Introduction

The purpose of “A Statue of a ‘Triton’ from Gaza,” by Labib Habachi, was to explore, using close observation and consideration of historical sources, whether an artifact discovered in Gaza could be a representation of Dāgôn, the biblical deity of the early Iron Age (late second millennium BC) Philistines whose temple was mentioned in Judges 16:21-23.  The object in question, a 65 cm (25.5 in.) high basalt statue of a bearded male form with a human torso and head, but with fish tails in place of human legs, was the only one of its kind ever to be “found either in Gaza or elsewhere in Palestine.”  Confiscated from a private residence in Gaza in March 1953, the object, referred to in the article as the “Massâ^cîd statue” or the “triton of Massâ^cîd,” was originally discovered in a well in the village of Massâ^cîd, approximately 5 km (3.1 mi) south of Gaza.

The author’s hypothesis was that this statue, which was dated stylistically to the Hellenistic period, was somehow connected to Philistine Dāgôn, perhaps being a Greco-Roman “rendering” of “the power of the old Oriental god Dāgôn,” or having been “set up in a Hellenistic successor of the Philistine Dāgôn temple at Gaza.”  The brief attempt was then made to support this hypothesis by invoking historical descriptions of Dāgôn and tying them, wherever possible, to the Massâ^cîd statue.  Though the author performed a detailed, if cursory, close observation of the object, the article’s discussion of the statue’s possible status as a late representation of Philistine Dāgôn suffered from a lack of objectivity, instead being colored by an apparent desire on the part of the writer to make the available historical and archaeological evidence support his desired outcome.

Methodology

The method of close observation was used to describe the Massâ^cîd statue in detail, from the “four separate curls” on its beard, to the direction of the remaining piece of left arm, to the inlaid eyes.  Three clearly labeled grayscale images of the statue - front, back, and three-quarter view - were presented along with the description.  Following this, the author ventured into the realm of interpretation, beginning with the statement that, “The question arises whether this statue could represent the…principal god of the town, Dāgôn.”

In order to test this hypothesis, the author drew on select historical mentions of Dāgôn as a Gazan deity, all of which used the Bible (specifically, Judges 16:21-23 and I Samuel 5:2-7) as their sole original source for proof of Dāgôn’s existence in Palestine. Accepting, in the absence of extrabiblical evidence, that Dāgôn did in fact exist in the early Iron Age as a Philistine deity, the author then proceeded speculate whether the triton of Massâ^cîd represented that deity in much later form.  The evidence called on to support such speculation came from a minority of scholars who, reading the deity’s name as the nominative form of the Hebrew root dāg, which means “fish,” held that Dāgôn was once portrayed in ichthyomorphic form.

Argument

As the author acknowledged, “there is almost no [existing] information as to how the god Dāgôn was shown,” as “no statue or other representation of him has yet been discovered.”  Further, rather than being a rendering of the Hebrew term for fish, a much more straightforward look at the context surrounding Philistine Dāgôn suggests that, if indeed he existed, this deity was a West Semitic version of the North Mesopotamian deity called Dāgān (the ā > ô shift is common in the transition from Middle Euphrates to West Semitic pronunciation.)  This god, whose name was a rendering of the Semitic term for “grain,” was known throughout the region from the early third millennium BC.   Such evidence, the author wrote, made it “difficult to interpret the newly discovered statue as a rendering of Dāgôn himself.”

Additional evidence for the triton of Massâ^cîd being representative of something other than a former chief deity of the region was considered in the article.  The statue’s pose, which was “not that which one would expect the cult statue of a major deity to be given,” suggested a “sea creature…forced to his knees by his opponent, his defeat closely mirrored in his face.”  Further, despite the statue’s status as the only one of its kind ever found in Palestine, the author acknowledged that several iconographic parallels to the triton of Massâ^cîd in Greek statuary were known elsewhere in the Hellenistic world.

However, having presented a strong case against his own hypothesis, the author concluded by ignoring this evidence and continuing his attempt to force the Massâ^cîd statue into the clearly ill-fitting mold - whatever shape it may have been - of association with Dāgôn.  This figure, the author wrote, “could have been adopted in Palestine during the syncretistic Greco-Roman period as a way of rendering the power of the old Oriental god Dāgôn.”  He concluded, “Perhaps the triton of Massâ^cîd was originally set up in a Hellenistic successor of the Philistine Dāgôn temple at Gaza” - a temple for which no extrabiblical evidence is known to exist.

The fact that “no similar statue has ever been found either in Gaza or elsewhere in Palestine” made the close observation and photographs of the Massâ^cîd statue contained in the article a source of valuable new information to the study of Hellenistic iconography in the Ancient Near East.  However, the author’s efforts to draw tenuous links between the Massâ^cîd statue and a Bronze and early Iron Age Semitic deity whose physical form is unknown, and whose very existence in Palestine is unattested outside of three biblical passages, was an unnecessary theoretical addition to the publication of an archaeological find.  The author’s dedication of so much space within the article to a quest to force the Massâ^cîd statue into an ill-fitting mold was unfortunate, as this find was important in its own right due to its workmanship and its status as the only one of its kind ever found in Palestine.

Conclusion

The close observation performed in the article, combined with the author’s photographs, provided the reader with a clear picture of the Massâ^cîd statue. However, the author’s attempt to associate this object with the Philistine god Dāgôn was far short of convincing.  In the absence of any extant statue or representation of Dāgôn, and of any extrabiblical evidence of this deity’s existence among the Philistines, attempting to associate any image with the supposed onetime chief deity of Gaza would have been a difficult undertaking.  This fact, combined with the tenuous etymological evidence for Dāgôn’s ichthyomorphic nature and the admitted similarities between the triton of Massâ^cîd and Greek iconography known elsewhere in the Hellenistic world, suggest that a more objective look at the evidence would have resulted in a different conclusion had the author of this article not been so determined to associate an important find with an early Iron Age deity for whose very existence there is precious little evidence.

To fully understand what a massive PWNing of the Left this was, it’s necessary to briefly look back at the last couple weeks of hype and debate over this ad. When it was reported that Tim Tebow (who, despite being a dirty, jeanshorts-wearing Florida Gator, is a model citizen and upstanding individual) was appearing in a Focus on the Family commercial with his mother which was being aired for the purpose of encouraging people to Choose Life, the Leftists in the media (a redundancy, I know) and in the political sphere went into a frenzy.

Is Tim Tebow endangering his NFL career by being political? asked ESPN, which features columns almost weekly that engage in political discussion by decrying racism in sports (such as accusing a college football teams of not scheduling an in-state school because of a fear of black people), patronizing blacks as inferiors who need Benevolent White Folks’ help to have a chance in life (see “Rooney Rule”), and by delving into plenty of other issues that have nothing to do with sports. Columnist Tim Keown even claimed that Tebow’s status as a Christian meant he was guaranteed to be exploited by “extreme-right fundamentalist groups that would love to trot him out as their hood ornament.”

NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and others went much farther in response to what they expected to be an affront to their pet issue — promoting abortion — and demanded that CBS refuse to accept Focus on the Family’s $2.5 million and turn away an ad whose whole purpose, they said, was “to create a climate in which Roe v. Wade can be overturned.”

“The spot, which has not been released, is said to feature Tebow…and his mother telling the story of her decision 23 years ago to ignore medical advice and continue a risky pregnancy,” reported the Washington Post. This, of course, was an untenable situation for these groups. “Focus on the Family has cynically set it up so they can say anyone who disagrees with airing this ad is disrespecting one woman and her choice!” declared NOW’s Terry O’Neill, in between frantic checks under her bed and in her closet for George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

When CBS refused to pull the ad, pro-abortion activists ratcheted up their alert level to DEFCON 1, and went into full character-assassination mode (for evidence, just peruse the 284,000 results of a Google search for “Pam Tebow liar”) while defending the decision to abort a baby as every bit “as tough and courageous a decision as is the decision to continue a pregnancy” in the pages of the Washington Post.

Needless to say, these tactics — in the face of silence from anybody at Focus or in the Tebow family — rubbed a good portion of the American population the wrong way. A good example of this was Sally Jenkins, the self-described pro-choice sports columnist at the Washington Post who wrote, “Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion.”

At that point, as Jenkins said, the ad hadn’t even run yet, and the pro-abortion left was already driving people away from their side with their growing cacophony of smears, outrageous claims, and demands that those who pick the “life” side of the “Choice” coin be silenced.

Then, after all of that buildup, the ad aired, and the pro-abortion left was revealed in all their horribly humiliated glory:

That — that — was the ad that caused the pro-abortion crowd to go into a frenzy of censorship advocacy, character assassination, and mask-slipping demonization of mothers who dare choose life over death for their unborn children.

In one fell swoop, Focus on the Family and the Tebows exposed the real pro-abortion left to a larger audience than, perhaps, had ever seen them in their natural state: as abortion-loving autocrats who despised Choice almost as much as (infant) life itself — all without really having to do anything.

Brilliant.

The fact that the commercial was not overtly pro-life (or anti-abortion) made the PWNing even sweeter, and likely brought far more people over to the Life side of the issue (or, at least, divorced them from the pro-abortion side) than an overtly anti-abortion spot would have. This is, in part, because the pro-abortion left used the run-up to the Super Bowl to reveal themselves to a massive audience as being solidly anti-Life and pro-abortion, and because the ad that actually ran demonstrated how laughably needless the left’s character assassination and censorship efforts really were.

On top of all that, the absence of an abortion message in the ad meant the pro-abortion left had to bear the entire burden of publicizing such a divisive and touchy issue all by themselves.

This was made possible, in part, by a brilliant non-information campaign. The ad’s contents were kept entirely secret until last night, with only the aforementioned media summary having been allowed to go public. In this absence of detail, the pro-abortion left immediately assumed the worst, treating the ad as though it would approach the issue as they do: by getting in people’s faces and shoving views down their throats.

The fact that Focus on the Family did nothing of the sort made the pro-abortion left’s smear-and-silence campaign into a massive overreaction — and made Focus’s effort an EPIC WIN for the pro-life side of the aisle.

The New Testament book of Matthew contains a well-known allegorical tale known as the “Parable of the Talents.” In this story, Jesus told of a man who entrusted his property to three servants while he was away. One servant was given five silver talents; another two; and a third one. The first two servants put that which their master had given them to good use, and doubled his money while he was away. The third servant, who had been given but one talent, buried the valuable quantity of silver to preserve it until his master returned, neither risking its safety nor putting it to good use while its owner was away.

Upon his return, the two servants who had taken that which he had entrusted them with and used it wisely during his absence presented their master with their earnings. He replied to each, “Well done, my good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.”

The third servant, who had merely protected that portion of his master’s wealth with which he had been entrusted, presented the single talent upon the man’s return. Seeing this, the master flew into a rage, chastising the “wicked, lazy servant” for allowing cowardice and irresponsibility to prevent his putting the master’s money to good use and ordering the servant to surrender his talent to the servant who had proved his resourcefulness and trustworthiness by doubling his master’s five talents.

The moral of this New Testament parable — be a good steward of a little and you will be trusted with more, but poor stewardship will lose you the privilege of being trusted with anything in the future — is recalled to mind by the federal government’s current attempt to take over the American health care system. The 33 years Medicare has been in existence have provided the federal government with an opportunity to demonstrate what type of steward its legislators and bureaucrats will be of a national health care program millions of Americans are trusting for their coverage and care.

“Medicare is… a government-run health care plan that people are very happy with,” said President Obama, at a late July town hall meeting in an effort to defend Medicare as a popular and successful example of government health care at its best.

A simple look at the numbers is enough to rebuff Obama’s claim that the program is an example of the federal government being a good steward of American health care dollars and coverage, while also serving to demonstrate the government’s inability to accurately predict the future costs of its programs (a very important fact to keep in mind in light of Congress’ claims that a health care overhaul can be undertaken without costing future generations trillions).

At its inception in 1966, Medicare carried an annual price tag of $3 billion. Its Congressional founders predicted that cost would rise to $12 billion a year by 1990 — a figure that accounted for inflation.

The true cost of Medicare is stunning. In 1990, rather than costing American taxpayers $12 billion, Medicare cost $107 billion — an increase of 800% over the government’s best guess at the program’s cost 23 years before. That cost has increased exponentially as the years have passed since 1990. This year, $484 billion will be spent on mandatory Medicare outlays; by 2018, that number will be $885.1 billion, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The total amount owed Medicare beneficiaries (American workers who are at least 22 years old and who have paid into the system, meaning they are due Medicare coverage upon retirement) is a staggering $32.3 trillion — an amount over twice America’s GDP, and nearly five times the publicized national debt.

The fact that the federal government has allowed a key health coverage program with which it has been entrusted to fall over thirty trillion dollars in debt should send a powerful message about Washington’s ability (or, more correctly, inability) to be a good steward of Americans’ health care dollars and coverage.

Further, the fact that Congress has refused to do away with a law requiring seniors to enroll in Medicare or forfeit their Social Security benefits — a regulation that is currently being challenged in federal court by a group of plaintiffs led by former Republican Congressman Dick Armey — for fear of losing massive numbers of seniors to private health coverage serves to reinforce the undesirability of the government-run program. It also demonstrates the federal government’s willingness, when given the opportunity, to force citizens onto the rolls of government care by denying them the opportunity to choose their coverage.

Medicare, the chief example of health care as run by the federal government, is an utter mess that is losing doctors, resorting to anti-choice laws to keep seniors enrolled, and hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars by the trillions. President Obama and his allies in the Democratic-led Congress should demonstrate their ability to be good stewards of the people’s health care dollars and coverage by fixing their own Medicare mess before they seek to expand their grip on America’s health care system as a whole.

]]> http://jeffemanuel.net/2009/08/wicked-lazy-servants-government-should-clean-up-its-own-medicare-mess-before-asking-to-be-trusted-with-the-entire-health-care-system/feed/ http://jeffemanuel.net/2009/08/5-myths-about-health-care-reform/ http://jeffemanuel.net/2009/08/5-myths-about-health-care-reform/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:00:07 +0000 Jeff Emanuel http://jeffemanuel.net/?p=477

The debate over health care reform — what constitutes it and what public opinion of such reform really is — has become more polarizing as the summer has gone on. Below are five key liberal talking points about health care “reform” and an accompanying dose of truth their peddlers so desperately need to hear.

1. Republicans, who either believe the health care status quo is perfectly acceptable or are in the pockets of lobbyists who pay them to say so, are opposed to the very idea of reform and want to block any effort to fix our health care system.

This is, of course, entirely untrue. Anybody can look at the American health care system — which is and continues to be the best in the world — and spot areas that are in need of improvement. Left and right differ in their views of what those problems are and how they are best dealt with. Republicans and conservatives only oppose “reform” outright if the term is limited to meaning the government-centric overhaul that the president and congressional Democrats are pushing.

Actual reform — a reduction in the dependence on third-party payers, increase in patient choice, reduction of costs, increase in personal freedom and control of health care dollars, added portability of health coverage, and reduced governmental interference — is almost universally supported on the right.

The two sides also differ in their approach to the other’s ideas. Conservatives look at the left’s proposals for “reform” and argue that — based on simple mathematics and economics, as well as on the physical evidence provided by states and countries who have already implemented the Democrats’ proposed solutions — implementing them will only make things worse. Liberals’ knee-jerk reaction to conservative counterproposals is to discard them out of hand because they do not rely on greater government influence and increased regulation to solve the health care system’s issues.

This is followed by accusations that those on the right either favor the status quo or are being paid by lobbyists and “big insurance” to spread the falsehood that “everything is fine” in American health care. The latter deserves no more attention than the brief moment it takes to point out how insulated a worldview is required to believe, as many on the left do, that their proposals and beliefs simply cannot be honestly opposed, and therefore any who publicly disagree with their policies must be getting paid off to do so.

Of course, the right is not defending the status quo in any way, shape, or form in the health care debate. Rather, conservatives are simply offering alternative, market- and individual freedom-friendly solutions while seeking to prevent a fundamental shift in our nation’s economy from being enacted without the relevant legislation even having been read or carefully considered first.

In fact, it is the left that has a recent history of declaring the status quo sufficient during a period of debate over reform. In 2005, when President Bush was pushing a partial privatization of Social Security in order to provide retirees with more control over their retirement dollars and to stave off the program’s looming bankruptcy (Social Security currently sits $20 trillion in the red), Democrats fought tooth-and-nail against the proposed overhaul, citing their belief that the program was not yet in “crisis” and therefore that no action whatsoever was needed.

2. President Obama’s health reform proposal is vastly popular among the people, representing the “collective will” of the American population.

This may be the number one myth driving the left’s passionate defense of their view of health “reform,” and the one which most reinforces their belief that opponents of President Obama’s proposal are in the pockets of Big Insurance or other special interests who pay them well for their active opposition. However, a simple look at public opinion polls will suffice to burst this bubble.

Support for Obama’s health overhaul proposal, which has been declining for months, is only 44 percent of Americans, according to Rasmussen. This is down from 46 percent who supported it in July, which is itself down from 50 percent in June. Further, 53 percent of Americans are now opposed to the Democrats’ “reform” plan that many liberals think represents the “collective will” of the American population.

The fact is, the more time that passes, and the more Americans learn about the Democrat proposal, the less popular it becomes — a key factor in Obama’s failed effort to rush his “reform” legislation through Congress as quickly as possible.

3. Everybody in America hates their insurance provider and has stories of themselves or someone they know being screwed over by an insurance company.

This assertion is so widely assumed to be true among Democrats that it formed the basis for a significant shift in presidential messaging on health care. Throughout his campaign and the first few months of his presidency, Barack Obama referred almost exclusively to “health care reform.” With fewer Americans supporting the idea of a top-to-bottom overhaul of the health care system, Obama and his fellow Democrats changed tack and went for a target they were certain every American could support fighting: so-called Big Insurance.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a public speech in which she referred to HMOs (which, lest we forget, were created by that now-arch-enemy of Big Insurance, Senator Ted Kennedy) as “villains” (though she has said she will not give back the money insurers have given to her campaign over the years), and President Obama himself has replaced the phrase “health care reform” with “health insurance reform.”

The problem with this assumption by Obama and the Democrats is that the sampling they relied on for this messaging shift is about as representative as that Pauline Kael consulted before her famous 1972 declaration that “everybody [she] knew” voted for George McGovern for president!

Generalizations and assumptions like this are a major reason why rigidly ideological leftists like Obama are genuinely mystified at the failure of their ideas and proposals to sweep through and inflame the populace like wildfire. Were Democrats to listen to those they purport to represent, rather than simply relying on that which they “know” to be true, they would know that going after individuals’ health insurers and providers is a losing proposition in this country.

Simple polling shows this to be the case. A July 1 Quinnipiac poll found that 85 percent of Americans are “satisfied” with their health insurance plan, with almost 58 percent of those being “very satisfied.” A June 20 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 77 percent were satisfied with their health care. Further, that same NYT/CBS poll found that 77 percent of insured Americans found health care “affordable.” At the end of May, a Rasmussen poll found that a comparatively paltry 70 percent of Americans rate their health coverage “good” or “excellent.” Much like the Obama “reform” plan has grown less popular as people have found out more about it, Americans’ opinions of their own coverage and care have improved as they have gotten a better look at the government-run alternative.

Further, not only do fewer people than Democrats expect have stories of being “screwed over” by their insurance company, but there are myriad examples of people being denied treatment and care by government-run health care programs and so-called “public options” of the type Obama and his allies wish to implement here. State governments have even gone to court here in the U.S. in an effort to have bureaucrats ruled more competent arbiters of medical decisions than medical professionals themselves.

Pointing out such facts almost invariably elicits the rebuttal “private insurance rations/denies care, too” — a response that is a complete non-starter as long as the goal posts in the health care reform debate remain where the Democrats laying out the playing field initially put them. The rationale for a government-centric health care overhaul has from the beginning centered on the ability of government to somehow do health care better — more humanely, more fairly, and more universally — than the pseudo-free market we currently have. Sadly, empirical evidence shows that such is not the case.

4. Republicans and “opponents of change” are employing scare tactics and peddling misinformation about the cost or contents of the health reform legislation in Congress and about President Obama’s proposal.

This has been the party line for the Democratic National Committee, MoveOn.org, the SEIU, and the Obama administration since opposition to their health care overhaul proposals began to take root among the general population. However, the actions of those pro-ObamaCare organizations — which amount to employing actual scare tactics and waging a misinformation campaign against those citizens who have turned out at town hall meetings across the country to express their concerns about the proposed health overhaul — have not been those of victimized policy proponents, but of professional agitators whose only experience dealing with people is as part of smear campaigns and astroturfing efforts, and whose knee-jerk reaction to dissent is to declare it “dangerous” and to quash it.

The information being repeated by opponents of President Obama’s health overhaul proposal comes from cost analyses published by the officially non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and from testimony by CBO director (and joint Nancy Pelosi/Robert Byrd appointee) Doug Elmendorf, as well as from ordinary citizens actually reading the health overhaul bills — an exercise many in Congress (and the president himself) have turned up their noses at repeatedly.

Publicly stating the contents of legislation, and asking those who will vote on whether that legislation becomes the law of the land, is neither an illegitimate scare tactic nor a misinformation campaign. On the other hand, sending union thugs to threaten protesters, calling on American citizens to turn their fellow men and women in to the government for questioning the president’s policy proposals online or in “casual conversation,” and rallying Democratic supporters by repeatedly and publicly referring to civic-minded citizens as a “dangerous mob” that must be countered and stopped are examples of both scare tactics and misinformation.

It’s just not coming from Republicans, or from those nefarious “opponents of change.”

5. Republicans are preventing health reform from taking place despite the best efforts of President Obama and Democrats in Congress.

The persistence of this myth speaks to both the lack of civics education in our school systems and the prevalence of partisan finger-pointing in the political discourse. The Democratic Party currently has 60 seats in the U.S. Senate — a filibuster-proof supermajority. If Senate Democrats actually want to pass a health overhaul bill, there is absolutely nothing the few Republicans in that body can do to stop them.

Further, Democrats have a 70-seat advantage in the House of Representatives. As Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) pointed out in July, this means every Republican representative could bring their surviving parents to a House vote and still not have a large enough contingent to defeat the Democrats on any legislation the latter wished to pass.

The Democrats got what they wished for — total control of Washington, D.C., and of the lawmaking and enforcing branches of government. However, liberals traditionally specialize in owning intentions, not results or consequences, meaning many are having difficulty accepting responsibility for enacting those policies they so steadfastly claim to support.

In the end, Democrats’ problems passing a health care overhaul bill are theirs and theirs alone, as are their problems enacting any other aspects of the sweeping liberal agenda so many of them — including the president — campaigned for office on.

Originally published by PajamasMedia.com

A series of recent polls showing that his health care proposal has fallen out of favor with a plurality of the American people — and that a majority are no longer predisposed to support a “universal” health care plan as they were before finding out that such a sweeping program would cost them money — has caused President Barack Obama to shift the focus of his health care overhaul evangelism.

Cast for the duration of his presidential campaign and the first six months of his presidency as a solution to the no-longer ignorable “crisis” of the 45 million American uninsured, Obama abruptly abandoned so-called “universal coverage” as the raison d’être for his single-minded pursuit of a health care overhaul, deciding instead to focus on the cost of health care for all, insured or not.

On July 13, Rasmussen Reports released a poll showing that more people (49 percent) opposed Obama’s health care proposal than favored it (46 percent) — the first time a major poll had produced this result. Further, according to a Rasmussen poll published July 18, 61 percent of Americans believe high costs are the biggest problem the nation’s health care system is currently facing. By contrast, only 21 percent had a lack of so-called “universal coverage” as their chief concern. Ten percent cited quality as the biggest problem with the health care system, and 2 percent said inconvenience in getting care.

These poll results seem to show that our health care system really isn’t in as much trouble as some would like us to think it is. After all, if the cost of lifesaving health treatments, rather than the quality of those treatments and access to them, is the biggest worry of a population, things just aren’t so bad, no matter what demagogues in Washington may say.

These Rasmussen polls also seem to show the folly of adopting the style of socialized medicine practiced in countries like Great Britain, where the cost of health care is far down the list of concerns, but where the quality of and access to lifesaving and life-prolonging treatments are incredibly serious problems.

Anecdotes revealing the high human cost associated with government-run health care gone wrong, United Kingdom-style, are endless. Emergency room patients have been left in ambulances outside hospitals for over 8 hours, in order for administrators to technically (and perversely) comply with a government decree that patients be seen by a physician within four hours of entering the hospital. Disabled children are being made to wait up to 2 years for wheelchairs because the government can’t — or won’t — provide them in a timely manner. The average wait is five months, and which children even receive such equipment then is determined by government lottery.

Women are being prevented from giving birth by cesarean section because bureaucrats in charge of health care have decided the procedure is too expensive — a rationale being offered by the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness for its rationing of care and denial of dozens of lifesaving and life-extending drugs, treatments, and procedures.

Earlier this year, a three-year-old girl had a heart operation delayed for the third time because of a lack of hospital beds.

Earlier this month, a veteran of the British military had to pull out 13 of his own teeth with pliers because he didn’t win the national lottery held to see which National Health Service patients would get a chance to see a dentist this year.

These stories, and more like them, are commonplace events in the government-run National Health Service (which Obama adviser and former nominee for Health and Human Services secretary Tom Daschle has openly said he wants the U.S. system to emulate).

The fact that polls are showing that the vast majority of Americans’ biggest concern is cost, not access, begs the question of what in the world makes Obama and congressional Democrats think trading America’s problem for Britain’s problems — inaccessible care that is low-quality at best when it can even be obtained — would bear the remotest of resemblances to a good idea.

With his newfound focus on costs, Obama — the supposedly post-political politician — is simply doing what politicians do: tailoring the sales pitch to what polls show the American people want to hear. Obama’s health care overhaul proposal hasn’t changed as a result of its new, cost-centric packaging; rather, the bills being demanded by the president and written by Congress will still do even less to bring down health care costs than they will to cover the 45 million uninsured.

The fact is, poll results that stark made the Obama administration’s decision to forsake the millions of uninsured in favor of beating the drum of cost-deflating legislation an easy one to make, despite the high level of energy and political capital the president had invested in playing up the plight of those uninsured.

Obama’s switch in emphasis hasn’t lessened the force with which he is advocating for government-run health care, nor has it curbed his sense of urgency about the passage of his overhaul proposal. On Monday, July 20, he repeated his demand that Congress pass a government-centric health care overhaul bill by the beginning of the August 1 recess, despite the fact that none of the three bills currently being worked on in the House and Senate have been completely written. In that address, Obama also emphatically declared that lowering health care costs is — and always has been — his number one priority. “I’ve said this before,” he said. “Let me repeat: The bill I sign must reflect my commitment and the commitment of Congress to slow the growth of health care costs over the long run.”

Unfortunately for the 45 million uninsured, the sudden jolt they and their supporters just felt was the presidential carpet being yanked out from under their feet, as Obama recognized that he couldn’t ride their plight to legislative victory. Further, an analysis of the House and Senate health care overhaul bills by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that they would enable only about a third of Americans (about 16 million) currently lacking insurance to gain coverage — something that, along with the Rasmussen poll results, made Obama’s decision to drop their predicament from its place of honor at the center of his health care overhaul stump speech all the easier.

Unfortunately for President Obama and for the 62 percent of Americans who see high costs as the number one problem with our system, the bills that have been put forth by the congressional Democratic majority would increase taxes while doing nothing to lower health care costs. You don’t have to take my word for it; CBO director Doug Elmendorf reported in his July 16 testimony before the Senate Budget Committee that those bills would add significantly to the national deficit, while doing nothing to “reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”

Unfortunately for the 100 percent of Americans who are consumers of health care, President Obama appears disinclined to back off his rigid insistence on trading the U.S.’s cost problem for Britain’s access, disease, and death problems — and on doing so as quickly as possible.

Were he to succeed in doing so, it would be an unfortunate outcome for all involved.

In an attempt to defend the trillion-dollar health care overhaul bills currently being marked up in Congress and to shift attention from his own actions to those of his predecessor, President Barack Obama (D-IL) declared in his July 18 radio address that “the same folks who controlled the White House and Congress for the past eight years as we ran up record deficits will argue — believe it or not — that health reform will lead to record deficits. That’s simply not true.”

Leave aside for the moment the fact that any deficit-spending records set in “the past eight years” were wiped out by Obama himself within a single month of taking office. Also leave aside the fact that the president’s ire was misdirected (it was the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, who made that indictment of the health care overhaul bills currently in Congress). The truth is, Obama’s claim to suddenly care about deficit spending at all is belied by his actions and his administration’s statements on a range of issues, from nationalized health care to the so-called “stimulus” package.

In that radio address, Obama urged legislators to “seize this opportunity — one we might not have again for generations — and finally pass health insurance reform this year.” He issued what was intended to sound like a warning along with that plea, saying, “I want to be very clear [that] I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.”

While this statement was carefully worded to sound like an admonition to legislators against producing a health care overhaul bill that isn’t revenue-neutral, the phrase “deficits over the next decade” is a direct reference to the recommended “Pay-As-You-Go” (or “PayGo”) policy Obama asked Congress to pass in June.

Room for One Man’s Priorities

At the time, Obama called on Congress to “to rein in deficits by addressing [current] challenges in a manner that is fiscally responsible.” This, Obama said, meant offsetting each new “expenditure” (including both spending and tax cuts) with a corresponding increase in revenue. The latter, of course, is poorly-disguised code for tax increases, generally targeted at the top 1% of wage earners who are already paying well over half of total taxes in America.

Though Republicans governed under pay-as-you-go guidelines from 1995 until 2001, Democrats added the policy to House budgeting rules shortly after taking control of the Congress in 2007. However, the policy has been waived or ignored several times since due to an unwillingness on the part of Democratic leaders to meet rising entitlement spending with corresponding budget cuts.

Obama’s stated hope is that the policy being enshrined into law will make it more difficult for Congress to waive or bypass it in the future when they want to fund pet projects without cutting spending in other areas. However, the proposed PayGo legislation he transmitted to Congress does allow for the rule to be bypassed in key areas important to Obama — like his trillion dollar health care overhaul.

Under Obama’s PayGo proposal, lawmakers would have free rein to run up massive deficits in the first several years following passage of health care-nationalizing legislation. In fact, as long as their legislation contained a plan for neutralizing those deficits over the ten-year horizon — even if they had no intention of actually letting the necessarily massive spending cuts or tax increases ever come into being — Congressional Democrats could pass as costly a health care overhaul bill as they wanted. Obama would be free to sign such a bill, as well, without breaking his pledge to veto it, having lived up to his promise not to give the thumbs-up to “any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.”

Deficits Suddenly Matter?

Obama’s sudden focus on reining in that deficit spending not associated with his multi-trillion dollar health care overhaul may come as a surprise to those who recall the rushed passage of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or “stimulus package.” Funded entirely by deficit spending — every one of the $787,000,000,000.00 spent by that legislation was borrowed and went directly onto the debt side of the nation’s balance sheet — the “stimulus” gave the (at the time) month-old Obama administration the record for an annual American deficit, blowing past the roughly $450 billion rung up in the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

This new record deficit came only months after then-candidate Obama twice looked America in the eye during presidential debates and promised a net cut in federal spending. Since the “stimulus” was passed and signed into law (without being read in its entirety by a single voting member of Congress or by the president who signed it), Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have attempted to evade responsibility for the astronomical debt it created, as well as for the utter failure of that massive exercise in deficit spending to create jobs or bring about any semblance of economic recovery.

Passing the Buck

The administration “misread how bad the economy was,” said Biden, in a lame effort to excuse the failure of the three quarters of a trillion dollars he, Obama, and the Democratic Congress added to the nation’s deficit to create jobs and stimulate recovery. Obama added to that a claim that there was a “lack of information” during the first days of his presidency about just how bad an economic situation he had “inherited” from Bush. The obvious question of why the administration didn’t wait until they actually had reliable information on the economy before setting a new debt record in one fell swoop went predictably unaddressed.

Further, Biden’s words seem to run counter to Obama’s new found belief in balanced budgets — and of proof of positive outcomes. “We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt,” the vice president declared at an Alexandria, Virginia, town hall sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).

“We’re doing things that we know are going to save you, your children and your grand children billions of dollars over the next years,” Biden said, “but we’re not able to prove it.”

Will “we’re right, but we just can’t prove it!” still be the rallying cry of the Obama administration when the entirety of the borrowed “stimulus” money has been spent and jobs still haven’t materialized? Or when Congress predictably decides not to offset the trillions in deficit spending Obama’s PayGo exception is allowing them to engage for the purpose of enacting health care “reform”? Or when the American health care system becomes the costly wreck that is Great Britain’s utterly failed National Health Service, as a result of a poorly-thought out, government-centric health care overhaul being pushed through Congress and signed into law without any serious consideration of the consequences?

For now that remains an open question. If history is any guide, though, the answer to that question will be a resounding “yes.”

Perhaps the most absurd bit of news to come out of Washington this week - and that’s saying a lot - was the announcement by the Pentagon Office of Clinical and Program Policy that it is recommending a blanket ban on the usage of tobacco products by members of the U.S. military.

The recommendation comes after a Department of Defense-commissioned study by the anti-tobacco organization Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported that the negative health effects of tobacco use “cost the Pentagon $846 million a year in medical care and lost productivity.” The report, which also claimed the Department of Veterans Affairs spends up to $6 billion in treatments for tobacco-related illnesses,” says, “Given the critical need for a strong and healthy military, the harmful effects of tobacco use on military readiness, and the short- and long-term health and financial burden of tobacco use on military personnel, retirees, families, and veterans, the time has come for DoD and VA to assign high priority to tobacco control.”

IOM recommended making all military installations tobacco-free zones and requiring new recruits to be tobacco-free, among other anti-tobacco measures. Though she did not comment on the proposed ban itself, Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith told USA Today newspaper that “the [DOD] supports a smoke-free military and believes it is achievable.”

As American As Apple Pie

Tobacco use is as ingrained a part of military culture as battlefield discipline and, for better or worse, swearing. At least one in three service members is a tobacco user of some sort, according to the IOM study - a number that is, if anything, understated. That number, unsurprisingly, grows far higher among those who are engaged in stressful combat operations.

There are few perks, and even fewer freedoms, associated with being a volunteer member of our armed forces. Long hours, harsh conditions, lengthy deployments far from home, and enemy fire are realities for these men and women who dedicate at least a portion of their lives to standing guard, on our behalf, on freedom’s frontier.

The ability to purchase tax-free goods on military installations is one of those perks, and many soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines choose to use what small income they receive in exchange for their service to purchase tobacco products.

It is already shameful that nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who are considered adult enough to lead men into combat as noncommissioned officers are legally unable to consume alcohol; whether these men and women consume cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco because they help alleviate battlefield stressor because they simply enjoy consuming them, the ability to smoke a cigarette or “throw in a dip” is one which America’s servicemembers shouldn’t be begrudged.

Yes, tobacco has been proven to cause both short and long-term health problems - but are we really going to preach about health benefits of their activities to Americans we pay (albeit poorly) to be shot at for a living?

Besides an outright ban, raising prices on tobacco products purchased on military installations, combined with an aggressive anti-smoking campaign, has been suggested as an alternative path to smoking cessation. Proponents of such a move, which include anti-tobacco activist and “architect of California’s anti-tobacco program” Kenneth Kinzer, accuse the military of complicating their eradication efforts by “subsidizing” the purchase of tobacco products purchased on military installations.

Such “subsidies” are, of course, the stuff of utter myth. Rather than having their purchases of tobacco products subsidized, military personnel, whose on-post purchases are almost entirely tax-free, actually pay the equivalent of a tax on their cigarettes and chew, making the prices higher than they would be otherwise.

The federal cigarette tax currently sits at $1.01 per pack. Though almost all goods purchased on military installations are tax-free, tobacco is handled differently than other products. By Department of Defense regulation, cigarettes must be priced 5% below “the lowest civilian competitor price,” tax included. This means a $5 pack of cigarettes could be purchased on-post for $4.75 - not exactly a massive savings, and certainly not a “subsidy.”

Further, much as our federal government depends on revenue from tobacco products to fund health care programs like its massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the military uses almost the entire remainder of the sale price that would have gone to the tobacco tax to fund Morale, Recreation, and Welfare (MWR) and much-needed spousal and family support programs.

Time, Effort Better Spent Elsewhere

The U.S. military is not a social Petri dish for use in engineering or experimentation, whatever Democrat presidents past and present may think. It has far greater responsibilities and concerns than whether or not its men and women, who continue to be the best in the world at what they do, engage in the safe and voluntary use of a 100% legal product.

Further, a policy banning tobacco use in the military - let alone in combat zones - either cannot, or will not, be enforced. I was in the military when the “no tobacco use inside military buildings” order came down from on high - and it was, among combat troops at least, almost universally ignored. Attempting to impose such silly, and laughably unenforceable, policies on our fighting men and women simply degrades military discipline, particularly among the junior enlisted ranks, by making a mockery of regulation as a whole.

IOM’s appeal to the need for a “strong, healthy military,” and its expressions of concern about the effect tobacco use has on physical fitness, is a non-starter, as well. Every branch of the military has physical fitness standards which must be met, regardless of bad habits or extracurricular activities. If soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines can meet the physical standards their respective chains of command have set for them, what they legally do in their own time should be considered entirely irrelevant, as it has been demonstrably shown to have no effect on their ability to meet those standards.

Finally, the fact that tobacco use by our military is receiving so much attention, and policies curbing or banning its use are receiving so much consideration, demonstrates a lack of seriousness on the topic of military affairs by far too many outside observers and civilian leaders, including the Secretary of Defense and those above him in the chain of command.

This column was originally published at CBSNews.com

The following op-ed was published in USA Today newspaper as the official “opposing view” to the paper’s editorial, “Our view on tobacco in the military: How to curb soldiers’ smoking,” which can be seen here.

Tobacco use is as ingrained a part of military culture as battlefield discipline and, for better or worse, swearing. At least one in three servicemembers is a tobacco user of some sort, and that number is, unsurprisingly, far higher among those men who are actually engaged in combat operations.

There are few perks, and even fewer freedoms, associated with being a volunteer member of our armed forces. Long hours, harsh conditions, lengthy deployments far from home, and enemy fire are realities for these men and women who dedicate at least a portion of their lives to standing guard, on our behalf, on freedom’s frontier.

The ability to purchase subsidized or tax-free goods on military installations is one of those perks, and many soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines choose to use what small income they receive in exchange for their service to purchase tobacco products. It is already shameful that nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who are considered adult enough to lead men into combat as noncommissioned officers are legally unable to consume alcohol; whether these men and women consume cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco because they help alleviate battlefield stressor because they simply enjoy consuming them, the ability to smoke a cigarette or “throw in a dip” is one which America’s servicemembers shouldn’t be begrudged.

Yes, tobacco has been proven to cause both short and long-term health problems – but are we really going to preach about the health benefits of their activities to Americans we pay (albeit poorly) to be shot at for a living?

The federal cigarette tax currently sits at $1.01 per pack. Though almost all goods purchased on military installations are tax-free, tobacco is handled differently than other products. By Department of Defense regulation, cigarettes must be priced 5% below “the lowest civilian competitor price,” tax included. This means a $5 pack of cigarettes could be purchased on-post for $4.75 – not exactly a massive savings. Further, much as our federal government depends on revenue from tobacco products to fund health care programs and other projects, the military uses almost the entire remainder of the sale price that would have gone to the tobacco tax to fund Morale, Recreation, and Welfare (MWR) and much-needed spousal and family support programs.

The U.S. military is not a social Petri dish for use in engineering or experimentation. It has far greater responsibilities and concerns than whether or not its men and women, who continue to be the best in the world at what they do, engage in the safe and voluntary use of a legal product. The fact that tobacco use by our military is receiving so much attention, and policies curbing or banning its use are receiving so much consideration, demonstrates a lack of seriousness on the topic of military affairs by far too many outside observers and civilian leaders.

Jeff Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, served in the U.S. Air Force from 1999-2004. He worked in Iraq as a combat journalist in 2007.

Anyone who remembers, say, his campaign pronouncement that a Kansas tornado had left “ten thousand dead” and “an entire town destroyed” (the 2007 storm actually killed twelve people) knows that President Barack Obama (D-IL) hasn’t been one to worry about playing fast and loose with a few facts or numbers.

However, his dogged refusal to deviate from his standard talking point of “150,000 jobs created or saved” by the $787,000,000,000.00 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the “stimulus package,” or, my personal favorite, “Porkulus”) is beginning to lend itself to more than a little head-scratching by observers.

A Claim Unchanged by Time

Mr. Obama and his administration have been making the claim for several weeks now. On May 27, “White House economic advisers” announced the “stimulus” had “created or saved 150,000 jobs” since its inception 100 days before — an average increase (or savings) of about 1,500 jobs a day. Twelve days later, on June 8, Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) made the same proclamation on a conference call with reporters: the stimulus had “saved or created 150,000 [jobs]” to date.

Theoretically, there should have been about 18,000 more jobs than that, given the twelve day interval between the May 27 announcement and the June 8 call, but never mind that. Just for good measure, despite the fact economists and simple observers who had the virtue of being awake alike were throwing up their hands in disbelief that a presidential administration would actually make such a claim about something as obviously incalculable as a “saved” job, Biden added the assertion that there had been “no ‘reasonable’ challenges to the estimates.”

Last Wednesday, July 8 — a full 30 days after the Biden conference call, and 42 after the initial 100 day claim of “150,000 jobs created or saved,” Mr. Obama’s deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget announced the “stimulus” had — you guessed it! — “created or saved 150,000 jobs since its inception in February.”

Why Settle for Millions When You Can Have 150,000?

Judging by the administration’s own claims alone, that’s one stimulus package that seems to have lost its, well, stimulation. Interestingly, Mr. Obama Himself said in early June — just after he first made the 150,000 job claim — that he was “not satisfied” with the package’s progress. Then this past Saturday, July 11 — after a full month of no job creation or savings, according to his administration’s claims — he suddenly declared that the stimulus had been a success, and that it has “worked as intended.”

So the intent of this $787,000,000,000.00 legislation, which the president claimed would “create or save 3.5 to 4 million jobs,” was actually to “create or save” 150,000 jobs in the first 100 days, then hold fast at that number? That seems like a wise investment — only $5.25 million of taxpayers’ dollars per job!

Don’t Look at This Website Number

Funnily enough, the one official deviation from this line is on Mr. Obama’s website. There, an interactive map which purports to track the number of “jobs created or saved by the Recovery Act” in every state in the Union claims 1,086,000 jobs “created or saved” in the states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York alone.

How these amazingly inflated numbers were arrived at is likely as much above Joe Biden’s “pay grade” to determine or explain (his words) as is the Obama administration’s method of coming up with the 150,000 number.

Real Numbers

All of this comes, of course, amidst one ironclad fact: the American economy has shed nearly 2.3 million jobs since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by Mr. Obama, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During that period, the unemployment rate has climbed from 8.1% to 9.5%.

Add to that the admission from Dr. Cristina Romer, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, that the administration has no way of telling how many jobs were “created or saved” because they simply don’t have a baseline to work off of.

From a CNBC transcript:

MARIA BARTIROMO [Host]: When the stimulus was first announced, the President said that he expected that in the coming years the administration, based on the policies on economic revival could save or create 3.5 million jobs. At this point does the administration know how many jobs have been created or saved?

ROMER: You know, it’s very hard to say exactly because you don’t know what the baseline is. Because you don’t know what the economy would have done without it.

This is noteworthy for two major reasons.

First, this appears to be the first time an Obama official has stepped in front of the renowned (and feared) Obamabus and admitted there is simply no way to prove the employment numbers Mr. Obama and his staff have been throwing around aren’t just made up from thin air.

Second — and this may be the most important — Romer is coauthor of the report that established the baseline numbers and formula for calculating jobs supposedly “created or saved” by the stimulus. It was her report that initially made the claim that the “stimulus” would “create or save” 3.5 to 4 million jobs. Further, she and her council released a report just this week — “Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow” — that Mr. Obama claimed in his radio address last weekend “confirms that our plan will likely save or create three to four million jobs.”

Which is it, Mr. Obama? Dr. Romer, who wrote this report, says there’s simply no way to tell how many jobs have been “saved or created” — yet you claim the same person’s report proves you right and gives hard numbers.

All the while, hundreds of thousands of real, calculable, and documentable jobs are being lost by real Americans every month, who live in real cities and towns across the country. How’s that for stimulus success?

Though it falls outside his original target of being within 100 days of taking office, President Barack Obama is keeping a pre-inauguration promise by “mak[ing] a major speech from an Islamic capital” this week in Cairo, Egypt.

Obama made what was considered by many to be the safest (and most “obvious”) choice in selecting Cairo for his “high-profile speech that would seek to mend rifts between the United States and the broader Muslim world.” Unfortunately, by deciding to play it safe, a president whose life to this point has revolved around an obsession with being “historic” missed out on a truly historic opportunity.

Cairo “Feels Bold”

Last December, when the incoming administration first floated the idea of Obama making a major speech from an Islamic capital, pundits, and bloggers alike immediately zeroed in on Cairo as the “perfect” choice - one that is safe, but “feels bold,” in the words of New York Times reporter Helene Cooper.

“Egypt is perfect,” wrote Cooper. “It’s certainly Muslim enough, populous enough and relevant enough. It’s an American ally, but there are enough tensions in the relationship that the choice will feel bold. The country has plenty of democracy problems, so Mr. Obama can speak directly to the need for a better democratic model there.”

The “democracy problems” Cooper and her allies in the media paid lip service to in their pronouncements of Cairo’s perfection are far more than just a passing concern. Just over three years ago, Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak promised nationwide parliamentary elections, a positive development coming on the heels of the first contested presidential election since the 1952 overthrow of Egypt’s ruling monarchy. Unfortunately, “the election was marred by widespread violations, fraud and the arrest and detention of hundreds of opposition supporters,” Saad Edin Abrahim wrote in the Los Angeles Times shortly after the election. That campaign of intimidation, which included the arrest and imprisonment of Mubarak’s chief challenger, resulted in a voter turnout of barely 20 percent and in Mubarak’s allies maintaining their dominance of Egypt’s government.

Baghdad the Clear Choice

If President Obama was as committed to actually being historic as he is to talking about being so, he would have taken advantage of the opportunity left him by former president George W. Bush and made his appeal to the pan-Muslim world from Baghdad, Iraq. A Muslim state by any reasonable definition of the word, Iraq has become, outside the tiny state of Israel, the only functioning democracy in an incredibly volatile region of the world where the U.S. has myriad interests.

Further, the move to normalize relations with Iraq has seen significant progress in recent months, with as evidenced by the Iraqi parliament’s approval of two landmark agreements cementing the American-Iraqi relationship as an alliance of “independent, equal states of sovereignty.”

The Status of Forces and Strategic Framework Agreements, which were passed by a parliament made up of sectarian officially “normalized the U.S.-Iraqi relationship with strong economic, diplomatic, cultural, and security ties” and will serve “as the foundation for a long-term bilateral relationship based on mutual goals,” said President Bush in an address shortly after the agreements were approved.

These agreements were passed by an Iraqi parliament made up of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds - groups which had been fighting a bloody sectarian war against their fellow countrymen speaks volumes about how far Iraq has come in such a brief time.

The recognition and establishment successful, democratic Iraq which is a stalwart U.S. ally would truly be a transformational event in the Middle East - and, by choosing Baghdad as a location for his first major Presidential address on foreign soil, Barack Obama could make it clear to the U.S. and the world - particularly the Islamic world - that he understands the importance of the new Iraq, and that America stands ready to join in an equal partnership with any nation, Muslim or no, which is willing to embrace freedom and peace with its neighbors, and to join the fight against terrorism.

Leave Grudges at the Door

Cooper summed up the “problem” posed by Baghdad as a potential speech site for President Obama in December, writing in the Times that speaking from that particular Islamic capital “could appear to validate the Iraq war, which Mr. Obama opposed.”

Rather than falling prey to such a petty, small-minded concern, Obama and his advisers should have recognized that this was one of several reasons why Baghdad was the perfect location for his pan-Islamic address.

Speaking from Baghdad would have publicly demonstrated the self-proclaimed “non-ideological,” “post-partisan” Obama’s ability to put aside his pre-presidential view on the invasion of Iraq aside and, in true statesmanlike fashion, embrace the Iraqi democracy as the ally it now is. Embracing and honoring the new Iraq in such a public way would have sent an even more powerful message to the Islamic world because of Obama’s opposition to the invasion itself, and because of his opposition to the shift in military strategy that pulled Iraq from the depths of sectarian war and made it what it is today.

Further, such a decision would have demonstrated that the inexperienced American president understands the value of the democratic state that resulted from an effort he opposed, and would have sent the message that Obama truly was what he constantly makes himself out to be: a high-minded statesman who is willing to put partisan ship and petty squabbles aside and to work for the purpose of building and maintaining alliances with members of the international community (in this case, with Iraq).

Tabula Rasa on Israel-Palestine

Iraq is unique in another significant way: it presents the lone location in the Muslim world from which the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be addressed free of clouding by the current regime’s statements actions. With the great emphasis Obama has put on “solving” the squabble he sees as the root of all Middle Eastern conflict to this point in his presidency, Baghdad offers an unmatched opportunity to address the Muslim world in general, and the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular, from the capital of a nation whose fledgling government has no history of supporting one side or the other in that millennial struggle.

Egypt can make no such claim. Though it has been party to peace talks and treaties with the Jewish state in the past, it was also an aggressor in the Six Days’ War against Israel, and its northern territory currently houses tunnels through which arms are sent into the blockaded Gaza Strip, where Hamas terrorists employ them against Israeli civilians in the southern cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. Further, senior Egyptian officials have gone on the record accusing the “Jews of Palestine” (modern Israel) of “killing children, old people, and women and ignoring taboos,” and of injecting civil Judaism with “their poisons, which are against all humanity.”

Egypt, in other words, has clearly staked out its position on the Palestinian side of the conflict between the Israeli population and those who virulently - and often violently - oppose them.

From providing cash payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who died to kill Israeli civilians, to sending surface-to-surface missiles over Jordan and into Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein was a similarly avowed enemy of Israel and supporter of Palestinian terrorism. However, with the overthrow of Saddam and the accession of a democratic government that has few if any ties to the late tyrant, Iraq is now the one nation in the entirety of the Middle East whose slate is virtually blank when it comes to Israel-Palestine policy and interference. In a region as polarized around a single issue as the Middle East is on Israel-Palestine, this virtue provides Baghdad with a value too great to be expressed in mere words.

Standing as Equals

Finally, a decision by President Obama to visit Baghdad as an equal of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would have sent the crystal-clear message to an Islamic world suspicious of American motives that Iraq is not a U.S. puppet state, but that is stands in sovereign equality to an America that is ready and willing to stand on equal footing with any Muslim nation that respects the rights of its people and those of other nations, and that actively repudiates terror both within its borders and without.

Obama’s choice of location for this address could have sent a powerful message to the Islamic world that the face of the Middle East was changing. Further, he could have used this opportunity to signal America’s willingness to deal openly, honestly, and as equal allies with Muslim nations who comport themselves in a manner consistent with America’s interests and values.

Unfortunately, in ultimately deciding to pass up Iraq with all its attributes in favor of a member of the Middle East’s “old guard” that has as few relevant attributes and as poor a record on human rights and honest democracy as Egypt, a president who is desperate to be “historic” and “transformational” missed a golden opportunity to be just that.