Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/472102
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151ext. 112 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS Afterhuddlingwithhis war council in Kuwait, De- fense Secretary Ash Carter says we've got the "ingre- dients of the strategy" to achieve a "lasting defeat" over ISIS. Some Senate Republi- cans claim that ISIS is going to kill us all in our sleep even as the U.S.-led coalition has the Islamic State forces play- ing defense for a change, but killing bad guys is the rela- tively easy part. As we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, the hard part is to win a peace that can last, and the strategy Carter outlined last week seems like a smart way to go about that. To hear the President's political opponents tell it, Barack Obama is naively whistling past the battlefield. Sen. Tom Cotton, a combat veteran who should know better, said, "Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico" and "could infiltrate our de- fenseless border and attack us right here." Said Sen. Lindsey Graham, we need to launch a full- scale ground war against the Islamic State "before we all get killed back here at home." And then, lest anyone think he had peaked too soon, he said ISIS "will open the gates of Hell to spill out on the world." And Sen. John McCain, who in 2013 said, "We should arm ISIS," now says we now need American "boots on the ground." These guys might under- stand metaphors, but they clearly don't understand how to beat ISIS and bring stabil- ity to the region. We'll do it with allies, advisers, and air- strikes. Only solid govern- ments and professional mili- taries in the Arab states will be able to win the war on the battlefield as well as the war for hearts and minds. Carter made clear in Ku- wait that a "lasting defeat" of ISIS requires NATO coun- tries and nearby allies to play a bigger role. Unless we want to make Iraq the 51st state, we need to strengthen local militar- ies and political structures. This can't look like Islam versus the Great Satan. This war doesn't work if it looks like the U.S. is invad- ing their country. We tried that. It literally blew up in our faces, over and over and over again. This war needs to pit civ- ilization against ISIS. Com- mitting ground forces to Iraq and Syria wouldn't just be politically untenable. Do- ing so would come across like a bad sequel to a movie that never should have been made in the first place. So far, allied militaries are making progress. Jordanian pilots have carried out 56 airstrikes in Syria. Egyptian pilots struck back after the deaths of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by hitting 10 targets in Libya. Kurdish forces have retaken territory and cut off supply lines running into Mosul. Even the much-mocked Iraqi Security Forces are re- claiming battlefield. And these are armies that can stay after we eventually leave. As much as McCain likes the phrase "boots on the ground," perhaps now is a good time to retire that tired cliche. We have a few thou- sand military advisers on the ground. Reportedly, they wear boots. They can pro- vide expertise and leader- ship for allied forces with- out confirming ISIS' narra- tive that they are defending Islam from the West. That doesn't mean we're not going to bomb the beje- sus out of them. Central Command reports the U.S. has killed 6,000 ISIS fighters, and leaving them only as many as 31,500 ac- cording to intelligence re- ports. And airstrikes have walloped oil production con- trolled by ISIS, cutting their income from $2.4 million a day last summer to $750,000 at last count. But as State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said, "We can not kill our way out of this war." We're going to have to win the message war and leave behind countries with vi- able economies and stable governments. We can't just "take 'em out" without con- sidering what we will leave in their place. Ultimately, that's why lo- cal leadership is vital. We'll leave. They live there. But for now, we're there, leading our allies against an enemy that reminds us of the worst we've ever seen. We can't allow our weak- est impulses to drive us back into a counterproductive land war. Our policy should point us towards building not just a decisive victory but a lasting peace. Jason Stanford is a regu- lar contributor to the Aus- tin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Secu- rity Project partner. You can email him at stanford@op- presearch.com and follow him on Twitter @JasStan- ford. Jason Stanford Todefeat ISIS, win the peace Cartoonist's take This war doesn't work if it looks like the U.S. is invading their country. We tried that. It literally blew up in our faces, over and over and over again. Assemblyman James Galla- gher: 150 Amber Grove Drive, Ste. 154, Chico 95973, 530 895-4217, http://ad03.asmrc. org/ Senator Jim Nielsen: 2634 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 879-7424, sena- tor.nielsen@senate.ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown: State Capital Building, Sacramento 95814, 916 445-2841, fax 916 558-3160, governor@ governor.ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa: 507 Cannon House Office Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202 225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Fein- stein: One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Francisco 94104, 415 393-0707, fax 415393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer: 1700 Montgomery St., San Francisco 94111, 510 286- 8537, fax 202 224-0454 Your officials Common sense explains the inability on the part of polit- ical, media and cultural elites to grasp the short- comings of lib- eral/progressive economic policy: the simple rec- ognition of suc- cess and fail- ure. Every person and family, each private ser- vice or charitable group, ev- ery business, corporation and entrepreneurial endeavor—all face the reality that success is based on goals and purposes. That involves accepting the fi- nite resources available to any given person, group or busi- ness with which to accom- plish said goals—one's income, a family's time and effort, the sales, production or revenue of a company. Wise and intelligent ef- forts produce not only success- ful and efficient results, but also the avoidance of waste- ful or useless activity. In real life, quantity and quality stan- dards, as well as comparative analysis, provide feedback to measure efforts, and guidance on recognizing and correcting problems. The above principles ex- plain why the information I've provided on America's failed economic performance is im- portant. Whereas commer- cial success is a known and measurable thing, our na- tion's economic and employ- ment success is measured in comparative terms. Progres- sives are unwilling to accept that policies driven by liberal, government-centric, Keynes- ian theory could objectively be termed failures—they simply dismiss verifiable, measurable facts, and impugn the motives and veracity of those pointing out said failures. Facts, as they say, are stub- born things. In "For Most Of Us, There's No Recovery," Jack Kelly writes, "From 1820 through 2000, real (inflation- adjusted) gross domestic prod- uct grew at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent. Last year was the ninth consecutive year in which the economy grew less than 3 percent." I showed already how Obama's recov- ery lagged previous ones, mas- sively so compared to the Rea- gan recovery. In "The Missing Ingredi- ent: Economic Growth," John Hinderaker explained "Unem- ployment, low wages and lack of opportunity for income ad- vancement dominate discus- sion of our economy these days. But an obvious ingredi- ent is too often missing from the conversation: economic growth. Growth, the rising tide that lifts all boats, cre- ates more jobs, more wealth, and more opportunities for advancement. The various ills that voters and politicians complain about are all largely the consequence of slow or non-existent growth. "This is the Obama admin- istration's most fundamen- tal failing in domestic pol- icy…rapid growth should have been relatively easy to at- tain. But the administration's wasteful spending (the stim- ulus) and anti-business pol- icies (the EPA) put a lid on that great opportunity." He in- cluded a chart, titled "Eco- nomic Growth In 2013 Just Half Of What The President Said His Policies Would De- liver," which showed 4 years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) of pre- dictions for the growth in 2013. Predicted growth aver- aged about 4 percent; actual 2013 growth was 1.9 percent. The difference "is enormous. We can now see that all of the projections that Obama and his budget team have given us are worthless." In "Defining Economic Fail- ure Down," George Will used Daniel Patrick Moynihan's fa- mous phrase, "defining devi- ancy down," to explain how liberal mainstream report- ing has attempted to per- suade America that the "Econ- omy Pulls Ahead" (NYT); the Times cheerily called it "an island of relative strength" which is, to Will, "defining failure down." The Wall Street Journal headlined "U.S. Economy Hits Speed Bumps," as though speedy growth had been nor- mal for a while. The single quarter of 5 percent growth, in a year (2014) that averaged just 2.4 percent, illustrated by comparison how America's economy had gone "43 consec- utive quarters without 5 per- cent growth, the longest such period since the government began keeping the pertinent records in 1947." The ninth consecutive year under-3 per- cent compared to the Reagan recovery, when "there were five quarters of 7 percent-or- higher growth, and five years averaged 4.6 percent growth." Will's sub-headline, "We're coming to accept a weaker economy as the new normal," says it all. April 2014 marked the point when the number of jobs re- turned to pre-recession levels; there were, however, 15 mil- lion more Americans. Nicole Gelinas writes in the Manhat- tan Institute's 'City Journal,' "A healthy economy should add 200,000 new jobs ev- ery month…By that standard, America should have 133 mil- lion people working in the private sector right now, not 118.4 million." Will: "The progressive proj- ect of maximizing the number of people dependent on gov- ernment is also aided by the acid of insecurity that grows rapidly when the economy does not. Anxious and disap- pointed people are susceptible to progressives' blandishments about the political allocation of wealth and opportunity— 'free' this and that. By mak- ing slow growth normal, iatro- genic (i.e. prescriptive) govern- ment serves the progressive program of defining economic failure down." Gallup's survey showed that only 44 percent of adults work 30 hours or more a week. Businessweek found that men, in 2012, working full time earned less (in in- flation-adjusted dollars) than they did in 1973. Obama's 7,805 regulations cost $1.88 trillion per year; reduce growth by 12 percent; cost $10,000 per employee; and have reduced jobs by 546,000 (NAM, Phoenix Center). Don- ald Lambro nailed it: "Obama Is The Main Obstacle To Eco- nomic Growth." Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at don- plsn@yahoo.com. The way I see it Economic success and failure Don Polson Nicole Gelinas writes in the Manhattan Institute's 'City Journal,' "A healthy economy should add 200,000 new jobs every month…By that standard, America should have 133 million people working in the private sector right now, not 118.4 million." OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, March 3, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6