Radio host's mission of mercy

Looking out the airplane window, on about the twelfth hour of a fourteen hour flight to Ethiopia, the hazy streak of water I’d been watching suddenly divided in the Sahara dust. The map suggested we were flying over Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile become simply the Nile, en route to Cairo. As the plane followed the White branch southeast towards Ethiopia, it began to sink in that our team of twenty-plus health care volunteers was getting pretty far from home.

With two dentists, two plastic surgeons, one obstetrician and an assortment of nurses and students, the International Medical Relief team arrived in Addis Ababa and then flew to our destination of Mekele, a remote city in Northern Ethiopia not far from the Red Sea. It was August 2008.

Walking into the Mekele Hospital the next day, we found several hundred prospective patients on hand to welcome the Americans. Word had gotten out, with demand for health care apparently quite profound in one of the poorest regions of the eighth poorest nation on earth.

I was informed that 305 individuals had gathered around the dental clinic, marking a spectacle of chaos. The dental team lugged its bags and suitcases through the crowd and into the clinic, laid out instruments, set up a sterilization area and started the screening process.

Along with Dr. Don Vollmer of Castle Rock, and Keren Etzion, a pre-dental student from New York, we took down each name and set up basic treatment plans and arranged general appointment times for the week ahead. We were joined by two capable Ethiopian dental technicians and eight nurses who rotated into the clinic.

Over the next five days we worked our way through the list of patients. One after another, with subsequent patients thronging the doorway. The most necessary procedure, by far, was the extraction. Some patients required scaling and debridement – with periodontal disease almost universal in the area – and some inquired about fillings. On the occasional tooth which afforded reasonable access to a spoon excavator, we carefully placed Geristore dual-cure restorations and hoped for the best.

The dental chair was a creaky 1973 Dental-Ease model which could be moved up and down if you held the wires just right around the plug-in. A bent-arm lamp was used to help with lighting, though my battery-pack loupe light attachment proved indispensable.

It was a definite jolt to the standard dental routine to find myself working in a small, hot room with a dozen spectators around the chair chattering in Tigrigna, with dozens more clamoring outside waiting to get in. Working during the August monsoon season, a string of afternoon rain storms battered the tin roof of the clinic, offering the sensation of doing dentistry to the sound of machine-gun fire overhead.

The electricity often went out during these storms, leaving the clinic room completely dark save for a beam of LED light between my forehead and the tooth I happened to be working on. As the days went by, focused and intense, I realized I had stopped noticing when the power had gone off – just kept on working away.

Though many of the Ethiopian patients were living with staggering levels of suffering, in terms of their dental and overall health, I was amazed by their optimism and good cheer. Quick to smile, quick to laugh, you wouldn’t imagine that Ethiopians have endured the history of famine, war, and dictatorship that they have.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of that, nor am I sure how best to respond to such scenes of hope and heartbreak, courage and happiness against the odds. But I do hope to find time to work again in Ethiopia someday, and am thankful for the chance to have spent some days in the Mekele Hospital last August.

Matt Dunn, D.D.S., is a founding partner and frequent cohost on Backbone Radio. He practices dentistry in Denver at the Cody Dental Group.

Memo to BHO: Enemies aren't 'just like us'

For months I've tried to show why Obama is unfit to be president. I have recently focused on his "spread the wealth" socialist economic plan, his years in church listening to a hate-spewing pastor and his time at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with William Ayers -- but my first and biggest concern with Obama has always been in the area of foreign policy. Barack Obama's foreign policy is typical among the left's "internationalist" wing -- those who see themselves as "citizens of the world", and who come to look at international cooperation as not simply a means but an end in itself. Obama has worked during the campaign to sharpen his edge and give the voters a sense that he will not hesitate to use force to protect America -- something any candidate in this day and age must say. But his inclinations are toward multilateralism, and he has said clearly that as president one of his first orders of business will be to bring "humility" to U.S. foreign policy -- principally by listening to the ideas and needs of other nations. My sense is that Barack Obama will return the U.S. to a "U.N./EU first" kind of foreign policy, where we are careful not to offend while trying to protect our interests both here and home and abroad. It won't work.

My concerns about Obama and foreign policy have been heightened (if that is possible) over the past few days by two events.

First, I was extremely troubled reading an interview given to the New Yorker's Nicholas Lehman by senior Obama military adviser Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret.). This interview reinforces Obama's internationalism, but it does so in a very dangerous way:

"Gration was impatient with the idea that conflict is the natural state of the world, to be managed rather than resolved. “People are more alike than their cultures and religions,” he said. “When Obama talks about global citizens, it’s the same framework. You see, religion and culture - they’re the way people communicate their values. They want stability, order, education. This is just humanness. Then you add on your religion, your culture - that’s how you execute it.” His implication was that if we can get past the religious and cultural identities that serve as host organisms for conflict, and deal with people at the level of their humanity and their basic needs, then we can make real progress - especially if Obama personally holds an office that permits him to set the tone and lead the effort (emphasis added)."

The "level of their humanity"? What humanity is that? You mean the humanity that beheads prisoners and blows up buildings?  Or straps explosives on the bodies of children in martyrdom operations?   Oh, but of course, this is another extension of "the One" using his cult of personality to sit down with radical jihadists and find a "common ground".  This is udoubtedly one of the more dangerous statements I have heard since 9/11.  It is also typical of the left which does not wish to admit that radical Islam exists and is fundamentally an extension of the teaching of Islam itself. 

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this, for it is prototypical idealism at work -- the notion that people's values are essentially the same, and that it is some external factor (poverty, oppression, imperialism) that makes people violent. Forget the fact that the perpetrators of 9/11 and the suicide bombers in London on 7/7/2005 were all educated, middle class Muslims who were indoctrinated with hatred. They were not poor or oppressed. They were, however, evil. This is something that the Obama team apparently can't get their minds around.

We should all be very afraid of this.

Second is the statement that Joe Biden made yesterday in Seattle before a liberal audience that he expects that in the first six months of an Obama administration, the U.S. will be attacked. He fears that our enemies will test the young president, much like the Soviets did Kennedy in 1961-1962. Here's what Biden said (courtesy of the The Weekly Standard):

"It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking.... Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy....

I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate… And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right."

This is troubling on several levels. It seems to be an acknowledgement that Obama represents a weak, inexperienced leader who invites an attack -- and that from what Biden is saying that Obama is going to flub the response -- at least initially -- and will need support and understanding. This is not confidence inspiring coming from the #2 spot on the Democratic ticket.

But it is not the 1960s anymore -- and while the stakes during the Berlin blockade and the Cuban missile crisis could hardly have been higher, our enemy was operating within the same rationality model that we were. It is clear that Khruschev and the Soviets backed down from Cuba because they understood that they could not survive a nuclear confrontation with the U.S. In other words, rationality prevailed. We don't have such a luxury today -- when we face an enemy who seeks suicidal martyrdom in their evil deeds. There is no rational basis (at least Western-style) where deterrence works with Islamic jihadists.

So if we are attacked, the devastation could be enormous -- and our response will be less far less important than the initial attack against us.  

Can we really afford this kind of on-the-job-training in the era of suicide bombing?

Enough with the Euro-smugness

From east to west, living room to board room, Americans are watching a slew of disturbing TV news stories . The focus of the citizen is overwhelmingly on the economy and his or her own, modest and hard earned treasure pile. This is not surprising, after all the Dow is behaving like a drunken clam and the finance sector is as chaotic as a college department meeting. The media is constantly rattling everyone’s cages and our commercial breaks are now plagued with the most annoying ads known to man: those of the goldbug.

In the depths of an election the worry meter on many Americans is high. We all want answers to our economic question and, in general, want to see this country restored to a place of prosperity, power, and might. But across the eastern ocean, in the world-weary lands of Western Europe, a strange and different dialogue is bubbling to the surface. In it, the cause for America’s troubles is not practical or function but moral and the feeling is not of despair but strangely, of glee.

As the United States hits a rather large bump in the road, many in Europe’s chattering class are taking up a rather despicable tone. This tone, in the forefront hammers home the idea that America’s Economic woes derive somehow from moral failing, that her age of dominance is over, and that both are happy occasions to root onward.

Moral supremacy and the role as judge has always been a part of the European tradition. Since 2000, this proclivity has been primarily focused against the United States and Israel in discussions that usually, either, apologize for Islamic terrorism, lift up the European ‘way’ as just, or simply scapegoat America for a host of domestic European problems. Recently, full and front page articles have popped up in major European papers claiming that the age of American dominance is over.

Strangely these articles and comments come with, not just a statement of fact, but a moral judgment and indictment of American and her way of life. Quite often the words ‘redneck’ ‘bubba’ and ‘empire’ appear when authors mention America and her apparently lost power.

Moreover, in these periodicals there is also an obvious bit of smug cheer. That is to say, that Americans current crisis is not just mentioned it is cheered on with a form of moiling academic demonology. In these circles, somehow, the financial troubles of America and Americans is actually a good thing.

Such feelings and statements are as uninformed as they are vile. To state things as they are and point out fault is one thing; but to actually root for calamity and chaos is quite another. Moreover, it is quite self-destructive. An important fact seems to escape most European chatterers, that is, if America ‘goes down’ that Europe will not be far behind.

We have already seen this as European markets have tumbled in the wake of U.S. financial problems. In a more abstract sense, a removal of U.S. power abroad would force Europe to actually grow up. Specifically, they would have to actually spend money on national defense and foreign policy as opposed to simply relying on the ample subsidy provided by both the United States and NATO.

The historian or more mature reader can attest to the fact that such disruptions from Europe are not exactly new. For years, on many European College Campuses, it has been both fashionable and convenient to viciously assail the United States. Such criticism usually comes in the form of vaguely defined critiques of U.S. policies and or a bizarrely styled bit of political wishful thinking that is not founded in the realities of America or Europe.

Even further back it should be remembered that in the 19th century it was the keen desire of many European Nations to subjugated American foreign policy and behavior to their will and call. Happily this did not happen and it is important that it does not happen now. Listening to friends is fine, but doing whatever they say while they slap you in the face is not.

Unfortunately, it is likely that these academic and anemic voices will continue to blame the United States with the smug liberal tone of Maddow, Mahr, Obama and Pelosi. This blame game will probably disparage the United States for the global economic crisis without the responsibility of say acknowledging that Europe readily invested in America and made economic blunders of its own. This is a shame and will only hinder Europe’s own recovery.

Relations between Europe and America have always been complex and full of recrimination. I like Europe, I like their food, silly accents and women, and I also share their desire for close relations. But I don’t appreciate their chattering classes smug back biting and moral judgment. I’d also say that if Europe wants closer relations and wants to influence U.S. policy, it would help if they don’t constantly attack the U.S. with puerile name calling and instead replace it with a real dialogue.

Early Debate Returns: Bad for McCain

I watched the debate tonight with growing frustration at John McCain's failure to attack Obama squarely on his confiscatory economic policies. I've finally come to the conclusion that John McCain is unable (or unwilling) to promote the kind of conservative economic message that I think much of this country is wanting to hear.  Instead, he's splitting hairs with Barack Obama on the economy -- and losing in the process. I'm always interested in the views of Steven Hayes at the Weekly Standard -- he's a smart, reasonable writer who I read frequently.  His review of the debate is that Obama won. Here's part of what he had to say:

"John McCain had a very strong debate tonight. It’s too bad for him that it came on a night when Barack Obama was nearly flawless.

The debate began with questions on the economy and for thirty minutes Obama answered those questions with the kind of substance that I suspect anxious voters wanted to hear and with exactly the right tone – empathic, aggravated and determined. Most important, he spoke to voters in their own language. In his first answer, in response to a question about things the government can do to help average Americans through these tough economic times, Obama spoke of a $400,000 junket that AIG executives took after the government bailed them out. “Treasury should get that money back,” he said, “and those executives should be fired.” Sure, a little demagoguery. But it’s exactly the kind of story – in a debate that included back-and-forth accusations and lots of statistics – that voters will remember and talk about tomorrow with their neighbors.

McCain took that first question and he turned immediately to energy. “Americans are angry, they’re upset and they’re a little fearful. And it’s our job to fix the problem. Now, I have a plan to fix this problem and it’s got to do with energy independence.  It didn’t work. Two months ago, when gas prices were nearing $5 and the cost of oil dominated the headlines, the McCain campaign deftly used anxieties about energy as a proxy for anxieties about the economy. So when McCain proposed to lift the ban on offshore drilling, voters responded positively and the polling reflected their enthusiasm."

This is what I was afraid of: McCain being unable to clearly articulate why Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress is a danger to our economy. The reflexive return of McCain and Palin to the energy issue is a comfort zone and understandable -- but not good enough in this economy. McCain seems unable to explain to the American people that Obama's tax policies and his liberal record will be a poison pill to an economy that needs liquidity. It needs low taxes to fuel growth -- something that simply isn't possible with Obama's tax-and-spend plan.

Even worse, McCain's populist instincts are taking him down the wrong path. Rather than returning to a free-market solution to what should be a free market problem, his instinct is to increase regulation and government control -- exactly what Obama and the Democrats want to do. He again misses a chance at differentiation. Here's Hayes again:

"But while energy issues remain important and cannot be separated from the broader economic picture, the convulsions in world markets over the past two weeks and the need for a $700 billion federal bailout have rendered worries about gas prices and energy independence to second-tier status. It’s not that these issues don’t matter, it’s just that they matter less now than they did over the summer. He later broadened his answer to include spending, tax cuts and his jaw-dropping plan to have the federal government buy up “the bad home loan mortgages in America” to “let people make those payments and stay in their homes.” So bigger government is bad, quasi-governmental entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “ignited” the current economic crisis, too much government spending is leaving us broke and we want the U.S. Treasury to renegotiate individual home mortgages? Seriously? No thanks."

No thanks is right. The correct and powerful answer here is to reignite the economy through lower taxes to stimulate jobs and growth so people can pay their mortgages -- NOT to have the government take over that role. This mess in the housing market is partly an issue of personal behavior -- not simply predatory lending. I, for one, am not interested in my tax dollars going to bail out people who made bad decisions. I think many Americans would agree with that. Unfortunately, McCain's instincts don't lead him down that path. He's still in the "Wall Street greed" mode.

I hate to throw in the towel here, but...it is now clear that the issues that many conservatives have with McCain are legitimate and real. That despite his great personal story, his maverick personality often betrays a message that would greatly appeal to a great swath of America. He's actually give people less of a choice by co-opting the position of Obama on so many issues.

My guess is that the polls are not going to be good for McCain after this performance tonight. In a debate where he really needed to help himself, I'm afraid he's come up short.

We'll see.

Words worthless to halt aggression

(London, Oct. 6) The mistaken belief that clever diplomacy was a substitute for force of arms led to Athens’ defeat by Sparta, according to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Two thousand years later the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu- himself a master diplomatist- observed that diplomacy was useful only when it was the “velvet glove adorning the mailed fist.” Finally we recall the 19th century German Chancellor Bismark who famously stated that “ the great questions of the day are decided not by speeches in the Diet but on the battlefield by Blood and Iron.”

These ideas may sound harsh to some contemporary ears but they remain highly applicable in our very imperfect modern world, as the Russian invasion of Georgia reminds us yet again.

Russia’s aggression has rudely shattered illusions and highlighted unpleasant truths worldwide.

Prominently revealed in the wreckage is the terminal disunity of the European Union. While French President Nicholas Sarkozy flew to Moscow to appease Vladimir Putin- reminding many of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous flight to Munich to appease Adolf Hitler- the Presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine flew to Tbilsi to support the embattled President of Georgia.

Besides revealing the stark divide between “Old” and “New” Europe this sad scenario puts a final end to EU dreams of being a coherent diplomatic and military power on a par with Russia, China, and the United States.

Thoughtful commentary across Europe is now realizing the EU is trapped between its ongoing hostility to its nominal American ally and its newly revived fear of Russia’s imperial ambitions. Equally clear is the fact that answers to these challenges are different in virtually every member state and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

The major lesson here is that diplomacy and the attendant speeches in the U.N., European Parliament and U.S. Congress are utterly useless absent a credible determination to impose serious consequences on aggressors.

Just as Hitler correctly perceived the flabbiness of the Western democracies at the time of Munich, so too did Putin calculate that he would face no serious consequences for his invasion of Georgia. Also like Hitler, no one should believe that he sees Georgia as Russia’s final territorial acquisition.

The hard lessons that Europe is relearning have considerable implications elsewhere in the world and are highly relevant to the choice Americans will make in the upcoming Presidential election.

Within the coming year the United States will face important decisions regarding the next chapter in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly the nuclear confrontation with Iran may reach critical mass.

As their first debate illustrated, Senators McCain and Obama have starkly differing worldviews and approaches to the projection of American power around the globe.

While Obama ritually insists that “all options are on the table” and casually repeats a willingness to send U.S. troops across the Pakistan border, absolutely everything we know about him and the Democratic Party he now leads strongly suggests that the preferred options favor talk over action. These include deference to the U.N., the World Court, the E.U., and “world opinion” generally. He worries that the U.S, is not “liked” and believes this should be corrected by a multilateral approach to just about everything.

When asked how he would handle Russia, Iran or other tyrannies Obama’s usual response is “tough, direct diplomacy." As Hillary Clinton pointed out he has a “naïve belief in the efficacy of sitting down face to face with dictators."

What exactly would he say to them? Does he really believe that his breathtaking eloquence would persuade Putin to leave Georgia, Ahmadinejad not to exterminate Israel, or Kim Il-Jong to cease his nuclear program? Would he be willing to actually threaten them with consequences, even if he lacked the full backing of the U.N., E.U. etc.?

McCain is much more like Truman or Reagan: Utilize diplomacy when helpful, but always be willing to take forceful action when needed. Seek allies whenever possible, but be prepared to go it alone when vital American interests are at stake. McCain’s motto as he noted in the debate is that of his hero Theodore Roosevelt who said “Speak softly and carry a big stick."

The worldview, policy inclinations, and attitude toward their country of these two men is as divergent as their life experiences. Not within living memory has a Presidential election presented Americans with a clearer choice. ---------------- William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, and Rocky Mountain News.