Empire Notes

March 24, 2010

Presente

Oscar Romero, gunned down 30 years ago today at the behest of the U.S.-backed right-wing junta ruling El Salvador.

February 15, 2010

Weekly Commentary -- "Kinder, Gentler" Counterinsurgency and Marja

Stanley McChrystal is very serious about his vision of "kinder, gentler" counterinsurgency.

When a recent rocket attack killed 12 villagers, at least nine of them noncombatants, he immediately apologized to President Karzai and ordered troops to suspend use of the weapon system involved.

I think it's fair to say that actions like this are unprecedented in the history of U.S. counterinsurgency.

Not that that is likely to be of much consolation to those who knew those twelve people, several of whom were children.

The incident occurred as part of Operation Mushtarak, billed as the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Involving apparently 15,000 coalition and Afghan troops, including 4000 U.S. Marines, it is an attempt to "clear" the small town and district of Marja in southern Helmand of insurgents.

Supposedly, Marja has now become the biggest Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan; a year ago, it was on no one's radar.

The "preparation of the battlefield" before the operation began was marked by confusion; a warning of the assault, much like the second attack on Fallujah in November 2004, so that civilians could flee ahead of the fighting, combined with admonitions to civilians to stay in their homes.

What supposedly makes this plan different from so many useless efforts previously in Afghanistan is the planning for the aftermath. Apparently, 2000 Afghan police will be stationed here after the battle is concluded, along with civilian officials; McChrystal has been quoted as saying, "We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in."

Whether this "government in a box" will be superior to Taliban governance is an open question; it is likely to be more corrupt and provide less security but may allow more political freedom. And if there is an improvement, will it be enough of one to justify the violence and disruption the people of Marja have to go through in this assault, and in the Taliban attacks that are sure to follow?

That is likely not a question Stanley McChrystal is asking himself; even "kinder, gentler" counterinsurgency relies on the automatic, unquestioning assumption that your side must prevail. And the reasons for that assumption, even in this "population-centric" paradigm, always lie beyond the good of the population in question. Here, they have something to do with al-Qaeda, but mostly to do with the idea that the United States shouldn't lose.

It's easy enough for members of the U.S. military and reporters embedded with them to convince themselves that these considerations are perfectly compatible with, or even logically linked to, the good of the Afghan population. The brutality of the typical insurgency faced with a technologically superior foe that has far more resources for coercion enables this feeling, and the reactionary ideology of the Taliban intensifies it. Any further qualms are put to rest by McChrystal's new rules of engagement.

Afghanistan has always been a difficult one. If you observed the early commentary from the left very closely, it would have been difficult to avoid noting that it was the very people who knew the most about Afghanistan and approached analyzing the war from the vantage-point of the Afghan people who most fudged the question of what is to be done, and in particular the question of U.S. withdrawal. Withdrawal has become an easy question for those "progressives" who believe that "Afghanistan is not worth the bones of a single American soldier" (to paraphrase Bismarck on the Balkans) or that Afghanistan is a primitive, stone-age civilization that, despite the best of our intentions, we cannot hope to democratize.

For those of us with a slightly more expansive view of the worth and capabilities of Afghans, it has never been that easy. Even now, it is not. The neo-Taliban has avoided both traps of the takfiri insurgency of Iraq; an increasing spiral of ideological extremism and one of baroque and macabre violence against one's own side. But how much of that is because of the existence of political competition; if they took over completely, who knows what order they would impose?

It is conventional for social scientists and others who apply a cost-benefit calculus to human misery to judge actions not relative to some unattainable baseline but rather relative to likely or feasible alternatives. Doesn't the Korean War, with all its saturation bombing atrocity, seem a little more reasonable when one looks at the horror that is North Korea today?

But the truth is that strong actions, like that one or the occupation of Afghanistan, play a constitutive role, creating and destroying various other alternatives. The trauma of the Korean War conditioned what kind of country North Korea would be afterward; the perpetuation of the Afghan counterinsurgency may well make the neo-Taliban more brutal and more desperate. If it does, just as in Iraq, everybody will wash their hands of it, saying that this proves all the more how right we were all along.

Posted at 10:39 am.

February 14, 2010

The Good Die Young

Charlie Wilson, 76. If you believe George Crile's stupid but informative book, he was the man who almost single-handedly created the CIA's Afghan jihad of the 1980's.

February 8, 2010

Weekly Commentary -- Orphaned Haiti

Ten good salt-of-the-earth American Christians from the New Life Church in Idaho who apparently went to Haiti to help children are now in prison, charged with child kidnapping.

They were stopped by Haitian authorities with a busload of 33 children they were trying to take to an orphanage run by New Life in the Dominican Republic. They had no papers with them. Their defense has been that they didn't know any documentation was needed. Many of the children have living parents, and some have claimed that they were taken without their parents' permission.

The emerging news story is that the leader of the group, Laura Silsby, is something of a shady character, while the other nine were just innocent dupes who were trying to do good.

That's not how I see it. When Americans are forced to admit they have done anything wrong, they always fall back on stories of blundering attempts to do good, which founder because they didn't understand the cultural peculiarities of Vietnamese or Iraqis or Haitians.

I do believe the other nine were stupid and ignorant; I also believe they were culpably stupid and ignorant. Who imagines that you can take 33 children that don't belong to you across a national border without a scrap of paper attesting to your right to custody? Would any native Idahoan, no matter how blissfully protected from knowledge by the New Life Church, have imagined they could do that with American orphans?

Haitian children are not puppies (and no, I don't approve of the way humans separate puppies from their families either).

You may concede the underlying racism that made this ignorance possible, but still believe they were trying to help the children and give them a better life. The truth, though, is that they were engaged in the despicable task of taking advantage of the poverty, desperation, and bereavement of Haitians to acquire tiny captives as subjects for the forced acquisition of their bizarre belief system (yes, New Life admits openly that the orphanages exist for the purpose of conversion).

Many parents claim that they gave up the children willingly; it's unlikely they knew what kind of life they were condemning them to. But the actions of desperate people are understandable and forgivable.

This little episode is Haiti and its relations with the United States in microcosm. The media has been full of opinion pieces about how this is now Year Zero in Haiti and the United States should remake Haiti ab initio so that such things never happen again. The Washington Post even ran a story quoting numerous Haitians who basically expected the U.S. to take over, build things that work, and use some tiny fraction of its enormous wealth to make life better for them.

It is a forlorn hope. The United States government is not the New Life Church. It doesn't want to organize life in Haiti; it didn't even want to in Iraq and Afghanistan until it began to seem necessary to defeat a tenacious armed insurgency. Haitians have no weapons and no military capability to mount an insurgency that will bother American soldiers, so this just won't happen.

But what will likely happen is an extended U.S. troop presence and an intensification of the effective U.S./UN trusteeship of the country.

You might say this makes sense. After all, Haiti is a miserable failure and national sovereignty notwithstanding, it makes little sense to repeat and perpetuate this failure.

This is true, but there is a real question about what exactly the failure is. Here's a thought. Since Dessalines' declaration of Haiti's independence in 1804, Haiti has never really been allowed to govern its own affairs. Francois Duvalier was the first ruler to create a genuinely independent Haitian politics; unfortunately, it involved intense political terror.

It was not until Aristide and Lavalas that anyone presented the possibility of Haitian independence without mass killing. Between Aristide and Preval, the evolution and then collapse of Lavalas, there is a complicated story that others can tell better than I, but the most salient point is this; since 1990, the evolving popular movements and the leaders they have elected have never had a chance to govern untrammeled by the white powers.

Haiti has a highly politicized populace. In the past 20 years, it has undergone two periods of mass terror and attempts to destroy popular movements. After the second, which happened under the aegis of the United Nations, the population still overwhelmingly voted for Preval instead of the candidates of the oligarchy that was terrorizing them. Maybe if they had governments that represented them and their interests without being hobbled by the so-called "international community," they would work out some form of good governance for themselves. It's just a thought.

Posted at 10:33 am.

January 27, 2010

Rest in Peace

Howard Zinn. He died in the saddle, fighting against the powerful and for humanity to the end. His People's History of the United States was one of the most important American books of the last half of the 20th century, and has played a major role in creating three generations of activists. His reflections on and repentance of his role in World War 2 as a bombardier contain more moral seriousness than anything an American politician has said since Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

Our lives are all richer for his having existed. Rest in peace, Howard.

Posted at 10:15 pm.

January 25, 2010

Weekly Commentary -- Haiti's Curse

There are already 150,000 Haitians in the ground. The total death toll may, one hopes, be as low as 200,000, but it could easily be significantly greater.

The world reacted immediately, with countries as far away as China and Israel dispatching rescue teams. President Obama avoided the initial mistakes of the Bush administration with the tsunami, declaring immediate solidarity with Haiti, pledging $100 million, and sending in the Marines. And individual Americans, reacted with a generosity and concern unprecedented in the speed of its mobilization. U.S. relief organizations have collected over $380 million in donations.

Almost no sooner had the earthquake happened than numerous left commentators who had connections with Haiti began criticizing, warning of the dangers, and reminding readers of the sordid history of U.S. and U.N. policy toward Haitians. At the time, I was ambivalent about it. On the one hand, politics and disasters always go together, and it's reasonable to make the case that people should focus on the potential political problems as early as possible. On the other hand, such behavior is indubitably part of why everybody hates the left.

My ambivalence was happily resolved by David Brooks' noxious op-ed in the New York Times, blaming Haitians for the disaster and calling for their subjugation under an "enlightened paternalism." I give him credit for being openly noxious -- the same theme, thinly veiled, cropped up in innumerable other places in the mainstream media.

They started it.

Of all of the arrogant, ignorant, paternalistic white commentators, the one who hit closest to the truth was Pat Robertson. Haiti is cursed. There is and has been for 500 years no more benighted place on the planet.

The indigenous population was wiped out by Columbus and his successors in perhaps the most complete genocide in history.

The population was entirely replaced by white settlers and Africans abducted, enslaved, subjected to a brutally deadly passage to the New World, and then subjected to perhaps the most onerous slavery in the history of the world. They were worked to death so fast that more slaves had constantly to be imported.

The first ray of light was the advent of Toussaint and the slave revolt. It was a bloody series of battles spreading over 13 years and costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of the newly freed. Any battle like that creates leaderships composed of hard men, who ruthlessly take the measures they deem necessary for survival. Those who do not, do not survive.

Given that process, Toussaint was a surprisingly enlightened and humane man, remarkably ready to forgive his enemies, stubbornly committed to racial reconciliation, even to the point of welcoming the return of the plantationocracy that was responsible for the crimes committed against his people.

His vision, gradually developing, of an independent Haiti closely connected to, helped and advised by Republican France, which he saw as the foremost source of culture and modern thinking in the world, was an admirable one that, if realized, might have changed Haiti's history forever after.

He was taken from Haiti by French perfidy and the counterrevolution in France. His successor, Jean Jacques Dessalines, autocratic but efficient, was assassinated, and Haiti broke up, split between different warlords created during the slave insurgency. Do not blame the ignorance and backwardness of Haitians for the fact that, after this mighty effort for freedom, they created emperors and kings to rule them; it was, after all, the ultra-civilized French who voted overwhelmingly to make Napoleon emperor and who later accepted the Bourbon restoration.

Fast-forward over 185 years of constant colonial depredations by France, the United States, and other European powers, including the 19-year occupation started by Woodrow Wilson, during which time Haitians were rounded up into work gangs not so dissimilar from their role in the days of slavery, the French theft of 150 million francs under the guise of compensation for the property lost in the slave revolt -- property in the form of the bodies of the slaves -- and Cold-War-inspired U.S. support for the murderous Duvaliers.

The second ray of light was the formation of Lavalas and the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He has now been removed from power by two coups, the first in 1991 by military and feudal elements friendly to the United States and in some case on the CIA's payroll, and the second openly backed and organized by the International Republican Institute of the National Endowment for Democracy with the connivance of the Bush administration and with the support of the U.N. Security Council. So dangerous is this meddlesome priest that for six years he has not been allowed to return to his country.

Who or what cursed Haiti? Consider this. By all accounts, when Columbus landed on Hispaniola, the island was filled with a prosperous, peaceful, happy people; it seemed to early European observers to be a paradise.

Posted at 10:24 am.

December 28, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Summing up Obama

In a recent New York Times piece, Adam Nagourney takes the liberal left to task for their anger at Obama over the sorry mess that health-care reform legislation has become, suggesting that they should have understood from the beginning that Obama is someone who plays within the rules, even if they are an arbitrary set of conventions that grew up in a recent period of political and ideological retrenchment by liberals, who doesn't try to change the system but simply works with it, and that by this token a health-care bill that individually appeases every single player that could have blocked it, from the AMA to insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies to Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman is what was always in the cards.

Obama himself tried to suggest much the same by telling the Washington Post, "I didn't campaign on the public option."

Technically, he is correct. He talked about a lot of things, like a public option, as desirable, but he didn't promise he would deliver it.

It has become fashionable to say that he has delivered everything he promised. He said he wanted to escalate in Afghanistan, and he's done it. He ran as an economic centrist and he has delivered.

But in every real sense he has overtly turned his back on his promises. He built much of his campaign around a claim that politics in Washington is dysfunctional and needs to be shaken up. In this, of course, he is like every American politician for 200 years. But he differed in that he actually talked coherently about his vision of how to do that -- and it was a vision that one simply doesn't hear from major presidential candidates. He was going to go over the heads of the politicians and the entrenched interests and try to build a mass movement. It was not going to be much of a mass movement, since there was supposed to be no ideological core; it was going to be held together by Obama's charisma and a bunch of vagueness about how much all of us normal people have in common.

That last part was fatuous, though it's a fatuity that many of our left rabble-rousers share. And the whole program was ridiculously unworkable -- how was a president going to anchor something like that without being excoriated by every opinion leader for "playing politics" with his office? But he said he was going to do it and he didn't make the slightest motion toward lifting a finger to actually do it. He didn't even do the traditional "bully pulpit" thing on health-care. Right from the beginning, he acted as if the only players in the game were in DC, even though he had promised us he was going to change the game by bringing all of us into it, even if it was as a great undifferentiated mass.

He also promised us, at least implicitly, that he was an original and independent thinker. That, plus of course his personal biography, was the only reason I had any interest in him. No president since FDR had been any such thing, and I thought it would be interesting to watch him try it out. I didn't think that he was anything but a moderate liberal politically; I had no illusions that he was some sort of stealth leftist. But I did expect that he would occasionally manifest insight.

He has not. He made some forays, like his speech in Cairo, which, for all its flaws, was not something one would expect from an American president. And, more subtly, he tried to signal to Latin America, after the Honduran coup against Zelaya, that the "war on terror" would no longer be used to refight the battles of the Cold War.

He did retain at least some of his capacity to think originally -- a very difficult feat for a president, since they are bombarded from day one with a thousand slightly different versions of the conventional wisdom by people who usually can't imagine anything outside it.

Unfortunately, he had no real commitment to any of his own ideas. His backtracking on settlements in occupied Palestine and on restoration of Zelaya and abrogation of the coup government at the slightest signs of resistance show that.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, Obama is passionate about only two things -- the idea that "reasonable people" can always find technocratic solutions somewhere in the muddled middle, and that his personal biography is not just a matter of world-historic import but a profound moral principle. Interestingly, these are exactly the two passions that Hillary Clinton has, making one wonder once again why we wasted all that time following the primaries.

Posted at 10:44 am.

December 20, 2009

The Good Die Young -- An Exception

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri died on Sunday at the age of 87. For most if not all of his life, he was a conservative cleric, but he was nonetheless a very admirable man. Designated heir presumptive to Khomeini's Imamate, he lost his position when he castigated Khomeini for the murder of hundreds of political prisoners, declaring that he would follow the Imam to the gates of hell, but he would not enter.

Discredited and ridiculed by the ossified regime, he became one of the foremost voices in Iran for greater civil liberties and women's rights, and more recently for the preservation of "Islamic democracy" against the evolving Ahmadinejad-Khamenei-Pasdaran coup. He spent 1997 to 2003 under house arrest for his criticisms of the Faqih Ali Khamenei.

A recent statement of his:

A political system based on force, oppression, changing people's votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate.

His death is a blow to the nascent Green Revolution, but do watch out for what happens tomorrow at his funeral.

Posted at 5:10 pm.

December 17, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- A Legislative Travesty

Whether it was Otto von Bismarck or some unheard-of American lawyer who actually originated the famous aphorism about the making of laws and sausages, he was very unfair to sausage-makers. After all, they don't really try to hide the fact that their final product, the sausage, is a revolting mixture of ground-up bits of waste gristle and fat encased in cleaned-out intestines, or even the fact that they will send you to an early grave. And they're very clear that they make them in order to make money.

Laws, on the other hand, like the so-called "health care reform" that may eventually pass through Congress, are frequently dressed up to hide the innumerable rat parts that somehow got included in them or at least to distract the average citizen from thinking of them.

The "public option," in whatever emaciated form might conceivably have emerged, is dead. The passage of an individual mandate requiring that everyone buy health insurance will mean a gigantic boondoggle for private insurance companies, who will at one stroke get 40-odd million new subscribers. In return for making this gigantic sacrifice, insurance companies may be allowed to lower the already low rate of premium repayment; i.e., not only will the numbers of subscribers increase, the profit per subscriber may well increase as well.

On the other hand, the poor and young, who are often just scraping by, will be required by law to give money to insurance companies while in general receiving considerably less health care than they are paying for. If not, they will have to pay a penalty.

Yet another bright idea: an excise tax on so-called "Cadillac plans." What this may well mean in practice is that those of us with half-decent health insurance through unions or because we are public sector employees will be hit with extra costs to help finance the extra profits of insurance companies. These groups, of course, vote Democratic, so the geniuses on the Hill will be hurting themselves.

Perhaps the most obvious reform was eliminating "rescissions," the charming practice of many insurance companies by which they retroactively drop coverage when somebody gets sick -- without repaying their premiums -- if they can find the slightest misrepresentation, accidental or otherwise, on a form. Instead, there will probably be a loophole allowing rescissions in cases of "fraud," i.e. business as usual.

About the only real reform will likely be the requirement that insurance companies cease discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. This is a small price to pay when you are delivered a gigantic new captive market.

There is no doubt a tremendous rogues' gallery here. One can certainly include every Republican. And then there are various wonderful blue-dog Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and a sea of political mediocrities. And, as always, the ever-noxious Joe Lieberman, who never met a super-exploitative oligopolistic cartel he didn't love (except those run by Arabs, of course), and who somehow manages to maintain his air of preening sanctimony whether he is arguing against accountability for torture and sexual abuse or in favor of increasing corporate profits by denying decent health coverage to millions of people.

But, honestly, it takes remarkable contortions to avoid criticizing President Obama for this, as well as every other debacle he is so calmly plunging into. He was exactly right during the primaries when he emphasized that major legislative changes could not be made by worrying about Washington, inside-the-Beltway culture, and picayune partisan politics; in order to get real change, he said, what was needed was broad principled appeals meant to mobilize the masses and force legislators to consider their concerns rather than those of entrenched interests. If you weren't convinced of that before, watching all those Congressmen in the pockets of insurance companies should have done the job.

The problem was that he resolutely disavowed, then and afterward, every kind of broad principled argument on every conceivable issue. He tried to create a national crusade on health-care "costs," as if costs were a problem in themselves. Why shouldn't we spend more money on health care, instead of on plasma-screen TVs and SUVs? The problem is not how much we spend on health care but how little we get for it. And talking about that requires the unmentionable word "profits." That is divisive and not Niebuhrian and Obama would not do it.

The truth is that we are not more alike than our politics would suggest. We are in large part what our politics make us. The Republicans, crazy as they are, understand this.

Posted at 7:58 am.

December 7, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Climate Change Theater

It's always disturbing when one finds oneself agreeing with George Will, but his disparagement in a recent op-ed of the "climate change theater" going on at Copenhagen are right on target.

Barack Obama is talking about a 17% reduction in carbon emissions in the United States (from 2005 levels) by 2020, with an 83% reduction by 2050. So far, the United States has proved itself incapable of even saying in any meaningful way that it will cut carbon emissions -- forget any question of actually doing so. Although liberals whined a lot when Bush pulled us out of the Kyoto protocol, the truth is that the Senate never ratified it. Even the pathetic 17% reduction Obama is talking about will only result in a massive barrage of verbiage from the Republicans until it is drowned in nonsense.

And yet we actually talk about how much reduction will be achieved by 2050. That is absurd, in a country where six months ahead is a long-term forecast, but to say that the reduction will be 83% is just insulting to whatever passes for our intelligences. Assuming Will's numbers are right (and you should never assume this), this will commit us to carbon emissions per capita at the level we had in 1875. Does anyone believe this? Does anyone outside of the radical ecologistic far left even have the courage to talk about what kind of life this would mean?

In truth, as is always the case with claims like this in America, "by 2050" just means "we're not going to do anything about it now." And yet on the strength of a couple of cheap numbers, the United States is being hailed for its newly constructive role in climate change politics and Obama will surely be much feted at Copenhagen. It's just a shame there's no Nobel Prize for the Environment.

And then there are India and China. They have a valid case for not being treated the same as the countries of the First World. After all, it is the Europeans and their descendants who created the problem, while simultaneously despoiling the Third World (and perhaps even creating it, if you go along with Mike Davis's thesis in Late Victorian Holocausts). But instead of putting forward an argument in terms of equity, or in terms of the equal right of every individual to the bounties of the earth (per capita emissions even in China are far below those in the United States and still well below those of Europe as well), they have actually attempted to compete with Obama in cynicism.

India says it will reduce its "carbon emissions intensity" by 20% by 2020, and China will reduce it by 40-45%. "Carbon emissions intensity" is a physically and atmospherically meaningless quantity -- carbon emissions per dollar of GDP. The environment really doesn't care how much you say various pieces of paper you produce are worth. Will rightly derides the use of this farcical phrase, although, since he is himself an apotheosis of dishonesty, he doesn't mention that this is a severe case of "monkey see, monkey do" -- the concept of emissions intensity was a creation of the Bush administration intended to prove that the United States was such a good environmental citizen that it didn't need to do anything.

Although one must admire these countries' cleverness in using America's folly against it, institutionalization of this pernicious concept is a serious price to pay.

The Europeans are no better; with few exceptions, the only countries that have met their Kyoto emissions targets are those of the former Soviet bloc, which did it through imposed deindustrialization and social dislocation.

Let us not forget the other half of "climate change theater," as underscored by Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeak Climate Action Network -- Buying your friends carbon offsets for Christmas, talking about voluntary adoption of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and generally trying to make people think that all they have to do to save the environment is to consume different products.

In the last two years, the level of concern with and belief in global warming among the American public has turned around and started heading down. This has to do in part with the resurgence of the far right wing, which has now taken over right-of-center politics, but it also has to do, I think, with the feeling that it's being taken care of. You don't even actually have to buy a compact fluorescent light bulb; just knowing you're supposed to has almost the same effect on individual psychology.

Nonsensical posturing about targets that no one intends to meet and that are likely not even socially or politically possible to meet is actually part of the problem.

Posted at 10:56 am.

December 2, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- To Surge or not to Surge

Well, Hamlet has finally made up his mind. After a major strategic review of Afghanistan, an equally major review of the review, and then several months of reviewing both reviews, he has finally committed himself to a course of action. Whether it involves his pretending to be insane or just treating the rest of us as if we are, next week he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just after announcing a major military escalation.

Obama's speeches have been variously criticized over the past few years for soaring rhetoric untethered to actual facts and circumstances and for dry wonkish attention to policy detail, so he cleverly arranged this time to satisfy all critics by having neither.

Indeed, if you set aside the increase of 30,000 troops, repeatedly telegraphed by the White House, there were only two things noteworthy in the speech -- first, his completely unforced reiteration of the commitment to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011 and second, his bizarre new commitment to start withdrawing the troops he is now throwing into Afghanistan within 18 months.

What the latter means is very unclear. If it were Clinton or Bush, I would ignore it as verbiage, a mere hole in the air, but Obama does not throw away words and has an uncanny consistency between what he says and what he ends up doing -- look at how he promised to escalate in Afghanistan while campaigning and has already doubled the U.S. troop presence since taking office.

I would guess the genesis of the promise is the growing pressure on him from Democrats in Congress. On Afghanistan, he is in the unenviable position of being dependent on the Republicans and at odds with his own party. Obama has tried to split the difference, thus pleasing nobody.

Still, being Obama, he no doubt had to convince himself that this commitment motivated by domestic political considerations is actually an important part of the optimal strategy in Afghanistan -- presumably, his reasoning is that he is signaling to the U.S.-propped Afghan government and to Hamid Karzai that the U.S. commitment is far from open-ended. He is also, I imagine, trying to signal to himself that he is not Lyndon Johnson.

The truth, though, is that if you're going to fight a counterinsurgency -- and that is the course he has clearly put us on -- this is a ridiculous way to do it. Why not just withdraw now? The chances that something climactic will happen in the next 18 months are minimal -- and if it does, it will likely be something horrible. In Iraq, things came to a head within a very short time frame from 2005-2007 because of the descent into a nightmare of internecine carnage, followed by desperate attempts by various groups to step back from the edge of the precipice. Of course, if such a thing were to happen in Afghanistan, it would provide the foundation for another great counterinsurgency "success" like Iraq, but it's very unlikely -- 8 years of occupation has seen no major sectarian violence.

Short of that, 18 months will not suffice to eradicate the neo-Taliban -- especially since all indications are that they're still growing and that things are still in the phase where more counterinsurgency means more insurgency.

I do have some hopes that the increase in troop numbers will not lead to significant additional violence against Afghans because of partial implementation of Gen. McChrystal's "kinder, gentler" rules of engagement -- it's worth noting that Germany's August airstrike on a tanker near Kunduz that killed up to 145 people has already caused the resignation of their chief of staff and their defense minister at the time.

Although the lesson that killing civilians may be militarily counterproductive has been absorbed, it is still amazing how many lessons have not. In his introductory boilerplate, Obama attributed the rise of the Taliban to the Soviet occupation, the ensuing civil war, and the fact that American attention had "turned elsewhere;" by some prodigious effort, he has avoided learning that the rise might have had something to do with what America was doing before its attention "turned." Similarly, he presents Pakistan's turn to a more militaristic approach as a realization at long last that Pakistan is endangered by "extremism." In fact, of course, Pakistan faced virtually no internal terrorist attacks before the 2001 war and subsequent ones are entirely a product of American and Pakistani military operations in the area.

Barack Obama was the only American president in living memory capable of absorbing the decidedly non-Western idea that in some cases doing nothing might be more productive than "doing something" -- witness his immediate reaction to the election tumult in Iran -- but by this point it seems all possibility of insight has drained out of his foreign policy. This lesson is apparently not one that Americans will ever learn.

Posted at 8:55 am.

November 23, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Sarah Palin and the Crazy Right

Sarah Palin's "auto"-biography is really boring. Having a mere twenty minutes to spare, I only got a chance to read about a quarter of it, but that was enough for me.

The exigencies of expending 400 pages on the non-events of what was until mid-2008 a non-life are not pleasant to imagine; it's quite obvious that the book was published early because, unlike most political memoirs, there was no need to sift through a mass of facts, anecdotes and musings to refine out a coherent story -- all that was need was to add in lots of junior-high prose describing the Alaskan landscape and to recapitulate well-known events from the presidential campaign.

The book is full of distortions and outright lies -- the AP put 11 fact-checkers on the story (as Markos Moulitsas pointed out, it might have been nice if they did this for the Iraq WMD story). There is also a lot of cheap score-settling, showcasing Palin's by-now legendary vindictive, backbiting personality. But the dominant thread is simply the fact that she is a non-entity, with nothing discernible behind the moose-shooting leg-showing façade.

There seem to be sharp disagreements over whether she can be safely dismissed. Frank Rich says she is here to stay as a phenomenon because she taps into something deep in the American soul, a sentiment shared by Maureen Dowd. Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, one of her greatest fans, locates her in a hallowed lineage of hard-nosed American "populism," following in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald Reagan, ending his bizarre piece with an injunction to Palin to oppose the crucifixion of America on the "cross of Goldman Sachs."

My sense, though, among the more explicitly partisan liberals, is that they are salivating at the thought of a Palin presidential campaign, expecting an easy win for the Democrats. It is true that key bloggers like Moulitsas and Matthew Yglesias do frequently express concern for the descent of the Republican Party into insanity and extremism. Some of that is schadenfreude expressed as concern, and some of it is based on the idea that the country needs a two-party system, that implosion of the Republicans because they have stopped representing Americans will in the long run be bad for the polity.

I come down on the side of concern myself, but not for the same reasons. I don't think the extremization of the Republican Party has any chance of leading to its disintegration. The institutional strength of the two-party system and the emotional resonance of the liberal-conservative divide are too great. The last real challenge to the two-party system was in the late 19th century with, in fact, William Jennings Bryan. The end of the Vietnam War and the impeachment of Richard Nixon wrecked the Republican Party; in 1975 and 1976, its demise was already being celebrated in some quarters. Yet, four years later, a Republican was elected president and an era of Republican political dominance was ushered in; it still has not ended.

My guess now is that, no matter how far the Republican Party goes, they will lose very little more of their support. You can already see Obama losing popularity, even though most of what he has done is at least partly in the interest of the lower and middle classes and even though the only prescriptions Republicans have are utter nonsense (or stalking horses for insurance companies, like the call to let them sell insurance policies across state lines, thus freeing them to pick the state with the least onerous regulatory requirements).

This analysis is, I think, especially true with a foreign black Muslim Kenyan in the White House. Although Obama's victory was indeed a victory for a certain post-racial America (which is very different from an America that has dealt with the injustice of race and racism), there is a large chunk of the country that is not ready to be dragged into the 21st century -- or the 20th.

The latest trope in this unsavory group is a bumper sticker saying "Pray for Obama -- Psalm 109:8." In the King James Bible (if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me), this reads, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office." The psalm continues with imprecations against his fatherless children and his widow. The expression of these charming sentiments coincides with a huge rise in death threats against the president, which, along with an increase in related incidents, apparently threatens to overwhelm the Secret Service.

Obviously, a presidential campaign espousing this sort of hatred will get nowhere fast; just as obviously, a non-entity like Palin would be nowhere without it.

Posted at 10:54 am.

November 16, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Nidal Malik Hasan as a Rorschach Test

Like all good current events, Major Nidal Malik Hasan's recent shooting spree at Fort Hood, wherein he killed 13 people and wounded over 40, has functioned as a political Rorschach test.

For the right, the blob resolves very easily; indeed, this particular incident was unnecessary. Muslims are scary and can't be trusted. Hasan was part of a massive "terrorist" ring planning assaults on the U.S. military from within. Joe Lieberman, always one of the stalwarts of anti-Arab paranoia and fundamentalist anti-Islamism, plans to hold hearings designed to ferret out said plots.

A further obvious lesson is that the pinkos and peaceniks running the U.S. military are caught up in "political correctness;" no longer just about keeping white boys on elite college campuses from having good clean fun, now it has a body count.

Interestingly, of all the mainstream commentators, only Frank Rich had the wit to point out the bizarre contradiction at the heart of the "war on terror" for the past six years at least; the very people who jump to support our various expeditions into the Muslim world and excoriate opponents for not wanting to help Muslims and not believing that Muslims are capable of democracy themselves rabidly hate Muslims. It's apparently not polite to say, but it's quite obviously true.

For the status-quo defenders of ponderous military bureaucracy, which apparently includes all militant liberals now, the lesson is that there is no lesson. The military's expansive tolerance and respect for diversity are good things, and Major Hasan's unfortunate emotional problems have nothing to do with his religion.

For some fervent opponents of the war, I suppose, the incident is a lesson that some incipient groundswell of Muslims is out there, ready to kill our soldiers and drown our empire in blood, and that we should cease to occupy Muslim countries or we will be destroyed.

There are other lessons one might just as easily choose to learn. Instead of the danger of Muslims in the military, one might consider the danger of the casual abuse and prejudice within the military; perhaps the all-too-common practice of soldiers cheerfully referring to people like Hasan as "ragheads" and "hajis" is actually not such a good idea.

Or one might consider how this incident manifests the severe problems with the provision of psychiatric care within the military; how was it that a man who was clearly in serious need of it himself ended up being charged with providing it to others?

One might even choose to learn the lesson that Hasan himself suggested, at the end of a rambling and semi-coherent PowerPoint presentation with 50 slides that he delivered in 2007 to a mystified group of Army doctors expecting a medical presentation -- a presentation that, by the way, was a cry for help that only a complete blockhead could have failed to notice. The last slide contained a single recommendation: allow Muslim soldiers to become conscientious objectors and/or leave the military if they felt too much conflict with the idea of fighting against fellow Muslims. In retrospect, at least, it is hard to argue with this one.

Personally, the main lesson I see, which is, I suppose, partly in line with that of the military brass, is that it's actually quite amazing how little of a problem Muslim soldiers have been. There have been two incidents of fratricide, that of Hasan Akbar near the beginning of the Iraq war, and this one, and only a handful of cases of conscientious objection or noncooperation.

While the military bureaucracy obviously failed miserably in dealing with Major Hasan, the complacency of the brass is well justified. Muslim soldiers and intelligence agents are a major asset in the prosecution of the "war on terror;" incidents like these are acceptable losses for a militarily sound program. It is quite obvious that these incidents are no more disconnected from the religion and/or ethnicity of the two men in question than membership in AIPAC or the NAACP is, but still they only add up to a minor cost; 13 American soldiers is the number being killed in a week in Afghanistan.

American Muslims, furthermore, have essentially posed no threat, either of terrorist attacks, or even of significant political resistance to the war on terror. They are not only less cohesive than Muslim communities in many European countries, they are apparently much more apolitical. Although there is a great deal of simmering resentment at the reflexive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice of much of the country, it doesn't seem to translate into any kind of action.

Naturally, of course, the right wing wants to take one of the few things that America does right and fix it.

Posted at 11:02 am.

November 9, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Reflections on the Fall

The Bengalis, my mother's people, have a saying: "Anyone who isn't a Communist at twenty has no heart. Anyone who still is a Communist at forty has no brain." Unpleasantly redolent of the complacency of age, of the status quo, and of capitalism as it is, it is still worth considering.

I was twenty when the Berlin Wall fell.

I was in the middle of a brief flirtation with anarchism at the time, brought on by my first reading of Chomsky. Like many young leftists, I found it liberating. "Actually existing" communism had produced societies that were nightmares of stultification; the Warsaw Pact countries had no trace of romance or revolution to leaven the image of dull gray lives led by dull gray people, made that way by a dull gray system.

At the time, we were mystified by the anger and despair of the older generation; to us, it betokened a kind of totemic identification with societies and systems because of past connections and reflexive verbal associations with terms like "socialism" and "collective."

Surely, these countries had no more to do with "real" socialism than Stalin did with "real" Bolshevism -- or the Holocaust and the Inquisition with "real" Christianity? The dethroning of Erich Honecker or Todor Zhivkov didn't change the inherent evils of capitalism and imperialism or the importance of a real alternative.

No sooner were such thoughts formulated, of course, than they were drowned in a welter of Western triumphalism. In some ways, perhaps the older generation was wiser; they saw that, rather than a blow for human freedom, the fall of communism would be a loss for one side and a victory for the other. Many of them even realized that the dissociation of "actual" socialism from "real" socialism -- that Platonic ideal form -- was a little too facile.

We have now lived through twenty years -- my entire adult life -- of a world with, as Margaret Thatcher correctly pointed out, no alternatives. We have seen the results. The monstrous tragedies of communism that billions lived through became for the United States nothing more than retrospective justification for its own crimes and follies and cheap fodder for a new global offensive, this one unchecked by the existence of another pole, ideological, political, or military.

Perhaps we have gained enough distance to evaluate the brief interlude that was the history of communism. It is true we still have China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea with us, and a lot of noise from Hugo Chavez, but the term of communism as a living idea in the world began in 1871 with the Paris Commune and ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

What can we say about it? It is true, of course, that the history of communism was one continually thwarted by imperialist reaction and bloodshed, by the machinations of unscrupulous, power-hungry intellectuals, and by the rise of a bloodless bureaucratic elite, who played no part in the revolutions but took for themselves the best of what their societies produced.

There are deeper truths, though. Michael Albert connects the evils of actually existing communism to the rise of what he calls "coordinatorism," the ideology of a new class defined ideologically by their role in dictating to society what it should do rather than economically by their role in production.

I don't think this goes deep enough. It has long been a staple of the conservative critique of communism that the very existence of a utopian ideology of social transformation itself inevitably leads to catastrophe. The mass killings of the 20th century lend a great deal of credence to this notion. It is not just Nazism and Communism; the postwar creators of the American empire, who evolved an ideological worldview that James Peck has termed "visionary globalism," shared the same problem in lesser degree.

The other critique, that communism removed self-interest and thus initiative, certainly did not apply to the builders of the system. Those revolutionaries, dictators, apparatchiks, and political entrepreneurs were engaged in a tremendous act of will. They shook the pillars of Heaven and tried to force the pace of history, all the while proclaiming that they were in the service of historical inevitability.

They weren't all, or even mostly, evil or purely self-serving. What united them, though -- the ones that survived or succeeded -- was a shared belief that they must use whatever degree of ruthlessness was required to achieve the dictates of history.

There is a new left in the world, that wishes to disavow any connection with that history of heroism, sacrifice, folly, and destruction, that wishes not to impose a cost on anyone -- and much of which also doesn't wish to bear any.

How will it avoid the mistakes of the past and also avoid the comfort and moral safety of powerlessness? How will it unite the head and the heart -- without forgetting the hand?

Posted at 11:06 am.

November 2, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Uncomprehending Sanctimony and the War on Terror

I'm beginning to think maybe Condoleezza Rice wasn't such a bad secretary of state. Those who thought that the Bush administration had a monopoly on uncomprehending sanctimony, meaningless and condescending expressions of concern, and blaming others for one's own faults in foreign relations need only look at what the media has been labeling Hillary Clinton's recent "charm offensive;" well, the term is half right.

She hectors Pakistanis about the prevalence of poverty and the lack of development. How does a country that consistently ranks in the bottom 20% of rich nations in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP have the face to talk about development? How much more so in Pakistan, whose pattern of massive inequality, feudal social relations, corruption, and autocracy owes so much to consistent reflexive U.S. support for a string of military dictatorships going back almost to the beginning of the Cold War?

Even worse, she hectors Pakistanis about their lack of enthusiasm for America's war. In a meeting with newspaper editors, she said, “Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002…I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.” Remarkably, she made these comments while admitting that she doesn't really know what the situation is. She then followed this up while talking to students at Government College University in Lahore by extending the accusation to the entire population of Pakistan; why exactly a poor peasant in the tribal areas would want to become a footsoldier in her war is apparently not something she considers worth thinking about.

Although the English-language Pakistani press at least treated her with restraint, it's hard to imagine too many Pakistanis who didn't feel the insult. After all, the war in Pakistan, which has claimed several thousands lives, is entirely the fallout from America's war in Afghanistan. In 2001, militant groups in Pakistan concentrated their actions on Kashmir, and Islamist parties were as significant in elections as the Green Party in the United States. All of that changed when the United States decided first to prosecute the war, and then to let everyone they were pursuing cross the border into Pakistan while they hared off to Iraq.

Those who wish to justify this by saying that it was Pakistan's policies, like support of the Taliban, that led to 9/11 are simply cutting the timeline at an arbitrary but convenient point. Draw it further back to U.S. support for the virulent dictatorship of Ziaul Haq and its callous support of the Afghan mujaheddin purely for the purpose of bleeding the Soviet Union, with no concern for the effects on Afghanistan and the region, and the point stands.

The same American incomprehension that anyone else could have valid concerns shines through most clearly in an exchange Clinton had with a woman who condemned the CIA drone strikes as extrajudicial executions and then asked whether they did not constitute terrorism just as surely as the car bombings that have taken such a big toll on Pakistan lately. Apparently, Clinton was as well-prepared to answer that as Madeleine Albright was to answer Lesley Stahl's question about the deaths of Iraqi children due to the sanctions, and presumably for the same reason -- such things are not allowed to trouble the beautiful minds of imperial elite when making their imperial dispositions.

The pace of drone strikes has considerably increased under Obama; in the past 10 months, there have been already 30% more than last year. According to a recent study by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation, since 2006 drone strikes have killed 750 to 1000 people, of whom they estimate two-thirds were militants and one-third civilians. An initial tally by Pakistani journalist Amir Mir estimated much higher civilian casualties, but his method seemed to be to assume that anyone who was not a named "high-value target" was a civilian. Of those deaths, half of them have come in 2009.

Had Clinton been better prepared, she would have known the conventional U.S. answer -- civilians killed in drone bombings are "collateral damage;" the U.S. is attacking valid military targets. Of course, the same could be said of many of the suicide car bombings carried out by the Tehrik-i-Taliban

The latest Pakistani offensive in South Waziristan has created 250,000 refugees and set off a series of retaliatory bombings in Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Lahore, and across the country that have killed over 300 people. Just from the timing of recent suicide bombings, it's clear that they are happening because of Pakistani military offensives; most of them would likely not happen otherwise.

Unlike George Bush, Barack Obama is capable of understanding these things if he wants to. He just seems to perceive little need to do so.

Posted at 10:36 am.

October 26, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Afghanistan -- Delusions about Democracy

After two months of delays in vote-counting, wrangling, fraud investigations, and fevered consultations that make even the American elections look like a paragon of modernist efficiency, plans are finally in place for a runoff election in Afghanistan, to be held on November 7. Although President Hamid Karzai got almost 55% of the votes in the initial tally from the August election, an election audit carried out under the aegis of the U.N. found widespread fraud. Hundreds of thousands of votes were disqualified, bringing Karzai's share of the vote down to 48%; although his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, also benefited from fraudulent votes, the vast majority of the fraud was carried out on behalf of Karzai.

Over here, we have been subject to two months of commentary about the great importance of clean elections to the American counterinsurgency effort. The Afghans must perceive their government to be legitimate; otherwise, there is no way to control the growth of the neo-Taliban. A fraudulent election undermines that legitimacy. This whole stream of commentary grows out of the earlier trope of blaming American failures in Afghanistan on the corruption of the Karzai government; statements that success requires that the Americans pressure Karzai into somehow eliminating corruption abound, at least inside the beltway.

Although the ability of pundits, the chattering classes, and specialized military analysts in the United States to figure out what is relevant to understanding the dynamics of the protracted occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly increased over the past several years, the discourse still retains a hallucinatory quality.

At a superficial level, the current approach is self-contradictory. As Julia Mahlejd writes on the blog Registan.net, Afghans must be perplexed at the conclusion that Karzai and Abdullah benefited from widespread fraud and that the remedy is to let them have a runoff election. Especially with Karzai, where the scale of the fraud strongly suggests his own complicity, this is a reward for criminality; why not disqualify such candidates and have a runoff between the ones who are clean?

Add to that the fact that turnout in the runoff is expected to be even below the anemic 30% of the August elections, and that some additional polling booths in the war-torn areas, where most of the fraud emanated from, are going to be closed. How is an election supposed to provide legitimacy among a population that won't actually get a chance to vote and many of whom won't even know about the election?

More deeply, what is the source of this belief, suddenly emerging in time for the elections, that making a mark on a ballot is of such fundamental significance to the average Afghan? Afghanistan no doubt has its liberal-minded citizens of the world to whom democracy is an abstract virtue of surpassing importance, perhaps even those who believe that marking a ballot to choose who will be the head of a state with no power, no revenue, and no commitment to the welfare of the people involves some realization of that abstract virtue, but such people are few and far between and likely doing little or nothing to support the neo-Taliban insurgency.

On the other hand, consider the weakness of democracy as a principle of legitimation even in the United States, where the population has been steeped in talk about it for over 200 years. When widespread fraud (the illegal disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters), followed by a risibly inconsistent Supreme Court decision won Bush the 2000 election in Florida, opinions on the matter divided almost entirely along partisan lines. If you wanted Bush to win, you were for the final verdict; if you wanted Gore to win, you were against. Where was the mass of people to whom democracy itself mattered so much? Now, consider how much experience Afghans have with the rhetoric and practice of democracy -- none, except for a few years of rhetorical bombast from Bush administration officials -- and ask yourself how much the concept means to them.

It is true, of course, that the corruption and general ineffectuality of the Kabul government are a real problem for the counterinsurgents. But no one is asking why it is that the United States always seems to end up backing corrupt governments with no interest in the people's welfare -- and why it is that at least some of their foes, like the NLF in South Vietnam and apparently at least some of the neo-Taliban groups -- are better able to provide security and governance than our allies.

Posted at 10:50 am.

October 19, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Stanley McChrystal -- the Petraeus's Petraeus

The must-read article of the week is definitely Dexter Filkins’s profile of Stanley McChrystal in the New York Times magazine.

One must be careful reading Filkins. He is a very good reporter and an intelligent, insightful person – his profile of Ahmad Chalabi is still the one and only source I’ve seen that gave me any insight into what he could possibly have been thinking in his mad quest to become the new king of Iraq (like so many exiles, he had ignored the passage of time in his country, in particular the collapse of the old feudal order).

There’s only one problem – his attitude toward the U.S. military and their mission, whatever exactly it might be, is roughly akin to that of a typical teenage girl toward the Jonas brothers. His first portrait of Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman made him out to be a great hero of the brave new world being created in Iraq; Sassaman, who was later forced out of the military because of the coverup of the murder of an Iraqi boy (he wasn’t involved in the murder), was in actuality a brutal overlord and a strong believer in putting the fear of God into the natives. When Filkins went into Fallujah during the second assault in November 2004, he was stunningly incurious about the possible use of chemical warfare by U.S. forces.

And his book The Forever War is a remarkable accomplishment: an acute observation and depiction of the reality of Iraq that actually makes it harder for the reader to understand and evaluate the occupation. His masterful evocation of the depravity to which so many Iraqis descended is not leavened by any useful explanation of the role the United States played in this descent, let alone by any understanding of these terrible acts as the acts of human beings not so different from us.

That said, I believe the general tenor of his reporting on McChrystal. Apparently, he is the Petraeus’s Petraeus; not only has he gone far further than anyone before in the “kinder, gentler” approach to counterinsurgency than any previous American commander anywhere, he can run faster than Petraeus as well.

Filkins recounts a striking incident. A U.S. foot patrol is attacked by a remote-control-detonated bomb. Although no one is seriously injured, the SOP in the past would have been to kick down everyone’s doors and raid their homes, yelling incomprehensibly at the residents. Even after the changes of 2005-2007, the response would have been quite forceful. Now, the soldiers ask for five men from the village to come forward, and plead with them for any information, which, unsurprisingly, they don’t get.

Perhaps even more striking is the meeting where McChrystal hassles a fellow general for gliding too comfortably past an airstrike that killed civilians.

Although these represent striking departures from business as usual, even under the “counterinsurgency paradigm,” in other ways McChrystal is no different from others. Filkins documents a ludicrous series of exchanges between McChrystal and “ordinary Afghans,” where he goes up to them and without preamble says “What do you need?” Some say security, some say development. It is utterly superficial and means nothing.

We have seen laudatory embedded reporting right from the beginning of the so-called “war on terror,” of course. This is credible, where earlier reporting wasn’t, for two reasons. First, the Obama administration is a conventional modernist rationalist bunch, not thoroughgoing postmodernists like Bush and friends; they understand that there must be some loose consonance between the words and deeds if credibility is to be maintained. Second, whereas “kinder, gentler” actions were earlier conceived as concessions to the laws of war or more often as fodder for PR to American audiences, significant parts of the U.S. military have bought into the idea that “kinder, gentler” is more militarily effective in counterinsurgencies. Mere humanitarian considerations could not have forced such profound changes in the mode of operation so quickly.

Whether this perception is accurate or not is far from clear. It depends on many things, including the strategy of the insurgency. While the changes McChrystal is attempting are very welcome (unlike the 40,000 additional troops he wants), there are two potential problems. First, it is hard to believe that he will be able to remake the basic attitudes, approaches, and inclinations of American solders to such a great degree. Second, it is impossible to believe that the military will hold to such changes in tactics if they prove unsuccessful.

And make no mistake; McChrystal has made himself so vulnerable not just by contradicting Obama but by articulating a vision of a war where the United States has nothing to gain, gives selflessly, and refrains from using violence even in situations where Americans are threatened. Such articulations are welcome and even necessary when they are propaganda for militarism; when they are actually sincere, they make all the important people very uncomfortable.

October 12, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Eight Years In

It cannot have escaped anyone's attention that in the past two months the old reflexive notion that Afghanistan was the unquestionable "good war" has disintegrated. There had been growing criticism around the margins, but it was only late this summer that a full-fledged public debate erupted. It is undoubtedly a testament to the great virtues of our open democratic society, with its free and active political discussion, that such a debate has broken out a mere eight years into the war.

It is unfortunately something of a surreal debate. The battle lines are drawn between those who believe we must help the Afghans, sacrifice for them, and build them a modern state in order to assure our own security and those who say we should let the Afghans go hang because they are not very relevant to our security.

Stanley McChrystal brought the simmering debate to a boil with his strenuous advocacy of a profound reorientation away from killing insurgents toward "protecting" Afghans and toward serious restrictions on U.S. military rules of engagement, together with a serious emphasis on state-building and the provision of security and other government services. For a number of military people who had already been extremely suspicious of the turn toward what they call the "counterinsurgency" approach, this was the last straw; either the proper role or the capabilities of the American soldier were being dramatically misconceived, with the result that the United States would be drawn further into a Vietnam-like quagmire.

This only intensified with McChrystal's call for an additional 40,000 troops to be sent, which would bring the U.S. contingent to 108,000 and the total international forces to near 150,000.

The other side ranges from status-quo centrists like Joe Biden, who wants to keep the number at 68,000 but step up drone strikes and anti-insurgent Special Forces raids, to people like George Will at the margins who want to withdraw ground forces entirely but continue to administer death from above.

The debate has distressingly little to do with the good of the Afghan people, although it is constantly used as a rhetorical device, especially by the McChrystal side. For those who take it seriously, it might be a good idea to evaluate the effect of the last eight years on the wellbeing of Afghans.

As far as I am able to determine, the only thing in the plus column, besides the odd highway and school, is the end of official, aboveground Taliban rule over the bulk of the country. This is not a small achievement; it's very different from the case of Iraq, because it's quite possible that the government/anarchy that replaced Saddam's government was actually worse for the people. In the case of Afghanistan, that's not true; the Taliban provided very few of the services of a state, other than public order, and their restrictions on people's lives were much more far-reaching.

Still, that has to be balanced against perhaps 10,000 civilians directly killed and 10 or 15,000 indirectly killed through the cutoff of aid during the 2001 war and 25-30,000 fighters killed. No one has good estimates of these numbers and there is no Les Roberts-style survey of Afghan households that I know of, but these can't be too far off. Say, 50,000 Afghans are dead because of this war, and close to 1500 members of the international force, including almost 900 Americans.

I don't know how to weigh those considerations against each other, but what is clear is that the negatives are steadily increasing. The Taliban is more powerful now than at any time since late 2001. How many more will have to be killed to prop up the weak, corrupt government installed by the United States? And will it be worth the price?

Those who favor a full-on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan justify it with reference to Iraq. The "surge" saved Iraq, and maybe something like it can save Afghanistan.

As military men and as proponents of good Western-style technocratic thinking, they are very poorly equipped to understand the central point of the Iraq counterinsurgency: the secret of America's success was its failure. Many of them might well concede that if they had waged a brutal campaign and killed 500,000 to 1 million people, they would probably have broken the back of any insurgency this side of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Well, the fact that all of those people died, and the bulk of them not at the hands of the United States but in internecine warfare, just made it easier.

A similar failure may well be the prerequisite to "success" in Afghanistan. But don't expect to hear this point of view on CNN.

Posted at 11:01 am.

October 10, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Not Even Worthy of Satire -- Obama's Peace Prize

At first, I thought it was a joke. "Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize." Then I realized it wasn't really funny. At least when Henry Kissinger won the prize, the Nobel Committee was striking a blow for surrealism and irony. This one was just straightforward power-worship -- and a pathetic, needy, clinging form of it, at that.

The only thing I can say in favor of the decision is that it's the one thing that could have made the International Olympic Committee look good; although the IOC may have the moral stature of the Nevada Gaming Commission, at least it didn't allow itself to be overawed by the merest contact with the aura of the Chosen One.

Obama is, of course, not a big-time war criminal like Henry Kissinger, but there's always hope; this award comes just as Obama is on the cusp of a decision regarding escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Since he took office just nine short months ago, both Afghanistan and Pakistan have seen dramatic escalations in violence, some of it directly at his behest.

Of course, the Nobel Committee is happy that Bush is gone; so is everybody else in the world. But giving Obama the prize just for not being Bush seems excessive; why not just give it to all six plus billion of us? After all, if "you" can be TIME's Person of the Year, why can't "you" be a Nobel Peace laureate as well?

The citation is weak tea, indeed. He is awarded the prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy," especially his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons." In other words, he gave a few speeches. He even traveled all the way to Egypt to give one of them. Even if they were the most remarkable things in the world, they are hardly evidence of any sustained or strenuous effort, let alone of success in advancing any agenda.

Some coverage has suggested that the recent passage of Security Council Resolution 1887 against nuclear proliferation was a landmark achievement for peace. In truth, it is utterly meaningless. It is not a Chapter VII resolution, meaning that it has no teeth. Almost the entire part dealing with general nuclear disarmament is "reaffirming" other agreements, like the Nonproliferation Treaty. It calls for everyone to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- any bets on whether the new Nobel laureate will even try to bring it up in the Senate?

For the rest, the resolution is a thinly-veiled warning to Iran, with language watered down far enough that it could get by Russia.

The committee also cites the "more constructive role" the United States is now playing on climate change; perhaps Khrushchev should have gotten the prize for the "more constructive role" of the Soviet state with respect to the gulag. Or, for that matter, Obama could have gotten it for his "more constructive role" in, apparently, ending America's brief flirtation with legalized torture. Going from being a major obstructionist on climate change to being a minor obstructionist is hardly worthy of this sort of recognition.

Anticipating the obvious objections, Thorboern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee, stressed that the award was given for work already done by Obama, but there were several hints that the prize was given as an inducement for future actions.

If so, the Norwegians are making a big mistake. Although Obama is the most remarkable person to occupy the White House in a long time, some of his moral failings have become very apparent. Foremost among them is a tendency toward complacency and a type of moral narcissism, conflating the admittedly inspiring trajectory of his life with actual achievement in changing the world for the better (this became particularly tiresome late in the campaign). Indeed, so focused is he on how wonderful it is that he could have achieved what he did that he generally seems to have very little room for anger on behalf of the dispossessed -- however he conceives them. Robert Kennedy obviously never thought much about Vietnamese peasants burned out of their houses, but he was passionately indignant about the plight of the poor in Appalachia.

This prize will just exacerbate Obama's worst tendencies. How easy it will be for him to conclude that winning the Nobel Peace Prize actually constitutes genuine accomplishment in working for peace. Given that even the small steps he has taken, like mentioning the suffering of the Palestinians in his Cairo address, were flashes in the pan, without any actual sustained effort to back them up, how much less likely is he to start making real efforts now?

Posted at 9:49 am.

August 24, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- A Plague of Jeffersonian Democrats

August 18, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- "Death Panels" and the Paranoid Style

It's an amazing, made-in-America story. A Republican representative, now senator, from Georgia no less slips an innocuous provision in a draft health-care bill giving patients the right to coverage for counseling regarding hospices and other end-of-life issues -- a need many face at some point in their lives -- and ignites a firestorm of political craziness that makes the hysteria over the nonexistent "war on Christmas" look like a paragon of logic and reason.

The gap between an attempt to make sure that people are treated with respect and kindness when they are in extremis and "death panels" that the government sets up to adjudicate whether people who are old, sick, disabled, or unable to work are sufficiently useful to society to warrant health-care or whether they should instead be turned into Soylent Green and fed to the burgeoning proletarian masses would seem to be a large one, yet elisions like this are the stock-in-trade of Republican operatives in our benighted era.

As an article in the New York Times points out, the source of this nuttiness is not some fringe conspiracist but some of the mainstream conservative players that defeated Bill Clinton's health-care reform in 1993, including the editorial board of the Washington Times and Betsy McCaughey, famous critic of the previous bill and former lieutenant governor of New York.

It starts simply, with some dedicated staffer scouring a government bill for language that can be mocked and derided, twisted and distorted, or used as the launch-pad for insane flights of fancy. It has the same provenance as the idiot jibes about money for "volcano monitoring" (who could be so stupid as to want to know when a town might be covered in lava?), with the added fillip of the hard-core paranoia that characterizes the right.

When the woman who, inexplicably, was a heartbeat away from being a heartbeat away from the presidency took up the cause, it went national. Some commentators are already treating it as a political victory for the right and are predicting the demise of the public option.

Along the way, we've seen threatening mobs at town hall meetings, people carrying guns to presidential addresses, and swastikas painted outside the offices of congressmen. Strangely, since this is America, those swastikas are not statements of belief by the right-wing lynch mob but rather statements about the putative beliefs of the congressman (a Blue Dog Democrat, as it happens). Never mind the fact that it is precisely the people who might believe in a crazy notion like death panels who are susceptible to beliefs like perhaps that the Jews control society -- and, indeed, they are the lineal descendants of people who did and do.

The Washington Times, whose owner Sun-Myung Moon of the Unification Church was once a member of the World Anti-communist League, a rogue's gallery of former Nazi and Ustashi, Romainian fascists, Franco-supporters, and right-wing Latin American dictators, has twice compared this proposal to offer counseling to people facing death to the Nazi T4 Aktion program of euthanasia for the disabled, retarded, and chronically ill.

As journalist and historian Rick Perlstein points out in a Washington Post op-ed, this kind of craziness is not new -- it's as American as apple pie. When Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in 1961, after all, he didn't have Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to draw from. At the time he wrote it, the John Birch Society had a widely distributed pamphlet showing irrefutably that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet Union, continuing earlier Republican analyses of FDR and Truman. Today's Birthers, who claim that Obama was born in Kenya, get their name from the Birchers of yesteryear.

Says Perlstein, JFK, a warmonger who campaigned against Nixon on the laughable claim that the Soviet Union was ahead of us in nuclear missile technology and who dramatically increased the military budget when in office, was accused of wanting to disarm the United States because he was moving toward ICBM's and away from long-range bombers. And let us not forget Nixon and McCarthy, who found Communists under every tree.

The difference, says Perlstein, is that these claims were not afforded serious attention by the three nightly news broadcasts. Walter Cronkite never addressed whether or not Eisenhower had been a Communist. He is right. There was a patrician consensus about notions like "fact" and "reality" -- which included a fair amount of self-delusion of its own, incidentally (see Vietnam) -- and the opinions of the canaille were not allowed to intrude, no matter how many of them there might be at the gates.

With the impending demise of the newspaper, the last vestiges of that world are disappearing. I am not sanguine about what will take its place.

Posted at 11:32 am.

August 10, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Global Environmental Strain -- the Way Forward

Is there hope for humanity? Can we avoid the precipice at our feet or must we inevitably fall into the yawning environmental chasm before us?

Everybody is asking themselves this question, whether they realize it or not, but it is the wrong question. And, as is so often the case, when you ask the wrong question, the answer doesn't matter very much; the mere asking of the question is at the core of the curious passivity that much of the left and the global public are showing about the major issue of our time.

The heart of the mistake is the seemingly all-too-natural tendency we have to take a continuum and force it into a binary opposition, in this case catastrophe or nothing.

Actually, both poles of this binary opposition are unreachable or nearly so. There will never be a point where human society has lost hope and is irreparably doomed. And there has already been much damage done; there is no pristine earth that we can rescue if only we act now now now and likely little to no prospect of completely undoing the damage that has already been done.

The invocation of these poles drives the mistaken formulations I wrote about earlier. Those who want to believe that we can buy carbon offsets and weatherstrip our houses and help the economy by promoting green jobs without paying a price in the total reorganization of industrial society are implicitly working with a model in which little damage has been done and in which every problem has a technical fix.

Then there are those who are driven into passivity by certainty that the planet is doomed. What that might mean is often left unexamined, of course.

In the middle, there are those who think -- again, implicitly -- that we have essentially a pristine earth but we are right on the cusp of suddenly wrecking it. The next five years are crucial; if we don't get emissions under control, or eliminate them, or do something that is patently politically impossible and frankly incompatible with what we know of human society, then we are doomed.

This dualism also manifests its ugly head in other ways. One argument often made by good radicals who want to stress the need for human beings to change completely their consumption patterns is that we must get rid of our faith in technical fixes; every technical fix generates more problems and leads us further down the road to perdition.

Even more important, people who attempt to address global environmental strain in a serious way often fall into the trap of thinking of this as an existential issue rather than a political one. Again, there is no neat dichotomization; no issue can be freed from politics.

In truth, I think the most sensible and useful perspective is not a difficult one. Every day we make things worse. It's not necessarily a gradual process; there may be small precipices we slide down. But there is no "point of no return" we're just about to cross.

Instead, the task for us is to figure out a way to stabilize the environment and our interaction with it in such a way as to provide as soft a landing as we can. In this task, we will need technical fixes and changes in patterns of consumption. Most important, we will also need political and social transformation. And not by suddenly going over to a localized subsistence economy; this isn't going to happen.

We need to wreak a political transformation in our societies that makes it more possible for us to take serious measures to deal with the crisis we're living through; we need to wreak a social transformation that minimizes the effects of the environmental changes that are inevitable.

For example, over the next 50 years, we need to start moving people away from low-lying coastal areas. We need to start mitigating the extreme inequalities in the global economic structure. When more people start dying of effects of global warming, we need to make fewer die of tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS; we also need to make sure smaller numbers are vulnerable through extreme poverty or through dependence on crops whose productivity will go down as tropical areas warm.

We need a grand new campaign with multiple prongs, technical, political, and social, all working together. We need to talk more about the hard work that has to be done over a long period of time and less about the imminent catastrophe that will occur unless we do various impossible things immediately. We can do it; yes we can.

Posted at 10:57 am.

July 27, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Global Environmental Strain -- the Need for New Thinking

Everybody who bothers to inform themselves and is capable of living relatively free of illusions -- unfortunately, a small minority -- is aware that we are creating severe strains on the global environment that are incompatible with the continuation of modern industrial society in unchanged form. Between the massive human-created increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the air, the beginning of the end of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, the impending exhaustion of key minerals necessary for agricultural and industrial production, and the looming scarcity of water, we see a convergence of crises that is already having effects and will cause much worse ones within the lifetimes of many of us.

Even one of our rare solutions, the 1987 Montreal protocol on the ozone layer that led to the almost complete phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons, has also contributed a new source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, those who want to do something are left with rather unpalatable alternatives. You can ignore the connection of all of these crises with the industrial production that is the source of affluence for perhaps one-third of the world's population and believe that small, painless changes will essentially solve the problem. Thus, we are told that dealing with carbon emissions will actually lead to economic growth, that weatherstripping our houses is the key to the future, that we need not reduce consumption. This blindness is revealed by the fact that all high-level political talk about carbon emissions is about reducing the current level of emissions. Even if we reduce global emissions by 80% by 2050, as lots of people like to talk about, all that means is that we have slowed down the rate at which we are making things worse; the atmospheric carbon concentration will still increase steadily. Not to mention that "by 2050" is simply a euphemism for "not now."

Or you can run around like Chicken Little and say that, even if the sky isn't falling quite yet, it will fall unless we make dramatic changes of the kind that are socially and politically impossible on the necessary time-scale. This approach accomplishes virtually nothing outside of a small community of activists, but it is comforting in a way; you can get some catharsis of your deep existential dread without actually having to do very much.

Or, of course, you can look for individual solutions. These can range from "buying local" and purchasing carbon offsets for the completely ineffectual to significant reductions in consumption and changes in lifestyle, again only for the highly committed few.

Or, says Derrick Jensen in a recent article in Orion magazine, you can forget about the notion that individual cuts in consumption are a political act, recognize that environmental problems are caused primarily by corporate cupidity, and fight the power in the streets the way good old radicals always have.

While Jensen has done signal service for the environmental cause and inspired many to dedicate their lives to it, this article is primarily useful in order to point up the bankruptcy of all approaches to global environmental strain, including those of the left.

He makes much of a statistic that only 25% of consumption is by individuals; the rest is "commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government;" over 90% of water use, he says, is "by agriculture and industry."

This is truly bizarre. In general, the left often falls down by not recognizing that corporations are us; artificial dichotomization, while it may serve the occasional short-term goal by creating political mobilization, falls particularly short when it comes to issues of gross consumption. It is not corporations that use those municipal golf courses that are supposedly such a scourge; it is human beings. Most of us didn't have much of a say in structuring the corporate system of production, consumption, and allocation of resources, but then it would be foolish to expect the average person to have much of a say in anything, including revolutions. We contributed by going along with the consumption styles and levels required by that system; those who try to opt out are accomplishing something, especially if their numbers increase.

Even stranger is Jensen's notion that we need to get out there in the streets to fight an "oppressive system." It is difficult enough to find an object to protest when it comes to the war in Afghanistan; when it comes to the accumulated effects of high levels of human consumption of the bounties of nature, who are we supposed to picket?

There is no area of political action more important and more in need of new thinking than this. A left locked in comfortable shibboleths will not be the source of this new thinking.

Posted at 11:20 am.

February 2, 2006

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