All hail the surge!

While Rolling Stone may not be known for the most unbiased reporting around, but their article on the surge underscores some significant issues surrounding the surge that has become everyone’s darling lately. Proponents have been saying the reduction in violence over the past 8 months is a clear sign that we are now decisively winning the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, that’s based on a definition of victory that has been so watered down over the past four years, that there’s practically dancing in the streets over the fact that only one soldier is dying every day over there and political progress remains stagnate.

The other problem is that no one seems to try to figure out why there’s been a reduction of violence over the past 8 months. Could this have something to do with it?

“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence officer.

“We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority,” says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. “Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future.”

It’s not easy to say (I’m generally an interventionist) but I’ve felt for awhile that Iraq is going to disintegrate into civil war and a lot of blood will be shed. Our options and ability to influence events are very limited. In my opinion, we can choose whether that civil will happen sooner or later. The longer we delay it (and provide the future combatants with money and weapons) the bigger the body county will be.

Why has violence gone down? Perhaps it’s because the insurgents think they’ve already won. They know that we won’t stay there forever. If the Americans want to hand out cash for ‘being good’ why not take it and prepare for the big fight that’s coming?

Osama himself makes no secret of his hatred for the Shiite government and its security forces. As we walk by a checkpoint manned by the Iraqi National Police, which is comprised almost entirely of Shiites, Osama looks at the uniformed officers in disgust. “I want to kill them,” he tells me, “but the Americans make us work together.”

If anyone was really serious about stabilizing Iraq, we’d see an attempt to give potential insurgents a stake in the existing system. Unemployment in Iraq is hovering around 60%. While handing out weapons and paying thousands of young, pissed off men to be militia men is quick it’s not the best idea for a jobs program. We’re just prepping guys for the next fight.

Instead, the money should go to a massive, civilian jobs program along the lines of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Have them build roads, parks, clear debris, etc. Quite honestly, it doesn’t matter if you have one group of guys stack rocks in one place and another group of guys to move the stack somewhere else. Get those guys working (ideally physically exhausting work) and paid by the central government (so that they’ll understand that if the government goes so do the checks). The key (and this is the tough part) is that the program needs to be so big that the corruption and cronyism that is everywhere in Iraq is just swamped. There needs to be so many jobs available that any eligible worker can get one without a bribe or having to be from the right tribe or sect.

Maj. Pat Garrett, who works with the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, is already having trouble figuring out what to do with all the new militiamen in his district. There are too few openings in the Iraqi security forces to absorb them all, even if the Shiite-dominated government agreed to integrate them. Garrett is placing his hopes on vocational-training centers that offer instruction in auto repair, carpentry, blacksmithing and English. “At the end of the day, they want a legitimate living,”

So, why are we giving them guns?

Since the Americans often require that each mahala, or neighborhood, have two ISV bosses, Osama has given half of his 300 men to Abu Salih, a man with dark reddish skin, a sharp nose and small piercing eyes. “We know Abu Salih is former Al Qaeda of Iraq,” a U.S. Army officer from the area tells me. In fact, when I meet with him, Abu Salih freely admits that some of his men belonged to Al Qaeda. They joined the American-sponsored militias, he says, so they could have an identity card as protection should they get arrested.

Oh yeah, I just know this is going to turn out well.

Consumer Alert…Wachovia credit card scam

About a month ago my wife and I got a credit card offer in the mail.  It promised to transfer a balance from another card at 0% interest for a year and with no transaction fee.  Now, I get these offers all the time but I’ve never seen one without some sort of fee attached.  That was clearly a good deal.  Perhaps a bit too good we thought so we called Wachovia Credit Services and confirmed it.  It was that good of a deal.

Well, if Wachovia wanted to give me a free one year loan I wasn’t one to argue with them so we signed up for the card and gleefully transfered a balance from another card.

Fast forward one month…

I get my first bill and low and behold Wachovia hits me with a $75 finance charge.

I call customer service to find out what happened and hear the rep tell me that Wachovia has never offered a deal like that.  I asked him to review the recording of my conversation with the rep who opened the account for us (I figured that they might actually be able to use one of those calls they’re always telling me are monitored for training purposes) and found out that (surprise!) they don’t monitor all that many calls after all and I was guessing even if they did have a copy of my call it would be deleted shortly after I hung up the phone.  The call quickly devolved into a game of he said/she said where I couldn’t prove anything and so I resigned myself to the fact that I just got screwed.

Then I took a look at my bill again.   On the second page it said quite clearly:

Promotional Finance Charge Summary:  Total Finance Charge:  $0.00

Ah ha!  This was all some clerical error, I thought.  I’ll just call back, point out that note and Wachovia will be happy to refund my money with apologies for inconveniencing me.

Not so fast, buddy!

I called back and spoke to a customer service rep and explained the mix up.  Then, to my astonishment, she said that I still had to pay the fee because it wasn’t a finance charge but rather a ‘transaction fee’.

I guess I should say at this point that on my bill it says:  “Transaction Fee **Finance Charge**” When I read that it seems like that means that either transaction fees are a subset of finance charges or the terms are synonymous.  In either case they should be covered under that ‘Total Finance Charge’ category.

The rep didn’t see it that way, telling me that it wasn’t a finance charge but rather some sort of warning that I would pay a finance charge if I didn’t pay the transaction fee.

What???  That’s got to be the most idiotic thing I ever heard so we quickly blew by that one.  The rest of the conversation was like an Abbott and Costello routine.

Me:  It says the $75 is a finance charge and later that I should pay a finance charge.

Her:  It isn’t a finance charge.

Me:  Than why does it say it’s a finance charge on the bill.

Her:  The finance charge is a transaction fee.

Me:  Right!  Exactly.  It’s a finance charge so I shouldn’t have to pay it.

Her:  No, it’s not a finance charge.

Me:  Than why does it say ‘finance charge’ on the bill?

Her:  Because the finance charge is a transaction fee.

Who’s on first?

Getting nowhere, I asked for her supervisor. We went through the same routine at first.  She first tried to tell me that ‘finance charge’ wasn’t the right terminology on the bill and it was a transaction fee which (according to her) was a very different thing.

Me:  Ok, no problem.  Can you then send me a correct bill where the charge is not listed as a finance charge?

Her:  No.  That’s the way it gets listed

Me:  So it’s a finance charge and I shouldn’t have to pay it.

And round and round we went again…

Eventually she said:  “I can see how you got confused.  Our billing is very deceptive and we shouldn’t list it that way.”

What?  Did I hear that right?  Did a Wachovia supervisor just tell me that they knowingly deceive customers?  Ok, I felt like I was making progress.  Now that she admitted that Wachovia was knowingly deceptive and confusing (Although I dispute that part of it.  There’s nothing confusing about being told something is free.) the next step was for her to please this new customer and refund the ridiculous fee.

Nope.

Her:  If we did that we’d have to refund everyone’s fee.

Me:  Why, do you tell all your customers that won’t get a fee and then charge them?

It ended right about there with nowhere to go.  Reason and logic were clearly not going to sway these people.  I’ve got to send this up the chain of command and see if I get some satisfaction.

Anyway, dear reader, learn from my mistake.  Stay away from Wachovia, they apparently can’t be trusted.

How’s that burger taste now?

When people ask me why I’m a vegetarian I tell them it’s for a host of reasons but you don’t need more than this to convince you that meat should not but industrialized. I’m convinced that there’s no way to insure that meat is safe when the animals are raised and processed this way.

I also think that it’s impossible for most people to work in situations like this without becoming damaged on an psychological level. I just don’t see a lot of difference from these guys and the guards an concentration camps that ‘processed’ people into the ovens or created ‘games’ to dehumanize, torture and kill. It’s all about establishing emotional distance from the thing you are killing and treating it like a thing.

Unfortunately, we in the West have distanced ourselves from our food. We don’t recognize where it came from or how it got into that patty shape. Personally, I think it’s important, even on a symbolic level for people to take part in the collecting their food, at least occasionally. I still eat fish and so it’s important to me that a couple times a year I catch and prepare fish to eat. It may not seem like a big deal but I think I am going to something that was, at one point alive, I shouldn’t shy away from having to kill it. On some level it gives me respect for where my food came from.

I think there can be a good argument made for eating meat from organic, diversified farms like the one described in Michael Pollen’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma“. Cherry Grove Farm is one such place in New Jersey (although I couldn’t seem to find where they actually process their meat.) I know the USDA makes it very difficult for small farmers to do their own processing on site and so forces many to use the big industrial plants but at raising and feeding farm animals properly that eventually get to the table is not small task and anyone who does that is making huge strides in both animal welfare and public safety.

I still don’t know if I could eat beef, pork, lamb or chicken. Even when faced with free range, grass fed, organic and humanely raised meat products I couldn’t cross over to the dark side to buy any. I don’t think I have any moral issues about hunting particular animals for food (particularly if human activity has resulted in them over populating an area and causing ecological damage - like white tail deer in the Northeast) but that may just be because I haven’t had a piece of venison on a plate in front of me.

Methinks it’s time for some moral searching…

The Army’s transition to a mercenary force

First, let me say that I have benefited from both the GI Bill and reenlistment bonuses in the Army and thought that they (particularly the GI Bill) can have a positive benefit which goes beyond just getting recruits to fill enlistment quotas.  But I have to admit, I’m getting a bit uneasy with the combination of lowering standards and sending enlistment bonuses sky high in order to gain new recruits.

These policies are incredibly short sighted and may make quarterly recruiting numbers look good but they’re really just pushing off the day of reckoning a few years.

The new enlistment bonus ($40,000 for active duty troops) seems particularly designed to attract people who will do one tour and get the hell out of dodge.  According to Fred Kalpan at Slate:

…the cash is handed over only after the recruits finish their service, they will have an incentive not to re-enlist for a second term, much less to make a career of the military.

Ah…brilliant.

So, in four years we’ll have a bunch of soldiers deciding if they should stay in the military or not.  If they stay in, they may be looking at additional combat deployments and the trials and tribulations of military life.  If they get out, they get a $40,000 check plus up to $73,000 for college.  Let’s face it, many will get out.

So, what happens then?  Assuming the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t over and we aren’t in some sort of major depression with significant unemployment, the military is still going to have trouble recruiting.  So, those bonuses or ones like them will have to be retained.  Even if, the wars are over, is it likely that people will come to view this high level of incentive as the new ‘floor’ of incentives for military service.  What are recruiters going to say in 4 or 5 years when a kid comes in and says her brother got over $100,000 in bonuses and wants the same (or better) deal?  Will they settle for half that?

Many of us serve in the military because we want to, not because it’s a huge money making proposition.  Yet, it seems the Army is spending all its time trying to reach those who live by cost-benefit analysis.

The Marines have done a much better job at keeping the focus of service on duty and less on making a buck.  While they’re able to do that in part because they’re a smaller force a can’t help feeling that the Army really missed an opportunity in the wake of 9/11 to appeal to people’s patriotism to join the military.  And the further we go down this path of buying people’s service, I think the harder it’s going to be to turn around and go with an alternative path to get people to serve.