Ninety one years ago, in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the armistice was proclaimed that ended the terrible fighting in World War I.  A war that had erupted in large part because Europe’s political leaders, a century on from the Napoleonic conflicts, were accustomed to war remaining limited, produced some of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The six-month battle of the Somme in 1916 took the lives of an unimaginable 1.5 million French, German, and British soldiers – without either side achieving sustainable penetration of the line of confrontation, or any operational victory. WWI was the most tactically and politically frustrating of wars, admitting little maneuver, little jockeying for advantage, and no enduring significance to victory.

But it marked the debut of the United States on the stage long occupied by the great powers of Europe, as American soldiers boarded troop ships to head “Over There,” and with their numbers and supplies, along with improving mobile tactics in the battles of 1918, turned the tide in favor of the Western alliance.

The shootings at Fort Hood on 5 November have thrown into strong relief the great conundrum facing the liberal West today:  how to administer freedom of conscience and thought, in the face of an ideological religion that, as practiced by its radical or fundamentalist adherents, is diametrically opposed to those very liberties.

A great many right-wing pundits have made a great many good points in the last few days, about manifold signs of trouble from Major Nidal Hasan, and those signs apparently being ignored by the Army.  Not only did he talk to his colleagues about his intense opposition to the War on Terror, he was fingered by the FBI for comments in an online forum in which he approved the actions of suicide bombers.  Colleagues knew he thought it was profoundly wrong for the US to be in a war with Islamists and to be fighting it in Muslim countries.

I love Peggy Noonan to death.  No, really.  She’s long been a favorite columnist of mine, and a delightful chronicler of Reagan and his years in office.  Bless her heart.

Alert readers probably sense a “but” coming here.

Tuned in to the conservative zeitgeist in 2009, she’s not.

In this seemingly endless period of indecision, all critiques of the Obama administration’s emerging (or not) approach to Afghanistan require the caveat:  If this is what they decide to do.

So consider the caveat posted.  In the interest of fairness, we must also note that it took George W. Bush time to decide to adopt the surge strategy in Iraq; although that situation is an imperfect analogy with Obama and Afghanistan in some key ways.  Unlike Obama, Bush had not announced a new strategy in Iraq only to begin backtracking on it when presented with the requirements for executing it.  Even more important, Bush did not at any point between 2003 and 2009 revise his objective for the campaign in Iraq.  All the deliberations in the period between the first battle of Fallujah and implementation of the surge strategy centered on what strategy to use, to achieve that constant objective.

Which leads me to the import of the deliberations currently underway in the top circle of Obama’s advisors.

How Do YOU Feel About “Redistribution”?

A recent discussion at another blog has reminded me that the concept of “redistribution” – of wealth, income, etc – is a heavy, heavy burden on our thinking about politics and economics, and one that, now more than ever, we all need to get straight in our minds.

We are in a dangerous and vulnerable political period today.  A political faction in America is seeking to implement an intentionally redistributionist agenda, and in my view has been surprisingly straightforward about that.  The practices of the past – obfuscating all drives toward collectivist redistributionism with invocations of compassion and emotional anecdote – have been left behind.  Politicians on the left today are making only the most perfunctory obeisance to feel-good obfuscation, and are working – quite avowedly, in many cases – toward coercive schemes intended to accomplish redistributionist goals.

We need to armor our thoughts on this subject.

So.  Big election coming up.  The off-year gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey can’t help being significant, of course.  They always are, even when Americans are not in the midst of what may be the greatest national debate over our political direction since 1860.  There are elections in many of the states, from the race to fill Ellen Tauscher’s seat in California’s 10th district, to the 11 constitutional amendments being voted on in Texas, to the seven seats in the Georgia statehouse being filled by special election, and the school board pick in my own town in the California Southland.

But of course the race that is suddenly front and center is the one for John McHugh’s seat in the 23rd Congressional district of New York.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, writing today about Pat Leahy’s dismissal of constitutional questions about the individual insurance mandate, vectored me onto this August 2009 piece by David Rivkin and Lee Casey.  In it they cite the principles, backed up by case law, that make it unconstitutional for the federal government to levy an individual mandate to purchase health insurance.

The bottom line for Rivkin and Casey is, first, that an individual health insurance mandate simply doesn’t fall under any kind of activity the courts have ever held that the federal government has the power to regulate.  Second, attempting to regulate it with a purchase mandate would violate principles the court has previously affirmed.

The debate, as discussed at the end of my earlier post, is most definitely taking place out there.  The individual mandate is not just a constitutional issue, of course.  It is one, but it is also the principal means by which Congress is looking to extract money from the people to fund transformation of our health care system.  The focus on the federal budget is misleading, whether CBO projections are showing large deficits or not.  All four of the Democrats’ plans will cost us a lot of money, whether through the mandate to buy insurance or through increased taxes of various kinds.

Nevertheless, it is particularly significant that there is no constitutional basis for levying this mandate.  How odd that so many Americans seem to have lost the sense that constitutional limitations are an indispensable guarantor of liberty, and now disparage this question as unimportant.

It’s one of those events for which you remember where you were, like 9/11 or the Challenger disaster.  You remember seeing it on TV and experiencing remarkable thoughts and emotions for days, like the terrible assassinations of the late 1960s or Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf coast.  Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down?

You

How do you add 25 million people to the rolls of the “health insured,” “without adding to the federal deficit?”

Simple:  make the people pay for it in other ways.  The principal methods under the Baucus bill would be increasing health insurance premiums for the privately insured, and cutting Medicare services.

The cost of private insurance premiums will, according to a study done by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), increase by about $4000 a year by 2019 for the average household.  The cost of “Cadillac” insurance plans will increase by 40% over and above any regulation-driven cost increase, since they would be subject to a 40% tax.  The dollar value of a “Cadillac” plan in the Baucus bill is $8000 (in annual premiums) for an individual, and $21,000 for a family.  The Baucus bill projects (in fact, is counting heavily on) revenues of $201 billion from this tax.

A four-person household headed by a 45-year-old making $63,000 a year would pay $7110 out of pocket for private insurance under the Baucus legislation.

I applaud Liz Cheney for starting her new organization Keep America Safe.  Two things are coming together here:  Liz Cheney’s intelligence and acerbic focus, and the fast-emerging – really fast-emerging – need for coherent policy alternatives to President Obama on national security.  Cheney has the pedigree to turn Keep America Safe into a 21st-century Committee on the Present Danger, and become a policy hub for the GOP candidate of 2012.

Following this analogy, I would recommend nothing so much as studying how Ronald Reagan – who famously heeded the analysis and advice of the Committee on the Present Danger – approached our national security policy.  He actually reversed the policy trend of 35 years’ worth of predecessors, and he did it on four key principles that remain centrally relevant today. We cannot do better than to look at those principles to establish a sound basis for national policy.