The Obama administration, wisely in my view, seems to mostly eschew the “war on terror” catchphrase. Lately, that fact has become the basis of a lot of nonsense smears from the usual suspects. Representative Pete Hoekstra, meanwhile, has been on a tear ever since the Underpants Bomber struck, seeking to leverage the failed attack into political gain. He’s ridden this stuff all the way to a booking on ABC tomorrow morning. I wonder if he’ll get asked about his take on the “war on terror” business from back in the spring of 2008:

Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, in an interview said the phrase ”war on terror” was the “dumbest term…you could use”. The Michigan lawmaker, who criticises the Bush administration for using an overly aggressive tone, says he has urged Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, not to use the expression.

Ever since the Bush administration first unveiled the term, my feeling has been that this is an overdebated issue and it doesn’t matter all that much one way or another. That said, “war on terror” does seem to me to have a variety of bad implications, including the fact that it’s hard to see how you’re ever going to be able to say you’ve “won” something like a “war on terror.”

Marc Lynch has a smart post on Yemen that all and sundry should read.

Obviously, I’m no kind of Yemen expert. But in the broadest possible sense the challenge posed by these kind of problems is that you need to find a middle ground in terms of commitment. The risk, as Lynch says, is that if you make hasty decisions in response to political pressure you wind up overcommitting in a way that leads to investing too little attention and resources to other places. You need to be able to say that the United States has interests in Yemen, and interests in Afghanistan, and interests in Pakistan, and interests in other countries without any of these things necessarily being an “existential threat” or a “war of necessity.”

To review some recent political history, after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives enacted budgetary measures that led to large and growing deficits. These were scaled back to some extent on a bipartisan basis in the late 1980s and during the administration of moderate Republican George HW Bush. Then in 1993 under Bill Clinton a bill was enacted that sharply reduced the deficit, conservatives argued that it would destroy the economy and Republicans uniformly voted against it. Then under Georeg W Bush, conservatives enacted budgetary measures that led to large and growing deficits. Then under Barack Obama, congress has been debating a health care bill that the CBO says will slightly reduce the deficit in the future. At the moment, it seems that zero Republicans will vote for such legislation:

Thus the stage is set for today’s David Ignatius column:

The test case this year for Californiazation will be the health-care bill. Democrats’ desire to provide universal access to care is right, but the country has to pay for it. Indeed, we have to lower the cost of delivering health care so that paying this bill won’t be a crushing economic burden.

We should judge President Obama and Congress this year on whether they’re paying for the promises they make — and providing real reform that cuts costs, rather than another political goody bag.

Yes, sir, that’s right—no mention of the fact that the bill contains offsets and is scored as reducing the deficit. Democrats should be judged on that, but Ignatius won’t judge them! Because the judgment would have to be good! And Republicans are not judged at all!

We have in this country one political party that doesn’t care at all about the budget deficit. And we have another political party that gets crapped on by the establishment every time it attempts to deal with deficits. Under the circumstances, how long can it possibly be until we have two parties that evince Bush/Reagan-esque levels of concern for the deficit?

The fact that voting behavior is so heavily driven by macroeconomic trends has some positive benefits. It means that incumbents have a strong incentive to implement policies that are conducive to growth. And the industrialized democracies of the world do, indeed, normally see economic growth.

Meanwhile, Ace of Spades doesn’t like the left’s take on terrorism:

The left has four political goals:

1) To reverse the public perception that they are a bunch of sissy-pants (not Sassypants, which is altogether different).

2) To de-emphasize terrorism as a media issue, because terror concerns play well for conservatives. (See Goal 1 and the sissy-pants problem.)

3) To sell the public, politically, on a hateful policy of treating terrorists nicely, because, like, Dostoyevsky said something like “you can judge a nation by the way it treats psychotic murder-cultists intent on killing as many innocent civilians as possible for no other reason except to masturbate in human blood.”

4) To actually reduce terrorism, because doing so achieves Goal 1 and Goal 2, and also would be a great selling point for Goal 3. (See?! It makes no sense but it works!)

This is all phrased in a pretty insulting manner, but I think it contains more than a grain or two of analytic truth. Which leads to the conclusion that left-wing politicians have strong political incentives to succeed in reducing the incidence of terrorism. Right-wing politicians, by contrast, have no such incentives.

The Ace, however, reaches a different conclusion:

Before getting any further, let us note the incandescently obvious that Goals 1-3 are Major Goals and Goal 4 is a sort of “Nice but Not Necessary” sort of thing. If they can accomplish Goals 1-3, in terms of politics, they’re all set. If they can sell the public on the idea that a little bit of mass-murder never killed anyone (except for the people it actually killed, of course), they can pretty ignore Goal 4.

This is obviously necessary in order for Ace to turn his analysis into a piece of liberal-bashing. But it really makes very little sense. It’s clear that if you want to accomplish the left’s political goals, the only reliable way to achieve that is going to be to in fact succeed in reducing the quantity and severity of terrorist attacks. Similarly, it’s clear that right-wing politics benefits from an increase in terrorist attacks. The most comprehensive research on this comes from Israel, where they have longer years of experience with terrorism, and it’s clear that terrorist violence boosts the fortunes of right-wing parties. This is why it’s easy for an issue that seemed close to a solution 10 years ago to devolve into the current mess—Palestinian violence brings right-wing Israelis to power, whose anti-Palestinian violence empowers right-wing Palestinian movements whose anti-Israeli violence empowers right-wing Israelis.

In America, it’s just the same. I have no doubt that conservative politicians and pundits have a subjective desire to see the country well-defended, but their objective interests point in the other direction. And objective incentives matter to people.

Intelligent point from The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section:

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn’t happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn’t have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks. That it continues to pour what little resources it can command into lame airliner attacks, like shoe bomber Richard Reid’s failed attempt to blow himself up in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt on Christmas Day, tells you something else:

Al Qaeda may be incapacitated, but its leaders aren’t dumb. So what if their hapless messengers only embarrass themselves and burn their legs? Al Qaeda can still count on the sizeable damage we will inflict on ourselves through an airport security apparatus that specializes in expensive political displays of barn-door closing that seldom have any real security payoff.

Exactly. Similarly, as I’ve been saying, the very fact that there are so few of these people out there makes it practically impossible to catch them reliably. This is a problem, but it’s clearly a much better problem to have than the problem where there are tons of al-Qaeda operative, we catch them fairly reliably, but still five percent or so slip through the cracks.

David Frum observes that there’s more to health outcomes than treating illness:

So if the U.S. health system does such a good job saving its middle-aged and elderly sick, why do Americans die comparatively young?

Answer: because Americans are much more likely to get sick in the first place.

And that likelihood owes very little to the health care system and a great deal to the bad choices American individuals make. If you eat too much, exercise too little, drink too much, smoke, take drugs, fail to wear a seat belt or ignore gun safety, there is only so much a doctor or hospital can do for you. And Americans do all those things, more than other people.

This is all more-or-less true, but I think the erection of a false dichotomy between “bad choices American individuals make” and “the health care system” obscures more than it reveals. Most Americans make choices in life that lead them to have jobs in which they get health insurance from their employers or else they’re retired and they receive health insurance on a socialist basis. Then they make choices to put this employer-provided or government-provided insurance to use by visiting doctors. Then they make choices to put those doctors visits to use by getting certains kinds of treatments. These are “choices”—for those old enough or prosperous enough to have them—but they’re also what the health care system consists of.

And the system does a good, though seemingly not cost-effective, job of treating serious medical problems once they develop. But the system does not do a very good job of persuading people to seriously consider the health implications of some of their actions. There’s evidence from the UK than when doctors are compensated in a way that rewards them for persuading patients to quit smoking, their effectiveness at getting people to quit smoking goes way up. Parents rely on doctors for advice about their kids in many ways. And pediatricians could, but generally don’t, say to the parents of school age children “I know many parents feel it’s safer to drive their kids to school than to have them walk with friends, but the evidence suggests that the risks of car accidents and physical inactivity are greater than the risk of crime.”

Last, the resources consumed by the health care system are one of the reasons people make the choices they do. You might walk a few blocks to the metro, then ride it most of the way to work, then walk a few blocks more to the office. But whether or not you make this choice has a lot to do with whether or not someone built a metro line. If we build more, people will make different choices. But that would be expensive. And Medicare is also expensive. Blueberries are healthy and easy to prepare. But they’re also a lot more expensive than, say, potatoes. Every dollar spent on insurance premiums or doctors visits is a dollar that could be spent on berries.

The point is that a well-functioning health care system should be conducive to public health. Ours isn’t. It’s true that our medical interventions are fairly effective, but that just tends to illustrate that our priorities are somewhat off base.