rather than a Confederate victory.

Horne makes the point that the FLN never changed its goals, never backed away from its demands, never conceded anything. In the end, the war in Algeria was too expensive. It was preventing the modernization of the French army and economy, it was diverting too much energy and manpower away from Europe, and the game was simply not worth the candle for the French. Certainly, from the time the Algerian war ended, France entered upon a period of rapid economic growth and modernization.

In the end, the dictum of Clausewitz is still with us: War is the continuation of politics by other means. The idea that one can have a military victory and a political defeat is nonsense. The only way to have that appear to occur, is if the military has been misinformed of, or has misunderstood, the political goals. It is the accomplishment of those goals, not military advances and retreats, which denotes victory.

Commentaries on Commentary: "Realists to the Rescue?"

Commentaries on Commentary: “Realists to the Rescue?”

Bret Stephens’ article in the February 2007 issue of Commentary magazine is, first and foremost, an attack on the Iraq Study Group’s set of “79 prescriptions for U.S. policy in the Middle East.” To reveal Mr. Stephens’ attitude, I don’t think I can do better than to quote this long sentence from his first paragraph. (I think this is what we might call the “topic sentence” of his essay.)

“With neoconservatism supposedly repudiated by the ‘fiasco’ of Iraq, the backing of a wise man’s council composed equally of Republicans and Democrats, and a friendly media breeze in its sails, the ISG report was heralded not just as a fresh perspective on Iraq but as offering, at last, a new and blessedly different type of foreign policy for a country tired both of foreign adventures and of the adventurist President conducting them.” (Page 27)

Let us consider for a moment this sentence. Mr. Stephens is saying that Iraq is not a “fiasco,” though it has been characterized as such by many observers. He is also saying that, therefore, neoconservatism has not been repudiated. He implies that the media is a leading force in attacks on our “adventurist President” and his policies. And, moreover, he considers that the favorable reception of the ISG report was due in large part to the bipartisan nature of the effort. If, however, the ISG report isn’t as successful as it was first represented to be, perhaps bipartisanship isn’t a valuable approach.

I could characterize this in a near-parody of criticism of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. Mr. Stephens seems – and the article makes clear that the seeming is real – to support the neoconservative enterprise which sponsored the war on and in Iraq, to support unilateralist and partisan political approaches, to place the media in the camp of the “enemy,” so that all media criticism of Mr. Bush can be attributed to partisan bias, and to feel that the war in Iraq has been to some degree successful. In other words, “We were right all along, and anyone who says we weren’t is against us for partisan political reasons.”

However, Mr. Stephens deserves better than that. He goes on to a review of the realist approach to international politics, from Hans Morgenthau, through Eisenhower and Nixon, to the present. He sees both failures and successes in that record, and his views may be summed up in this sentence: “Finally, realists have performed best when they have resisted the lure of their doctrine’s ingrained passivity, verging on defeatism.” In other words, realism is all right as long as it isn’t too realistic.

Mr. Stephens proposes five factors which are present in today’s “global affairs that challenge realism’s most basic premises.” These are:

The accelerated pace of democratization.
The reach and impact of the news media.
The intersection – one might say the blending – of humanitarian and strategic challenges.
The nature of post-9/11 terrorism.
The increasingly asymmetrical nature of global conflicts.

“The upshot,” says Mr. Stephens, “is that the United States faces a set of urgent challenges – and, to be sure, potentially fruitful opportunities – which realism never fully anticipated and to which realists have yet to adapt.” (Page 32).

This brings us back to the ISG and its weaknesses. Since the ISG is based on “bad” realist thinking, the sort of narrow, interest-based thinking that characterized the Eisenhower administration, it proposes that the U.S. hold the Iraqi administration to various standards, proposes diplomatic approaches to Syria and Iran, and ignores the perils of Hamas and Hizballah.

After saying that realism was, at its best, a call to common sense, he goes on:

“By contrast, today’s realists begin from theory and proceed to wishes: the wish that war against Islamist terror can be waged at the same relatively leisurely pace as the cold war, and perhaps need not be waged at all; the wish that one can negotiate in good faith and clear conscience with Iran and Syria; the wish that all will be resolved with the resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict; the wish that one can curry favor with terrorists, and win them to our side, if only one offers the right mix of incentives; the wish that we can hold our allies’ feet to the fire, and not lose them.” (Page 34)

I would like to make four points.

First, Mr. Stephens is absolutely right that a realist approach (Thank you, Mr. Burke!) stressed prudence and a due regard to one’s limitations. Realists disliked exchanging a known, and controlled evil, for a new situation of unknown difficulty.

Second, a lot – only God knows how much – of Mr. Stephens’ critique of realism is due to the neoconservative attachment to Israel. Eisenhower’s realism was bad because it led him to stop the Suez adventure in 1956. Nixon’s realism was good because he support the Israelis in 1973. And, I suspect, the ISG is bad because it would call upon Israel to make concessions and to accept realities that are unpalatable to Israel.

Third, I think that none of Mr. Stephens’ five new factors are particularly new, nor do I think that a realist approach cannot account for them. After all, realist thinking was based on the run-up to World War I, in which terrorism, increasing democratization (from a much lower base), and asymmetrical relations all played a major part.

Fourth, I think Mr. Stephens’ gives his game away with one little phrase in the last statement quoted: “clear conscience.” Let us think about why one could not, with a clear conscience, open a discussion with any country about any subject.

Commentaries on Commentary: "Health Care in Three Acts"

Commentary is a magazine of strong, and sometimes unpalatable, views. It is, perhaps, most famous as a neoconservative magazine: Norman Podhoretz is Commentary's Editor-at-Large. Other prominent contributors in a conservative vein are Gabriel Schoenfeld, Joshua Muravchik, and Victor Hanson Davis. In addition to its political side, Commentary, provides criticism, book reviews, and a "Letters" department that prints the longest letters I have ever seen in a magazine. Even though I disagree with the contributors more often than not, I find Commentary fascinating because the articles are usually well thought out, well-written, and thought-provoking. On top of all that, Commentary provides insight into Jewish (and Israeli) culture and thought which is all terra incognita to this Gentile.

The tradition of commentaries is long and rich. I would imagine that most of my readers have read Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Decades of Tito Livio. (If you haven't, run right out and get yourself a copy.) In the Discourses Machiavelli uses the stories in Livy's history of Rome since the founding of the city to generate and illustrate a variety of political and military lessons. Many of the essays of Montaigne are also based upon his reading in the classics.

I am not trying to establish the essays in Commentary as equal to Ab Urbe Condita. I am merely invoking the tradition of one author using the words of another as starting point for his own reflections. There are, of course, other sources upon which one may draw as an inspiration for one's essays. In any event, I plan to comment upon a number of articles from Commentary. Those who are interested in seeing the orginals are invited to visit commentarymagazine.com.

The February 2007 issue of Commentary, is rich in material. Joshua Muravchik leads off with "Our Worst Ex-President," attacking Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid as the centerpiece in our 39th president's array of crimes of omission and commission. Two articles on Iraq: "Realists to the Rescue?" by Bret Stephens and "Is Israel the Problem?" by Amir Taheri follow. I can recommend the Taheri article, although the question posed in the title is somewhat disingenuous. It is interesting to compare Taheri to some of the articles and essays in Bernard Lewis From Babel to Dragomans, as a study in the tendency of the Arabs to displace the blame for their failures and shortcomings onto the Israelis, the British, and, naturally, the United States. Gabriel Schoenfeld weighs in with "Why Journalists Are Not Above the Law." Hillel Halkin contributes an essay about Tel Aviv: "The First Hebrew City." Terry Teachout, the regular music and art reviewer, has sent in "Hitchcock's Music Man", a nice piece for anyone who has seen North by Northwest recently enough to remember the way in which Bernard Herrmann's scoring helps to maintain the pace and tension of the film.

The books reviewed include Dangerous Nation, by Robert Kagan (a neoconservative himself); The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud; Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War, by Robert L. Beisner; Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life, by Jon D. Levenson; and American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, by Paul M. Barrett.

The particular article I would like to discuss here is by Eric Cohen and Yuval Levin, "Health Care in Three Acts." In the interests of full disclosure, let me note that one reason - the primary reason, I enjoyed this article is that I have an analytic bent. The original meaning of "analysis" goes back to the Greek for "breaking down" or "taking apart." I don't have any problem with big, sweeping measures to solve a lot of problems, but I think they should be based upon a process in which the problems are disassembled into their constituent parts and examined severally. This is what Cohen and Levin do in "Health Care in Three Acts." The key sentence comes near the end of the first page of the article (page 46 of this issue of Commentary, for those who are following along).

"In fact, America faces three fairly distinct predicaments, affecting three fairly distinct portions of the population - the poor, the middle class, and the elderly - and each of them calls for a distinct approach."

They go on to further analyze the problem of the poor, in which they break the 46 million uninsured Americans into:

- those who have lost insurance with their jobs
- those who are not American citizens
- those who are eligible for for Medicaid and similar programs
- those ("many of them young adults under 35") who could afford insurance but don't buy it.

The problem of the middle class, on the other hand, is "the uncertainty caused in part by the rigid link between insurance and employment and in part by the vicissitudes of health itself."

Finally, the elderly face different problems based on costs and end-of-life issues.

As Cohen and Levin note, such disparate problems are not susceptible of a single solution.

Let me note at this point that the portability of health insurance, with some means-tested subsidies, would take care of many people both the "poor" (i.e., the poor and the unemployed). There is a program now, COBRA, which allows people to retain their employers health insurance coverage, if they can pay the premiums. Take off the time limits, add a subsidy for those who can't afford the premiums, and allow coverage to continue if a new employer does not offer a health care plan, or if the employee has a pre-existing condition, and you would both eliminate many of the 46 million uninsured, and ease middle-class anxiety about the prospect of losing coverage. Add to that a campaign to educate poor people about the programs for which they are already eligible, and you narrow the numbers a lot. The big remaining question is: Do we, or do we not, want to provide health care coverage for illegal immigrants?

Cohen and Levin opine, and I find them persuasive, that the biggest problem we face, the one we've done least to solve, and the one that is going to be a killer, is how to manage health care for the elderly. Again, we can break this problem down into its constituent parts, but the big problem is that we are not facing the problem at all As Cohen and Levin say:

"Neither socialized medicine nor a pure market approach is suited to America's three health-care challenges, while the bipartisan conspiracy to ignore the looming crisis of Medicare in particular will return to haunt our children." (Page 52)

Let me give you their last paragraph, as they seek to balance practicality and compassion in a complex system:

"Even as we pursue practical options for reform, however, it behooves us to remember that health itself will always remain out of our ultimate control. Medicine works at the boundaries of life, and its limits remind us of our own. While our health-care system can be improved, our unease about health can never truly be quieted. And while reform will require hard decisions, solutions that would balance the books by treating the disabled and debilitated as unworthy of care are no solutions at all. In no small measure, America's future vitality and character will depend upon our ability to rise to this challenge with the right mix of creativity and sobriety."