So You're Saying There's A Catch, Then?

Zachary Roth, doing yeoman's work over at The Muck is reporting that the same U.S. Army colonel that wrote this memo on Iraq:

Referring to the Iraq Security Forces, the memo said: “The massive partnering efforts of U.S. combat forces with I.S.F. isn’t yielding benefits commensurate with the effort and is now generating its own opposition. We should declare our intentions to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Iraq by August 2010. This would not be a strategic paradigm shift, but an acceleration of existing U.S. plans by some 15 months.”

Before deploying to Iraq, Colonel Reese served as the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, the Army’s premier intellectual center. He was an author of an official Army history of the Iraq war — “On Point II” — that was sharply critical of the lapses in postwar planning.

Colonel Reese’s memo comes at a sensitive time in the Iraq conflict as American forces are gradually shifting to an advisory role. American combat troops moved out of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities last month, as required by the Status of Forces Agreement concluded by the United States and Iraq.

Colonel Reese’s memo lists a number of problems that have emerged since the withdrawal. They include, he wrote, a “sudden coolness” to American advisers and the “forcible takeover” of a checkpoint in the Green Zone. Iraqi units, he added, are much less willing to conduct joint operations with their American counterparts “to go after targets the U.S. considers high value.”

The Iraqi Ground Forces Command, Colonel Reese wrote, has imposed “unilateral restrictions” on American military operations that “violate the most basic aspects” of American-Iraqi agreement.

“The Iraqi legal system in the Rusafa side of Baghdad has demonstrated a recent willingness to release individuals originally detained by the U.S. for attacks on the U.S.,” he added.

...is apparently the same Colonel Reese that wrote this "memo" on Obamacare.

Entitled "The Camel's Nose of Health Care," Reese's post takes an alarmist, paranoid, view of the president's plan to reform health care, and rehashes many of the most far-fetched, misinformed, and flatly false fears about reform that currently circulate on right-wing blogs and email lists.

Reese warns that "the inexorable logic of government health care costs will drive big brother to intrude ever more deeply into your life in the vain hope of making it work by making you work to change your life." He adds: "[M]any in government will seize this as the opportunity to shape your lives in their image of the new dependent class."

Later, he warns that health-care reform will bring on rationing so extreme that a future couple will be forced by the government to abort a damaged foetus:

More Orwellian will be this, "Mr. and Mrs. Jones, while we appreciate your desire to give birth to your fetus, but its deformity / disease / syndrome exceeds allowable limits over its expected lifespan."

Reese also invokes future "restrictions on your lifestyle," again imagining a conversation between a government bureaucrat and a patient:

Mr. Smith, I see you have failed to lose the 25 lbs we have been talking about during your last three required checkups. I'm afraid we are going to raise your premiums 25% until you lose the weight. Or you could join the walking club at the government health club next door; as long as you walk every day with them we'll keep your cost share as it is now. But smoking is right out - give it up in 30 days or be denied care.

And Reese suggests that the government will use food vouchers to force people to eat healthier foods, thereby reducing medical costs:

Mrs. Brown, here is your new food voucher for the month. It has been encoded to allow the purchase of balanced combination of food items specially tailored to maintain a healthy, "low health care cost you," based on your medical history and condition. It can be used at any government approved grocery or supermarket, just buy the correct number of each type of item as shown on the attached printout. If you try to purchase an item that doesn't have the ObamaCare stamp on the label, the cashier will simply remove it from your basket.

You can read the whole thing here.

Yeah, turns out the guy's a regular on Townhall.com and posted both items there on July 20th. Absolutely nice grab by the Muckraker crew. Reading his archived copy of the original Townhall.com Iraq post, it's actually a very coherent and moving argument for our accelerated withdrawal. As he says, "The use of the military instrument of national power in its current form has accomplished all that can be expected." His comment on the June 30th handover to Iraq that "The limitations place[d] on US combat operations are no so restrictive as to make our presence here irrelevant to the overall security situation" is something I've talked about before, our troops are being hamstrung by the Iraqis and are being left on the inside of a shooting gallery. Payback is a bitch. Declaring victory and going home in 2010 instead of 2011 makes absolute sense at ths point. There is nothing another 30 months in Iraq will accomplish for us, other than more deaths. I absolutely agree with the Colonel on this point.

Which is what makes Zachary Roth's discovery all the more shocking. If this guy is the same Colonel Reese (and indications are so far that they are) then as coherent and persuasive as his argument on Iraq is, his view of health care reform is bugnuts, assuming that the kind of health care Americans will receive will be all of the worst aspects of Walter Reed's Building 18 plus the worst aspects of the military bureaucracy he has apparently come to know and loathe over 30 years, describing the nightmare scenario a few paragraphs above where the government seeks to control every aspect of Americans' lives to make sure taxpayers get the maximum benefit of their dollars.

The reality of course is that the health care reform legislation being discussed includes none of those draconian measures, and he somehow neglects to include the fact that insurance companies already have a nightmare bureaucracy out there that we all have to deal with, that deny us care based on cost-benefit analysis anyhow, that's how insurance companies stay in business.

It bothers me that a person that can write such an intelligent and reasoned defense on one subject, and then goes off into insane-o-land on another.

Then again, I'm betting some of you say that about me, too.

Here endeth the lesson.