SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2011 • THE BULLETIN
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Predator drones lead to victory W
e are in a long war against radical Islamic terrorism. The struggle seems almost similar to the on-again/off-again ordeals of the past — like the FrenchEnglish Hundred Years War of the 14th and 15th centuries, or the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants in the 17th century. In these kinds of drawn-out conflicts, victory finally goes to the side that responds best to constant new challenges. And we’ve seen a lot of those since 9/11, when the United States was caught unaware and apparently ill-equipped to face the threat of radical Islamic terrorists hijacking our passenger jets. But even when we adjusted well to the 9/11 tactics, there were new threats like suicide bombers and roadside improvised explosive devices that seemed to nullify American technology and material advantages. But now America is once again getting the upper hand in this long war against Middle Eastern terrorists with the use of Predator drone targeted assassinations that the terrorists have not yet an answer to. In systematically deadly fashion, Predators are picking off the top echelon of al-Qaida and its affiliates from the Hindu Kush to Yemen to the Horn of Africa. New models of drones seem almost unstoppable. They are uncan-
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON nily accurate in delivering missiles in a way even precision aircraft bombing cannot. Compared to the cost of a new jet or infantry division, Predators are incredibly cheap. And they do not endanger American lives — at least as long as terrorists cannot get at hidden runaways abroad or video control consoles at home. The pilotless aircraft are nearly invisible and without warning can deliver instant death from thousands of feet away in the airspace above. Foreign governments often give us permission to cross borders with Predators in a way they would not with loud, manned aircraft. Moreover, drones are constantly evolving. They now stay in the air far longer and are far more accurate and far more deadly than when they first appeared in force shortly after 9/11. Suddenly it is a lot harder for a terrorist to bomb a train station in the West than it is for a Predator to target that same would-be terrorist’s home in South Waziristan. All those advantages explain why President Obama has exponentially expanded the program. After five years of use under George W. Bush,
such drones had killed around 400 suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, under President Obama, Predators have taken out more than 2,200 in less than three years. The program apparently is uniquely suited for the Obama “leading from behind” way of war: killing far out of sight, and therefore out of mind — and the news. Indeed, so comfortable is Obama with this new way of war that at a White House correspondents dinner, the president joked about using Predators on would-be suitors of his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.” For President Barack Obama, the Predator drone avoids former candidate Obama’s past legal objections by simply blowing apart suspected terrorists without having to capture them — and then ponder how and where they should be tried. With a dead, rather than a detained, terrorist, civil libertarians cannot demand that Obama honor his campaign pledge to treat suspects like American criminals, while conservatives cannot pounce on any perceived softness in extending Miranda rights to captured al-Qaida killers. Antiwar protestors demonstrate in response to American soldiers getting killed, but rarely about robotic aircraft quietly obliterating distant
terrorists. American fatalities can make war unpopular; a crashed drone is a “who cares?” statistic. Still, there are lots of questions that arise from this latest American advantage. Waterboarding, which once sparked liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more that 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity? Predators both depersonalize and personalize war in a fashion quite unknown in the past. In one sense, killing a terrorist is akin to playing an amoral video game thousands of miles away. But in another, we often know the name and even recognize the face of each victim, in a way unknown in the anonymous carnage of, for example, the battles of Verdun and Hue. Does that make war more or less humane? Once the most prominent critic of the war on terror, Obama has now become its greatest adherent — and in the process is turning the tide against al-Qaida. And so far, the American people of all political stripes — for vastly different reasons — seem more relieved than worried over Obama’s most unexpected incarnation as Predator in Chief. — Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
The milquetoast radicals have their say T
he U.S. economy is probably going to stink for a few more years. It is beset by short-term problems (low consumer demand, uncertain housing prices, too much debt) and long-term problems (wage stagnation, rising health care costs, eroding human capital). Realistically, not much is going to be done to address the short-term problems, but we can at least use this winter of recuperation to address the country’s underlying structural ones. Do tax reform, fiscal reform, education reform and political reform so that when the economy finally does recover the prosperity is deep, broad and strong. Unfortunately, the country has been wasting this winter of recuperation. Nothing of consequence has been achieved over the past two years. Instead, there have been a series of trivial sideshows. It’s as if people can’t keep their minds focused on the big things. They get diverted by scuffles that are small, contentious and symbolic. Take the Occupy Wall Street movement. This uprising was sparked by the magazine Adbusters, previously best known for the 2004 essay, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” — an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy. If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent. This is a theme that allows the people in the 99 percent to think very highly of themselves. All their prob-
DAVID BROOKS
lems are caused by the nefarious elite. Unfortunately, almost no problem can be productively conceived in this way. A group that divides the world between the pure 99 percent and the evil 1 percent will have nothing to say about education reform, Medicare reform, tax reform, wage stagnation or polarization. They will have nothing to say about the way Americans have overconsumed and overborrowed. These are problems that implicate a much broader swath of society than the top 1 percent. They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling meekly only around the edges. The 99 versus 1 frame is also extremely self-limiting. If you think all problems flow from a small sliver of American society, then all your solutions are going to be small, too. The policy proposals that have been floating around the Occupy Wall Street movement — a financial transfer tax, forgiveness for student loans — are marginal. The Occupy Wall Street movement may look radical, but its members’ ideas are less radical than those you
might hear at your average Rotary Club. Its members may hate capitalism. A third believe the U.S. is no better than al-Qaida, according to a New York magazine survey, but since the left no longer believes in the nationalization of industry, these “radicals” really have no systemic reforms to fall back on. They are not the only small thinkers. President Barack Obama promises not to raise taxes on the bottom 98 percent. The Occupy-types celebrate the bottom 99 percent. Republicans promise not to raise taxes on the bottom 100 percent. Through these and other pledges, leaders of all three movements are hedging themselves in. They are severely limiting the scope of their proposed solutions. The thing about the current moment is that the moderates in suits are much more radical than the pierced anarchists camping out on Wall
Street or the Tea Party-types. Look, for example, at a piece Matt Miller wrote for The Washington Post called “The Third Party Stump Speech We Need.” Miller is a former McKinsey consultant and Clinton staffer. But his ideas are much bigger than anything you hear from the protesters: Slash corporate taxes and raise energy taxes, aggressively use market forces and public provisions to bring down health care costs; raise capital requirements for banks; require national service; balance the budget by 2018. Don’t be fooled by the cliches of protest movements past. The most radical people today are the ones who look the most boring. It’s not about declaring war on some nefarious elite. It’s about changing behavior from top to bottom. Let’s occupy ourselves. — David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.
Why block a test that really does save lives? By Michael Milken Special to The Washington Post
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orty years ago, my motherin-law learned from a mammogram at age 57 that she had breast cancer. We immediately sought the best available treatment. She lived for many happy years and enjoyed precious time with her grandchildren. Would she have died sooner without the mammogram? I don’t know. But here’s what I do know from four decades of working to accelerate progress against all life-threatening diseases: No screening test is perfect; well-informed patients consulting with their doctors are better equipped than a government agency to make decisions about their health; there are options other than screening everyone or screening no one; and finally, there’s no comfort in ignorance. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a panel supported by a congressional mandate, now recommends that healthy men not receive prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests, which measure a protein in the blood produced by prostate tissue. I agree that the current PSA test is inexact and, in many cases, leads to overtreatment that can have terrible side effects such
as incontinence and impotence. Research supported by the Prostate Cancer Foundation has led to the development of several new molecular markers that could soon complement or even replace the PSA test. These new tests, now in clinical trials pending approval from the Food and Drug Administration, should greatly improve diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer. However, in the meantime, the USPSTF recommendation is a disservice to the majority of men. While it would eliminate some short-term health-care costs, long-term costs of treating metastatic disease would be higher. And some men will die. A recent European study showed that testing reduced deaths significantly among men ages 55 to 69. These relatively younger patients are the ones the recent recommendation would most likely exclude from testing because they more often appear to be healthy. The PSA test doesn’t diagnose prostate cancer. But it can raise a red flag calling for a doctor-patient dialogue on medical options, risks, benefits and costs. We need to make better use of it, not ban it, and, as the American Cancer Society rec-
ommends, better inform patients of overtreatment risks. When we founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation nearly two decades ago, more than 40,000 U.S. men died annually from the disease. That toll was expected to rise sharply as population grew and baby boomers aged. Instead, deaths have dropped closer to 34,000. There’s no precise way to know how many lives were saved by increased awareness that led to testing and how many by improved treatment. But experienced urologists tell me that before PSA tests, the vast majority of patients’ prostate cancer had already metastasized by diagnosis. Today, only about 20 percent of these diagnosed cancers have spread outside the prostate, partly because PSA tests provide early warning. We shouldn’t turn the clock back to the pre-PSA days. The argument against testing reflects the same false economy seen throughout America’s health system. Spending on care skyrockets while funding for screening, prevention and research drops. Out of each health-related dollar Americans spend, research by the National Institutes of Health represents little
more than a penny; and the medical research programs of private industry, universities and governments together total just over a nickel. Congress should consider research and funding for prevention an investment, not an expense. The Milken Institute estimates that America’s gross domestic product will be $5.7 trillion lower by mid-century if we don’t contain the containable consequences of chronic diseases. We can save trillions — more than enough to balance the federal budget — by losing weight, exercising, avoiding tobacco, using seat belts and getting regular tests such as PSAs, colonoscopies and mammograms. In 1993, I was one of those “healthy” men the task force says should not be tested. At least I seemed healthy and felt fine. But I’d recently lost a friend to prostate cancer, so I asked for the test. The result was a reading six times the upper limit of normal. If I’d been kept in the dark by a federal task force, I might not have been here to write this. — Michael Milken is chairman of the Prostate Cancer Foundation and of FasterCures, a Washington-based center of the Milken Institute focused on all serious diseases.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN
There’s something happening
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hen you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide. Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of the book “The Great Disruption,” argues that these demonstrations are a sign that the current growth-obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits. “I look at the world as an integrated system, so I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy, or the climate going weird, in isolation — I see our system in the painful process of breaking down,” which is what he means by the Great Disruption, said Gilding. “Our system of economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth — our system — is eating itself alive. Occupy Wall Street is like the kid in the fairy story saying what everyone knows but is afraid to say: The emperor has no clothes. The system is broken. Think about the promise of global market capitalism. If we let the system work, if we let the rich get richer, if we let corporations focus on profit, if we let pollution go unpriced and unchecked, then we will all be better off. It may not be equally distributed, but the poor will get less poor, those who work hard will get jobs, those who study hard will get better jobs and we’ll have enough wealth to fix the environment. “What we now have — most extremely in the U.S. but pretty much everywhere — is the mother of all broken promises,” Gilding adds. “Yes, the rich are getting richer and the corporations are making profits — with their executives richly rewarded. But, meanwhile, the people are getting worse off — drowning in housing debt and/or tuition debt — many who worked hard are unemployed; many who studied hard are unable to get good work; the environment is getting more and more damaged; and people are realizing their kids will be even worse off than they are. “This particular round of protests may build or may not, but what will not go away is the broad coalition of those to whom the system lied and who have now woken up.” Not so fast, says John Hagel III, who is the co-chairman of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, along with John Seely Brown. In their recent book, “The Power of Pull,” they suggest that we’re in the early stages of a “Big Shift,” precipitated by the merging of globalization and the Information Technology Revolution. In the early stages, we experience this Big Shift as mounting pressure, deteriorating performance and growing stress because we continue to operate with institutions and practices that are increasingly dysfunctional — so the eruption of protest movements is no surprise. Yet, the Big Shift also unleashes a huge global flow of ideas, innovations, new collaborative possibilities and new market opportunities. This flow is constantly getting richer and faster. Today, they argue, tapping the global flow becomes the key to productivity, growth and prosperity. “We are living in a world where flow will prevail and topple any obstacles in its way,” says Hagel. “As flow gains momentum, it undermines the precious knowledge stocks that in the past gave us security and wealth. It calls on us to learn faster by working together and to pull out of ourselves more of our true potential, both individually and collectively. It excites us with the possibilities that can only be realized by participating in a broader range of flows. That is the essence of the Big Shift.” Yes, corporations now have access to more cheap software, robots, automation, labor and genius than ever. So holding a job takes more talent. But the flip side is that individuals anywhere can now access the flow. We have more big problems than ever and more problem-solvers than ever. So there you have it: Two master narratives — one threat-based, one opportunity-based, but both involving seismic changes. My heart is with Hagel, but my head says that you ignore Gilding at your peril. You decide. — Thomas Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times.