R. K. Rodebaugh's Radio Weblog

Sun, 04 May 2008 02:00:35 GMT

Introduction:

This is a series of essays, comments etc. on history, politics et al. I would appreciate feedback via the comment bar at the end of a given piece or via e-mail (also enabled). I will try to reply and will post feedback from time to time in an attempt to conduct a dialog. I don’t ask for agreement, but rather encourage disagreement. Hopefully we can learn from one another.

I would have liked to post in reverse chronological order, but this software does not allow it. I wanted to start off with a sequence of pieces setting out a general perspective from which much of my commentary will arise. Those pieces can be found, therefore, at the bottom of the weblog rather than the top. Sorry about that! The “root” piece is an essay entitled Science and Modernity. The link below will take you to it. http://blogs.salon.com/0001185/2002/08/13.html#a4

I have now decided to lead the site with an updated version of Science and Modernity. It was slightly modified and conflated with ‘The Link’ and can be found immediately below.

Sat, 03 May 2008 15:00:56 GMT

Science and Modernity

The modern world is born of the nexus between human creativity and the discoveries of modern science and technology. That nexus has created, and is creating, a world that prospers no longer by the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs, but by the educated creativity of people. (By educated I mean read, write and do basic arithmetic. That opens the door)

Societies achieving a strong flow of educated creativity will prosper; those failing, will not, and will fall into eclipse. That flow will not come from people systematically repressed, suppressed, and exploited. It will come from populations secure in self-governance, rich in opportunity for innovation and its implementation, and able to project a rewarding life for all.

The societal, institutional and conceptual structures of all previous human history have been, and are under, assault by a new reality whose birth travail has vexed the last three hundred years. The sheer prodigality of outcomes becomes defining: such potentials are released for both creative and destructive outcomes that we must be keenly aware of the power and responsibility that devolve upon us.

Modernity is about our increasing mastery of material reality. It is not wisdom (except of a particular sort), and it is not spiritual elevation, or moral accomplishment. It remains for us to inform the modern world with those achievements.

The above attempts to distill a message from the long arc of the human story. It seeks to define where we are now. Before laying out the particular understanding of history which leads to it, I want to make it clear that I do not comprehend some steadily winnowing dialectic working its will through history. A Grand Narrative of sorts, perhaps, but nothing like a relentlessly evolving storyline. Rather think of change under the aegis of some great transformative pulse, followed by a period of adjustment, and a rich elaboration of consequences.

We are social creatures. We live in mutually interactive, mutually supportive societies. Our first model for social organization was the tribe, structured around the wisdom of the ancestors and the laws and customs of the tribe. For tens of thousands of years we survived by inhabiting this planet as tribes. Between five and ten thousand years ago, to seize the advantages inherent in large-scale domesticated agriculture, we transitioned into far larger, far more extensively and intensively organized societies. What was required was enduring control of fertile land, and people constantly on that land to work it. What emerged were division of labor constructs, ruled from a narrow base of military, governmental and religious elites via a severely hierarchical top down authoritarianism. Coercive force could, and largely did, suffice. The vast majority of people could be assured of the necessities of life, but their grasp upon them was tenuous. Most of the human beings in these new societal constructs were “division of labored” into some form of peasantry, peonage, serfdom, or slavery; that is to say, an efficient organization of the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs. But we got an unintended consequence: Civilization.

It was no easy time for tribal societies as they came up against these new Civilizational ones. The strengths of the new constructs proved to be both wide and deep. Tribal territory was seized through the disciplined application of force by a professional military, and tribes were variously disrupted, displaced, and (or) dispersed. Not infrequently they were enslaved. On occasion, tribes would take their revenge by assaulting and overthrowing a (usually) declining Civilizational society. More often than not, however, a newly triumphant tribe would, in a generation or two, became more Catholic than the Pope with respect to what they had overwhelmed. They would be conquered by their conquest! So powerful and persuasive were the possibilities which opened to this new societal paradigm.

For the next several thousand years we circled within this paradigm, elaborating upon it in many ways. Many distinct civilizations, rich in culture and accomplishment, arose and prospered. But the bedrock minimum remained the same: an efficient organization over time of simple human physical tasks - any ten peasants could tend the fields and mind the herds as well as any other ten peasants. Coercive power was decisive.

Eventually, the unintended consequence – Civilization – got around to a new idea. A second pulse. It was Newton’s idea. It may not have been entirely original with him, and aspects of it are certainly apparent in thought, and trends of thought leading far back into recorded history, but it is incontestably Newton’s formulation of the idea (in the Principia of 1687) that leads to its implantation in the fertile soil of post Renaissance Europe. Its subsequent rooting and exfoliation leads directly to modern science and technology, and on to the modern world.

Newton does not simply set forth that there is a gravitational attraction between bodies, but formulates it as a precise mathematical relationship. The force is directly proportional to the product of masses of the attracting bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. The force is calculable! Precisely and exactly calculable! And a like conceptualism might be thought to extend to all of physical reality. The natural world is encompassed by a regime of mathematical rigor. Material reality can be described by universal, discoverable, mathematically exact expressions of causality.

After Newton, the Physicist Bernoulli, observing that the flow of air over a surface curved on top and flat on the bottom produces an uplift, can calculate what flow of air, over what surface of wing, will produce exactly what lift per unit area of wing. You can build a plane and know that it will fly! A child can observe steam displace a heavy iron lid from a pot. The grown James Watt can, after Newton, calculate precisely what pressure of steam against what piston head can, when translated through the mechanical apparatus of the piston, produce exactly what turning force on a wheel or crankshaft: the steam engine.

With Newton, science transforms from a cottage industry of inspired eccentrics into an ever broadening, ever deepening, universal human endeavor. Over the next three hundred years, the constant and rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge has yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity for human creativity as both invention and enterprise to feast upon. And feast it has.

A new age comes upon us and everything changes – as it did with the Agricultural Revolution and the birth of Civilization. The first great consequence of the Scientific Revolution was the Industrial Revolution. That, and the continuing advances flooding in its wake, so dominate us with their dazzling transformation of our material circumstances, that we generally fail to be aware of the changes in human societies that have accompanied the process. Consider, three hundred years ago there were no democracies (Pace Switzerland). Today a great portion of the world’s people live in democracies, and those societies are incontestably the most vital and prosperous we have. Three hundred years ago, if you had proposed that you had to educate all of a society’s children, you would have been laughed at. Today, throughout the developed world, it is the accepted commonplace. There is more to the modern world than a plane in the skies, and the channel changer in your hand.

The work by which the world prospers has changed. Slowly and inexorably, a world has been emerging that prospers by the educated creativity of its people. People with only a basic education - read, write, and do simple arithmetic –encounter a vast range of opportunities to make a life for themselves and their families – a level of possibilities unprecedented in all previous human history. The success of enterprises and societies becomes driven by efforts that can no longer be usefully obtained by main force, by standing over people with a whip. It is a new reality that has reshaped the world – an emergent process that has created wealth on an altogether staggering scale.

Societies have been, and are, transforming themselves in accommodation. As noted above, a strong flow of educated creativity will arise from populations secure in self governance, rich in opportunity for innovation and its implementation, and able to realize a satisfactory life for all: The New Paradigm.

Historically, that’s our story! The Grand Narrative (of sorts). Two pulses and two periods of adjustment, the first seemingly so far distant that we are generally only vaguely aware of it; until, of course, we reflect on the fate of Native Americans. The second pulse comes only three hundred years ago, with the rooting and exfoliation of Newton’s idea. The putative Man from Mars, looking back on the human story, would see - I believe well above all - these two things: our transition to Civilizational societies, and the advent of modern science and technology. In between: periods of adjustment, and an exploration of possibilities within a general given, gradually enriching a matrix from which the next pulse might come.

From this it becomes apparent that we are currently in the midst of a period of profound worldwide re-adjustment - a perilous passage. Critically, it suggests a stance with which to approach things: Mutually undergoing a change as vast and sweeping as any we have ever encountered, we need less to confront one another as to work together to meet the common difficulties of the passage. We are all in it together, and such intelligence as we can muster, and such wisdom as we can achieve become our greatest necessities.

Top down, authoritarian, governance becomes progressively less and less viable because it does not foster, and cannot secure over time the work by which the modern world prospers. Savagely exploitative economic relationships cannot be supported over time because they will alienate, even cripple, those whose genuine creative engagement is required by the very nature of the work to be accomplished.

Twin intertwining threads: the active committed intelligence of individuals engaged in a technologically advancing marketplace, and the commitment of individuals secure in self governance to their society, define the basis for prosperity in this “second phase” of Civilizational societies.

The traditional military/police coercive powers are rendered helpless against even the first, industrial enterprise/assembly line, phases of this. Coercive power can assert control over modern industrial enterprises, but cannot run them day to day. The critical labor which runs a modern economy lies with its entrepreneurial elite. Entrepreneurs are skilled in unique ways, and are not infinitely replaceable. They are a new presence which can neither be compelled nor readily co-opted by the old elites. But the entrepreneurs themselves cannot hold power indefinitely against their need for increasingly educated and motivated employees. This does not mean that power inevitably devolves such that the individual realizes the benefits of his or her real position in the scheme. Indeed, grave, often explosive, instabilities result from exactly that failure. In the end, however, those benefits must be realized, or the enterprise will break down, or fail competitively against those in which benefits and power are reasonably aligned, and which reap the continuing rewards of effective commitment.

Realize that we confront something new. The history we might search for insight remains largely the history of a now dying paradigm; one in which coercive power alone could be, and most often was, decisive – a paradigm attuned to, and successful in, an earlier reality.

Lincoln: “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. We must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”

A world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people may sound quite promising, and, in the main, it has proven so; but the story of the past three hundred years has hardly been a walk to the paradise garden. The West, the first beneficiary of modernity, was also its first victim: the “satanic mills”, wars, revolutions and turmoil of the past two hundred plus years testify to enormous disruptions. All around the world societies coming to modernity experience a revolutionary change in their material circumstances, and, at the same time, feel a gravitational pull towards a radically new societal paradigm. It is all an invitation to upheaval and uncertainty, and we have had it: the period adjustment to a great transformative pulse.

The steadily increasing dependence of modern societies on the freely given talents and abilities of their people is inexorable, and yet the benefits native to that dependence are only fitfully realized. Turmoil ensues. And it is not simply a matter of resistance by the elites being displaced. For the people themselves, it is a new world, and they have to learn how to be comfortable in it, to feel secure in it. The possibilities for exploitation by narrow and particular interests within societies, and for dangerous and widely held misunderstandings by the broad base towards which power is moving, are great. The whole of the dark history of the 20^th century might be understood to lie beneath the dark wing of that last sentence.

Our primary task becomes managing the passage to a new paradigm - for to make the passage seems inevitable, barring such catastrophe as, unfortunately, modernity itself makes it all too easy to envision. Tribal societies could not, did not, and perhaps their people ultimately did not wish to, decline the transit to a new reality. Today’s people face a similar problem with regard a transition they can clearly see possesses great capacities for a better life, but which also immerses them in a new and profoundly different world, with which they have had, at best, limited experience. With the best will in the world, whatever those who have substantially made the passage, America, Western Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim, may attempt (and we must make the attempt) will be inseparable from the power of the modern world to both enthrall and disrupt. A volatile blend of envy, frustration and resentment is both inevitable and understandable. Our universal charge becomes finding mutually constructive outcomes.

The very nature of modernity opens vast possibilities for improvement in the material well-being of all peoples everywhere, but it also enables conflict no longer with sticks and stones and blades, but with nuclear tipped missiles and vials of contagion. This prodigality of outcomes, both constructive and destructive, becomes possibly the essential point. Recourse to violence begins to take on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite factory, and peace becomes mutually beneficial for all, including parties to previously intractable conflicts. Make peace and you can move on, prospering by the educated creativity of your people.

It seems obvious, to me at least, that over the next one hundred years or so the human race will make such choices as will define our future for the next several hundred years, or perhaps even our entire fate as a species - in so far as that is ours to determine. We can either chose a path of comity and cooperation, of peaceful resolutions to tensions, opening the way to a full flowering of our (now demonstrably) enormous constructive and creative powers. Or we may choose a path of persistent and pervasive contention, lashed to the wheel of conflict, trapped in the exchange of murderous stroke and counterstroke, and opening ourselves to all the impending disasters.

I believe in people, in both their ability and desire to make wise and constructive choices. But this is rendered likely only in a world at peace. Threatened, we too easily become creatures of our fears and not our hopes.

This transformation can work to beneficent ends, but the passage is hazardous. It is for us, now, rather to facilitate that passage, to seek its realization with ever diminishing pain. To do all we may to assure emergence of what can be a far richer and more hopeful world than any we have known. It would be my hope that, from the perspective herein, we come to engage this process consistently, creatively, compassionately. We have seldom had a greater or more urgent task, or more golden an opportunity.

Sat, 03 May 2008 14:58:28 GMT

The Cognitive Age

I came upon a line of thinking about ten years ago.[See above 'Science and Moderity' (and below, at the bottom of this site)].

The following is a passage from a David Brooks New York Times Op-Ed ‘The Cognitive Age’ which appeared May 2, 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/opinion/02brooks.html?ei=5087&;em=&en=1628bc39165590dc&ex=1209960000&pagewanted=print

“The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or down the street). . . . The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked. . . . . The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived? . . . The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. . . . . But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.”

The Cognitive Age

IN OTHER WORDS: A world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people.

Its taken ten years, but people are getting there. I saw a Charlie Rose interview last night with Fareed Zakaria on his new book: 'The Post-American World' which seems to enfold the same consciousness.

I have never taken to my particular formulation of the idea. But calling it the Cognitive Age doesn't quite hack it for me either. . . A little too remote. How about a world that prospers by Cognitive Creativity, (or the Cognitive Creativity of its people.)?

A world that prospers no longer by the strength of our backs and sweat of our brow, but by the Cognitive Creativity of its people.

Kind of like it!

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:00:40 GMT

Has Jacob Weisberg Discovered the Rosetta Stone for the Iraq War?

In ‘The Bush Tragedy’ Weisberg propounds a logically coherent, if altogether chilling, unfolding of the Iraq War story. At its center is a literally paranoid Dick Cheney and a coterie of acolytes drunk on the same Kool Aid. They believed all that WMD, operational Al Qaeda contacts, we will be greeted as liberators stuff, and, sealed away in their own world, would entertain only confirmatory evidence, dismissing anything else pretty nearly apriori. Consideration of alternative courses of action were likewise dismissed in cavalier fashion. Add to that, with an America threatened by Acts of War, Cheney’s well documented fixation with the ‘Unitary Executive’, wherein the Constitution is understood to devolve all power and prerogatives relating to the President’s war authority upon the executive branch without exception, up to and including control of any and all flows of information. Finally, into the mix falls a psychologically flawed President, without a capacity to critically reflect upon either himself or the world around him, and a Dick Cheney who understands just how to exploit the situation.

It is almost as if three hermetic seals fall into place. The Unitary Executive, which seals the White House from all examination - let alone the normal checks and balances; an undying Hobbesian Cold War ideological intoxication holding sway inside the bubble, and a critically limited President, rendered psychologically susceptible to certain possibilities which open in the post 9/11 world, folded under the wing of a man who understands the situation and is willing and able to exploit it.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:57:34 GMT

Change Election in Danger of Being Hijacked

For a long time, more or less two thirds of the American people have indicated they believe the country is on the wrong course and needs to change direction. Nearly every poll has highlighted change as the electorate's principle concern. For the matter to now begin to turn on the question of whether or not we might elect a woman or a black man President betrays this well expressed concern, and the country's interests.

No one proposes that electing a black man will solve the problems of the economy, the Iraq War, and the leadership role America should pursue in the world after 9/11 - let alone the finding the right direction for the country. Nor is anyone proposing electing a woman President would accomplish those ends. Electing some particular woman, or some particular black man, perhaps, but that is another question.

So who is skewing the matter in the direction of race and gender?

Who would benefit?

Clearly the Republicans.

A choice between a woman and John McCain, or between a black man and John McCain drains attention away from the real issues of concern. You can bet, in many and various ways, the right wing machine will echo with increasing force these attempts to reorient the debate. And of course our Main Stream Media will be all too easily suckered into aiding and abetting this ‘game’, not least because it fits in so readily with their flogging of the horse race aspect of elections.

In 1960 Kennedy famously offered: I am not the Catholic candidate for President, I am a candidate for President who happens to be Catholic. So now Hillary Clinton is not the woman candidate for President of the United States, but a candidate for President of the United States who happens to be a woman, and Barack Obama is not the black candidate for President, but a candidate for President who happens to be black To turn the debate on the point of race or gender turns it away from the question of the where the country is going and how it is to get there. The REAL concern of the electorate at this moment.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:52:52 GMT

The Numbers

For those opposed to Bush et al Tom Oliphant has written a wonderful book: Utter Incompetents. Hardly a rhetorical flamer, it is far more full of light than heat. Page after page after page Oliphant just lays out the ‘record’, and allows the evidence to accumulate. For the anti-Bushie, dabble in it as you will [and you will!], it is like catnip.

Be that as it may, at the books conclusion, Oliphant lays out a series of simple numbers that devastate. I will return to these in a moment, but, as the book – of necessity - ends with the status of things in 2007, consider the interview with Chuck Hagel conducted by Charlie Rose March 28, 2008:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/03/28/2/a-conversation-with-senator-chuck-hagel

It is as ‘up to date’ as possible, but not yet available as either video or transcript – one assumes it will be shortly. Hagel clearly seconds many of Oliphant’s points and makes reference to a new poll that shows 81%[!!!] of the country believes we are on the wrong course.

And so back to those numbers.

[It would be nice if I could ‘cut and paste’, but I will have to enter text by hand, and apologize for any ‘typos’ in advance – note that Oliphant’s numbers are matter of public record, being nothing more than poll data, which, in the aggregate, define a truly stunning reality]

From pages 271 – 272 ‘Utter Incompetents’ 2007 by Thomas Oliphant, Thomas Dunne Books, St Martins Press 2007:

"President Bush’s Polls did more than just go poof.

As his days dwindle down to precious few, his handling of the presidency has cost him what once were his most appealing qualities – and, in a way the foundations of his standing as president.

In the Washington Post/ABC News surveys early in his administration most people (including most people who disagreed with him)on major issues) considered Bush honest and trustworthy, by 63 to 34 per cent in the last survey before the 9/11 attacks. In January of 2007 the result was 57 – 40 percent negative.

Another part of his foundation was a once wide spread felling that the outwardly affable Bush understands ordinary Americans and their problems. That was the view by 61 – 37 percent margin in survey in early 2003, shortly after the terrorist attacks. By 2007, the result was67 to 32 percent negative.

Americans also once saw strength in him. Just before the 9/11 atttacks sent those ratings into the stratosphere, Bush was seen as strong national leader by a 55 – 43 percent margin. In early 2007, the result was negative by almost the reverse margin, 54 to 45 percent.

Above all Americans had long considered Bush the kind of person to be trusts in a crisis. That was the view by 60 to 37 percent in the late summer of 2001. Nearly six years later, the verdict was 56 to 43 per cent negative. One important reason for the harsh judgment was an overwhelming view of Bush as stubborn and unresponsive. By 63 to 36 percent, the American public declared him unwilling to listen to different points of view."

Now just THINK about this, in an era of great and grave consequence, by significant and consistent margins, the American people believe the President of the United States is untrustworthy, does not understand them, is stubborn, unresponsive and unwilling to listen to different points of view, is NOT a strong leader, and NOT to be trusted in a crisis.

What conceivably could be more damning! Or Chilling! And not least as it defines the trashing of possibly the greatest Presidential asset of them all: the bully pulpit.

81%[!!!] of the country believes we are on the wrong course.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:48:59 GMT

Matrices

Matrix mathematics is one of the most powerful tools employed in modern science. A matrix is envisioned as an array of elements to be brought to bear (more of less simultaneously) on phenomena. If the elements of the matrix are well chosen and weighted, the ‘operation’ of the matrix on the phenomena in question will produce a prediction which matches experimental observation. The virtue of the conceptualism is that it opens a way to assessment of complex interacting systems in which factors can in act simultaneously – or nearly so - in various directions.

The possible usefulness of such an approach to historical and geopolitical matters is pretty nearly intuitive, since such matters are all too often understood to be complex realities in which competing elements, inclining one way and another, act more or less simultaneously to influence the evolution of events. OF COURSE no predictions made in tangled human and societal matters can, or should be proposed to, approach anything like mathematical rigor.

Nevertheless, I will try to take the approach ‘out for a spin’ with reference to the Iraq War. (The ‘test’ will be does application of the matrix lead logically to the historical observation.)

To begin with, there were too many ways the war could go too far wrong, and too few it could go as right as we would need have it go once we began it. Specifically we would need to have a stable, democratic, pluralistic, prosperous Iraq within a time frame effective in challenging the appeal of radical Islam within the Arab/Muslim world. This was more than a little like saying we were going to run the table five straight times in Vegas. While the all too many elements which might act against success could stand alone, as well as operate in concert, the brighter possibilities, which clearly appeared less probable, needed to come off in concert, lowering the probability for success still further. In short the ‘matrix’ out of which the Iraq War would evolve was heavily dominated by elements arguing against its success. The one positive element in the matrix that seemed like a ‘sure thing’, was a quick and easy victory by the American military.- and that indeed happened. For about 10 minutes we were, in fact, greeted as liberators – and 10 minutes was all it was ever likely to be – after that it became: ‘When are you leaving?

In prospect: It was a dumb war!

You might consult ‘Choices’ posted to my blog site in October 2002

Now let us consider the ‘purple finger’ elections of January 2005. An immense success, the Bushies proclaimed them, and worked them assiduously for every rose colored glasses, count our chickens before they are hatched advantage they could yield. Yet it was apparent from the beginning that those elections were set up to produce an avatar of secular division: Vote for me, I’m Shia! Vote for me, I’m Sunni! Vote for me I’m Kurd! In the event the Sunnis declined to participate, exacerbating the rigorously sectarian outcome. Add to this the bed rock reality that a government with, of necessity, no record, would in a short time, need to find enough young men willing to fight for die for a unified Iraq which the government itself in no way embodied. The body of young men from whom such force might be fashioned, would be counter posing what was a vision of an Iraq little more that a faint glimmer on a far too distant horizon, with their far more immediate – and ‘purple finger’ affirmed - loyalties to family, tribe, and above all, their identities as Sunni, Shia and Kurd. Here we had a matrix crushingly dominated by elements whose operation predicted EXACTLY the reality which evolved from January 2005 forward. [Laid out in three pieces posted to my blog site January 30, 2005.]

Finally, let’s consider The Surge.

I proposed recently in a post to OpenDemocracy: 'The Surge is Working': Flip Side on March 1, 2008, that there were likely aspects (elements in a matrix) to be added to the simplistic ones the administration was carefully (as ever) singling out to its advantage. My principle citation in the post was an article by a one Chris Hedges, some of whose assertions were not ‘common knowledge’ at the time, but which have been widely acknowledged since. Listening to the administration, you would not have gleaned, for example, that we had been systematically paying the Sunnis fighting to suppress their former foreign Jihadi allies. Hedges said we had . . . . and we had. It appears to be emerging that the more complex matrix I supposed is, in fact, responsible for how things are evolving now. That matrix inclines rather strongly towards increased trouble, not ‘success’, let alone ‘winning’ For a broader consideration of elements in play you might consult ‘The Insurgency’ at my blog site: http://blogs.salon.com/0001185/

FINALLY, I emphasize this is a conceptual approach. It can only yield useful results if the matrix devised is as intellectually rigorous as the one who proposes it can manage. It will be of no use to put together elements after one’s own desires, ignoring other possibilities, or short changing or over emphasizing the weight of some elements as opposed to others. Perhaps the best ‘rule of thumb’ would be that suggested by Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’. Gather as much evidence and experience as you can, let it stew, and wait for the moment when things snap into focus. In the end, given the complexities involved in human societies, there is no substitute for informed intuition. We can strive to cultivate that, and, in so doing, witness well for democracy in our own time – perhaps the most any generation of Americans can count on the opportunity to contribute.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:43:17 GMT

‘The Surge Is Working’: Flip Side

‘The surge is working’ appears to be one more ‘rose colored glasses', ‘count your chickens before they’re hatched’ huckstered to us by the administration, its right wing coterie and John McCain(!) and is all too likely to be naïve, and dangerously so.

In this light, please consider:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080225_the_calm_before_the_conflagration from Chris Hedges.

It sets out exactly what I suspect - and have sketched below in 'The Insurgency', to be the nature of a likely and significant reality lurking beneath the blue skies, pretty balloons, straight on to morning, we’re winning in Iraq screed the right wing echo chamber, and John McCain(!) have been urging so insistently upon us.

Now I don’t propose this confirms I have been right, but it strongly suggests my caution on the dangerous naïveté we may be courting WAS correct.

I do not endorse all that Hedges proposes, but if his numbers are anywhere near correct, and Petraeus is unaware of them, it would betoken a failure of epic proportions. If he is aware of them – and he has not, and neither he nor the administration has as yet – communicated to the American people the danger they portend, it would be an almost equal failure [there IS another word I could select].

One number Hedges cites is:

"The Sunni Arabs, who make up about 40 percent of Iraq’s population, held most positions of power under Saddam Hussein."

This flies in the face of the almost universal understanding that the breakdown is 20 % Sunni, 20% Kurd, and 60% Shia. However, it of real consequence that the Sunnis (or more particularly the broad mass of the Sunni population) believed they constituted better than 50% of the population of Iraq. The import being that the armies of young men they are amassing will believe that ,and will be further encouraged to fight thereby. Trouble!

Another place where I would take exception to Hedges:

"The U.S. doled out funds and weapons to tribal groups in Afghanistan to buy their loyalty, but when the payments and weapons shipments ceased, the tribal groups headed back into the embrace of the Taliban."

No, they went back to their ages old internecine struggle for power and pelf, whose dysfunctions initially opened the door to the Taliban.

In closing, it should be noted how this definitively undercuts John McCain’s utterly simplistic and oft repeated, idea that Iraq will fall into the hands of Al Qaeda if we ‘fail’ in Iraq. How does anyone, observing armies of well armed Sunni, Shia and Kurd propose they will give up their country and its oil wealth to a small foreign collection of fanatics who are of no use to any of them. It is lunacy!

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:53:15 GMT

Change

This has been called a ‘Change’ election.

One problem with calling for change is crystallized in Hillary’s sarcastic moment:

www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/24/hillary-clinton-mocks-bar_n_88194.html - 147k -

Any reply to this should encompass:

Change, and especially great change, is difficult because it will almost certainly be opposed, and vigorously opposed.

We all understand this.

But change is difficult not only because it will be opposed, but because change itself is difficult. Even for those who believe passionately in it. For it requires us to think new thoughts, and to break new ground, and to place ourselves in unfamiliar places.

In this moment the American people appear to believe deeply that we need change, and someone who calls us to this moment by reminding us that we have done this before, by encouraging in us the confidence we can succeed, by calling us to once again become creatures of our hopes and not our fears is performing an inestimable service.

But, in a democracy, it is not the ‘leader’ alone who is critical; it is, it must be, ultimately, we ourselves who matter. It will almost certainly be from the wealth of our thoughts and talents and abilities that we will discover what is needed, and then find the will and the wisdom to implement it.

That is Obama’s message in this moment.

In the whole of his writing, indeed in the whole of the American cannon, Lincoln’s message to Congress 1862 is perhaps the single document most pregnant with meaning for the American Experiment. Its conclusion specifically addresses change and its difficulties: . .The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . ‘we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country . . . . We - even we here - hold the power and bear the responsibility.

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:49:04 GMT

Irrationality/Passion

Digby is a well known, and justly celebrated, blogger. Her take off point for ‘ressentimental-journey-part-one specifically cites a Washington Post Op-Ed by Rick Pearlstein. In order to place in context what I write here as Irrationality/Passion the links are provided.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102827_pf.html

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/ressentimental-journey-part-one

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/ressentimental-journey-part-deux

What is the basis for the PASSION of today’s right?

The passions that preceded the Civil War, were, and are, all too understandable. A whole way of life was based on keeping one race of human beings as chattel slaves to another. To the force of an overwhelming and defining economic interest were added the ancient division of tribe and, in turn, an effectively a more elemental division of race. (1) The Civil War was hardly an unexpected response to a wrackingly difficult situation. Your point here, however, is a descent into sheer irrationality as a component of the slide towards war.

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(1)Understand both those latter divisions are artificial, essentially phantoms. But it doesn’t matter. Ethnicity and race are fundamental identifiers, and we NEED to identify. We are social creatures and cooperate together in the business of life. Some basis for identification will be sought, and race (although a later genetic artifact) is literally an all too obvious one. Our first identifier, however, was ethnicity – the tribe - and cooperativity was organized around the ‘wisdom of the ancestors’, and the laws and customs of the tribe. An injunction to be part of a ‘tribe’ must be understood to lie very, very deep.

_________________________________________________________________

The Americans of the antebellum south were in denial over the simple reality that the logic of the Declaration, which they (rightly) reverenced, was in direct contradiction to a harsh reality they could not separate themselves from - separate emotionally psychologically, economically or practically. At the same time, their opponents in the north were driving forward with little or no acknowledgement of the difficulties redress of what was a monstrous injustice would certainly entail for the both the white and black populations of the south.

That the situation held great difficulty was the reason it was side stepped by our founders. As things evolved (THE COTTON GIN!) the matter grew steadily more intractable, and eventually broke beyond what has, otherwise, proven to be great powers of political reconciliation. One sign, and in the event, one driver of the process, was the passion of a group that came to be known as the ‘fire eaters’. In the instance of the American Civil War, it is all too understandable.

I must confess to some bemusement with Perlstein’s characterization of the Great Depression as a period of great polarization. “Tens of millions of Americans hated tens of millions of other Americans, sometimes murderously so.” Huh? I will concede the Veteran’s March on Washington fairly early on, but as the misery become pervasive we were ‘all in this together’, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. No, later in the Great Depression the ‘other tribe’ were the Banker Potters of this world; the rest of us were Jimmy Stewart.

Let’s step back for a moment. I hold the essential factor behind that particular complex of things to which we apply the label ‘fascist’ to be protection of the ‘sacred tradition’, i.e. what holds us together against the world, what under girds the cooperativity trough we function and survive. The fundamental impulse behind that complex of things one might term ‘revolutionary’ (Political Liberal/Libertarian), socio-economic(Marxist) is a simple truth that no society that requires a broad consensus can function indefinitely against the perception that it is substantially unfair. The crisis of the modern world lies in the fact that by far the most economically productive societies do indeed require exactly that broad consensus. Curiously, in the modern world to fail to be at least open to change fails what is an essentially (even profoundly) communitarian need, a NEED for a fair society. Nevertheless, REVOLUTION is in air. Revolution is in the air, while most of the world is still enmeshed in traditional tribal or top down authoritarian structures of governance. Structures with little, if any, history of venting, let alone accommodating, revolutionary pressures.

We got Trouble right here in River City!

Change is coming; it is even understood to be needed, either because it represents a reassertion of fairness, of simple justice, or because it is seen as a practical necessity, but change will disrupt the fabric of stability that ‘holds us together against the world’, it threatens what ‘under girds the cooperativity through which we function and survive’.

The Conservative case is that Liberals will smash everything to produce change, with too little attention the consequences that change may entail, and with little or no regard for who gets hurt. The Liberal case is that Conservatism stands in the way of NEEDED change, helping to perpetuate injustice and inequity.

Are those sufficient causes for passion either way?

I think so!

It is the passion of today’s right that is a puzzle. Consider, nearly anyone in the history of this planet would have given their eye teeth to have been a part of the American reality over the past 75 years. Yet incontestably there is a significant portion of Americans who seem to believe they are on the verge of being engulfed by a liberal hell hole.

Might irrationality (on either the liberal or conservative side) emerge from some unacknowledged dissonance in the minds of the parties to that irrationality.

As observed above, the Americans of the antebellum south were in denial over the fundamental contradiction of our founding - caught ever more deeply in a reality they could not separate themselves from, and could not, would not, resolve. The thesis would be that strains were generated leading to the irrational extremes and attendant passions of the ‘fire eaters’ – which Lincoln remarked - and eventually gave way to a commitment to Civil War.

Conversely, the irrationality of the ‘fire eaters’ had a precedent incarnation in the Abolitionist movement. Although morally right, all too often, and all too insistently, abolitionists appeared to think they had only to pronounce their anathema, and all would, and should fall before them. The irrationality of this position was brushed aside by the abolitionists, but noted by large majorities of Americans in the north. ‘Bloody Kansas’ and, ultimately, John Brown, became passionate irrationality incarnate.

We struggled though a long confrontation with this matter from the Compromise of 1820, to the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas/Nebraska Act of 1854. The center piece of the latter was the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the cognitive dissonances of which aroused Lincoln, and led to his increasing emergence on the national scene. Ultimately we failed the test of finding useful resolutions, and the bloodiest war in our history was the result..

So then, what are the mind sets of today’s Americans that can give rise to unacknowledged contradictions?

I have proposed there is one built into the liberal agenda by the rapidity of change in the modern world, a consistent need for a broad societal consensus, and a concomitant need for, at least, peaceful revolutions. But historically, barring the real excesses of Vietnam era emotional flights, peaceful resolutions are what American liberals have sought, and largely proven willing to work through, for last the last 75 years.

The lineaments of today’s Conservative agenda are: (1) Get the government out of the economy – indeed out of as much of the economic aspects of our lives as can be accomplished. In theory, this maximizes the ‘freedom’ to innovate, and the creation of new enterprises.); and (2) Protect (Champion!) the ‘sacred traditions’ that promote stability and order in all other things.

The modern Conservative movement is, arguably, schizophrenic. Conservatives exalt the freedom of the individual to innovate (economically!), and the traditions of stability that are threatened by innovation, and they do not address that contradiction. They want to ‘buccaneer’ economically, overturning or ignoring all sorts of social bonds, and then enact fits of allegiance over ‘other’ bases for social cohesion in defense the ‘sacred tradition’ One can, of course, be far more cynical. Propose it is all a pose on the part of the ‘buccaneers’ in which they exploit the need of all people to defend the ‘sacred tradition’, while selectively (and effectively!) pursuing their ‘buccaneering’. But a substantial component of self delusion is all that would be needed to explain PASSION. Do we believe Grover Norquist really buys into it all?

While the Grover Norquists of this world may not be truly convinced zealots, the rank and file Conservatives, the Rush Limbaugh crowd, have been enthusiastically lobbied to value ‘freedom’ in economic matters, and to resist the destabilizations of ‘freedom’, of change, in all other matters. Liberals are cast as feckless enemies of the principles and traditions we hold most deeply, and which define and keep us together as working societies: in the name of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ they would overturn it all, and the consequences be damned.

With respect to today’s conservatives, the thesis would be that the strain of exalting destabilizing ‘economic’ freedom, while being persuaded to a fierce defense of all other bases of stabilization, ignites the irrationalities cited by Pearlstein, and by Digby in Ressentiment. Closed to resolution, matters are open all to readily to passion.

One more reflection:

Ultimately, a consideration of the history of the last few hundred years sees all too many examples of near colossal irrationality. Most of these can be associated with such cognitive dissonances as are proposed above, acting at least as accelerants toward upheaval. The depth and extent of difficulty to which these cognitive dissonances incline, the extremes such irrationalities contribute to, MUST not be ignored.

The liberal inclination towards revolution provides an active, participatory basis for being in the world. From Lenin and Mao to Pol Pot, we all know the worst to which that can lead.

The quintessential conservative mind set ‘preserve the sacred tradition’ leads to a kind of semi-permanent defensive crouch. Is it all too surprising to find that, from time to time, there appears an urge to stand up and strike back? When, as in the 1930’s, it extended to an aggressive ‘defense’ beyond the boarders of the sacred traditions’ polity, we were visited by the Fascist nightmare.

The following considers one irrationality we are confronted with at the moment:

For the moment, the threat of ‘terrorism’ lies with its most immediate and pressing incarnation through radical Islam. Ultimately this can only be dealt with by a great, continuing cooperative effort on the part of the whole world, but most especially the developed world. Its resources, moral, intellectual, economic, and military are overwhelming. There is no way radical Islam can hope bring these societies down. Only the developed world itself can bestow such power upon a mere faction, by making repeated poor, foolish, and even catastrophic choices. That faction is lethal to the very people they seek to enlist and enflame – and those people know it. Radical Islam has nothing to offer but pyrotechnic nihilism and stagnation in life closed to all of the opportunities that open to people in the modern world. The societies of the developed world enjoy the free and deep commitment of the vast majority of their people, people of enormous cultivated talents and abilities. Does any one propose that such societies, with such vast resources, both human and material, will simply fold their tents and go away when challenged? Anyone who does propose it – and it is a core Neocon propaganda fixation - should be made to defend it.

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:36:27 GMT

Right On Day 1

Twice on Iraq Barack Obama has summed up things with a simple precise phrase.

Before the war he said he was not opposed all wars, he was opposed to dumb wars. It drew our attention to the core of the matter. What made this war, at this time, in this way THE way to proceed after 9/11, and against Islamic Radicalism.

The wisdom to act is not wisdom in the actions chosen.

With respect to where we are now, Obama has said we need to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in. Again right to the heart of the matter. We cannot leave Iraq spiral down into a catastrophic failed state.

Success in leaving behind an even tenuously stable state is the only ‘victory’ we can achieve now. Osama bin Laden has already won the Iraq round in our confrontation with Radical Islam The relative appeal of the jihadist agenda has grown in the Arab/Muslim world since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The debate isn’t over whether to achieve a stable Iraq, it is over how best to do it.

Framing the debate around the level of American troops in Iraq at some given time is something the administration’s supporters are all too eager to do. The administration’s critics understand we have long needed to significantly widen an essentially military commitment to meaningfully include political, economic and diplomatic initiatives. Senator Obama has indicated he means to do just that. In the process, applying pressure on Iraq’s factions to politically reconcile by drawing down our troop levels is one legitimate avenue to be explored.

But the bottom line remains as Obama has framed it: we need to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.

Two ‘spot on’ insights, ‘spot on’ in their placing in time as well.

And we can elect this guy President!

Do we want to go with someone who has been so sharply and unerringly right, or someone who saw less clearly (Hillary Clinton), or with little clarity at all, who has more or less been in the corner of an administration that has been virtually without any clarity at all: John McCain.

Why should we now have confidence in the judgment going forward of a John McCain? Why should we apriori accord him credibility, and deny it to Barack Obama (on the basis of ‘experience’ no less!), when Obama’s clear and timely insights have been so pointedly right? If Obama has chosen (and he is far from alone in this) to champion a far broader and encompassing reconstruction of our effort in the confrontation with Radical Islam, why should we not accord what he proposes respect and careful consideration.

Most (all?) of what we have heard from McCain emphasizes an essentially military engagement – albeit one which now encompasses a broad counter insurgency strategy – as opposed to merely more troops on the ground, or what McCain seemed to be proposing for most of time he was fitfully in opposition to Bush’s course in Iraq.

In 2004, McCain had a real opportunity to change the administration’s course. Instead he backed Bush wholeheartedly while still entertaining, he would have us believe, a conviction things were seriously wrong with Bush’s efforts. Does anyone really propose McCain believed his Senate colleague, John Kerry, who had elected to go to war for his country in Vietnam, served, was wounded, and decorated for his service, would ‘cut and run’ in a matter so clearly of great consequence? Does anyone believe McCain could have seen so great a gulf between the two, that he had no choice but to uncritically support, and not substantively challenge, Bush on policies McCain believed were so very wrong? He might have had a real effect, but chose not to act. Wisdom? Judgment? Experience?

Right on Day 1?

With Barack Obama, we have substantive evidence that, in the moment itself, there is reason to have confidence that he will be: Right on Day 1.

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:32:30 GMT

Reflections (with notes) on Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton

In political matters, as in many others, we tell ourselves stories about who we are, where we are going, and what we are about. When we grow tired of a story, or sense that a new one is needed, we go looking for it. These moments define periods of flux where change is both welcomed and a source of anxiety.

The late 1950’s and early 1960’s presented us with such a moment. We understood, at some deeper level, that the world had not only changed, but defined itself anew [1]. Yet there was, at a conscious level, no attendant framing story to articulate what was little more than a growing awareness.

On to the stage stepped John Kennedy. With his youth, wit, energy, vigor and intellect, he inspired us to believe we would forge a ‘new story’ to orient ourselves and move us successfully through the second half of the 20th century.

When he was killed, it all went away.

The only ones left standing were old politicians and their old politics. And they led us back to the past. It could be no other way. It was all they knew, and lacking both Kennedy’s sense the country was looking for something new, and our deeper longing for it, it was all they could do. [2]

So now, after 9/11, a new reality has shaped itself. So now an old politics, riddled with old contentions, holds our politics and politicians in thrall.

And onto the stage Barack Obama strides, calling for change. Young, vigorous, with a clear and penetrating intellect, he urges us to embrace a moment of flux, to stand forth once again as creatures of our hopes, to have the confidence we will discover a new story to orient ourselves, and our allies around the world, in constructive and purposeful endeavor.

It is in this that Obama’s great appeal resides. He is telling us: Have confidence in yourselves; working together we can do this. We’ve changed in the past and emerged all the stronger for it. We can, and must, shake off the miasma of fear the current administration has worked so hard to trap us in. Break free, and this free people can and will discover successful new stances and new strategies. [3]

‘. . . we, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility - Abraham Lincoln, message to the Congress 1862.

Hillary Clinton is everything her advocates say she is: deeply committed, highly talented, and an extremely well prepared individual, but by her life and her history, she is tied to the past. She has strategies, plans, and proposals all lined up and ready to go. The very concrete nature of all of that is ineluctably tied to past experiences and trials, and consequently cannot help but gravitate around an old politics. All of these proposals are eminently worthy of consideration, and I am confident any Democratic administration would be eager to pursue them.

However, through no fault of her own, she is also tied to the past by forces beyond her control. In a concerted, persistent, and virulent effort, the conservative right set out to bring down the Clinton Presidency in flames from day one. And it did not hesitate to go beyond the President, but eagerly sought out anything and everything it could bring to bear, ultimately trashing and demonizing both Bill and Hillary. The ‘polarization’ with which the Clintons (and now especially Hillary) are charged is largely the creation of that right wing effort. Nevertheless, ‘that ‘stuff’ is out there, and will surely be brought to bear in the coming election campaign - and after, as she would try to govern and bring her agenda into being. This reality cannot be brushed aside in choosing the Democratic nominee.

So, do we now want someone, however well intentioned and well prepared, but tied to a more concrete and fixed vision, or someone who inspires us with confidence we can ride the flux: We can, we must, do this ‘new thing’.

[1] Emerging from the Second World War as by far the least damaged and most powerful nation in the world, we proceeded through 15 years of peace and prosperity; assumed, by default, the leadership of a world wide alliance dedicated to containing a vast totalitarian threat, establishing and maintaining, in the process, an enormous and unprecedented peacetime defense establishment. Yet, by 1960 we sensed burgeoning new energies, and felt ourselves capable of more.

[2] Arguably, the great youth unrest of the later 60’s reflected the perception on the part of the young that there was nothing out there which explained or rendered purposeful the altered world they saw all about them. They ‘tuned in’, ‘turned on’, and ‘dropped out’.

[3] The ultimate strength of a Democracy may well lie in a permanent capacity for renewal, for new energies and ideas to well up from the broad base on which it resides.

A little elaboration:

The three footnotes above were not some sort of obiter dicta. They were entirely integral to the piece.

The first sketched in how things had changed significantly as we moved from the end of WWII through the 50’s to 60’s. A world had redefined itself and we sensed a need for new understandings.] The second note suggested if we do not find what we are seeking, things ‘will out’ anyway, and the youth culture of the late 60’s might be considered the ‘way out’ that was found.

The third note proposes that (as things always change) one great strength of democracies may be some permanent ability to evolve change from below – evolving it from democracy’s (by definition) broad base.

After 9/11 things have again redefined themselves. We are again in a moment seeking new understandings, and with that, meaningful change. These moments are not constant, and the virtues appropriate to them cannot be considered any sort of permanent necessity in the process and processes of democracies. Neither, in any way, does the occurrence of such moments preclude a need for sound and serious policy considerations.

The roll a Kennedy (or an Obama?) can play is to help catalyze the process. It is my claim that, in such a moment, a leader can inspire confidence in us that we will succeed in our search for new understandings, and, in such a moment, that is not trivial. If that leader is truly exceptional, he (or she) will be able to see the most useful and constructive elements in what emerges, and help ‘midwife’ them into being. Kennedy did not live for us to see whether or not he would have accomplished this, but his (at first) grudging acquiescence to the emerging Civil Rights movement, and the near breathtaking traversal from the Vienna confrontation with Khrushchev, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the test ban treaty could be considered encouraging signs.

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:28:52 GMT

ALL HONORABLE MEN

I have written often about my perplexity concerning this administration and its courses. The most recent attempt , ‘Bush Who’, was mostly concerned with the President himself. It does not satisfy on the larger question of nearly inexplicable courses pursued by a whole administration. I find it possible, however, to propose something far more cynical and profoundly disturbing which does cohere. In the end, it ascends into a truly frightening empyrean.

To do this, we must go back to the University of Chicago and a Professor of Philosophy and the Classics who taught there from the late 40’s until the late 60s, Leo Strauss. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss

In this, I first want to emphasize that I am by no means sure Strauss himself actually bears much real responsibility for what I am about to outline. His principle obsession(?) in these matters appears to have been a then widely expressed concern that democracies were liable to fecklessness. That is to say they would be slow and reluctant to defend themselves against threat (as witness the 30s experience with Fascism). Of course, why this should obsess intellectuals of Strauss’ era is all too obvious, but the associated anxieties can legitimately be extended to any era, time and place. In particular, although a clear a war for survival – WWII (after Pearl Harbor) – seems overwhelmingly likely to trigger an appropriate response (however dangerously belated it might be), what might happen when clearly vital interests (oil?) are in placed in jeopardy. Will democracies take the ‘necessary’ actions?

The unstated assumption would be that such will likely involve military aggression. THAT comes up against the consistent observation that modern democracies don’t fight wars. The reason for this is generally left to float out there as, more or less, ‘ a given’. In fact ‘the reason’ can be simply stated: modern democracies are prosperous, and their people understand better things to do with their lives than to go out there and get shot for strategic control of some ‘vital interest’. Find some other way! Cutting some deal or innovating are far more likely than not to be preferred to war - and democratically enjoined.

WAR!?! THAT’S ME! THAT’S MY KIDS!

The thinking which has been associated with Strauss centers on a Platonic formulation. The demos ultimately cannot be trusted. It is fickle, insufficiently reflective, and too ready to indulge irresponsibility. The responsible wise men of the society, its leaders, must exercise their powers to redeem such unfortunate situations as will, from time to time, arise. They are enjoined to do this by employing all their political skills, explicitly to include the telling of ‘noble lies’. That is to say, engaging the demos with such representations of things as will persuade it to do the difficult things that must be done. The wise men ‘know best’ and pursue ‘higher truth’.

Suppose then a group of ‘patriots’ who believe deeply in America. An America not simply of the blood or soil, but as an ideal of freedom and liberty, a beacon, a shining city on a hill, Lincoln’s ‘Last Best Hope of Earth’. An America to whom the opportunity has fallen to lead the world, in the world’s own best interest, to a promised land. It would be criminal to fail this responsibility. But, these patriots clearly see, as just suggested, an inconstant, often heedless American body politic, easily diverted and too often ‘not up to the task’.

What to do?

The Project for a New American Century was formed in the 1990’s as think tank like effort to consider America’s future on the world stage.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

Ultimately PNAC offered a blue print: Rebuilding America’s Defenses.

http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

PNAC became an explicit continuation of a group under Wolfowitz in the Bush I administration that (with Cheney’s blessing) set up to strategize outside the box. What they came up with was issued as ‘Plan B’. It proposed an American leadership whose proper objective would be to make and keep America paramount, the only power able to truly shape things, and that compromising allies - who might not ‘go along’ with America’s vision - as well as opposing our foes might be contemplated. When Plan B went public, George H W Bush was appalled, publicly condemned it, and had it both withdrawn and specifically rejected by those associated with it.

Perhaps the two most signature items in Rebuilding America’s Defenses are an injunction that our military must be prepared to fight multiple simultaneous major theatre wars, and a lamentation that it might take ‘another Pearl Harbor’; to allow us to ‘go there’.

Then comes 9/11.

By some chance, by some quirk of fate, (or by the hand of God?), a number of these ‘patriots’ find themselves uniquely positioned to play the role of Platonic wise men. How can they not seize the opportunity?

What would they do?

First find a ‘causus belli’. Initially very easy: Afghanistan. But they cannot succeed too well. A palpable blow must be struck, but not in any way conclusive. A longer term objective, more involving, more deeply engaging is needed. Saddam Hussein and Iraq are by far the most likely target. And beyond this a ‘Great Enemy’ must found. And it is! Radical Islam: especially in its conjunction with modern technology. [From the National Security Strategy of 2002: “The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.” An almost infinitely inflatable bogeyman is realized, inspiring fear and outrage. Kept alive in the public imagination, enlivened as it will be by the all too real trauma of 9/11, we arrive at something which conspires to keep us creatures of our fears. A ‘permanent’ injunction to make the hard choices, and bear the difficult burdens necessary to keep America strong and dominant.

So tell those ‘Noble Lies’!

It must rip the heart out of any American to observe that nearly everything we (which is to say our ‘patriots’) have done finds a coherent explanation within this framework. The ‘failures’ aren’t failures at all. They offer excuses to continue on chosen courses. We didn’t want to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, barely three months after 9/11. How could the American public be persuaded on Iraq if Al Qaeda, who so hideously attacked us on 9/11, and to whom Saddam might give ‘those weapons’, was out of business, with its leader dead or facing international justice? Why concern yourself overly with taking maximal steps to prevent Al Qaeda from getting at least some of Saddam’s weaponry - some lesser stuff as we gather the bulk to justify our invasion? (Recall - all of the world’s security agencies knew Saddam had no nuclear capability.) How else could we have been so casual as we managed to secure NO Weapons of Mass Destruction? (If we hadn’t found any, then, at best, Osama could have found but little.) Ultimately, of course, everyone lucked out: there were no W.M.D.s. Then an insurgency in Iraq, along with other problematic situations in Middle East (IRAN!, Pakistan), works to our benefit, providing reasons for a continuing strong military presence in a vital, resource rich, region of the world. And, needless to say, violence and turmoil in the area constantly serves to refresh our fear of ‘the bogeyman’. Finally, why truly settle the Israeli Palestinian conflict, since the ability of such a solution to compromise the appeal of radical Islam – and diminish the ‘bogeyman’ - is all too manifest?

So, then, who are our ‘wise men’.

To begin with, let me say who I believe they are not, starting with the President himself. Neither I, nor, I expect, anyone, can see Bush even conceiving a permanent group of Platonic ‘wise men’, telling noble lies’ and guiding the country. However, for reasons I suggest in ‘Bush Who’, he proved to be highly susceptible, a ‘set up’, for their objectives after 9/11. And I believe he is knowingly and sincerely committed to the idea that, in the choices his administration has made since 9/11, he is pursuing some ‘higher truth’, or deeper reality, and that it is his job to ‘sell’ the choices made. And, of course, as President: HE IS RESPONSIBLE!

I would find it hard to believe any of our serving military are part of a group of self elected ‘wise men’. It is too contrary to American tradition, training and - far from least - the honor of our military. I must observe, however, that these same individuals are surely susceptible to injunctions to maintain high levels of American military strength.

I would find it hard to believe our judiciary would be involved – again too contrary to our history. But, as well, recent trends to the right have placed in highly consequential positions individuals who are manifestly likely to be more, rather than less, sympathetic to appeals in favor of greater governmental authority in national security matters. Exactly what our ‘wise men’ might hope for.

I do not believe Colin Powell to have been in on this at all, but Powell’s ‘good soldier’ orientation did not serve this country well in a critical moment. Nor do I believe Condoleeza Rice was in any way involved, although, like others I believe she proved all too persuadable.

So then, WHO?

At one point or other, and in critical positions all too often:

In Power – Cheney, to begin with, along with David Addison and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby; then the Defense Department axis of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and including sometime national security gadfly and ‘advisor’ Richard Pearl. In Justice, John Woo must certainly be a possibility.

In Support - I deem likely to be ‘in’ with the idea of Platonic ‘wise men’

public intellectuals like Irving Kristal and his son William, Norman Podhoretz, and Charles Krauthammer.

Then in broader support, although unwitting, a truly massive operation consisting of right wing media, the money that finances both that media and various aggregations that provide ‘think tank’ underpinning for the directions our ‘wise men’ have charted, and finally a Republican Party all too mindlessly compliant, chiefly in what amounts to a devil’s bargain for holding on to political power, with all that power’s other uses.

NOW UNDERSTAND: I am not asserting that there really is an operative group of ‘wise men’, but that the operation of such offers the only (nearly?) coherent explanation for all that has happened. As one who made a career in science, which works to discover exactly such explanations, I am fully aware that the existence of a logical explanation in no way constitutes PROOF. Unfortunately the arrival of a logically coherent explanation comes with the proposal of a point of view I believe would revolt any American, explicitly including the gentlemen just proposed to have elected themselves as our ‘wise men’.

I am, in general, a resolute foe of conscious conspiracy theories. Unconscious ones, conspiracies of commonly held self-interest, even self-delusion, I deem far more likely. But what I have proposed here is explicitly a conscious one. Nevertheless, I find it not unreasonable to suppose a group of ‘super-patriots’, convinced of the nation’s need, persuaded of their own unimpeachable honor, and the virtue of their ultimate aims, who could accept Strauss’ arguments for Platonic ‘wise men’ and the telling of ‘Noble Lies’.

If the attendant circumstances were not so grave, it would qualify as farce.

To conclude. if there is a conscious conspiracy, it is treason pure and simple. But setting that aside, I believe these people have broken American law and betrayed such sacred trusts that President George W Bush and Vice President Richard B.

Cheney should be impeached and removed from office. Our history cries out for it.

My personal conviction runs deeper. I believe it would be just if President George W. Bush,Vice President Richard B. Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were arraigned, indicted, tried and a verdict reached for Criminal Incompetence and Criminal Negligence over the Iraq War. Guilty or not guilty, I would be content. If the verdict were guilty and punishment imposed, I believe justice would have been served. If that punishment were death, I would believe justice had been served. I am appalled that I should think this last, but I do. And I am saddened well beyond words.

‘. . . we, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility’ - Abraham Lincoln, message to the Congress 1863.

All Honorable Men!

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:25:40 GMT

Bush Who

George W Bush is a mystery to me, and, it would appear, to many others as well.

Not only has he proposed and effected poor policies, overseen the catastrophic implementation of those policies, but, as President of the United States - from the bully pulpit – he has reported to the American people what he has been (and is) about with persistent, virtually constant, duplicity. The first two offenses are, however regrettable, within the realm of expectation, but the last we do not expect. The office and its bully pulpit have been treated with surpassing disrespect.

To make clear what I see to be Bush’s almost constant practice in using the ‘bully pulpit’:

Suppose an FDA panel issued a warning against a particular drug, citing a clear body of evidence. Suppose, then, that the CEO of the company marketing the drug gave a briefing in which the evidence cited by the FDA was dismissed, more or less by rigorously ignoring it. Instead, he presented a sales pitch for the drug, i.e. the construct of its marketing managers and advertising agency. You would say, no surprise there. Suppose, now, the head of the FDA repeated essentially the same performance: explicitly dismissing the report of his own panel, failing to deal with it, while, at the same time echoing the drug’s advertising campaign. Impossible[!] Outrageous[!] you would respond. Yet the action I have just proposed for the FDA head is a very accurate description of how this President has used the ‘bully pulpit’. In dealing with issues of the greatest consequence, rather than honestly present a contention to the American people everyone sees is there, and then forthrightly facing up to it, he acts the part of a marketing executive employing the all the sophisticated resources of modern advertising to ‘sell’ the chosen point of view. Others may do this, but high public officials, in matters of grave consequence, should not, and the President of the United States, speaking from the ‘bully pulpit’ must not. It is betrayal most foul and abominable.

This President has done so many things that defy simple common sense, and said so many things – with utter conviction (no less!) – that have later been shown to be untrue, half-truths, or gross distortions and misrepresentation of truth, that it stains credulity well beyond the breaking point to propose his acts to be those of a simple, honest man doing his best, and just getting it wrong.

Beyond these things, one sees someone who professes ‘The Prince of Peace’ to be his ‘favorite philosopher’, and yet leapt into a war with Iraq as anything but a ‘last resort’. One sees, as well, someone who shows what might be best described as compartmentalized compassion, someone who will meet privately to comfort those who have lost loved ones in the Iraq war he so clearly could have, and should have, avoided. In this it is difficult not to see an ability to screen himself away from the emotional and psychological consequences of his actions.

In the January 10, 2008 Salon, Camille Paglia makes this observation:

“But amid the glut of campaign news, Bush has been oddly recessive. When he surfaces, he looks a bit untidy around the edges, and his manner veers from the awkwardly jocular to the portentously overemphatic. After seven years in office, Bush still hasn't welded his different parts into a steady, consistent presidential persona.”

It occurred to me, over the years, we have consistently seen a ‘smirk/grin’ reflex(?) from Bush. Is it an indication of a poorly-integrated personality suddenly stumbling over a fault line?

Bush is known to despise this kind of analysis, and perforce, to shun any self examination.

How to make sense of it all?

To begin with, I am not asking: Can a rationale (or set of rationales) be proposed? As anyone with a scientific background knows, it is always possible to fashion a theory, but a satisfactory one is another matter entirely. Rather, I am asking: can a rationale be proposed that is consistent with all, or nearly all, of the evidence.

There have been attempts, generally falling into two categories: personal and external.

The personal ones: Saddam tried to kill my daddy, Maureen Dowd’s darker Oedipal competition with his father, or others I have seen, can explain inner psychological and emotional leanings, but something more than ‘leanings’ seems to be required for so consequential a set of outcomes. Besides, the evidence we have seen on all of these is more by inference than from any really close observation of the actual people in question.

The ‘external’ explanations – (1) an assertion of American power in a vital area of the world, (2) the need to ‘do something’ against Islamic radicalism, (3) pursuit of a ‘freedom agenda’, and (4) pursuit of domestic political advantage (the ‘permanent Republican majority’). Taken singly or together, they open to compelling and plausible rationales - but there are flaws. The first explanation can be made almost entirely persuasive, but fails to convince at an absolutely crucial point. The next two crumble when faced with a simple maxim: ‘the wisdom to act is not wisdom in the actions chosen’. What made this war, in this way, at this time, the way to proceed after 9/11 and against Islamic radicalism? The last, as Frank Rich establishes in The Greatest Story Ever Sold, actually becomes the most logically consistent, if chillingly cold blooded and utterly foolhardy.

The first explanation is the ultimate statement of Real Politik, made by the world’s sole remaining superpower. A stable, reliable flow of oil from the Middle East is a vital interest for the developed world, and nations go to war to defend their vital interests. Close case! We have only to add that America arrogate to itself the responsibility for securing a vital resource, and, of course, the inside track on an enduring economic and military control of that resource. The decision is made to pursue the matter in complete cold blood (Yes: Blood for Oil!), disdaining to responsibly persuade either the public or the congress. Electing, instead, to use all the resources of Madison Avenue, and a well financed, well oiled right wing media establishment to sell their chosen course. It is a virtually seamless, fully adequate, explanation for all that happened. EXCEPT for the shocking mess that resulted. If you are as clear eyed, and ruthless in pursuit of your ends as this Real Politik rationale requires, you WILL be prepared to lock down and tie down post war Iraq to secure the vital interests that were your objective. Yet the planning for Iraq after Saddam manifestly failed to provide for difficulties all too readily anticipated. To say it was grossly inadequate devastates understatement. Their plans explicitly were to be down to 30,000 troops by September! In this light, how can anyone defend Real Politik calculation as a satisfactory explanation for the administration’s actions – not to mention the actions of the President at the head of that administration.

The inability of 2 and 3 above to satisfy as explanations for the Iraq War has been pointed out exhaustively by many. Beyond the (Wisdom to act . . . . , this war at this time, in this way) ‘crumbling block’ cited above, I will mention two here. [1] There were clearly too many ways the Iraq War could go too far wrong, and too few it could go as right we would need to have it go right once we began. [Specifically, we would need to have a stable, democratic, pluralistic, prosperous Iraq in a time frame effective in significantly compromising the appeal of radical Islam within the Arab Muslim world. Anything less would be net gain for Osama bin Laden.] [2] Kenneth Pollack published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002. It is said to have ‘persuaded’ many of the ‘liberal hawks’ in their support for the war. Although the book meshed all too perfectly with the emerging Bush administration’s desires, Pollack himself confessed he did not believe Saddam was next on the list after 9/11 and

Afghanistan. Well up on the list, perhaps, but NOT next.

This leaves Frank Rich’s domestic political agenda. It is so stunning that it encourages one to dismiss it almost out of hand. And yet, strictly on its own terms, driven by the infatuated, incredibly well established and well funded, devotees of a ‘permanent Republican majority’, there is no obvious downside, as exists with avengeance in regard to 2 and 3 above, not to mention the decisive flaw in 1. Might it be possible, to propose a President looking to do this ‘big thing’, seeing all the ways possibilities 1, 2 and 3 do offer for positive outcomes, but focused sufficiently on 4, with no great obvious problems in prospect, so that the all too clear difficulties of 2 and 3 are blown off, and the utterly essential ‘end game’ of 1 is assumed to be ‘an automatic’: we couldn’t possibly get that wrong; we will have ‘won’ and be in absolute charge. In short, all of the explanations 1 – 4 are in play, but they are ‘cherry picked’, and inadequately examined. One need only add the same completely ruthless pursuit of this end as proposed in the case of explanation 1.

I would still have to regard this as highly improbable, but new evidence on the ‘personal’ side has recently appeared. It is Robert Draper’s ‘Dead Certain’. It offers an inside look, not just at the events of Bush’s Presidency, but at the personality of the man himself. Two themes constantly recur. The first is a persistently voiced disdain for ‘small ball’: working the details on issues, making small adjustments here and there, producing incremental, if worthy, gains. This is a man who longs to do big things, to be identified with large themes and large outcomes. 9/11 opened the possibility. The second recurring theme is that Bush is an intensely competitive alpha male. The book constantly comes back to Bush as a driven exerciser, whether running (early in his Presidency) and now, a biker, he will positively exult in ‘waxing’ the younger secret service security personnel assigned to keep up with him. The President is shown reveling in the fact that, with biking, he can keep his heart rate up at 140 -176 for 90 minutes. He is ‘the man’, in charge, and very much wants to be seen as such.

Another story Draper reports plays upon this theme. It relates to Colin Powell – initially projected as the true luminary of the new administration. When Bush first, and effusively, introduced Powell as his Secretary of State, Powell took over the presentation and positively glowed with intelligence, sophistication, and command. As this unfolded, Bush, according to Draper, became noticeably uncomfortable. Not too long after that, the President administered an explicit humiliation to Powell. Bush likes meetings to begin on time. When Powell was late to a meeting early in the administration, the President ordered the doors locked. When Powell was caught rattling the door a few minutes later, ‘everybody had a good laugh’ And, of course Bush made his point: I’m the top dog here.

More recently, an NY Times Elizabeth Bumiller piece on Condi Rice charts the rising profile she has assumed with respect to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Previously the closest of buddies, Bumiller reports the President has begun to refer to Condi, one gathers sarcastically, as ‘Madame’ Rice. A subtle game of ‘put down’ appears to be currently in play.

Then, in Draper’s accounts, contrary to conventional wisdom, the President is consistently presented as presiding over meetings with engaged command, driving things with sharp questions. But what remains unclear is the whether the active probing is a search for evidence and clarity, or just a means of establishing who’s in charge, numero uno.

So let us suppose Frank Rich is right about the domestic political agenda being the master rationale behind Iraq. The others are adjuncts, insufficiently examined with potentially tragic outcomes flowing in their wake. No matter! You have a President desiring to be a figure of great consequence, who sees the opportunity and will force the way with a personal style of moment to moment dominance. Once the matter is decided, however flawed the choice, doubts are banished, and further reflection becomes one with: ‘thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought’. Add to this Bush’s faith in God’s guidance: He will not allow me to go wrong. From this point, doing God’s work, an intense competitor sets out to WIN the argument - a point of macho honor. He will drive forward fiercely, say anything, strike any pose, to get his way. It isn’t reason, let alone being the maker of wise choices, but being seen to be the leader, the decider.

So.

Do I have a ‘W’ I can believe in? Nearly. Of course, going to war as we did in the first quarter of 2003, still doesn’t ‘add up’ if faced with any rigorous examination. What is in question here is rather whether one can credibly propose a President who could, or would, evade such rigor in matters of such consequence. Circle back to the man who compartmentalizes, disdains introspection, and who despises self-examination. Such a man, it seems to me could plausibly shirk the rigor of integrating all he knows, and dwell only on those things which open to other aspects of his personality: a desire to be recognized for something great, and a blinding drive to be ‘the man’. Sad in other contexts, and tragic in this.

In the end, perhaps the most curious thing in all of it is why this has been, and remains, a matter of consuming interest. It does bother me deeply to see a leader and a course of action I can’t come to terms with, that ultimately make little or no sense. Is it simply that human beings want (need?) to believe they understand, at least at some level, what the people and forces that palpably move things in very consequential ways around them are about; even if, in the end, the motivation is seen to be significantly irrational, where the most we can do is make a determination as to the particular nature and origin of the irrationality?

If I’ve succeeded: Cold comfort!

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 23:10:13 GMT

The Insurgency

From nearly the beginning we have heard that Americans regarding insurgency in Iraq have asked: Who are these guys?

Also from the beginning, the answer has clearly been shifting and complex. To date, (and a very late date it is) I don’t recall seeing any attempt to address the question head on, in a comprehensive fashion. What I have seen is a peripatetic series of snapshots defining what some particular element in the insurgency might be at some given time. While I have neither the sources nor resources to put together what would like to see, I will attempt to sketch things in to the degree that common sense would suggest, and an intent observation of media coverage and much reading would permit. In so doing, I would hope to offer a starting point for consideration of what is clearly a vital question.

‘These guys’ are willing to fight and die. We are talking motivations. I will propose those motivations are many and various, but perhaps the most important point of all is that they act, variously mixed, simultaneously on both individuals and groups. The ‘players’ can be actors in many scenarios at the same time.

It began with something inevitable: Iraqis of whatever stripe were going to be resentful of an alien, i.e. non-Muslim, occupying force. How quickly this would start, how wide and deep it would go, and how steeply it would rise could not be exactly predicted, but it would happen. Likewise all Iraqis would be suspicious of the motives of a nominal international presence overwhelmingly dominated by Americans. Americans, Iraqis knew, were interested in their oil.

As his regime was being driven from power, Saddam and his acolytes engaged the insurgency. I rather doubt, however, this ever had, or would have been likely to garner, any significant support. It was clear most Iraqis, Sunni, Shia and Kurd alike, were quite glad to be rid of Saddam along with his, by then, pervasively thuggish cronies. On the other hand, Sunnis understood that an Iraq run by a majority Shia would not only end traditional Sunni dominance, but would likely open to reprisals against them. They could reap the whirlwind they had so assiduously sowed for so long. For that reason, predominantly Sunni Anbar province – populated with non-Baghdadi, non-cosmopolitan Iraqis - offered fertile ground in which an insurgency might take root and grow. At the very least, Anbar was a place where eyes might be averted, and ‘things’ be allowed to proceed. It was good territory for recruiting resistance to an Iraq which was all too likely to be anti Sunni, and under the influence of a non-Muslim foreign power. Al Qaeda in Iraq – initially a non Osama affiliated entity – would find good pickings in Anbar for its radical agendas.

The initial heart of the insurgency, then, were disaffected Sunnis, protecting traditional Sunni dominance, and, as they saw it, striking against an infidel invader. In this, Al Qaeda in Iraq, with a foreign core of leadership and, in the main, a locally recruited Sunni force, played a relatively small, if virulent, role. (Al Qaeda in Iraq was never assessed at more than10% or so of the total insurgency.) What is certainly true, however, is that a primarily Sunni rising was the only part of what we saw in Iraq that closely fit the profile of a classic insurgency. The Sunnis were insurgent against us and a nascent Iraqi government expected to be hostile to their interests.

The insurgency in majority Shia Iraq played off of a contention for power and influence within the Shia population. As Anthony Shadid lays out in his Night Draws Near, the exultant release from Saddam’s repression initiated something like a Shia religious revival. This exacerbated a struggle for authority within the Shia community that had its roots in the recent past. The clergy in the Shia world is far more influential than is the case in Sunni communities. They exercise political power in addition to spiritual influence and magisterial authority (i.e. the administration of Shiria law). The leadership of the Shia clergy is vested in a community of Ayatollahs - men of unquestioned religious devotion, accomplishment and scholarship. When we invaded, the leader of the Shia religious community was the Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, but there was an incipient rival. A decade before another well regarded Ayatollah, Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, broke with his brethren to begin energetically championing the cause of the urban and rural poor in Shia Iraq. Almost of its nature, the religious aspect of Sadr’s cause gravitated towards hidebound traditionalist Islam. This was a populist movement, however, and its demagogic dimension of did not escape his fellow Ayatollahs - or Saddam Hussein. Saddam had Sadr assassinated in the late 1990s, along with a couple of his sons. The Sadr movement died away, or rather went underground. There remained one son: Muqtada al Sadr. When Saddam was driven from power, and the repression of Shia Iraq lifted, the upsurge of the ‘old’ Sadr movement became a dramatic part of the scene. Muqtada - young, by all accounts feckless, and by no means an Ayatollah - was vested with his father’s mantle and (at least) ostensible control of the movement. The movement quickly fielded its own militia: the Mahdi army. Muqtada’s authority over the movement (or the Mahdi army) is not well comprehended, but he appears to be wielding his influence with an eye to becoming a power.

The relationship of the situation just outlined to the insurgency is complex. For quite a while the Ayatollah al Sistani held to a line that emphasized civil peace (and our interests). The Shia were the dominant polity and the Americans championed democracy. If things worked out, the Shia would wind up dominant and in control of the ‘new Iraq’. Both the Sunnis and their Al Qaeda elements were NOT interested in ‘things working out’ and did not hesitate to employ violence to keep the pot boiling. The first shock came with the attacks on participants in a long banned pilgrimage observation early in 2004. With that, the gauntlet on sectarian conflict went down and has not been taken up since - although Sistani still managed, more or less, to keep the lid on for some time. The Mahdi army, however, was a joker in the pack, and would from time to time take revenge against the Sunni community. As Sunni predations multiplied, the Mahdi army and other Shia elements (e.g. the Badr Corps) would come to play the role of defender of their communities, and then morph into agents of ethnic cleansing. As this evolved, the Sadr forces, the Badr, and other Shia forces became rivals for power and influence. None of this Shia activity, however destabilizing to Iraq as a whole, follows a classic insurgency profile. Only insofar as fundamentalist leanings, especially manifest in the ‘traditional’ Sadr movement, took the form of a boiling anger against the ‘alien’ occupation forces, did these violent disruptions take on aspects of a classic insurgency. This was rather, in General David Petraeus characterization, an ethnocentric struggle for power and resources in an oil rich state: a struggle between Sunni, Kurd and Shia, and between elements in the Shia community.

The tangle only gets worse from there. To this point we have pretty much cited the sorts of motivations conventionally dealt with in thinking about societal contentions. But the chaos of looting at the inception of the American effort in Iraq helped to empower a whole other set of motivations. That lawlessness, all too much in line with the thuggish reality of the departing regime, opened to criminal activities of all sorts and at all levels. There were many reports that at least some of the looting was highly organized and operated on a massive scale. All kinds of associations, from incidental and petty, to organized criminal groups, to familial and tribal interests quickly came to see vast opportunities to enrich themselves from two monumental floods of wealth. First and foremost was Iraq’s own oil riches, but then, in addition, there was clearly going to be an immense flow of American monies pouring down upon Iraq.

Criminal activity and political corruption go hand in hand, and neither has any use for any more stabilization than serves their own narrow interests. The convergence of this with insurgent activity was all too predictable, quickly realized, and remains pervasive right up to the present. It constitutes an immense can of very nasty worms that fits a classic insurgency profile in only one aspect – it is an enemy of all social stability and order. It is a problem at once deadly, pervasive, and elusive, animated by prospects for rewards sometimes easy and sometimes immense.

Finally, some role for Iran in post invasion Iraq was inevitable. How consequential and what directions it might take were going to be a function of how things actually played out. However that may be, there were two likely enduring concerns. First, a ‘failed-state’ Iraq would not be in Iran’s interests; second, a weak Arab state on Iran’s borders was in their interests. In those regards a fine line to walk would exist between supporting destabilizing violence and containing it.

As I have tried to sketch in, the Insurgency is associated with many motivations, sometimes conflicting, and all too often overlapping. The pervasive nature of Muslim resentment of an alien occupying force and a suspicion of its motives underlays everything. The Sunni/Shia problem, and the problem of the Sadr forces versus the more traditional Shia elites (not to mention further divisions within those elites) can only be resolved politically. The ubiquitous criminal problem calls for an effort that American forces might contribute to, but assistance from locals, so critical to success, will always find self-interested treachery in play. Ultimately the criminal problem can only be dealt with after the larger political resolution is achieved. In the end, a classic insurgency strategy, the only truly substantive thing we have done, addresses only a part of the problem. For the rest, we await.

While George fiddles, Iraq burns – and we bleed.

For an update on the political situation see Tom Friedman’s NY Times Op-Ed for Wednesday, October 24, 2007:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24friedman.html?_r=1&;hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:15:56 GMT

Conflict with Iran

The drum is pounding. The same Neocons who sold us the Iraq War are ginning up another one with Iran. The best ‘device’ falling to hand is the current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They use statements he has made to cast him as the ‘new Hitler’. They anneal him to the Iraqi state and its intentions. Likewise they anneal Iran’s stated intention to develop nuclear power with a drive for nuclear weapons. No air at all is allowed between the announced effort and the perspective one, despite an Iranian fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by the current Iranian ‘Supreme Leader’, the Grand Ayotollah Ali Khamenei:

http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2005/08/iranian-leader-issues-fatwa-against.html

Note, however, a more recent fatwa arising from a faction within the ruling theorcracy allows them:

http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2005/08/iranian-leader-issues-fatwa-against.html

Then there is the Lieberman-Kyl resolution which swallows whole the proposition put forward in the Petraeus/Crocker testimony - not to mention the Neocon universe - that Iran is organizing and otherwise supporting military efforts in Iraq that target and kill our forces. In counterpoint to this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/liebermankyl-vs-the-evi_b_66020.html

Finally there is this from Seymour Hersh in the October 8, 2007 New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh?printable=true

It is clearly time, possibly long past time, for an NIE on Iran. Decisions on a path forward must rest on good intelligence, accurately characterized as to quality and thoroughness. And what you DON’T know can be as critical as what you know. We need to know what evidence there is, where - and to what degree - it is deficient, or even nonexistent. From my scientific background I am keenly aware of how important it is to know precisely what evidence you do NOT have.

There is little that could help us more in this moment than to know how power is held and exercised within Iran, how critical decisions are reached and implemented, and yet there is little that appears murkier.

For example, nearly all agree that the position of President would appear to be something of a means by which the powers that actually rule in Iran allow the public to blow off steam through an election. The two previous Presidencies were largely understood to reflect a wide discontent by middle class Iranians with the narrow and ill-liberal course of the regime, and neither President was able to satisfy the public at large as agents of liberalization. Ahmadinehjad’s election was understood to have been impelled by the dissatisfaction of poorer Iranians, both rural an urban, with their economic lot. Again, it appears, the ‘President’ has not been able (allowed?) to deliver on his promises. It would appear from this that the relationship of ‘the President’ to the shaping of events is, at best, vague.

The power is elsewhere. But where? It is generally acknowledged that the current ‘Supreme Leader’ is not so ‘Supreme’ as the Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Iranian Islamic revolution to victory the late 1970’s, and charted its course for many years thereafter. After Khomenei’s death, the position of ‘Supreme Leader’ devolved on the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, but it is believed he exercises authority on behalf of a larger aggregation of Grand AyatollahsAyatollahs/Mullahs etc. Beyond that, there appears to be little more than speculation.

I have seen almost nothing in the MSM on what would seem to be a supremely important question: What is the nature of the relationship between the ‘Supreme Leader’ and the Mullahs, and what are the currents and internal interactions defining what is, effectively, Iran’s controlling governance? We know something of the general situation and the issues they confront, but how do THEY see them? What are the principle contending views? How are the questions of governance resolved within the aggregation of Mullahs? Although answers to these questions deal with the most critical of the ‘unknowns’ we face on Iran, all of the other information available must be carefully assessed. Until an NIE on Iran is realized, we are in a poor position indeed for making decisions on Iran, let alone decisions that involve the irrevocable step of war.

Here are three further articles to consider:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/16/wiran116.xml

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/09/19/iran/

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174838

The first, more or less, says Bush & Co. WILL attack Iran; the second takes the position they WILL NOT, while the last, by Peter Galbraith, offers a longer, more detailed consideration of the case.

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:44:17 GMT

Reflections on Petraeus’ Testimony

First: two impressions watching General Petraeus opening statement before the House on September 10, 2007:

1 – Virtually the only people we have been fighting in Iraq are Al Qaeda.

2 – Not only can we see light at the end of the tunnel, but a successful resolution is just around the corner. Hang in there. Morning in Iraq!

Now, if confronted with these impressions, do I expect General Petraeus would confirm they represent the reality in Iraq? No, of course not! Nevertheless, that is the impression he provided by the sheer weight and the general tenor of the statements he made. Were there demurrals that specifically undercut those impressions? Yes, of course - for no one could seriously make those two cases above. But one question becomes, why did I derive those impressions? Why did the Petraeus’ opening statement – as a whole – convey these impressions? Perhaps I was the only one who reacted in that way, but I am inclined to doubt it. It is clear, of course, that those impressions serve the purpose of the Bush administration to ‘play for October/November’, i.e. get to a point where we are committed to Iraq along the lines the administration would like us to be until the end of this administration.

I watched almost all of the House committee questioning and did not see much of any consequence.

Representative Wexler [D]from California was the most directly confrontational - theatrical, but not very useful.

A Representative from New York raised the question of Petraeus’ previous statements on the situation in Iraq, pointing out they were optimistic and later shown to be seriously wrong. Petraeus offered that he stood by his contentions, but that the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara in February of 2006 threw everything out the door, initiating a wave of sectarian violence. The inference from that would be that things justifying his optimism were on track between the time in July of 2004 (a Washington Post Op-Ed), and statements to visiting Senators in the summer of 2005 (Senator Boxer in the 9/11/07 Patraeus/Crocker Senate hearings), all the way until February of 2006.

Does anyone believe this?

Thomas Ricks, much traveled and experienced in Iraq, offered in a live Washington Post blog accompanying the testimony:

“His [Patraeus’] comment goes to an interesting aspect of the narrative many in the U.S. military are developing, that everything was going pretty well in 2005 and early 2006, until a low-level civil war broke out. I have a hard time with that. I remember knocking around Baghdad in January 2006 and being shocked at how bad security was in the city, and how out of touch the U.S. military was with that fact.”

The most potential blood could have been drawn by a question from Representative Loretta Sanchez [D] California. She raised the issue of a recent ABC/BBC/NHK poll on Iraqi attitudes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/10/AR2007091000528_pf.html

The poll shows very considerable Iraqi discontent/disillusionment with the surge. They feel they are less safe, and that the overall situation has deteriorated since the inception of the surge. Representative Sanchez, however, did not leave it there. She quoted the new army Counterinsurgency manual back to Petraeus – who superintended its preparation. The manual explicitly seeks to dramatically expand understandings of what the nature and extent of the military role in counterinsurgency should be. It specifically proposes that ‘the people are the prize’: the security of the people becomes the tactical objective of counterinsurgency military engagement. If that is so, how can anyone propose the surge is succeeding in its military objective, given that the people believe themselves to be less safe and to be experiencing deteriorating conditions? Unfortunately (or fortunately?) for Petraeus, time ran out before he got a chance to answer.

Perhaps the best perspective I have seen on the reality on the ground comes from a featured article in last Sunday’s (September 9, 2007) New York Times. It is a neighborhood by neighborhood assessment of Baghdad: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/world/middleeast/09surge.html?_r=2&;oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Print only version of the above:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/world/middleeast/09surge.html?_r=2&;oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Key excerpt:

“General Petraeus has focused on “tactical momentum,” citing the so-called Sunni awakening as proof of success and cause for a continued and expansive American investment of lives and money.

But a close look at three kinds of neighborhoods — Sunni, Shiite and mixed — indicates that while there is certainly momentum, it is still largely driven by the sectarian forces in Iraq, and moving according to their rules.”

Fighting in Iraq:

a - It’s against Al Qaeda and Islamic Radicalism.

b - It is over the presence of an occupying, alien (non-Muslim) force.

c- It’s Sunni/Shia sectarian conflict.

d - It’s over the division of spoils in an oil rich country.

e - All of the above.

Obviously ‘e’, all of the above.

And America is stuck in the middle of all of this.

Nevertheless, the Sunni/Shia sectarian division is closest to the heart of the matter. It is something the administration was well aware of before it went in [see Cheney circa 1993/94], and signally failed to prepare for. This was from the start a Sunni/Shia conflict before it was anything else. It was the reason the Sunni Arabs of Anbar provided a nascent insurgency a substantive base to work from. How exactly Petraeus could have been in Iraq during 2003 – 2005 and proceed on the basis that sectarian division was not a principle concern beggars belief. Yet that was apparently the case. He had responsibility for the training of Iraqi forces in that time frame, and represented that things were ‘looking good’ and ‘on track’ as late as the summer of 2005. At the same time he failed to systematically address the utterly critical matter of the real (and deep) allegiances of the forces he was training up. To assert, as he has in his testimony, that the dramatic upsurge in Sunni/Shia internecine conflict – with Al Qaeda acting as an accelerant - was somehow an unanticipated event that disrupted ‘smooth’ progress in Iraq cannot convince. An inflammatory role played by Al Qaeda has been obvious from the beginning. His assertion, instead, either underlines a significant deficiency in his understanding, or represents dissembling before the Congress in a critical moment in his country’s history.

Dare we wonder what he (and we!) may be missing in Petraeus’ assurances now that the surge is working, and we are on a path to ‘success’?

Further considerations (added September 17, 2007):

Any government, Iraqi or any other, must be able to establish and maintain civil peace/civil order.

The administration, and the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, cleave to the idea civil order must be achieved before political reconciliation will occur. In Iraq, at this time, that will require a force willing and able to fight and die to hold civil peace/civil order in place for a reconciled, and (theoretically) united Iraqi government.

General Jones and his commission see things in a critically different light. The concluding paragraph of the Jones report contains this:

“At the end of the day, however, the future of Iraq and the prospects for establishing a professional, effective, and loyal military and police service, hinges on the ability of the Iraqi people and the government to begin the process of achieving national reconciliation and to ending sectarian violence.”

Jones elsewhere has repeatedly affirmed that preparation of the Iraqi security forces can proceed only so far without political reconciliation. In order to get those security forces to where they have to be, substantive political resolution must be achieved.

This brings us to Catch 22.

Mere political reconciliation is not enough. What the Iraqi people will have to see is a couple of years, at a minimum, where the political reconciliation holds, and is equitably providing a decent life for Iraqis.

Then, and only then, is there any likelihood that the Iraqi security forces will be able to find enough young men who are willing to fight and die for this 'new' Iraq.

You can’t get the security forces you need with out enduring political reconciliation, and you can’t establish any enduring reality without those forces.

In other words, you can’t get there from here.

Catch 22

Meanwhile,

You might check out this article by George Packer in this week’s New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/17/070917fa_fact_packer

bleak indeed

Wrap up: September 25, 2007

What Petraeus SHOULD have said:

We have presented evidence for trends in positive directions in a number of key areas since the surge began. Nearly all of this is associated with Sunni Iraq and not with Iraq’s dominant Shia polity. With this overriding reality in mind, I must further emphasize that by far the principle driver for what progress has been realized was the dramatic change in position by leaders of the Iraqi Sunni population. That critical transformation came before the surge was even announced. The surge clearly aided what has occurred over the past nine months, helping our forces to make the most of a largely unanticipated development, but without the change in position by Iraqi Sunnis, little of what I have reported here as ‘progress’ could have been achieved.

It becomes, therefore, critical to what I recommend that we carefully consider the factors behind this historic shift by Sunni Iraqi leaders. I judge it happened for a variety reasons, but two stand out. The first is an increasing anger within their own communities over aggressive, even brutal, Al Qaeda attempts to impose a rigid fundamentalist Islam. The second is the likelihood that support of the insurgency by Sunni Iraq was determined to hold little of value for Sunnis as the current situation evolves, and that cooperation with Americans - and assistance from them - would serve the Sunni cause better, at least for the moment. In short, this change in position by Sunni Iraqis is perilous, at once hopeful and dangerous.

The second reason proposed clearly the harbors the dangers of augmented sectarian division. We will be making one side stronger in an impending all out civil war. The other reasons I suspect may be at work in this transformation are of a more narrow and parochial nature, but also tend towards division.

The first reason I proposed, however, does open a door for a larger Sunni, Shia and Kurd reconciliation. That alone holds hopes for a ‘new’ Iraq in accord with our interests, and with the interests and hopes - I believe even now – of most Iraqis. By suppressing Al Qaeda in Iraq within Sunni areas it is possible that sufficient civil peace will be realized to allow all of the constructive efforts so desperately needed to move forward. In Anbar - large, geographically well defined, and 99% Sunni - these constructive efforts should be easier, even much easier, to achieve. But in more demographically complex, largely urban areas, especially Baghdad, we cannot expect so ‘easy’ a path. Nevertheless, the current Iraqi governance must move with urgency and dispatch to try to achieve reconciliation. If it fails, we all fail.

I recommend, therefore, that we continue pursuit of this Sunni opening for a while longer, but I do not believe the chances for success can be considered very good. Minority Sunni Iraq, not the majority Shia, become the principal focus for our efforts. It is a devil’s bargain, with less hope for success than we would like to see. Accepting the losses in life and treasure our persistence will entail become advisable only given the grave possibilities for further, less mediated, devolution in Iraq’s situation.

The efforts of our armed forces must be accompanied by the very determined application of whatever pressures we can devise to push the current Iraqi governance along the path of political reconciliation. To fail to do so, as has been, in my judgment, largely the case till now, breaks faith with our soldiers, who have already sacrificed so much. In this effort serious exploration of the effects of troop drawdowns should not be arbitrarily ruled out. At the same time, pursuing the diplomatic initiatives recommended by the Iraq Study Group should be attended to with levels of commitment and effort sorely missing so far. If these efforts do not accompany the continued exploration of the opening the Sunni turnaround has provided, there will be no basis for proceeding further. At long last we must give substance to the understanding that the military alone cannot solve the situation in Iraq. If the administration does not turn itself around sharply in these political and diplomatic endeavors now, we must begin active consideration of how to contain the effects of a tragic and dangerous reality.

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:57:22 GMT

The 'game'

My first glimpse of Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy came in a short excerpt published in the Huffington Post just as the book hit the stores. The excerpt addressed the possibility of a war with Iran, and it featured this paragraph as a summation of the ‘mind set’ hovering in the administration’s ether on Iran:

“Iran is governed by Evil leaders. They are the moral and practical equivalent of Hitler's Nazis. They are intent on regional, perhaps even world, domination. They are so insane and so Evil that they will attack other countries with nuclear weapons even if it means that they would then be annihilated. Particularly if they acquire nuclear weapons, they would pose a grave, imminent, and undeterrable threat to the United States. Their leaders do not fear death, and in fact crave it as a result of their religious extremism. They cannot be negotiated with because they are both Evil and deranged. The only feasible course of action with Iran is to treat it as a Nazi-like enemy, refuse to negotiate, and stop it by any means necessary, which -- due to its leaders' inability to be reasoned with -- inevitably requires "regime change," by military confrontation if necessary.”

The paragraph initially prompted this response:

<<It is an interesting bit of business. Some of it is plausible, if hyperbolic. Too much of it is extreme to the point no one could offer it as argument to any even marginally reasonable audience. Nevertheless, it is highly consequential. Think about how the Iraq war was sold to us. A set of plausible statements was made. These were then woven through with artful and vivid imagery whose net effect was to produce a state of mind quite like that one would arrive at if one swallowed the set of propositions above whole. Isolated statements following this formula need not be all that alarming, but should it become pervasive . . . . .>>

I have just concluded the whole of A Tragic Legacy, and, while all of it is excellent, Chapter 4, on the possibility of war with Iran, should be read by every American. I had not been aware that so much material, essentially re-running the ‘game’ played to get us into Iraq, is out there already. It is (surprise, surprise!) in the writings of those same Neocons who drove the Iraq war. While statements on Iran from key players, including Bush and Cheney, have been heard from highest levels of this administration - echoing exactly the same line seen from the Neocon pundits - what has not happened (so far) is a great fusillade, consistent and persistent, from all consequential levels of the administration.

What I want to do is reflect a bit on the ‘game’.

I have proposed before that the public dialog in democracies can be prejudiced by the emotional power of past traumatic events, now deeply lodged in the popular imagination. For example, WWI - understood as a colossal folly - shaped and limited the debate in both Europe and America throughout the 1930’s. Avoiding the last ‘Great Mistake’ led, as we know all too well, to a new one - to new trauma with all its attendant emotional furies. Those emotions were born not simply of the horrors of war, but of the unprecedented terrors and brutality of Hitler and the Nazi regime. And emotions arose, as well, when what was understood to be wise caution by Europe’s statesmen, came to be seen, in retrospect, as cowardice before an aggressor, defined by the litany: Chamberlain, Munich, and appeasement. It is beyond dispute, of course, that 9/11 was also a traumatic event, engendering sheer horror and outrage, and rendered all the more powerful in America by our historic isolation from foreign attack.

So imagine now the impact of a ‘game’ in which a sketchy assemblage of ‘facts’ - on Iraq or Iran - invoking terrorists and 9/11, becomes wreathed in artfully contrived, emotionally charged imagery, tying it to Hitler and the Nazis, Chamberlain and appeasement. Do you remember your terror, shock, and fury after 9/11? How does being faced again with Hitler and his Nazi hoards impact your imagination? How does the prospect of repeating Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich make you feel? Public attention, after 9/11, has been consistently assaulted and distracted by references to these past traumas. This powerful brew all too easily inclines us towards a mode of feel and react, and even panic response. A panic response is, of course, then brought forward: WAR. [Recall in Ron Suskind’s ‘The One Per Cent Doctrine’, the Bush administration official who asserted (in effect): you analyze, we act, trapping you in our reality.]

In a true emergency, panic response – even the ‘last resort’ of war – is understandable. But, if there is time for reasoned analysis, for careful consideration, no responsible governance could fail to engage it. Any governance that did so fail, in matters of such consequence, should be dismissed out of hand. The perfidy of this administration lies in the fact that it has, with such persistence, played exactly the ‘game’ described above, prejudicing us away from serious and careful consideration of our choices.

One would not, in general, expect this kind of business to work its ways with us for long. In matters of this consequence, we would expect to break free of such beguilement. But that does not appear, even now, to have happened. One reason for this may lie in the particular course our political dialog has taken over the past 30 years or so, and another in the nearly rigorous polarization of that dialog. They are not unrelated.

The current nature of our political dialog was presaged by a book whose title said it all. The book was by a one time Philadelphia Inquirer Op-Ed writer by the name of Joe McGinniss. He was excellent in that short form, but with this book he broke through to a higher level, and a national audience. The title of his book was ‘The Selling of the President’. It dealt with the 1968 campaign, and specifically with Richard Nixon.

The idea, once articulated, is obvious. Use proven Madison Avenue techniques to get voters to ‘buy’ your candidate. Every election from then to now has seen the influence of this strategy rise to higher and higher levels. Elections have become a thing of blink-of-the-eye images and sound bites. See, feel, vote! Our so-called debates limit the candidates to pitifully short one, two and three minute stretches. Anything more extended happens only in (all too often) carefully controlled - even staged – ‘town meetings’ or ‘open forums’. Nothing on the order of the Lincoln/Douglas debates seems even remotely possible, and far too few of our candidates strike us as possessing even a minimal capacity for extended discussion. The net result is that we have become accustomed to making the critical choice of our political representatives on the basis of virtually instantaneous gut reactions. We impulse buy our leadership.

What secondarily has come to happen, however, is less obvious, but more disturbing. Selling not a candidate, but policy with Madison Avenue techniques. I will contend this began to fall into place in the 1970’s as a vast storehouses of right wing money began to focus began on getting its agendas adopted by the country. This extended to establishing an archipelago of right wing organizations and think tanks, e.g. the Federalist Society, AEI, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, etc. to work out not only doctrine and dogma, but develop it in ‘saleable’ terms. Their 'product' would be accepted – even demanded(!) – by the American public. [Just consider the ‘Death Tax' gambit] The defining effort, however, became the creation of a vast media empire, enfranchised with the end of the ‘fairness’ doctrine in broadcast media, and the discovery of personalities who could put across ‘the message’ (chiefly on talk radio) 24/7. The unifying strategy behind all of these efforts was simple: we have a product to sell and Madison Avenue knows how to sell things. Whether selling a candidate or a policy, the techniques remain the same: fast ‘gut’ emotional appeals to trigger an impulse buy. Don’t think. React. NOW!

[Thinking is for woosies! Or, to put it artfully: ‘thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought’]

Think of it, the most serious and consequential decisions addressed, not by substantive debate, but by the techniques used to sell you cigarettes, soda pop, and candy bars. Our founding fathers could not have imagined it, and frankly – at least with respect to policy – neither can we. Thus we were blind sided into a (nearly) unilateral War with Iraq in the first quarter of 2003.

Keep in mind, I do not propose we are in anything like a ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ reality. Informed opposition challenged the Iraq War from the beginning, and continues to do so till this day. [If not successfully enough, as yet.] We have, nevertheless, been disarmed by the presumption that no responsible American governance would even contemplate playing the ‘game’, rendered more susceptible by the sound bite nature of current political dialog, and have fallen into a trap that consistently prejudices us away from hard and careful thought about the most serious matters.

I will withhold judgment on whether this is by conscious design, Neocon self-delusion, or some combination of the two. It has unquestionably been the observed practice. We are all the poorer for it - and all the more in peril for failing to break free of it. When will we realize our vast advantages over a rag tag and seriously fragmented foe, offering little to the people of its own world beyond pyrotechnic nihilism and stagnation in a life closed to all of the opportunities the modern world opens for people? When will we stand up, take mature stock of our situation, and begin to act with the judgment and confidence appropriate to our strength, abilities and manifest accomplishments?

When will we WAKE UP?

Having just written the above, I discovered this in the July 10, 2007 New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/arts/10west.html?pagewanted=print

The above was posted to a forum where objections were raised that what I termed 'the game' was merely propanda, practiced by both sides of the political asile, and in no way novel, or any big deal. This seemed something of a misreading of what I had described, and promted further consideration on my part:

Rhetoric is the art of political discourse. Propaganda might be understood as rhetoric’s bastard stepchild. It dishonors itself as political discourse because it is understood to be intentionally fraudulent, and generally relentless about it to boot. Whatever may be true elsewhere, we generally don’t think of the governments of modern liberal democracies as employing propaganda. They do of course, but we reserve a right to cry foul, and our leaders should understand that. If they go too far, they can be called to account.

Political and social propaganda do have a long history, just consider Hogarth and Dickens. But that is legitimately considered to be argument by alternate, and yes(!) prejudicial, means. Hogarth clearly solicits scorn, and Dickens sympathy, but not a panic response. They prejudice our thinking, and hope to influence it, but neither wants to stampede his audience past thinking about the matters at hand. In fact they hope to make you reflect. What I described as the ‘game’ kicks the can much further down the road. Tied to great trauma, it excites strong emotions, and doesn’t want you to reflect at all ( “thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought”). Its objective is to deflect thought, if not bypass it altogether.

What shocked about the ‘daisy/mushroom cloud’ assault on Goldwater was precisely its blatant use of Madison Avenue techniques. It was, in its moment, considered to be something quite new under the sun: propaganda on steroids. It was a reply, in effect, to a Goldwater rhetorical flourish: ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice’. Given the Goldwater’s identification with aggressive Cold War positions (of the’ roll back the Iron Curtain’ sort), the commercial did dramatize the question of just how far the candidate might go, and what fate he might tempt. It certainly shocked when it appeared, and it was surely a low blow to an honorable and decent man.

On the other hand, surely no one proposes we have been well served by a debate on war and peace over Iraq and Iran driven by artfully crafted 'low blows'.

I have not made the point that the use of Madison Avenue techniques in re Iraq, Iran, and Islamic radicalism, is a neocon only thing, but that it was – and remains - their practice with those matters, dominating all else. The tragedy is that nearly the whole of our political discourse, not only that surrounding Middle East policy, has been taken up with this kind of engagement. This ‘propaganda on steroids’ has systematically, and all too successfully, prejudiced our debate away from serious and sober thought just when it was urgently needed.

The beau ideal of rhetoric is understood to be use of fact, logic and reason to make an argument, and only then to rise to eloquence and the evocation of emotion. Propaganda selectively culls facts, burlesques logic, leans very heavily on emotion, and occasionally even rises to eloquence. The Madison Avenue ‘game’ short circuits straight to quick hit emotion. ‘W’s prepared addresses are propaganda, not infrequently rising to eloquence. But they are woven through with Madison Avenue ‘quickies’: exactly the stuff of sound bites.

John Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, might be best taken to heart by asking ourselves first to become well informed citizens. Then to further ask that, on important issues, each of us work out – alone, with only our conscience for company - where we stand. Finally, to take our conclusions out to others and defend them, but with a willingness to clarify where substantive objections are made, and alter where persuasive arguments are encountered, or if new information is discovered.

Dialog is useful, and the charge of 'merely propanda' led , I believe, to a clearer specification in re what I have termed: the 'game'.

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:50:33 GMT

Glenn Greenwald: 'A Tragic Legacy'

Mind Sets

Glenn Greenwald’s ‘A Tragic Legacy’ hits the bookstores today. His thesis is that Bush is caught (and has helped catch us) in a ‘good versus evil’ mind set. Of course, ‘anything goes’ against evil. It has led to an ill considered war in Iraq, a trashing of American values, laws and even the Constitution itself.

I have proposed something similar [see ‘A Pattern of Abuse’, posted to my blog in July of 2004]: a mind set underlying actions taken over three of the last four Republican administrations, playing its way out through Nixon/Watergate, Reagan/Iran-Contra, and Bush/Iraq. It is, in fact, complimentary to Greenwald’s idea, running pretty much congruently with good versus evil Manicheanism. Interestingly, the President is heir to both, the one Greenwald proposes through Bush’s born-again experience, and the one I propose through the Bush family political heritage.

My consciousness of this mind set first emerged as an impression I derived from John Mitchell et al during Watergate. It can be put: We are the people, the salt of the earth; we are the right and proper stewards of this nation; our hearts are pure, our motives are honorable, and what we choose to do is, therefore and apriori right, proper and above reproach.

While the 'good versus evil' framework of thought is shared by Bush's evangelical base, the alternate mind set suggested above is that of a significant part of the moneyed Republican establishment. It goes back well into our history - to the Republican Party of McKinley and the party boss Mark Hanna, who cursed the advent of Theodore Roosevelt (‘that damned cowboy’) into the White House. [It must be regarded as one of history’s great ironies that our present ‘cowboy’ in the White House is very much a man after Mark Hanna’s heart.]

I don’t propose that this particular mind set is so much consciously held, but rather manifests as a kind of sub-conscious presumption of rectitude, dangerously unexamined, and capable of generating a massive conceit of empowerment. It is difficult for me, and I expect some others, to credit Dick Cheney and his Neocon coterie with fundamentalist religious Manicheanism, but I would suggest that the conceit I propose well prepares the ground for the conscious articulations of Neocon hubris.

This is all to suggest that we may need to rid ourselves of more than one pernicious mind set.

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:49:23 GMT

The Problem

The Arab/Israeli conflict, and its most intimate and intractable avatar, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, currently see two grand strategies visited upon them. The first says: solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict first, opening the way to broader engagement; while the second says: solve the whole problem of the Middle East, up to and including our confrontation with Radical Islam, and the ‘lesser’ problem of Israel and Palestine will become (relatively) easy. This latter is the Neocon strategy, and gave us the Iraq war.

Let’s examine the two. The second strategy calls for a great transformation involving 200 – 300 million people of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religious persuasions. All of these ‘differences’ have occasioned armed conflict in the past, and can be confidently expected to so incline well into the future. Further, the lands occupied by these 200 – 300 millions sequester the world’s largest known reserves of a vital natural resource – a resource of nearly incalculable value, well understood to lay the basis for wars. The first strategy, on the other hand, involves only a small fraction of the population in question, and virtually none of the oil lands.

So, which should we choose for a ‘likely’ path to follow?

Consider this ‘choice’ from another point of view. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is like a burr under the saddle. You may calm a situation with the ‘burr’ still under the saddle, but it wouldn’t it be MUCH easier if you extracted the burr first?

It appears, we have reached ‘nolo contendere’. The Neocon vision stands naked before its enemies, devoid of practical value. The movement of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict towards an equitable resolution will do more to compromise the appeal of radical Islamists within the Arab/Muslim world, and more to boost the prospects of moderate Islam, and the developed world’s hopes, than any other single practicable accomplishment

So how do we proceed.

First, be aware that the recent re-affirmation of the Arab offer of full recognition and acceptance for an Israel holding essentially to the borders of 1967 constitutes an admirable initiative, and provides a useful starting point.

Second, the whole developed world should commit to finding an equitable resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where ‘failure is no longer an option’. To this end, it would propose:

1 – The integrity and viability of Israel is guaranteed by an unconditional commitment of all the moral, economic, political, diplomatic, and military resources of the developed world.

2 – The monitoring and policing of the peace would be the responsibility of a force internationally funded, mandated, assembled, and supervised.

3 – A referendum will be held in Palestine under international auspices in which the question will be: Do you favor a two state solution recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and accepting negotiation as the approach approved by the Palestinian people to resolve any outstanding contentions?

4 - It will be acknowledged that the establishment of the state of Israel constituted an act of aggression against the Arab/Muslim world, and, in particular, against the Palestinian people. Justice will be sought. Just – and even generous - compensation will be negotiated, and the costs will be borne by the developed world. The negations (including the question of compensation) will deal with, among many other issues, the extent to which a ‘right of return’ for Palestinians will be recognized.

Avenues of compensation to be considered for what Palestinians give up might be:

a. Low interest loans to start Palestinian enterprise guaranteed for 25(?) years.

b. A first class educational system [K -12] will be created for and by the Palestinian people, and funded at the expense of the developed world.

c. Access to a university education, anywhere in the world - room board, tuition, fees, books et al - will be guaranteed by the developed world for any Palestinian child born between 2000(?) and 2025(?). The only qualifications will be an ability to do the work, and a commitment to the effort.

I fully understand what is outlined above to touch peremptorily on controversial issues, and expect hard negotiation on these and other matters will need to take place. All of the diplomatic resources the developed world can make available will be made available. For too long we have indulged the irresponsibility of both parties to the conflict, and indulged our own failures as well. Failure is no longer an option.

2.

While a ‘failure is not an option’ confrontation with the Israeli/Palestinian question is the first strategic step we must undertake, the Bush administration has, perforce, confronted us with a more immediate tactical problem in Iraq. A stunning combination of idiocy and incompetence has reduced us to a choice between the frying pan and fire. There are no other practical alternatives. (1)

______________________________________________________

(1) One could, of course, propose a real surge – a la Shinseki – of however many boots on the ground it would take to stabilize Iraq. This would, additionally, have to be under a genuine international mandate, and under international supervision as well. Nothing less could hope to succeed. By success, I mean an Iraq understood to be on the road to prosperity, with governance in consultation with and by consent of the governed - governance competent, internationally respected, and able to command such coercive force as will assure civil order. But that ‘real’ surge – friends - isn’t practical.

_______________________________________________________

The Iraqi people don’t much like our being in their land, but a majority of them, even now, appear to believe our leaving will place them in an even worse position. The principle reason they believe it lies in the fact they see nothing before them that yields confidence. Such post war governance as the Iraqis have seen has universally failed. We are at stasis: caught in the middle of a civil war American incompetence has done so much to mid-wife into being. Nothing plausible appears likely to change that reality. We have arrived at as good a description of 'being in a frying pan' as one might propose.

Leaving - leaping into the fire - seems to offer a way to get things moving. But any phased withdrawal/redeployment plan must be accompanied by an understanding that we will be in unknown territory, and will have to be ready to improvise. We can’t leave with ‘leaving’ becoming our only substantive initiative.

One improvisation which we might attempt would be, at long last, to try to enfold tribal structures explicitly into the game. Beyond the Baker-Hamilton recommendations for talks with Iraq’s neighbors – which surely must be attended to - we could explore a modified partition proposal. It would certainly help the current situation if Sunni, Shia and Kurd each had an area under their authority to which their people could repair for safety. We can, and should, assist in providing whatever is necessary to facilitate the attendant movement of people. Each region would be responsible for its own security and governance, and such international aid as could be mustered would be made available to promote stability and prosperity. There are two jokers in this pack: Baghdad and Oil. I would propose we internationalize both. The nature of the internationalization would be tricky, and unique to either ‘joker’. To ‘police’ Baghdad as an international city we would have to bring into being a ‘neutral’ force. This would ideally include a significant Muslim component, but not one with interests in the area. Indonesia, perhaps, would be a source. Internationalizing Iraq’s oil industry becomes necessary because, at this time, there is no prospect the various Iraqi sectarian interests will trust one another. The profits would accrue to all Iraqis according to a just formula to be negotiated. The set up, structuring, and control of the internationalized entity would involve, of necessity, all significantly interested parties, i.e. damn near everybody: Iraq, the U.S., Europe, the nations of OPEC, India, China and Japan. The international partners to this enterprise would be responsible not only for extracting the oil, but for the security of the oil infrastructure, including investment in modernization. While America would play a major role, in both these undertakings, the supervision would be genuinely international. Nothing less could succeed. By removing what are the most likely sources of contention from the mix, and asking the international community to help with specific limited responsibilities, perhaps we arrive at something that might actually work.

While addressing the tactical problem in Iraq, and starting in earnest on the Israeli/Palestinian strategic problem as our first step, we must also engage the larger problem posed by radical Islam.

Two points to be made:

1 - In the end, there is no way we can be absolutely free of terrorism. This is a world that has engendered not only Osama bin Laden, but Timothy McVeigh. The most we can hope for is to reduce the likelihood of attacks to a minimum.

2 - For the moment, the threat of ‘terrorism’ lies with its most immediate and pressing incarnation through radical Islam. Ultimately this can only be dealt with by a great, continuing cooperative effort on the part of the whole world, but most especially the developed world. Its resources, moral, intellectual, economic, and military are overwhelming. There is no way radical Islam can hope bring these societies down. Only the developed world itself can bestow such power upon a mere faction, by making repeated poor, foolish, and even catastrophic choices. That faction is lethal to the very people they seek to enlist and enflame – and those people know it. Radical Islam has nothing to offer but pyrotechnic nihilism and stagnation in life closed to all of the opportunities that open to people in the modern world. The societies of the developed world enjoy the free and deep commitment of the vast majority of their people, people of enormous cultivated talents and abilities. Does any one propose that such societies, with such vast resources, both human and material, will simply fold their tents and go away when challenged? Anyone who does propose it – and it is a core Neocon propaganda fixation - should be made to defend it.

I have written before, and will repeat it now, that what we need to design is a Cold War like grand strategy. This engagement, like the Cold War, calls for a great collegial effort on many fronts: military, diplomatic, political, economic, and ideological. Like the Cold War it will extend for a long and indefinite period of time against a dangerous foe. The ultimate objective will be to enfold (now) prosperous Arab and Muslim worlds into the larger flow of developed world success - the enfolding explicitly to take place according to the desires, insights, and wisdom of the peoples involved. As a corollary, this is to be effected with as little recourse to armed conflict as possible. War, the exchange of murderous (often enraged) stroke and counterstroke – in a world that fights with Weapons of Mass Destruction - takes on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite factory. You may get away with it for a while, but it’s not a good idea.

Elements in the Strategy

1 - A Vigorous Point Defense employing intelligence communities around the world to track down clues, disrupt networks, interdict plots and frustrate terrorist attacks to the extent humanly possible.

2 – Know your enemy. We must not succumb to a dumbed-down infinitely inflatable bogeyman. That is a Conservative/Neocon creation, ideologically intoxicated and politically self-serving. We face a murderous maddened faction, lethal to its own people and offering little beyond nihilistic destruction and stagnation. The tip of the spear, suicide bombers and the fanatics who prepare and send them out, are likely beyond hope. But those figures have doubtless been down many paths and through many turnings to bring them to their present state. By discovering what such paths and turnings have been, we can disrupt them, anticipate others, and generally diminish the likelihood they will be followed by other young Muslims. The movement of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to an equitable resolution is clearly a highly useful first step. The Arab/Muslim world and its outliers in western Europe, are full of angry young men who find much in the world they see that inclines them towards radical Islam. Osama bin Laden sprang from such, and an incendiary reservoir of these young men remains - and is likely growing. Most are not yet committed (suicide bombing isn’t exactly a self-recommending proposition), and moving them to more constructive paths becomes a central objective for our efforts. We must seek to sever the maddened few from the reservoir they draw upon, sever the tip of the spear from its shaft.

3 – Engage Islam It is one of the world’s great religious faiths. It could not have appealed to so many for so long if it were essentially the creature of its most aggressive and destructive impulses. No deeply held and broadly practiced religion would be, or could be, relentlessly nihilistic. A failure to constructively engage the whole of a great religious tradition, to substantively discriminate the whole from its most extreme elements, cripples our effort. It also releases the passions of religious identification to become a driving force for ‘inflating the bogeyman’. How, in what ways, and by what paths we might bring the constructive elements in the Muslim world into play should be thoroughly explored. One thing to be attempted might be establishing a permanent entity for consideration of just this problem. It would be jointly funded by the Arab/Muslim world and the developed world. A chrysalis for the Arab component of this arguably already exists in the body of people who issue the Arab Human Development Reports for the United Nations Development Programme.

4 – Prosperity First. For the long haul, we seek to diminish the appeal of radical Islam to an absolute minimum. Providing young Muslims with alternative constructive outlets for their energies, ways to make a life for themselves and their families, offers the most creative and promising avenue for engagement. In a world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people, strong successful societies emerge from the conjunction of that creativity with the discoveries of modern science and technology. Over the last three hundred years those discoveries have yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity for human creativity, as both invention and enterprise, to feast upon, and feast it has. Mass prosperity has resulted. That sets the stage and eases the way for democracy. Promotion of such means as will produce broadly based prosperity throughout the Arab/Muslim world becomes the central element in our long term strategy. Just as a recovered and prosperous western Europe (think Marshall Plan), and a recovered and prosperous Japan were central to the eventual outcome of the Cold War, so broadly prosperous Arab/Muslin populations around the world will be absolutely central to success in this second Cold War. Both we, and those constructive elements in the Arab and Muslim worlds we seek to work with, must be acutely aware that the vast opportunities that open broadly to people in the modern world also mean vast (and destabilizing) transformation. The educated populations that drive this modern explosion of prosperity will not be content with little or no say in the direction of their societies. To fail to provide substantive governance in consultation with and by consent of the governed, cripples the effort and promotes failure of its purpose. Genuinely broad prosperity prepares and strengthens populations and the societies enfolding them for change. At the same time, government in consultation with and by consent of the governed is unquestionably the most difficult and complex organizational structure ever attempted by human societies. Nothing else is so moment-to-moment 'labor intensive'. For its part, the developed world must be ready to help mightily, and to understand the range and depth of difficulty our Arab and Muslim allies will be dealing with. What, together, we must seek to devise is utterly unprecedented as a purposed project, let alone for what will be, of necessity, a long, voluntary, profoundly collegial effort.

We are all in this together.

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:37:36 GMT

A Mystery

If a leader got up before you and, in matters of the most grave consequence, with the greatest sincerity, told you things you later learned were untrue, half truths, or gross misrepresentations and distortions of the truth, and proceeded to do this time and time and time again, why would you, how could you, continue to tolerate him?

By now most Americans, as well as the large majority of the rest of the world, find themselves confronting a mystery. Why is George W Bush still tolerated?

The list of the administration’s perfidies and failures gets longer every day. The least of them seemingly offers a more worthy basis for removing Bush and Co. from office than the (relative) trivia that occasioned an impeachment for Bill Clinton.

I propose an explanation: America as the victim of Spousal Abuse - Battered Spouse syndrome.

Now I know that seems way o-u-t - t-h-e-r-e, but . . . . .

I have long contended that after 9/11 the country desperately wanted to believe in its leadership. More critically, we (and the world) needed to be led well. Initially, and through the first phase in Afghanistan, Bush and Co. fulfilled our hopes (the honeymoon?). After that, the administration has been (quite literally) horrific, and this country has been in denial.

With 9/11 the need for good, even great, leadership was clear, and our history legitimately gave us confidence we would find it. Instead we have been actively pressured to remain creatures of our fears by leaders who have chosen reckless and dangerous paths. In a great confrontation with a complex and difficult reality, logically calling for a response as rich and varied as provided throughout the (‘long’) Cold War, we have established armed conflict as a defining response, and pursued it at great cost in blood, trauma, and treasure. Then, in executing their plans, Bush and Co. proceeded to bungle nearly everything beyond belief. Throughout, they conveyed the notion that failing to back them amounted to treason; rejecting their courses, and proposing anything but what they chose, would be Chamberlain and Munich all over again. (Battering enough?)

In 2004 we had an opportunity to end this, and strike out anew. But Kerry chose not to insist upon confronting the reality of our situation and the administration’s failures. Nor did he offer a clear and substantive alternative - a grand ‘Cold War’ strategy - for a way forward, in what we understood to be the defining conflict of a new century. So we returned to the psychosis we knew.

To this point, discovering almost daily more and more about how badly we have been served, we still see neither an individual nor a plan which excites our confidence - yielding hope. We remain in denial, and in thrall.

Lincoln: . . . ‘we must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.’

For our country, and for the sake of the young men and women we send into harms way, we cannot tolerate even honest mistakes for long. Anything less breaks faith with our history and with the sacrifice free people must, from time to time ask of themselves.

This could end here, but there is something else lurking at the back of what is, after all, a rather strange conjecture.

If we are, in fact, ensorcelled, as proposed, the manner of our breaking out could hold significant dangers. If we come out fast, suddenly stripped what was, till that moment, a mind clouding malaise, our reaction could be violent and perilous. The perception of a betrayal of such breadth and depth, seen - as it well might - to be actively connived, could sweep and shake us as nothing before in our history.

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"

[William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming]

Am I being a creature of my fears? I fear so, but I feel a need to attest to a cold, nagging something at the back of my mind.

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:25:17 GMT

Iraq, W.M.D.s, the Administration, and Tenet

If you believe there are W.M.D.s in Iraq; if you believe: “The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.”(1); if you believe: “Should Saddam conclude that a U.S. led attack could no longer be deterred he . . . might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamic terrorists in conducting a W.M.D. attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance. . .”(2), then initiating a war against Iraq must set off the most terrifying of alarms. Once started, with no WMD’ s as yet secured, Iraq lost in the fog and frictions of war, and the regime being driven from power now with every reason to sell or give away Weapons of Mass Destruction to terrorists, we create a perfect storm of opportunity for Al Qaeda to obtain W.M.D.s. [Talk about hair on fire, Tenet should have been going off like thousand roman candles all at once.]

Simple regard for National (let alone World) Security would require us to win fast, tie down, and lock down Iraq, sealing its borders. If you can’t do this, DON’T GO. In the event, we won fast, but were not only unprepared to do the rest, we did not even plan to do it. [See the Shinseki/Wolfowitz “300,000” testimony, Gordon and Trainor’s “Cobra II”, and Thomas Ricks’ “Fiasco”.] This was betrayal, not only of simple common sense, but of absolutely vital American National Security interests. If there had been W.M.D.s in Iraq, Osama bin Laden almost certainly would have obtained some of them - obtained them as a direct result of actions chosen by Bush and Co. and a gross failure to allow for the consequences of their own beliefs.

If this isn’t criminal negligence - at a minimum - and outright treason - at worst - what is?

(1) The National Security Strategy of United States, 2002

(2) The NIE on Iraq October 2002 as cited in George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm p335.

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:51:03 GMT

‘That Vote’ (Then and Now)

The 2008 Presidential season appears to be off and running nearly a year from any vote of actual consequence. A central, even critical, element in this is the vote in the fall of 2002 for the congressional resolution allowing the President to go to war in Iraq. Before proceeding much further we should be clear on just what the situation was in that moment. This extends to the realities, to what were the likely realities, and to how “the realities” were represented at the time. Those are three different things, and so they remained throughout the debate.

None of this is news. We know now that, however real the threat from Islamic Radicalism, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was no part of that threat, there were no WMD’s, and the evidence supporting either proposition (an Iraq/Al Qaeda connection, and an Iraq with WMD’s) was vague and equivocal. On the other hand, shading to the side of worst case scenarios, there was sufficient evidence to support a contention there were biological and chemical WMD’s in Saddam’s possession, although none of it strong enough - or the situation of such urgency - as to persuade traditional American allies (Britain excepted) to join in an invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. All of the vagaries were swept aside by the administration in what we know now was a drive to war. The evidence was ‘cherry picked’ and worked up with Madison Avenue polish to ‘market’ a war.

Considering any politician’s vote on the resolution, all of this must be taken into account – and one other thing as well. Something never clearly brought forward at the time, but, I believe, of considerable moment for those who decided to favor the resolution: they didn’t believe Bush really meant it, that he actually would go to war over Iraq.

Let us reconstruct the moment.

It was the year after 9/11. That attack, on an achingly beautiful September morning, had scarred the American psyche as nothing since Pearl Harbor.

My own initial desire was to find somebody to swat. I did not want just anybody, of course; the administration needed to find somebody genuinely culpable, and ‘hittable’ without any really absorbing commitment. Then we would settle down with allies to forge a genuine long-term strategy for engaging Islamic radicalism. It would be the same kind of broad collegial commitment we made during the Cold War, requiring military, political, diplomatic, and economic components in varying degrees, over an indefinite period of time. Its conclusion would see the defeat of radical appeal within Islam, and the incorporation of a prosperous, peaceful Islamic world, responsive to the will and desires of its people, into the broader developed world.

But first, if possible, ‘the swat’. Lo and behold Bush and Co. found Afghanistan. Its Taliban rulers had fostered those who struck us on 9/11, and would not yield them up. Within three months of 9/11, the Taliban were dismissed from power, and the outcome in Afghanistan was welcomed as a liberation. ‘Swat’ mission accomplished.

I thought our next two immediate objectives should be getting Afghanistan to be a good, decent and hopeful place for its people to be, and getting the Israeli/Palestinian conflict clearly on the road to an equitable resolution.

Instead the administration directed our attentions towards Iraq. It did NOT make much sense. Iraq had not been involved in 9/11, and existed in a condition of mutual loathing with Islamic radicals. The possibility of a nuclear Iraq was understood to be virtually non-existent in any proximate time frame, and the evidence for the existence of biological/chemical WMD’s was clearly seen to be equivocal. War with Iraq would be risky and dangerous, with too little likelihood for any constructive result. How could they possibly mean it? It HAD to be a ploy, a political move to strengthen the President and his party for 2002 and 2004. It was against that background that the curtain went up, and ‘the play’ unfolded.

The scenario Bush and Co. began to roll out in the summer of 2002 (even though no one rolls out anything before Labor day), involved a highly selective culling of the evidence, couching it in (focus group) honed phraseology, and dramatizing it against the vividly evoked background of 9/11. The request for a resolution to go to war was presented as giving the President sufficient weight in the diplomatic arena so that he might pursue peace. With permission to go to war, the President could confront Saddam with the necessary clout, and/or the President could face the international community with a strong hand in putting together the kind of alliance his father put together for the first Gulf War. War was the ‘last resort’. But, if it should come to pass, we would be in the best possible position to achieve a useful outcome. A vote for the resolution was a ‘really’ a vote for peace!

Any Democrat contemplating a vote against the resolution knew he or she faced being charged not only with being weak on terror, but actually voting against a peaceful outcome of a confrontation with Saddam. Couple this with what seemed (in the fall of 2002) to be the very significant likelihood that Bush was bluffing, and a vote against the President held only one realistic downside. In the months to come you would be blamed with a string of hypotheticals. For not giving the President (1) the credibility needed to face Saddam down, (2) the credibility needed to form a sufficiently persuasive international coalition such that, with the coalition standing by, Iraqis themselves might decide to remove Saddam ; and (3) the credibility to form a Gulf War I type coalition to engage war as a ‘last resort’. In short, you weakened the President and are weak in the War on Terror. Saddam is still in power, and its your fault.

In the above light, with 9/11 still fresh in memory, a vote for the President would shield Democrats from nasty attacks now, and - of particular note - from similar attacks in 2004. A vote against the President, on the other hand, opened you to all those attacks. And for what? To stop something that most likely wasn’t going to happen anyway.

In the event, too many Democrats took the ‘easy’ way out and voted to give the President the power to go to war. Most of them tried to hedge their bets with protestations that they trusted the President to make war truly a last resort, listing all the precautions that needed to be attended to, and all the promises they felt had been given. A political calculation to be sure, but one shrouded in an unstated belief that war with Iraq was most likely a bluff.

How reasonable was that?

From the hard realities on the ground, it certainly looked reasonable.

Kenneth Pollack , who wrote the most influential book arguing for confronting Saddam (The Threatening Storm), thought Iraq was by no means at the top of the priority list after 9/11. The factual basis for war was weak if anyone looked carefully, however the administration tried to hype it. Curiously, even the hype itself - and it was pretty clear that’s what it was - argued for a bluff. Would they dare use such demonstrably questionable, and transparently slick, stuff, if they really were going to war? They would be ‘conning’ us into a war that would cost American lives. No one would leave themselves open to that, no one would dare such a thing. Impossible!

The administration’s political calculation appeared problematical as well. Using 9/11 for political gain was clearly their game plan, but carrying it too far could backfire. So serious and tragic an event was not to be ‘played with’.

Then, the whole course of our post WWII engagement with the world was grounded in collegiality, working with our allies, not defying them. Even as Bush and Co. moved forward after Labor Day, it was clear major allies in the Cold War, and certainly allies in the Arab/Muslim world, had very serious reservations. Surely they could not be contemplating blowing all that aside.

Finally, it was clear once war was begun, and in order to achieve anything substantively useful against the appeal of Al Qaeda, we would have to have a stable, democratic, prosperous and pluralistic Iraq in pretty short order. Anything less (say an Iraq with a government no better or worse than those of our Arab allies in the region, but friendly to American interests) would be a victory for Islamic radicalism. Yet, if we did not go in with a Gulf War (I) level of collegiality, the prospects for that outcome ‘we would have to have’ plummeted.

The case was weak, the dangers high, the prospects for success so slim, the rhetoric so obviously contrived and so easily seen as deceitful - thereby, lying the country into war - they HAD to be bluffing. War with Iraq was insane.

And yet, however hard it might be to take seriously, there was substantive evidence it is what they intended..

As far back as Bush 41, a nascent Neocon movement had created a stir with a foreign policy ‘Team B’ proposal. Team B was a group within the Defense Department focused on providing an alternate analysis of the world we faced, and proposing a strategy forward. Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz were key players in what emerged. Team B proposed that America become the world hegemon, championing and spreading democracy by actively conniving to maintain American dominance though, among other things, compromising any and all rivals – including historical allies. Bush I immediately quashed the Team B report, and had Cheney disavow it. The ideologues who drafted it, however, did not go away. They retreated throughout the Clinton years into a foundation dubbed The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). From that base they formalized their thinking into a signature document, Rebuilding America's Defenses, and issued it in the late 90’s. Its most novel ideas became the direct progenitors of the Bush Doctrine. Among other things, PNAC calls for a military strong enough to fight ‘multiple simultaneous large-scale wars’.

The first announcement relevant to the Iraq War came in the commencement address Bush gave at West Point in June of 2002. In it, a concept clearly drawn from the PNAC afflatus, pre-emptive war, made is first appearance. Then, in September 2002, with the National Security Strategy of 2002, the Bush Doctrine was announced. A basis in formal policy for the Iraq war was put in place just as the game began.

Throughout the fall and winter of 2002, the Congress knew, it had to know, that plans for an Iraq War were far, far advanced beyond any simple question of addressing contingencies. The President and his spokesman (including, if I’m not mistaken, in sworn testimony before Congress) used a stock phrase to cover this up: “There are no plans for war on the President’s desk.” (I longed for some smartass opponent of the war to inquire, after it all became too clear, just where those plans had been: on the coffee table, on the floor, on the couch, on a table in another room? )

While traduced evidence, and Madison Avenue polished formulations might inspire doubt as to ultimate sincerity, they also diminish wiggle room if you want to back away from them. At no time did the administration show any evidence of backing away from them, they only intensified their use. Then, of course there was the ‘gossip’ that the Neocons had been ‘enraged’ at the success of achieving the re-entry of inspectors into Iraq, and then the administration proceeded to trash the inspectors’ work from (very nearly) day 1.

Finally, there was hard evidence in the administration’s record. They had blown off Kyoto (bad for our economy), agreements on land mines and protocols on chemical and biological weapons (compromises us), and withdrawn from the ABM treaty (limits America): Hegemonic Neocon drive was propelling American policy.

While none of this evidence suggesting it was war, and not a ‘bluff’, is conclusive, it was consistent with what was increasingly, and then overwhelmingly, obvious as we moved through late January and into February of 2003. War WAS coming. They were risking ‘the impossible’. It is in this, not in the original vote, that the real perfidy of the Democrats is to be found. Disavowing ‘that vote’ became a compelling necessity, as it became clear that Bush was blowing past all the cautions, all the good advice he had promised to observe, traducing the evidence and lying the country forward into a dangerous and risky venture. Simple common sense, quite apart from the obvious moral considerations, argued for vigorous opposition. The war as proposed was stupid. Against the cry that they had gone ‘peacenik soft’, Democrats should have countered that strength and resolve should be informed by sound judgment. Who would or could respect leadership which did not meet that condition.

“The wisdom to act is not wisdom in the actions chosen.”

And the Democrats? . . . . . . . did nothing!

They allowed themselves to be swept along , and so did the rest of the country. A poll that appeared just before the administration began to really beat the drums, showed a residue of good sense still remained with the American people. A plurality still favored going to war only with a UN mandate. Sadly, that was swept aside as the trumpets sounded. Voicing opposition to the war was understood as declining to support troops now being sent into harm’s way.

Within 10 days of Pearl Harbor Senator Robert Taft (Mr. Republican) gave a speech in which he asserted that, in war, criticism is the highest duty of a patriot. In March of 2003, not only the Democrats failed, the country failed.

“We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility” – Lincoln.

So Bush and Co. did it. They were so bold – and foolish – to do what we have every reason to believe no American administration would ever do. Our expectations were reasonable; Bush et al were not. After 9/11 we deeply desired, and deeply needed, good, wise, and effective leadership, and have been very reluctant to judge we have not had it. But we have not had it.

We are shaking free of our illusions, but, with two more years to go, the administration still appears to be at it.

Iran looms.

Again launching a war seems so foolish, so improbable that they can’t possibly mean it. Again they seek to defray anxiety as to their intended course - and this time without some slick verbal formulation about ‘no plans for war on the President’s desk’. Yet are we seeing a replay? They have not explicitly repudiated the Neocon vision, nor repudiated its spear-point of pre-emptive/preventive war. The ‘horror’ of an Iran with a nuclear weapon has been a staple talking point for quite some time now. Evidence against Iran, again grounded in slippery sands, is being brought forward with urgent rhetorical polish. If there are no WMD’s in the immediate offing to trigger an imminent American move, we appear to be getting into position to provoke a ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ incident.

Ultimately ‘that vote’ becomes a prism through which to see all of our current dilemma. The refractions through it encompass so many elements: deception (self and otherwise), foolishness, hubristic afflatus, political calculation, 9/11, American (and Iraqi) blood and treasure, destabilization in the region, America’s role in the world. The Senators and Representatives who voted had all of these on their minds in 2002, and properly so. The failure on the Republican side was to place party over responsibility, the failure on the Democrats side was to choose political calculation - playing a hunch as to intention – and then refuse to cry foul when Bush gave the lie to their calculation.

Do we trust this administration one more time?

Can we trust them?

Why should we?!

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 23:01:27 GMT

Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near

I have just finished reading Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near. If you want an understanding of America in Iraq, you must read it. Shadid is an Arab-American, and a Pulitzer winning reporter for the Washington Post. He was assigned to Iraq prior to the war and is fluent in Arabic. The book was published in 2005. It describes the situation in Iraq as it evolved through the war, the toppling of the statue, and the reaction of Iraqis as 2003 moved into 2004 and then early 2005. It can break your heart.

Early on I proposed why any American welcome in Iraq was unlikely to remain positive for very long:

1. We were going in essentially alone, with only the Brits as a substantive ally. The Brits were the last western power to try to suborn Iraq, and the Iraqi’s remember.

2. We were an alien - i.e. non-Muslim- culture.

3. We were Israel’s great champion in the world. No apologies, but it would not endear us to any Arab/Muslim population.

4. The Iraq’s knew we were interested in their oil.

What one discovers in Night Draws Near is how perilously short a ‘grace period’ we had.

Shadid outlines a range of Iraqi mind sets after the statue came down. The Shia welcomed us, but were soon caught up in an intense religious revival as they emerged from the long repression of Saddam’s Iraq. To the extent this would assume a fundamentalist Islamic cast, it would undermine American hopes. The Sunnis were broadly glad to be free of Saddam, but were anxious to maintain their traditional primacy in Iraq. As such they would become a large and ready base for an insurgency.

On top of this basic divergence is what might be most easily grasped by contemporary Americans as a red state/blue state divide. City Iraqis - principally Baghdadis - held more cosmopolitan views, and were likely to remain open and tolerant far more than ‘country’ Iraqis, who were fiercely traditional as to Islam and, equally important, as to Arab/tribal customs and mores. In particular the Sunni Arabs of Anbar very, very quickly became deeply dedicated and savagely engaged against ‘the occupation’.

Then Shadid discovers another destabilizing division within Shia Iraq.

For an analogy we might go back to the Roman republic. The republic was ruled by an aristocratic oligarchy. From time to time, one of their number would stir up unrest by making an explicit appeal to the poor and dispossessed - to plebian Rome [see the Gracchi and, later, Caesar].

In Iraq, unlike the Sunnis, the Shia have a well established, scholarly, and revered clerical elite (no little of it Iranian oriented). In the early 1990’s, one member of this elite, Mohammad Mohammad Sadiq al Sadr (Muqtada Sadr’s father), assumed the ‘populist’ role. He gained a pronounced following, antagonizing his clerical colleagues, and drawing Saddam’s attention - and assassins. Those assassins did away with him in the late 90’s. With the fall of Saddam, the father’s following quickly re-emerged and marshaled behind the son. As such they constituted a body of angry and embittered Iraqis, of fundamentalist sentiment, who are less amenable, even antagonistic, to the sway of the traditional clergy.

By the fall of 2003, we had lost the vast majority of ‘country’ Sunnis, and the Muqtadaist element of Shia was not on our side. In fact the vast majority of all Iraqis, of whatever allegiance, were deeply resentful of the alien, non-Muslim, American presence.

What Shadid so movingly presents is the travail of everyday Iraqis as the situation unraveled, and so many of them passed from hope to despair, and towards identification with the insurgency.

What becomes clear is that one year after the statue toppled, the principle impetus for violence was not competition for power in the new Iraq, nor was it any atavistic Al Qaeda derived fury against modernity (and its western avatars), but a hatred for the occupation. Occupation itself was a perceived insult. Then a deep fury was engendered as America failed to deliver on its promises for a better life in Iraq, and Iraqis came to see, and keenly experience, American disrespect for Islam, and for Arab customs, manners and mores:

"It cannot be endured!"

By the spring of 2004, with Fallujah, the Ashura bombings in Karbala, and Abu Ghraib, the window had closed, and the game was over with respect to the situation America had contrived for Iraq.

Any hope after that - until to this moment - would have to depend on a radical restructuring of the effort. And that hope would be very, very slim.

No such restructuring has been seen. [There isn’t even a hint of it in the current plan for the surge.]

The book closes with Shadid witnessing the election in January of 2005. One gathers he was somewhat surprised by the genuine euphoria of the moment. In the end he concludes, quite reasonably I think, that all Iraqis saw the election as their first chance in 35 years to have a say in shaping their own futures. Tragically, the context in which those elections unfolded was fatally flawed. The choices offered were essentially: Vote for me, I’m Shia. Vote for me, I’m Sunni. Vote for me, I’m Kurd. In the event, the Sunnis largely declined to participate, while the Shia and the Kurds participated with enthusiasm. The Shia saw their first chance in all Islamic history to become the dominant power in an Arab/Muslim land, and the Kurds were determined to perpetuate the autonomy they had exercised for a decade in the north. The result was a set of elected representatives who understood their role as championing the narrow sectarian interests of their respective factions. It was both the opening move and the shaping event for a descent towards civil war. The day of elections became a heart piercingly brief, bright gleam as night drew ever nearer.

Thus America in Iraq.

Cry the Beloved Country.

Both Countries!

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:05:40 GMT

The Decider

I am certainly not alone in wondering just what is (or has been) going on in Bush’s head. More people have conjectured on that than you can shake the proverbial stick at, including professional, as well as amateur (the rest of us!), psychologists.

A true cottage industry!

Here is a conjecture:

The President has been described, from pretty much the beginning, as one who would get a list of choices from his ‘expert’ advisors, and then choose one (or maybe one from column A and one from Column B.) More recently he has presented himself as ‘The Decider’.

Let’s take that for the reality.

There is a difference between working through material on your own - deciding within yourself what you think and then charting a course - and choosing something from a list provided you. (It is something like the difference between breeding, raising, training and racing a thoroughbred, and picking one before a race to bet on.) You are ‘personally invested’ in the former in a way you cannot be in the latter. True leadership could be proposed to consist of the former, and then, after collegial ‘peer review’, choosing a course. The strategy of choosing from a list can, over time, create a framework for your ‘experts’ in which they will never challenge you to think for yourself; they will just provide new lists. You never develop any personal investment beyond placing ‘the bet’. And, of course, one can incline towards placing a bet on gut instinct.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps someone (Condi?) should have made Bush write a ‘term paper’ on situations he faced, certainly on Iraq. Made to do that kind of ‘homework’, the president might have cultivated habits of personal investment conducive to more effective leadership. Lacking that, leadership can become confused with sticking with your bet, come hell or high water (or Iraq as it is, and Katrina as it was). The ‘quality’ of your leadership becomes solely a function of the resolve with which you pursue your 'selection': a curiously hollow kind leadership. No wonder people have trouble figuring out what is going on inside your head. You are just reviewing the lists and waiting for the diviner’s twitch of your gut.