This is a blog-like annex to the Enlightenment Network. It replaces the webmaster's previous blogs which were primarily devoted to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. This material is found here or here. The primary difference between this effort and the earlier blogs will be the greater range of entries, a weaker compulsion to come up with an entries on a regular basis, and, consequently, less repetition.

18:42 5/27/2006

Death on the Installment Plan

The killing goes on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Day after day, week after week. It deadens the senses of all Americans who regularly follow the news. There are not enough deaths of Americans to cause a huge outcry in this country. There are many more of Iraqis and Afghans, but they are far away and these people are inured to death and injury.

Sometimes American forces on the ground get so scared and angry that they lash out and commit atrocities. More often, pilots in support of our troops, far above the battlefield, are given assignments that either are inattentive to the number of civilians likely to be killed in military attacks, or they are mistakenly directed to the wrong targets. The Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents play on these tendencies, making the situation worse for all.

We are not much moved by this situation in our living rooms, but Iraqis and Afghans are. They are frustrated by the lack of progress toward any kind of peace. Even those who welcomed the Americans at first have tired of them now. If they can's provide security, if they even add to the danger, they want the Americans gone. The latest report is that in the case of the Iraqi middle class, this frustration is resulting in an increasing movement to leave the country. Yes, they may like the new government, and wish it luck, but they must think of their families, and the best future for them is in another country. It is really surprising how long this decision has taken for those Iraqis who have the means to leave.

So where are we now? On the ground there is always good reason for hope and good reason for despair. In Afghanistan, we are steadily handing over more responsibility to NATO forces. In Iraq, the new government continues to take shape, and there are more and more efforts to have its forces take over from the Americans. Yet the average informed American's reaction is that we have heard this all before, that we cannot be forever sold new batches of false hopes

I have come to the conclusion that whatever we can do or want to do in these countries, our first task should be to get out! Many authorities have called this irresponsible. But I believe that they have not fully appreciated the extent to which we are the problem. The local governments, police, and other forces that we sponsor are too easily tarred by the insurgents with the brush of treason, with cooperating with the foreigner. We do not understand the maze of groups, the corruption and intergroup fighting that complicates our every move. But more and more we learn that we cannot trust those around us and they cannot trust us. As long as the new Iraqi government can only function in the Green Zone under American protection, it is not going to be seen as the government by many Iraqis.

Our task now is to induce the local governments to demand that we get out. We should resist such demands at first, but soon agree that if that is what they really want, we will leave, and quickly. The last gift we can give to these governments is the heroic story line that they drove us out. Exchanging a few shots at some point might make the story more believable.

We cannot say what the result will be. Nor can we say what it will be if we continue on the slow and bloody path of our persistence. If the end result of our "abandonment" is the breakdown of these societies, their regionalization, or endless endemic war without development, this will be a tragedy. But we would also have to admit that this could well be what would happen if we stuck it out. It may be that the shock effect of our leaving would force the Iraqis and Afghans to take over more of the burden of establishing security and making their systems work. Maybe. It's a hope. But these societies are so splintered now that only time and a great deal of bloodshed will put them back together again, either as democracies or authoritarian states.

NOTE: It is too glib to treat the two countries as though they are the same. They have many commonalities, and hatred of the foreigner is certainly an important element of both situations. However, Iraq remains a much more modern society, and in spite of the interference of outside Islamists in its affairs, and of the Iranians with their own agendas, the basic problems of Iraq are internal. If they can get their internal house in order, these other problems are surmountable. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is beset by a Taliban movement with long and intimate relations with Pakistani forces along its eastern and southern border. No matter how many Taliban are killed internally, the survivors can simply melt across the border, be rearmed and provided with new recruits for their next incursion. Since the United States has very little leverage on the weak central government of Pakistan, Afghanistan's long-range future is even cloudier than Iraq's. Working on improving our relation with Pakistan would seem to be more important in this case than any similar effort with Iraq's neighbors.

16:40 5/23/2006

A Careful Approach to Alleging "Conspiracy"

In a recent Op-Ed (May 4), David Brooks advanced the thesis that the arguments of Kevin Phillips in his "American Theocracy" and Mearsheimer and Walt in their essay "The Israel Lobby" were examples of the return of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking on the left side of the political argument. He compared this type of thinking to that of the John Birch society that attempted to pulled the political discussion to the extreme right in the 1960s.

Let us first look at the comparison. Robert Welch, the founder and leader of the John Birch society, repudiated democracy as a fraud, declaring that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower, were part of a communist conspiracy. Welch sent out a letter claiming that President Eisenhower was a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy". In 1956 Welch also wrote that other top government officials such as John Foster Dulles and Allan W. Dulles were "communist tools". A famous writer of the time, allied with Robert Welch, was Dan Smoot , who wrote The Invisible Government. The book asserts that "'Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship, under the control of the Kremlin". The Council on Foreign Relations was seen as the apex of this pyramid.

This suggests what a full-blown conspiratorial or paranoid analysis might look like. The principal ingredient in a paranoid analysis is the suggestion that what we understand as news is not only wrong but the reverse of what is really happening. Those pretending to be in charge of the process are actually tools of others who have goals quite different from what the leaders say publicly. For example, one might say that those pretending to fight communism are communists underneath. The conspiratorial writer then goes on to selectively find "proofs" that this is so.

On the other hand, Mearsheimer and Walt in "The Israel Lobby" (discussed in an earlier commentary) did not create a fictitious that their critics claim does not exist. What they did was to argue that those supporting Israel in Washington, whether through AIPAC or independently, have played a major role in maintaining American support for Israel's interests since WWII. They are not asserting a conspiracy in making this claim: they are simply pointing out that the supporters of Israel have simply had more political clout in America than in other NATO countries, and explaining why this is. One reason they mention is that Evangelical Christians have added to the strength of the pro-Israel group because of their interest in the prophecy of a "final coming" that must be preceded by a Jewish takeover of Palestine.

Phillip's "American Theocracy" discusses three major trends affecting government policies: the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy, the intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government, and the dangerous willingness of both government and people to run up an astonishing debt. In its review, the New York Times writes that "If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future".

I would agree that Phillip's discussion of the role of "big oil" in the formation of American foreign policy smacks a little of conspiratorial thinking. He is arguing that we attacked Iraq essentially to secure future oil supplies, and that, beyond this, much of our Middle Eastern policy is based on the partially behind the scenes manipulation of policy to secure advantages for the large oil companies. This does oversimplify the many reasons for war in Iraq, and also runs somewhat counter to the well-documented role of the "The Israel Lobby".

Yet this partial agreement with Brooks brings us back to the question of when a conspiracy theory might actually be right. The oil thesis is hardly new with Phillips, and one does not have to be paranoid to believe that both oil and Israel played a larger role in deciding to attack Iraq than the administration has revealed. But the search for truth must go on. On the one side are those who too-easily accept standard explanations based on a well-meaning assumption that people and organizations are trying to do what they honestly believe is best for all; on the other side are those who too-easily find, or come to believe in, explanations that at first boggle the mind.

Phillips' recent books rest on a long tradition, going back to the work of C. Wright Mills' in the 1950s, to Marx more than a century before, and to Rousseau nearly a century before that. The essential point of these theorists is that small groups of people at the top of the social pecking order determine public policy in their group interest at the expense of the interests of other groups. To better protect their interests they often band together in public and not so public ways. No matter what the laws of a society appear to say, whether they are democratic or not, the majority in a society will rarely determine what happens. The few will dominate the many and profit from this domination. The institutions of all societies play a part in preserving one or another discriminatory "class structure". Marx wrote of religion being the "opium of the people". We might say the same of commercial sports, or of pervasive advertising that diverts "the masses" into making consumption their primary goal. Wars become another way to exert control over "the masses". These ways in which power structures maintain themselves do not mean that most of those who are associated with a power elite knowingly use war or religion as tools to maintain their control.

David Stockman, as Budget Director, presided over another era of tax reduction and deficit increase in the 1980s. When it was over he confessed that the trickle-down economics that was supposed to off-set the cuts by increasing economic growth was in part a scam in two ways. First, the cuts were passed by combining small across-the-board tax decreases with very large tax decreases for the rich. By calling it the across-the-board cuts a "trojan horse", he suggested a conspiracy. Stockman also alleged that the administration ran up a large deficit as a way to force cuts in social programs and thereby reduce the size of government. This would certainly look like a conspiracy as it was not being explained to the public. From a broader perspective, the authors of such a policy may have sincerely believed that government size was out of control and anything to force its diminution was good, but their beliefs are a different story

A recent letter writer in the New York Times (May 22) states that "We rightly bemoan the incompetence, the arrogance, and the indifference of the administration. But . . . this is not a purposeless government. From the beginning it has achieved, with ruthless efficiency, its most cherished goal — to make businesses more profitable and less accountable, and to make the rich fabulously richer. It is sickening to see how this crowd has   intentionally — transferred American tax dollars directly out of the pockets of the middle class and into the coffers of greedy businesses and selfish millionaires. On that score the Bush Administration has been frighteningly competent."

The writer is alleging that Bush the administration has returned to behavior much like that alleged by Stockman: Conspiring to run the country for the benefit of the few while saying it has the interests of all at heart. But we should not be too quick to see a conscious conspiracy. We note that there Americans seem to relish a culture that exalts greed and extreme wealth by whomever can achieve them, be it in through the ridiculous salaries of top corporate administrators, star athletes, or even university presidents. There is little sense of the relative balance still found in other wealthy countries. May it not be that the President and those about him really do believe that "what is good for General Motors is good for the country", or an updated version of this? I find this all disgusting and thoughtless, both on pragmatic and moral grounds. But I also talk to people who think this way, and are not themselves conspirators.

These comments are elicited by the danger that many of those involved in seeking and explicating the "truth", which is one of the main goals of this site, will develop a paranoid style that too often sees conspiracies in the actions of those they disagree with. On the other hand, truth-seekers should not be loathe to discover and report conspiracies wherever they can actually document them.

16:24 5/6/2006

Nuclear War Remains the Greatest Threat to Humanity

I was shocked by the surprising nonresponse to an excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times posted by Max Kampelman on April 24. Kampelman, now 85, worked for several previous administrations, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and has generally been considered a competent cold warrior. However, on this occasion, he recalled President Reagan's attempt to get the Russians to sign a pact with us to do away with all nuclear weapons (a proposal undercut by advisors to both Reagan and Gorbachev because they thought it was a foolish and dangerous dream). Kampelman then went on to argue that policy must be based on both reality and vision, on the "ought" as well as the presumed "is". Kampelman is right; his vision is especially important now when we are pressuring the Iranians to abandon any hope for nuclear weapons. There is no way we can make a good case against Iran unless all nuclear powers are moving to disarm all nuclear weapons. Without this commitment, there is no reason the Iranians should not develop an option.

I was amazed that the response of readers (or NY Times letters editors)to Kampelman's exceptionally long Op-Ed was decidedly tepid. As far as I could tell, the paper printed only one short letter; this from a reader apparently with an Israeli viewpoint who dismissed Kampelman as a dreamer. Apparently the Times' readers or editors were not that interested in the subject, in spite of Kampelman's name.

We need to think for a minute about the meaning of nuclear deterrence. Winston Churchill famously proposed in the early 1950s that nuclear weapons would do away with war because they would be too terrible (a similar argument was made about dynamite and other explosives by Alfred Nobel at the end of the nineteenth century). There then developed two theories about the "proper" use of nuclear weapons. The first was that they should be targeted against people to produce the most horrific results should they ever be used. This has always been the French position, and it tends to be the position held by smaller nuclear powers in confrontations. The more nuanced position was that nuclear weapons should be targeted primarily at the forces of potential opponents so that nuclear wars against such opponents would be in some sense "winnable". This was the RAND and Hudson Institute position. The argument was not so much that such wars were actually "winnable" but rather that if they were not treated as such, then an opponent had every reason to bargain fiercely in a confrontation so that it might come away with all the marbles. As Herman Kahn would say, in spite of all our careful plans to resist the Soviets, our NATO allies actually had a strategy of "preemptive surrender" if they were severely threatened by the Soviets. He thought that to defend Europe (the main "prize" in the cold war) in spite of itself the United States had to have a stronger policy.

More recently, as nuclear weapons have spread to other countries, such as Israel and India, some theorists have fallen back on the Churchillian doctrine. The obvious end point of this thinking was that the world would be safer if all countries had nuclear weapons. A few commentators on the current Iranian effort have asserted that we should not worry, because more nuclear states simply makes the world safer. This is not a view generally held today, but then the apparent low quality of the understanding of the issues makes this largely irrelevant.

The problem with the MAD approach is that deterrence is not a fail-safe system: if it were, it would not work. Israel, for example, appears to have developed a nuclear weapon capability in the belief that if there were a severe threat to the state its opponents would believe that Israel might with less than zero probability use its nuclear weapons to destroy them. If everyone believed there was a zero probability that Israel would use the weapons, on the other hand, then Israel would appear to be wasting its money.

We have collectively lost our fear of nuclear war, and see no reason to think about it any more. Contrast this with the 1950s and 1960s, when fear of nuclear war was in the air. The other night I had occasion to view "Dr. Strangelove" again. The moview was the culmination of a series of books and movies against nuclear war, including "On the Beach". But unlike "On the Beach", it was well-researched and careful exposition of the possibilities (from an antiwar perspective). Dr. Strangelove himself was an amalgam of at least three persons in the public eye at the time: Kahn, Kissinger, and von Braun. His Nazi aspect was taken from the career of Wernher von Braun, a leading German rocket scientist brought over after the war to lead our rocket research. Kissinger was born in Germany, but as a Jew was most unlikely to be pro-Nazi. Kahn was an assimilated American Jew. The movie's plot revolves around the idea of a "Doomsday Machine", an idea that had been dreamed up at a research institution some years before. A doomsday machine would have the capability of killing all human beings and be triggered automatically by computers if the country with the machine were to be attacked. Yet the Doomsday Machine was actually an idea meant to illustrate the foolishness of the "deterrence only" approach to nuclear weapons, an approach actually enshrined later in strategic thinking under the acronym MAD (mutually assured destruction). In the movie the failure of systems of Command and Control under the of pressure of imminent destruction offered a good picture of what could go wrong.

Clearly, the world has forgotten. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are background noise for this generation, taught to think of 9/11 as the most evil attack that can be imagined. Yet most of the weapons are still in the inventories of the United States and Russia. So far the world has been incredibly lucky that nuclear weapons have not been used. Let us hope that we do not have to experience another Hiroshima before we achieve a world without WMD. But instead of just falling back on a vague hope, we need to take Kampelman's challenge seriously and try to see what could be done.

17:20 4/22/2006

Aligning Our Fate with Europe's

In a recent discussion, I once again heard two respected pundits agree that our relations with Europe were now of secondary importance: the essential relationships for the United States were now with the East Asia. This is a sad development, and one that will lead us into ever more ineffectual isolation. We must remember that we fought two major wars to "save Europe", in part because the peoples of Europe were those with which we most closely identified. It is the Europeans that have the same values that we do, and are most closely identified with the spreading of democracy and human rights. One feels that much of the rest of the world does little more than pay lip service to these ideals.

European countries have been leaders in taking a truly international responsibility for human rights and foreign assistance. The United States remains a leader in emergency response, but for the long haul it is the Europeans who devote the larger part of their income to assisting others. Internally, the Europeans are the ones most concerned with establishing fair societies in which the public sector provides for both the cultural and material necessities of their own people in a manner generally superior to the United States. While European medical and penal systems have problems, they both do a much better job of respecting the rights of all than is common in the United States.

The most effective military pact in the post WWII era has been NATO, and today when the world looks to ways to obtain military capability that neither the United Nations nor the United States can provide, as in Darfur, the immediate thought is that NATO should provide it. NATO has been heavily relied upon in preserving peace in the Balkans. It is already providing a significant part of the forces in Afghanistan, and with better diplomacy on our part would long since have done the same in Iraq. NATO includes the United States and Canada outside Europe and is developing special relations with Australia and New Zealand. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO has been expanding to the East, asserting its identity in many respects with the expanding European Union.

Turkey has been the one part of European NATO that has not yet been included in the European Union. The reason is that the EU has stringent requirements on topics such as the treatment of prisoners. freedom of speech and religion that it wants to be sure Turkey can live with. What is remarkable is that the Union is the only major organization in the world that sticks to standards for membership, even when it is in many ways against its other interests. This takes us back to the fact that the Europeans are the people most consistently supportive of human rights.

This being the case, as the United States strives to improve its role in the world, to recapture the moral leadership that it gained under Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, it should look to strengthening in every way possible its relationship with Europe. Specifically, it should strive to use instrumentalities such as NATO rather than American forces outside the NATO framework to handle problems that emerge in the future. Working in this context, Americans would be less likely to overstep the boundaries of what is permissible in warfare, and less likely to engage in wars that the rest of the world will judge to be illegal wars of aggression.

If America is to navigate the treacherous waters of this century, we will need capable friends with whom we can work and on whom we can rely. James Huntley has suggested that we need to develop a Community of Democracies that will form a cohesive block supporting and extending our interests in the world. (See his Pax Democratica. A Strategy for the 21st Century, 1998.) His approach emphasizes the importance of democracy as the binding ingredient in the block. This would certainly be an important constituent, but I would now judge more important the sense of common values, of a common mission that would tie these countries together. Important democracies such as India, Japan, or South Korea might or might not be a part of the proposed alliance; it would depend on the extent to which they come to express the same values in their domestic and foreign policy as the other members of the group. Whatever the exact mixture of states, by binding closely with such a group, the United States would be able to extend its leading role in the world generations beyond what is now envisaged, and would become a more respected partner in world affairs in the bargain. Such a partnership would also mean that whenever the United Nations appears unable or unwilling to handle a major international crisis, such as that in Darfur, there would be an international institution powerful enough to step into the breach without the expectation of encountering significant opposition.

In making this suggestion, we are quite aware of the fact that the Europeans are often seen as weak and unwilling to step up to the plate when they are needed. Their opinion makers have gone perhaps too far in their rejection of the harder side of international relations: the taking and inflicting of casualties to achieve necessary goals, and the complete rejection of torture and capital punishment. They are often thought to need more backbone. The virtues and defects of the United States are somewhat the opposite. We would have to strive in working with our traditional allies to come to develop attitudes and capabilities that express the best in both traditions. To fail to find and strengthen a common ground will mean the inability of both the United States and Europe to play a responsible role in the world.

21:10 4/21/2006

Rebuilding and Restoring Our Role in the World

Ever since Governor Winthrop compared the Puritan experiment to a "City on the Hill" which should be a model for all peoples of the ideal life, Americans of all types, including most famously Ronald Reagan, have recalled this image. As a people, we have bought into this exceptionalist vision of America, one that led us most recently to the idea that we had a responsibility to reform Iraq. This is a recent misreading, traceable perhaps to Woodrow Wilson, that our exceptionalist achievement includes a duty to reform the world in our image. For most of American history, the "City on the Hill" was meant to be developed as a model and inspiration for others, not a call for America to reform the world. This is a new interpretation of mission, dangerous to us and others, but not necessarily wrong.

Whether as model or as enforcer, the United States will be able to express its exceptionalism successfully only if it rethinks and then thoroughly remodels its position in the world. To do this we need to be able to see what how the actions of the United States in the world look to others. Growing dissatisfaction with our performance suggest that we have lost our way and also suggest that others can see our mistakes much more clearly than we do. We must remember that we have been more responsible than any other people in internationalizing the human conscience. We played the leading role in creating the United Nations and in writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Americans played a major part in the comprehensive rewriting and updating of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, further limiting the kinds of actions that may be taken by military combatants in times of war.

We have been the chief defender of the oppressed everywhere in the world. This was the mission that President Wilson announced at the end of World War I with his emphasis on self-determination. It was a primary reason that the United States stood against its allies on the question of colonialism after World War II, eventually playing a significant part in forcing these allies to end colonialism nearly everywhere. It is said, for example, that Winston Churchill never forgave Roosevelt for forcing him to give up India. For obvious reasons, we could not force our values on the Soviet Union until much later. But eventually the Soviet Empire also fell apart with our help (particularly in Eastern Europe), and self-determination made another significant advance.

We played a major role in helping Japan reconstruct after WWII, but even more significantly in fostering the recovery of Europe outside the Soviet sphere, an effort that resulted in the progressive creation of a united and peaceful Europe, infused with the ideals of the modern world and the Enlightenment. The inspiration for the European Community was in large part the model of the United States.

It is in this tradition that some members of the current Administration perceive a responsibility to continue this process of restructuring and reformation, most notably with its efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the policy has been in trouble at home and abroad since its inception, and many do not see how we can extricate ourselves from the traps we have stepped into. It is time that we stop and consider how our behavior looks to the rest of the world, including even the people we are out to assist.

Too many peoples with too good reasons regard the United States as the great bully that arrogates to itself the right to interfere everywhere and whenever it desires. Although it has played a major part in establishing institutions through which international order was to be secured, the United States now arrogates to itself the right to set aside the rules and regulations that are meant for all. It is the United States, so its purposes are pure and it knows better. The Administration wants to bring others along, but if they are reticent, it will go ahead anyway. This is an approach that has been bitterly resented by many Latin Americans in the past. Today, interventions to the South have become less important, while we are coming to treat others the way we treated our Latin neighbors in the past.

Many national leaders and their publics believe that for reasons of internal politics, the United States has promoted and supported the colonial ambitions of the Zionists in the Middle East. In this "crusade", we have become ever more isolated. The money that supports Zionism comes largely from the United States (public and private), the arms with which Israel kills its opponents come largely from the United States, and the American government and much of its media regularly ignores the cruelties perpetrated against the Palestinians while decrying the terrorist attacks of Palestinians on Jews. Most recently, we denounce the attempts of the Iranians to develop nuclear power, arguing that they are pursuing a nuclear option. Yet we keep silent about what all agree is the already existing Israeli nuclear weapon capability, a completely "illegal" development of nuclear weapons in terms of international agreements.

The United States has seen itself as the beacon of human rights, the country that has done more than any other to extend these rights to other peoples. Yet we have in our recent wars contemptuously ignored the rights of persons captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, both as to their status and their treatment. We have deliberately tortured persons captured in what we claim is a "war", even going so far as to go argue that the President has the right to ignore the Geneva conventions that the world believes should protect them. We and our Israeli allies have conducted warfare in ways that the Geneva conventions explicitly condemn. This has included deliberately targeting people and structures when we had reason to know that civilians would also be killed. We have in two Iraq wars killed large numbers of combatants without making the good faith effort required by the conventions to discover the identities of those killed or to give them proper burials. Our troops and their leaders have seemed blissfully unaware of their responsibility. In Baghdad, immediately after capturing the city, we made no attempt to protect the people and their possessions and cultural heritage from organized and substantial looting in spite of the fact that the Geneva Conventions that we signed explicitly demand that a conquering power protect the people from such destruction. Again, we appeared to make no attempt to prepare for such protection, and, even when it was pointed out that the troops we did have on hand had made no effort to stop the destruction, orders were reluctantly given, if at all, to change the behavior of these troops.

Having to this degree disappointed our friends and enemies, it would seem that our first task as a people is to step back, take a breath, and recommit ourselves to adherence in both words and action to the international agreements that are meant to govern the relations among states. We must strive again to become a cooperative and supportive member of such organizations as the United Nations, NATO, and the OAS. We must take an affirmative part in international conferences such as the Kyoto Protocol on the environment or the International Court of Criminal Justice. Before we take major actions such as our war in Iraq we must truly consult with others and listen to how they understand the situations we face. We must reduce our involvement in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, letting the Europeans or the wider international community take the leading role. At home, we must get our house in order by reducing our national debt and trade imbalance. We must conserve our capabilities, fiscal and military, so that we can again play a more positive role on the world stage.

Once we were "The City on the Hill", a beacon for all peoples. Lately, the beacon has been intermittent, its bulbs smudged. Yet no one has taken the place of America in the world. There is an urgent need to rebuild that city in 21st century terms.

11:54 4/8/2006

Fighting Oppression at the Expense of the Oppressed

In The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf 2005), Robert Fisk asks us to consider the cost of war to ordinary people. He emphasizes the plight of civilians who become the expendable in the great plans of political leaders, but he also reminds us of the massive slaughter and suffering of common soldiers who are forced or duped into participating. "If we make war, we are going to kill and maim the innocent. The numbers of dead and wounded are overwhelming, even if attackers are careful, or at least care. Writing of the early days of the air attack on Baghdad in 2003, he writes "The targets were indeed carefully selected, even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent." (page 941) But too often he finds that the parties in conflicts, either because of inattention or callousness by commanding officers or because of the brutalization of soldiers thrown into confusing and deadly situations, end up directly targeting civilians and not caring who gets hurt as long as they get their way.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we sent in forces to free the people from tyranny. Some welcomed us, especially at first. Many did not, and inevitably as time went on and the people continued to suffer, the numbers of those who wanted us there diminished. Iraqis suffered under Saddam, yet they had not asked us to come to their assistance through an invasion. As Fisk writes:

Between 1980 and 1988 [the Iraqis] fought the Iranians to prevent the occupation of their country. Occupation, for Iraqis, for Arabs — for anyone of any race or religion — was not just humiliation. It was a form of rape. The enemy came into your country, your city, your street, your home, your bedroom. They would tie you up, insult your family, torture you, kill you. Saddam's own secret police did that. They, too, were occupiers. Woe betide anyone who tried to take their place.

Fisk is asking us to consider the price we ask others to pay for giving them what we think will be a better life. It is a sobering thought. The Germans did not welcome the allies when they overran their country, even though Hitler had been a vicious tyrant. Perhaps there are peoples who would genuinely welcome an invasion by Americans "for their benefit", but they unfortunately are likely to be rare. Fisk also believes that the people who "cook up wars" for supposedly humanitarian reasons often have quite different reasons. But this is a different argument; our task here is to consider whether we have the right as a nation to be violent humanitarians with the lives of others.

If violence is not the road to follow, then what road? Tyranny is dangerous, both to the people directly affected and the wider world. How do we control it from a distance? This is clearly something we should think about. We might start by considering Iran, a country that has been cruelly oppressed by religious leaders for whom the bulk of the educated middle class (a major part of the population) have nothing but contempt. On a different scale, Burma has suffered a repressive rule by generals for many years, and the plague shows no sign of easing. Economic sanctions are seldom the answer in these situations. Fisk argues that the economic sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s killed many thousands, destroyed the progress the country had made, earned the hatred of many Iraqis and other Arabs — and it did nothing to weaken Saddam's hold on the country.

20:51 4/7/2006

Imposing Democracy Abroad

Many fear that Iraq is falling apart. The United States has made a mighty effort to develop a democratic system, but old rivalries and hatreds are tarnishing the effort so seriously that we will be lucky if we don't have to fight our way back out. Much the same can be said of Afghanistan. Although not as much ink is spent on the problems of Afghanistan, the level of violence in the country has also not gone down after our democratization. Many local and foreign observers see the surrender of the country to the warlords that we accepted as allies as having irretrievably damaged the effort.

A little historical reminiscing at this point might be helpful. In the early 1790s, Gouverneur Morris became a fixture in the social life of Paris as the representative of the United States. Just before the taking of the Bastille, Morris wrote to President Washington: "Our American example has done them good, but like all novelties liberty runs away with their discretion (if they have any). They want an American Constitution . . . without reflecting that they have not American citizens to support that constitution." (Excerpted from an article on Gouverneur Morris in The Atlantic, April 1886, pages 433 to 449 by Henry Cabot Lodge) He told Lafayette that "an American constitution will not do for this country; that every country must have a constitution suited to its circumstances. . ." Morris predicted on several occasions that France would soon be overtaken by a disastrous revolution and end up in the hands of a dictator.

In promoting democracy, we have tended to ignore the importance of the experiences of the people that would prepare them for a successful democracy. The United States was extremely fortunate in that it was made up of states that had had working democratic systems (or the local equivalents of such) for generations. In Europe, only the Dutch and the Swiss had had comparable experiences. We forget that Latin America, often brought up as an example of democratic success achieved its present position only after 150 years of democratic failure, failure that nevertheless gave them useful experience with the working of democratic institutions. The British succeeded in leaving behind democracies in the Caribbean and India, but this was only after many generations of tutelage in democratic and legal practices. Even in the Philippines, after our considerable efforts, making democracy work continues to be an enervating struggle.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are attempting to democratize peoples with the scantiest experience with self-government and democratic institutions. And we are making the attempt under the worst possible combination of circumstances. In the first place, many Iraqis and Afghanis see the systems they have been offered as imposed by an invader, and their leaders as puppets of that invader. For purposes of individual survival, they may tentatively endorse the imposed systems, but with the reservation that after the foreigner leaves, they will rethink them. We have also attempted to force democracy on peoples who are not at all sure that they want to live together in the nation states that they have been granted by history. Ethnic and religious cleavages are more meaningful than national affiliation to all but the most educated people in both states. The institutions by which these states could hold together as a group of semi-autonomous regional states, such as the original thirteen colonies, are poorly developed and understood by the people on the ground.

18:54 4/6/2006

The Power of AIPAC and the Importance of Truth

A friend recently led me to an excellent article, The Israel Lobby, appearing in the London Review of Books. The authors are John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt: respectively, a professor of political science at Chicago and Dean of the Kennedy Center at Harvard. In convincing detail the article points out the extent to which America's Middle East policy is hostage to a relatively small group of pro-Israel lobbyists centered in Washington D.C. They identify them as one of the major sources of the strange gallop to war in Iraq. They point out the extent to which the lobby is able to squelch any attempt by members of either party to bring into question the actions of Israel's government or the American policies that have consistently supported it.

One predictable result of the publication of this article has been a flurry of denunciations by the people in the lobby's camp. For example, Eliot Cohen in the Washington Post (April 5) condemns every aspect of the article, even going to the extent of linking the authors with David Duke, the ex-klansman. The reaction serves only to offer additional proof of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis.

But the Israel lobby is not our central concern here. I want the reader to focus on the appearance and continued existence on the web of a false rumor that Harvard asked Walt to step down as Dean after the article appeared. If we look at Antiwar.com we find this story put forward as another example of the power of AIPAC and its friends. It is dated March 31 with the heading "The Lobby Strikes Back: Harvard study of Israeli lobby's influence costs the academic dean of the Kennedy School his job". This is not the only instance. Times on Line, March 30, in a discussion of Harvard "disowning" the study adds that Harvard confirms that Walt is stepping down as Dean.

I found that this story was very easy to check. An email to Dean Walt brought back an instant response that he had in fact sent in a request to leave at the end of this term weeks before the paper was published. He regretted that this rumor ever got started and added that Harvard had behaved "admirably in all this". The obvious question is why the people on "the anti-zionist side" (where I would place myself) in this controversy had not taken the trouble to check the story. It seems that it fit their suppositions and biases so well that they didn't need to.

Some people have criticized the Enlightenment Network for its ideology. There is always some ideology in disputation. But this is not the core of what the network is about. The objective is to get the country to revise its way of thinking about issues. It suggests that we go back to a scientific model, using rational analysis and the search for truth as our weapons wherever we can. Where we cannot, this inability should be admitted. This approach puts an absolute premium on truth, as the accompanying essay on the place of truth in morality suggests. This does not mean that people who follow this path will always be right. It means only that they strive for the truth, get as close as they can. In reporting and commentary on the world around us, it means checking the facts whenever it is possible, not being satisfied with what is comfortable, with what supports what one wants to believe. Having Harvard fire Dean Walt was just too good to be true, and it wasn't. This should have raised a red flag with those who promoted the rumor, but it didn't. This the path of ideology, not rationalism and enlightenment.

17:51 3/25/2006

Promoting Democracy: Rethinking Priorities

The recent threat of a Kabul court to execute a man for converting from Islam to Christianity raises in an especially clear form the contradiction between "democracy" as we understand it and "democracy" as it may reasonably understood by others.

Democracy was understood by the ancient Greek scholars and the Founding Fathers to be a dangerous form of government. They saw it as mob rule, and they knew that a mob could easily be swayed one way or another by emotions, often stirred by demagogues. James Madison wrote: "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." John Quincy Adams added that: "[T]he experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived." Many of these Fathers were, of course, looking at the course of the French Revolution, which most of the Founding Fathers (with the partial exception of Jefferson) saw as a lesson to be avoided.

In this climate of opinion, they drew up a plan for a state based on a Constitution that circumscribed the political rights of ordinary people in several ways. First, political power was to be exercised through elected representatives rather than directly. In addition, the senate and the president were to be indirectly elected. Today, the electoral system allows for a clearer expression of the popular will than it did originally, but our constitutional system still limits the ability of the people to directly affect how the country is run, especially in the short term. Most important, the Constitution established a system of rights guaranteed by courts presided over by judges that at least at the top were not elected and served for life. The rights guaranteed by the Constitution were effectively "set in stone". The Constitution could be changed, but changing it was a lengthy process. The amendments that were accepted over the course of the next 200 years expanded guarantees of freedom and equality, but did not fundamentally change the structure the Founders had created.

When American governments go out into the world proclaiming the universality of democracy, they appear to be asking all peoples without democracy to change their systems of governance in three rather different directions. First, they are seen to be asking other countries to accept a political system similar to ours. Or they are understood to be asking other peoples to establish political systems in which "free and fair" elections are the essential ingredient. Or, they are asking other peoples to institute political systems that guarantee international human rights, particularly those characterized as civil liberties. It is seldom pointed out to other publics or understood by American communicators that these three aspects of democracy can contradict one another.

In the Islamic world, America's promotion of democracy becomes especially problematic. Many Islamic countries are quite prepared to establish electoral systems for choosing the people who will lead them. But they understand that those elected should be limited in their decision power, much as they are in our own Constitution, by courts established on the basis of operative legal traditions. In their case, the best known legal tradition is Islamic, and the highest courts may be Shariah courts, courts based on principles and ideas that are quite different from those prescribed by modern definitions of human rights. Islamic leaders might well note that American democracy is even today not always on the side of what are now considered international human rights, particularly in areas such as polygamy and capital punishment. In America, "the people" are free to enact legislation violating international standards. This legislation remains the law of the land as long as it is not countermanded by our courts. On the other hand, our nonelected judges are also free to decide against international standards on the basis of what they understand to be American legal tradition.

So in bringing "democracy" to Islamic countries, we are faced with the fact that an Islamic people may through electoral processes decide on laws and procedures that go very much against our modern concept of democracy, such as prescribing the stoning of adulterers. We also must face the fact that accepting the American idea of an independent judiciary would seem to lay the basis for enshrining in law and practice Shariah provisions that are simply not "acceptable" to the modern West. It is very difficult to say that in instituting democracy in this way, they are not adopting at least one of the proffered definitions of democracy.

This suggests that those of us who promote democracy should step back and rethink what we are about. Two changes appear to be necessary. First, we should be clearer in our own minds about what changes should have highest priority in moving the world toward greater freedom. It would seem to me that the first priority must be the creation of a world of responsible states that progressively exhibit increasing respect for international human rights while preserving their capability to secure the peace internally and within their regions. Given this change of focus, we should be less enthusiastic in our promotion of "democracy" without qualification in Islamic countries. America's democratic role should be to increase respect for human rights in such countries, building the bases for the emergence of a true western-style liberal democracy sometime in the future. Secondly, when we campaign for an expansion of democracy, we should stop defining our goal primarily in terms of elections. We should make it understood that we understand a democratic society to be one based on modern liberal institutions. In our democracy campaign, it will also be helpful to deemphasize American models, asking other peoples to consider a wider range of models, some of which are more decisively in the modern liberal tradition than we happen to be. It is particularly important that we not identify capitalism with democracy. While capitalism with a variety of qualifications has characterized our own democratic success, other countries have succeeded as democracies with governments and peoples much more dedicated to egalitarianism and a larger degree of governmental intervention in the economy than has characterized the United States.

With this approach, we will be less likely to seem brazenly inconsistent in our advocacy of democracy, as we have been characterized after we threatened to reject the coming to power of Hamas in Palestine through free and fair elections. We will also have created a more understandable platform from which to criticize the human rights performance of Afghan or other governments that have established ostensibly democratic constitutional systems under our tutelage.

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