One interesting sub-plot thus far in the Obama administration has been the not-quite-official disavowal of the term “war on terror.” This saw another flair-up recently when a civil servant named Dave Riedel emailed Pentagon officials to tell them “OMB says: ‘This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” But according to Brian Beutler, when Peter Orszag was asked about this he distanced himself from the distancing saying “I’m not aware of any communication I’ve had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service.” Brian observes:

So GWOT it is. That doesn’t mean the Riedel email didn’t go out, though, and some (me, for instance) wonder if some at the Pentagon might stick with the supposedly new moniker (Overseas Contingency Operation) leading to some amusing confusion on the Hill.

This has been a problem for the government for some time, and to such an extent that even George Bush was willing to admit error. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush said in August 2004. “It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Touche.

I think this is a more important issue than people realize. Names of programs matter. The fact that the Future Combat Systems project is named “Future Combat Systems” allowed John McCain during the campaign to try to get people to believe that Barack Obama had some kind of blanket opposition to funding future combat systems, rather than opposition to a specific boondogglish program. Similarly, it sounds and feels a lot more reasonable to say that Pentagon requests for money to use in overseas contingency operations need to be weighed against other priorities than it does to question funding requests aimed at winning a “Long War” or a “War on Terror.” Completely non-military endeavors have often tried to leverage the term “war” into increased funding (War on Poverty, War on Drugs) but obviously this works a lot better for the military which is in the business of fighting wars.

But reducing the world’s exposure to terrorists is neither an enterprise with a defined beginning and end, nor is it mainly a military undertaking. “War on Terror” and “Long War” thinking distort our policy approaches, distort our budgetary priorities, and encourage the problematic idea that we need to fight a hazily defined “global counterinsurgency” and can’t afford to think about the costs of doing so.

Peter Harbage and Karen Davenport have a new report for CAPAF in which they make the case for a robust public option as a component of a systematic health care exchange, and spelling out some details:

The operational features of this public health insurance plan and exchange would include: health insurance plan and exchange would include:

* A health insurance exchange that offers private insurance plans and a public health insurance plan—all of them competing on a level playing field.
* A public insurance plan operated by public employees separate from existing public and private plans.
* Comprehensive and affordable coverage, with guaranteed access to health insurance and other consumer protections offered by all plans in the exchange.
* A service delivery model that provides choice among insurance providers, better care coordination, and fair and efficient payment processes for patients and physicians alike.
* A health care system that promotes innovation rather than risk segmentation.
* An option for individuals to keep the coverage they have today if they so choose.

The point that I think receives too little attention in the debate is the one about innovation rather than risk segmentation. At the moment, insurance companies primarily compete by getting better at risk segmentation—at avoiding the riskiest cases, and doing various kinds of price discrimination. We can and should regulate much of this away. But if that’s all we do, we’ll still have a situation in which the companies are trying to find new and more creative ways of doing risk segmentation. We’ll end up “overly dependent on government enforcement to achieve the goals of health reform,” playing an endless game of cat-and-mouse to see whether or not we’re actually achieving our policy objective of promoting health in a reasonably fair and cost-effective manner. Inserting a publicly managed enterprise into the framework lets us rely more on competition and less on regulatory mandates.

The way this works is that if the private plans can’t or won’t compete by offering innovation, value, and quality then the bureaucrats at the public plan should be able to beat them. That, in turn, creates incentives for the private sector to unleash its own imaginative powers on beating the bureaucrats. Otherwise, it’s just bureaucrats drawing up rules and then the private sector dully complying with the rules while working creatively to find loopholes.

One of the enduring mysteries of American life is how it is, exactly, that so many people guilty of serious breaches of the public trust manage to maintain respectability in virtue of having committed this breaches while working for Republican presidents. Here’s Fred Malek guest-hosting on CNBC and loading Rep Paul Ryan’s “give more money to rich people” alternative budget. Who’s Fred Malek? Read this Colbert King article for the full details. But to make a long story short, though Malek is most infamous for the fact that on Richard Nixon’s behest he compiled a list of Jews working at the Bureau of Justice Statistics so that the paranoid and anti-semitic president could keep tabs on alleged conspiracies against him. But there’s really much more! He helped politicize the administration of justice all up and down the land, bailing out racist universities and corrupt unions and everything in between.

At last night’s press conference, Barack Obama made some news by conceding that the rise of a Netanyahu-Lieberman administration in Israel was not making the prospects for peace any better. That’s true enough, but it’s worth recalling that it’s not as if the previous Kadima-Labor government was really going the extra mile to show its commitment to a just resolution of the problem. The rise of the far-right in electoral politics reflects a general—and quite ugly—rightward turn in Israel more generally. Take this story, for example:

In testimony reported by Israeli news media and in interviews with The Times, Gaza veterans said rabbis advised army units to show the enemy no mercy and called for resettlement of the Palestinian enclave by Jews.

“The rabbis were all over, in every unit,” said Yehuda Shaul, a retired army officer whose human rights group, Breaking the Silence, has taken testimony from dozens of Gaza veterans. “It was quite well organized.”

The army, which conscripts almost every Israeli Jew at 18, has been dominated for most of its history by secular officers. But over the last 15 years, as secular Israelis have soured on the occupation of Palestinian territory, religious nationalists have taken over senior positions in elite combat brigades.

With them have come hundreds of volunteer rabbis, who teach at pre-military academies for religious youths and serve side by side with the troops.

Needless to say, the parallel growth in strength of the religious nationalists of Hamas doesn’t help matters either. Indeed, these two groups have been in a mutually beneficial embrace, both rising to power in their respective societies as both sink further into the mire. My hope would be that we can turn this trend around, but it may not be possible and the United States might have to ask itself what kind of relationship it can have with a country where this sort of doctrine is put forward in official settings.