If the Iraq Study Group Could Work a Miracle

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Indeed, one of the most important things the new Democratic majority in Congress can do as it prepares to take control in January is to agree on a set of goals in foreign policy. Of course, under the Constitution the responsibility for setting and executing that policy rests with the president, but if Mr. Bush is serious about working with the Democrats, the evolution of such a set of goals ought to help define areas of possible cooperation. A lot depends upon tone. For example, it would be reassuring to our allies if, as a matter of principle, the Democrats would stress their belief that we should consult them, not lecture to them, and to work through the United Nations where feasible.

In particular, it would help if we were now to give the re-escalating war in Afghanistan the attention and additional resources it demands. Many other nations also have troops there and have a broad stake in checking the resurgence of the Taliban and its attempt again to degrade the status of women. Indeed, this furnishes one of the clearest examples of the struggle between Western values and what has been called militant Islam.

With most of Islam and the right of Muslims to practice their beliefs we have no legitimate quarrel; but there can be no accommodation with the fanatics who seek to make women mere chattels any more than there can be with societies that still practice slavery. Indeed, the Democrats have an opportunity to stress improving the status of women around the world as a major concern by contrast with the record of the Bush administration in eliminating funds for family planning assistance and cutting AIDs programs that advocate use of condoms.

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Democratic leaders have been quick to pounce on the bill introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel to revive the draft as a means of providing necessary personnel for the military services in Iraq. Of course Mr. Rangel knows full well that no draft could be instituted in time for use in the Iraq war. What he seeks, rather, is to call attention to the disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics who find in today’s military services their best opportunity for equal opportunity and decent pay. Even during the Vietnam War, while the old draft was still in effect, the number of college deferments and other exemptions made it very much a poor man’s conflict.

Mr. Rangel’s bill serves, though, to introduce the much broader question of universal service for young people. Just after World War II President Harry Truman advocated universal military training for all young men at age 18, but his suggestion died on the vine. Later modifications extended the concept to include all young people, women as well as men, and broadened the scope to national service in such fields as hospitals and public health, the Peace Corps, inner cities work, conservation, forest fire fighting and the like.

Young people would automatically serve their country for two years at age 18 or before going to college. They might qualify for educational assistance. What I like is the concept is that each of us owes a brief period of his life to serving the country. I can’t think of a better way to put youthful idealism to constructive use.

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"Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind," read the head on a story in The New York Times about a physician-scientist who had left active practice to become an adviser on medical investments. The field doesn’t really matter. The distinction between what to most of us would seem a comfortable salary and what is received – I don’t say earned — by the super-rich grows more and more gaping. Some chief executive officers get a thousand times as much as what the lowest workers in their firms are paid.

I can remember agreeing with another Army officer during World War II that we would be well satisfied if we could be assured salaries of $5,000 a year for life. Little did we know the cold hard facts of the economic world that awaited us on the outside. Despite some socialist sympathies in college, I came to believe that socialism dulled initiative and that regulated capitalism probably provided the greatest good for the greatest number.

Now I am not so sure. In the first place, capitalism in the United States is less and less regulated effectively. The trust-busting days of Theodore Roosevelt are a century in the past, frustrated or made irrelevant by globalization and the difficulty of maintaining a check on huge international firms that in effect are answerable to no one.

In the second place greed is pretty much unbridled and feeds on itself. Corporate stockholders demand ever-increasing profits. When I see what greed is doing to the newspaper industry, forcing the sale and debasement of once-fine papers in order to meet unreasonable profit goals, I shudder at how this may affect the constitutional watchdog role of a free press.

The Scandinavian countries seem to me pretty good examples of egalitarian and democratic societies in which everyone has enough — food, health care, education, disposable income. If the system has discouraged obscene profits and thereby dulled initiative – well, maybe we could use a bit of that kind of equalization here.