– This opinion piece was written by C.M. Sennot for GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own. It was originally published here on GlobalPost. –

The last time America had to borrow money to finance a war was during the Revolution and a cash-strapped Continental Congress took loans from France to fund a surge against the British.

That worked out pretty well.

But it’s hard to feel the spirit of 1776 in President Obama’s journey to China. He went as a representative of a borrowing nation to its primary lender amid a call for yet another costly military surge in the Long War that is escalating in Afghanistan even if it is hopefully winding down in Iraq.

As the president completes his journey to Asia, he returns to Washington to face what is the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency, a decision that this administration has not yet fully thought through.

That is whether to heed the counsel of his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and call for a surge of 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan.

Obama is said to also be pondering a middle ground of calling up somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 more troops.

Or, and this is shaping up as a long shot, he and his team of rivals in the Pentagon and the State Department could decide to rebuff McChrystal. In this scenario, Obama would refocus the mission but still hold to the general counterinsurgency plan that he originally spelled out in March and which increased U.S. troops by 21,000 to a total U.S. presence of 68,000 troops. That surge was just completed this fall.

From my experience talking with counterinsurgency experts and meeting with U.S. and coalition counterinsurgency leaders and trainers in Afghanistan over the summer, I am hoping Obama chooses to hold to the existing troops level. I am hoping he does that while refocusing his original plan to be more targeted on counterterrorism than the wider goal of classic counterinsurgency against the Taliban. He should stick to his guns and hold at the troop levels he has and make the troops who are there better and more effective and provided with better equipment and intelligence assets to get the job done. As I said in an earlier column, less is more right now in Afghanistan.

Every empire in history has regretted an escalation in Afghanistan and it is hard to see how America would be any different.

I do not envy the president and his team in making a very difficult and costly decision at a very hard time economically in America. Few presidents in history have had to face so many fateful decisions in their first year in the White House.

But despite all the pondering the president has given to whether to increase troops, it seems he has given far too little consideration to the overall cost of escalating the war and how it will undercut his ability to fund the ambitious domestic policy agenda he has set out from bank bailouts to health care reform.

With all the debt piling up, it seems to me there is a clear connection between his trip to China and these war costs in Afghanistan.

If you think about it, the hundreds of billions we borrow from China every year will go at least in part to fund the enormous cost of an escalation of troops in Afghanistan, a cost — in terms of lives and treasure.

The war in Iraq will end up costing this country more than 2 trillion dollars, according to the conservative projections of Linda Bilmes, an economist at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The cost is higher still if you include interest on the debt, interest which will in a large measure be paid to China.

Bilmes has worked closely with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to do the long math on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to factor in not just the military budget and the interest on the debt but also the extraordinary high cost on every level of soldiers who are wounded physically and mentally by war.

Bilmes is credited with highlighting the failure of the administration of President George W. Bush to give an accurate cost assessment of a war that escalated several hundred times beyond the original projection of just $50 billion to $60 billion made by the Pentagon at the start of the war in 2003. She’s been proven right and she’s worried that the Obama administration may be fatefully making another miscalculation on the cost of war in Afghanistan.

And we’ve hit a profound turning point in Afghanistan. In this new budget year, which started Oct. 1, for the first time, the war in Afghanistan will cost Americans more than the war in Iraq.

And, as Bilmes points out, fighting in Afghanistan is more costly than it is in Iraq because of the terrain and the difficulty in supplying troops and evacuating the wounded. She estimates that Afghanistan is as much as 1.6 times more expensive per soldier than Iraq.

“While this administration has brought great military expertise to thinking this through, there needs to be a greater focus on the cost. How are we going to pay for this? People are still not looking at the long term costs,” said Bilmes.

And so as the president stares out the window of Air Force One pondering the dark skies in the long journey back to Washington, one can only hope that he has thought through the extraordinary cost — on every level — of calling for an escalation of troops in Afghanistan.

More on Afghanistan from GlobalPost:

America’s farmer-soldiers in Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s only pig quarantined? Must be bad

Afghanistan: Waiting for the dust to settle

Troops’ deaths shatter trust in Helmand

Pictured above: U.S. President Barack Obama tours the Great Wall of China at Badaling, November 18, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed

By John Aloysius Farrell — the views expressed are his own. This article first appeared on GlobalPost.

The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy will cost the United States not just a passionate voice for economic and racial justice, but also its irreplaceable champion of a liberal, less belligerent, humanistic foreign policy.

Step back to Friday, October 11, 2002, when only 23 U.S. senators voted against the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq.

The anger and fear spurred by the 9/11 attacks was too raw, and Democrats named Clinton, Kerry, Biden and Edwards, nursing ambition, dared not look “soft” on terrorism. Election Day was just weeks away. The two Democratic leaders — Sen. Tom Daschle and Rep. Dick Gephardt — gave Bush the green light for war. Kennedy’s pal, Sen. Chris Dodd, voted “yes.” Even Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the Democrat from Rhode Island, voted for war.

But not Patrick’s dad. Not Ted.

In what seemed, at the time, a quixotic performance, Ted Kennedy returned to the Senate floor time and again, warning Americans and his fellow senators of the catastrophe ahead. His prestige gave cover to other Democrats, and the number of “no” votes doubled, then tripled.

“Just one year into the campaign against Al Qaeda, the administration is shifting focus, resources and energy to Iraq,” Kennedy warned. “The change in priority is coming before we have fully eliminated the threat from Al Qaeda … Even with the Taliban out of power, Afghanistan remains fragile.”

In the end, Kennedy still got creamed that day — 77 to 23. But a few years later, when asked what vote made him the proudest, in all those thousands of roll calls in almost five decades of service in the Senate, he pointed to his vote against the Iraq war.

And that is what I, you, we, the world will miss: the big guy with mighty shoulders and international stature, willing to shout “No!” when the drums of war are being pounded by the cons and neo-cons, the neo-libs and triangulators, the chicken hawks and profiteers.

“It is possible to love America while concluding that it is not now wise to go to war,” Kennedy said in 2002. What American politician will have the guts to say something like that, at a pivotal moment in US history, after Ted joins Jack and Bob beneath the grassy slope at Arlington?

Sure, the guy was no saint. Great politicians, in my experience, rarely are. Kennedy’s personal failures have been amply catalogued.  And the same senator who could rail against the military arms industry did pretty well over the years, using his roster of behind-the-scenes tricks to add fighter planes and advanced research funds to the Pentagon budget in order to protect jobs and promote industry in Massachusetts.

Nor can we forget how the Kennedy family legacy mixed such gems as the “missile gap” and the Bay of Pigs debacle with genuine accomplishments like the nuclear test ban treaty, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Alliance for Progress. Or how Jack Kennedy’s inaugural vow to “pay any price, bear any burden” led us into the bloody swamps of Vietnam.

It was the Vietnam War, and Lyndon Johnson’s relentlessly ineffective prosecution of that war, that split the Democratic Party, shattered the liberal consensus, and gave Ted Kennedy his voice.

Kennedy’s initial venture into foreign affairs occurred in 1965, when he helped steer a historic immigration reform bill through the Senate; it was an issue he would stick with, and a cause he would champion, for more than 40  years.  As Kennedy’s biographer, Adam Clymer, relates in “Edward M. Kennedy, A Biography,” he used that same Judiciary Committee perch, with its oversight of American refugee policy, to hold hearings and fact-finding missions about Vietnam.

In 1966 and 1967, Ted and his brother Robert began to split with Johnson over the war. After losing a second brother to assassination in 1968, Ted picked up the fallen colors. He quickly became a leader of the New Left — in both domestic policy and foreign affairs. It was a job he never relinquished.

In the Senate, Kennedy fought Richard Nixon’s Vietnam and nuclear weapon policies and vexed the White House with his strong human rights stands on Biafra, Chile and Bangladesh.  He tangled with Ronald Reagan over nuclear arms, El Salvador and Nicaragua. And throughout his career, he was an outspoken critic of the British crackdown on Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Soviet government’s brutal treatment of dissidents and South Africa’s racist system of apartheid.

As Conor O’Clery, Andrew Meldrum and Pascale Bonnefoy will tell you here at GlobalPost, Ted Kennedy will be mourned in Ireland, South Africa and Chile, as well as in Massachusetts tonight.
The culmination of Kennedy’s Irish ventures came during the Clinton administration, when I happened to be covering the White House for a Boston newspaper. It was a great perch, and given my own Irish ancestry, I took an abiding interest in what was going on.

Oh it was fun. For years, Kennedy and a few other Irish-American politicians — Tip O’Neill, Pat Moynihan, Hugh Carey — had resisted the sentimental blarney, rampant among their constituents, that glorified the violent acts of the hard men of the Irish Republican Army.  Then their friend John Hume called from Derry with a message: the IRA might be ready to deal.

And suddenly there was Teddy, mischievous and grinning and determined as hell, employing his skillful staff, exploiting his contacts with former Kennedy staffers at the White House, and mightily pissing off the English, the British desk at State, and some of Bill Clinton’s own advisers by suggesting that a visa be granted, and a hand extended, to Gerry Adams and his Sinn Fein brothers-in-arms and their Protestant counterparts on the other side of the divide.

Teddy had Bill’s back, and Clinton responded with nerve and verve and insight. George Mitchell earned his own brand of sainthood negotiating the Good Friday peacemaking agreement. And, typically, Teddy cashed in by getting his sister, Jean Smith, appointed as U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Honey Fitz and PJ would be proud.

I will miss the big guy. There are few in American politics who loved the game, and played it so well, for so many years — who did so much for so many, despite the inevitable tragedies. Kennedy joins an elite handful — Clay, Webster, Calhoun and the like – who never made it to the White House, but define the word “senator” in American history.

Yeah, I will miss him. But I fear we all will miss him, in the pitch of a crisis, when our baser instincts come to the fore, and we need that bellowing independent voice, reminding us what America means. And I’m hoping tonight that, like John Steinbeck’s ghost of Tom Joad, Ted Kennedy will never leave us:

“Well maybe … a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one … Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there … I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.”

More from GlobalPost:

Kennedy’s death: Ireland mourns a “true friend”

Ted Kennedy, anti-apartheid crusader

Analysis: Lessons of Europe’s history with terrorism

Michael Goldfarb serves as a GlobalPost correspondent in the United Kingdom, where this article first appeared.

In America, the health care debate is about to come to a boil. President Barack Obama has put pressure on both houses of Congress to pass versions of his flagship domestic legislative program prior to their August recess.

Good luck.

Opponents are filling the airwaves with the usual litany of lies, damned lies and statistics about socialized medicine and the twin nightmare of bureaucratically rationed health care and high taxes amongst allies like Britain, France and Germany. So here is a brief overview of health care in some of Europe’s biggest economies: Britain’s National Health Service is paid for out of a social security tax. Services are free at the point of provision. No co-pay, no reimbursement. The budget last year was 90 billion pounds (about $148 billion). That makes the average cost per person about 1,500 pounds ($2,463).

The NHS is big — huge, in fact. With 1.5 million employees it is one of the largest employers in the world. Only China’s People’s Liberation Army, India’s state railways and good old Wal-Mart employ more folks. Sixty percent of the NHS budget goes toward salaries.

The French system is run on a compulsory purchase of insurance through the workplace. The insurance cost is based on how much a worker earns. Low-income workers pay nothing. The average contribution per person is about $4,000. The government sets fees for services and negotiates the price of drugs with pharmaceutical companies. (See related GlobalPost story “Why French doctors still make house calls.”)

Service is not free at the point of provision. But reimbursement for costs is swift and in the case of catastrophic illness all fees are waived. People are free to purchase supplementary insurance from private companies.

With a compulsory insurance plan, as in France, German care is universal and equitable. Germans pay approximately 14.3 percent of their earnings to buy this insurance. As in France, people are free to buy supplementary private health insurance. Each system is unique (as are all the systems around Europe) but they have two things in common that make them different from the United States: Coverage is universal and the cost of care as a percentage of GDP is significantly less.

For Europeans — even those who would label themselves conservatives — American attitudes to setting up a universal health care system with strong state participation and management seem bizarre. The peace of mind that comes from knowing that in an emergency you will be taken care of and you won’t be financially ruined has no price. Why resist it?

Beccy Ashton, policy adviser at health care think tank The King’s Fund, worked for more than half a decade in the U.S. She explains the difference this way: “In Europe healthcare is regarded as a human right. In America, people think of it as a commodity that you buy.” If you look at how the Big Three’s health systems came into being you realize changing American attitudes may be difficult.

Britain and France created their systems out of the rubble of World War II. Pushed from below, the leaders of both nations sought to bring greater social equality to their societies. Social security systems were set up with equal access to health care given pride of place.

This wasn’t done without facing down doctors and insurance companies, but politicians are never so bold as when the public will for something is clear. In 1945 in both Britain and France, there was no going back to the status quo before the war started. Germany’s system has the weight of history behind it. Its origins can be traced back to the first era of German unification when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck created the First Reich. In the 1880s he set up a system of compulsory health insurance by workers and employers and other forms of social security. He did not invent the system out of nothing. There had been a tradition among the German guilds going back to the Middle Ages of members making compulsory contributions to help their brothers in old age or if a colleague had to stop working because of injury.

Clearly, America at this moment in time has not recently experienced an epoch-shattering historical event like a World War and despite Obama’s comparative popularity, he doesn’t have the clout of an Iron Chancellor to simply decree what he wants and know that Congress will rubber stamp it.
Beccy Ashton points out, “The President must be aware of the fine line he has to walk. If he goes forward with a radical agenda, he knows you’ve lost before you’ve started.”

So people in Europe continue to watch with bemusement as American legislators grapple with reforming a system that basically needs to be junked. Professionals like Ashton answer calls from reporters and try to refute right-wing misinformation that floats around the debate. Those damned lies and statistics.

The only statistics on health care systems that really matter are life expectancy and infant mortality. Both speak to accessibility and affordability. If you want to know how the U.S., the wealthiest nation on earth, stacks up, here you go:

In life expectancy, the U.S. ranks 38th or 45th depending on whether one uses the United Nation’s statistics or those compiled by the CIA. (In both cases, life expectancy in Cuba is higher!) According to the CIA World Factbook, the U.S. has many more infant deaths than its EU counterparts or northern socialist (to right-wing ideologues) neighbor, Canada. While the U.S. has 6.26 deaths per live births, Canada had 5.04. Britain, France and Germany? 4.85, 3.33 and 3.99, respectively.

Other health links from GlobalPost:

Winter in the time of swine flu

Coming home from school with strawberry condoms

(Pictured above: Healthcare reform supporters rally outside U.S. Senator Sam Brownback’s office in Overland Park, Kansas, July 9, 2009. REUTERS/Carey Gillam)

Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. Any views expressed are his own.

It seems like a science fiction novel: Near-starvation of much of the world’s population results in the development of patented seeds and widespread livestock cloning.

But that scenario is not pure speculation. Rather it is a possible future envisioned by analysts for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in a new report titled “The Bioeconomy of 2030.”

The report, which extrapolates current trends into the year 2030, deals with every aspect of biotechnology from medicines to plant-based chemicals, and projects their impacts on the world economy. It raises the fictional starvation scenario to prod the public and policymakers into considering biotech agriculture in a new light.

“Two consecutive years of extreme drought and high temperatures in the major grain growing regions of the world between 2016 and 2017 … caused an explosion in food prices,” says the report published last month. “The ‘Malthusian years’, as they were quickly called by journalists, fueled further investment in agricultural biotechnology.”

Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer, famously predicted that population growth would outpace food production, resulting in famine. But over the past two centuries, a series of technological advances — the Industrial Revolution, for example — have greatly expanded the world’s ability to produce food and his theory has been largely discredited.

The report’s sections on agriculture stand out because they evoke provocative concepts to revive the policy debate over what opponents have sometimes call “Frankenfoods.”

There has been public opposition to the genetic modification of foods, particularly in Europe, since herbicide-resistant soybeans were introduced in the mid-1990s. Consumers have questioned the health and environmental risks of the products.

The genetically modified crops currently on the market have been designed to resist insect damage and viral infections and to tolerate certain herbicides, according to the World Health Organization. They are widely grown in North America, South America and China, but only a handful have been approved in the European Union.

The report says that overcoming this unease will require some policy response — possibly driven by an unwanted disaster.

“The goal is to get people thinking about the way the world is changing (population, consumption patterns, climate change, etc.) and encourage them to take a hard look at how society is going to cope,” OECD analyst and report co-author David Sawaya said in an e-mail exchange from Brussels.

In the sections focusing on agricultural issues, the report anticipates that growing middle classes in China and India will increase demand for meats and grains. It predicts a global trade pattern in which manufactured goods flow from the East to the West, while edibles flow back from bread-basket regions such as North and South America.

The report envisions that population growth, coupled with trends like water scarcity, will increase the pressure to obtain greater yields from arable lands. The OECD planners also think that an increasing demand for biofuels and biochemicals will lead to the development of non-edible plants designed to be grown on arid or other marginal lands.

All of these trends, they say, will increase the need for genetic modifications to design drought-tolerant crops, optimize non-edible plants for fuel and chemical production, and improve livestock through advanced breeding and cloning techniques. “The use of biotechnology in primary production is therefore likely to be pervasive by 2030 for the production of plant and animal food sources and for plant sources of feed and fiber,” the report suggests.

Biotech-skeptic Michael Sligh, director of the sustainable agriculture program for the U.S.-based Rural Advancement Foundation, said such a technology-centered view of the future ignores the social, economic and environmental issues that should be considered when planning how to feed the world.

“There’s always been a great deal of rhetoric and promise around agricultural biotechnology but issues of hunger are far more complex than any technological fix,” Sligh said. “Do farmers have access to fair credit, good roads, open markets? All of these are factors that have to be taken into account.”

Among other objections, Sligh said biotech agriculture will increase the number of patented seeds and other inputs that farmers will have to purchase year after year, making them more dependent on global trade and credit flows and decreasing self-reliance.

“When you shift from a very long tradition of 12,000 years of farmers saving seeds to a technology that is patented that is a fundamentally different paradigm,” Sligh said.

Biotech advocate C.S. Prakash, a plant geneticist at the University of Tuskagee in Alabama, thinks the OECD report correctly predicts that global warming will increase the need for genetic modifications.

“The whole geography of farming is going to change,” he said. “You will have more water in some places and less elsewhere, and we will need to redesign crops quickly to meet these new stress factors.”

Prakash said he hopes the report’s fictional scenario spurs debate, especially in Europe, where opposition to genetically modified foods is strongest.

“Unless Europe changes in a big way I don’t think the rest of the world will follow,” he said.

In addition to the public opposition that could impede biotech agriculture, the authors of the OECD report noted another issue that could diminish its usefulness in avoiding the Malthusian possibilities.

In a follow-up email to GlobalPost, they noted that mass-market crops like corn, soy, cotton and canola have been the focus of biotech development because they are most profitable. There has been far less development of the niche crops and local adaptations that are sorely needed.

“This will often be in areas without huge (in a monetary sense) markets,” the OECD authors wrote, suggesting that research subsidies and public support would have to be part of the scenario for “fulfilling the promise of biotechnology.”

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(Pictured above: Alberta farmer Dwayne Marshman measures the height of his wheat crop, which should be at his waist, on his farm in the Canadian prairies near Rockyford, Alberta June 30, 2009. REUTERS/Todd Korol)