Empire Notes

June 29, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Made in the USA? Coup in Honduras

We live in strange times. A revolutionary movement shouting "Allaho Akbar" in the streets of Teheran gets adulation from all parts of the American political spectrum; a military coup in a Latin American country described by many as a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States against an ally of Hugo Chavez is opposed in no uncertain terms by the U.S. government. Perhaps next week George Bush will denounce himself as a war criminal.

No sooner did the military coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya occur than one could see left headlines blaring – "Obama’s First Coup," "Key leaders of Honduras military coup trained in U.S." Allegations of U.S. involvement are hardly surprising – this would not even have been the first Central American president named Zelaya deposed by us.

These suspicions in some were fed by the fact that it took many hours for the Obama administration to come up with an unequivocal statement. And State Department officials admit that they have been working for some time to help resolve the growing constitutional dispute in Honduras; in times past, this would certainly have been code for preparing the ground for a coup.

In this case, however, it’s clear that the United States was not involved and it is opposed to the coup; this does not, however, mean that it’s not responsible in some way.

The miserable eight years of George W. Bush validated the harshest views of U.S. Latin American policy, with strong approval for one anti-democratic coup in 2002 and heavy involvement in another one in 2004. They represented, however, more a recrudescence of Reagan administration Cold War ideological and militaristic hysteria than continuity with previous policy. It was natural that an incoming Democratic administration would repudiate those stances.

Although the Obama administration has fully owned the Bush war on terror, there are some strong differences. First, they want to turn down the ideological temperature; they talk much less about war, even as they escalate it in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they hector less, and they go beyond mere pro forma invocations of Islam as a religion of peace. Second, they have no desire to assimilate the war on terror to the unresolved battles of the Cold War; as far as they are concerned, we won the Cold War and it’s time to let go. This second may well not be a conscious policy change, but the absence of the previous anachronistic Cold War mentality is palpable.

Thus, we go from the 2004 elections in El Salvador, where Otto Reich, Roger Noriega, and even Oliver North made various heavy-handed threats about the dangers of electing Shafik Handal of the FMLN to 2009, where Hillary Clinton attends Mauricio Funes’ inauguration dressed in red. Obama has indicated perfect willingness even to deal with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.

In this crisis, the administration has turned down the chance to make rhetorical attacks on Hugo Chavez and, most interesting, seems to be waiting for the OAS to take the lead, not wanting to throw its weight around.

Despite all this, the United States still bears great responsibility for this coup. Of course the key coup plotters were trained in the United States. It would be news if they weren’t. The entire Honduran military is stamped "Made in the USA," and we’ve been heavily involved in institutionalizing the political power of the military.

For decades, Honduras has been a staging area for U.S. dirty wars in Central America. The army that overthrew Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 was trained there; during the 1980’s, Honduras was of critical importance. We started heavy “cooperation” with the Honduran military in the early 1950’s; shortly afterward, the constitution was changed to recognize the political independence and even dominance of the military over civilian power. In 1982, some changes were made, but they had little to no effect until much later because it was during the 1980’s that the United States poured in tens of millions of dollars every year to the military. Only in the 1990’s, as the United States lost interest in Central America, did some measure of civilian oversight of the military emerge.

The constitutionally and historically embedded power of the military is the question that provoked the current political crisis in Honduras; our complicity in that power is unquestionable. What responsibility do we bear to undo the ill effects of our previous interventions? This is dangerous ground – this sort of argument was used to justify the 2003 Iraq war. But these questions deserve some thought.

Posted at 10:51 am.

Additional thoughts:

1. Everybody agrees that the primary motive force in the coup is the Honduran military, with pretty broad backing among the traditional political elite. Even the famous 1973 coup in Chile was indigenously driven, although there was a great deal of U.S. facilitation. Coups mostly or entirely ginned up by U.S. operatives, like Iran and Guatemala in the 1950's are rare. So the question is whether the U.S. was involved in some peripheral way. I don't think so.

2. These remarks apply to the U.S. government. Given the Republican Party's even further descent into absurdity, I think we could well see, especially in Latin America, a real divergence between official policy and the operations of the International Republican Institute (part of the NED). It's something to watch for. Even so, the IRI can be a dominant player only in a country like Haiti, where there are virtually no organized forces; in a country like Honduras, with a well-organized military that has a tradition of political dominance, the IRI would only facilitate. If anyone comes across info on an IRI role in Honduras, please send it my way.

Posted at 12:29 pm.

June 22, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Green Revolution 2

Have you heard of Neda Agha-Soltan? In times to come, schoolchildren will learn her name. Nobody knows how many martyrs the Green Revolution has generated – it is certainly in the double digits – but she is the first one to rocket to worldwide fame, as video of her collapsing and dying on a Teheran street is viewed over and over. Repression and killing is always a double-edged sword for the forces of order, but this is especially so in Shi’a Iran, where so much of the culture is built around the veneration of martyrs, from Hussein the grandson of the Prophet through the line of Imams and down to the present day.

The dead are commemorated on the third, seventh, and fortieth days after their deaths; in the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970’s, waves of protest often came in 40-day cycles. Whatever the next few days reveal, this is not over; nothing short of the severest repression, an unlikely eventuality, can erase these events from Iranian history.

Regarding the elections, history’s first draft is still a set of disconnected notes, but the past week has turned up nothing to discredit the initial analysis of fraudulence. A new Chatham House report, while far from definitive, casts further doubt on the official figures. For myself, it is striking enough just to view the change in vote-counts for Ahmadinejad between 2005 and 2009. In East Azerbaijan, he went from 75,000 votes, less than 10% of those cast in 2005, to 623,000, almost half of those cast in 2009. The disparities in West Azerbaijan are almost as great.

Mir Hossein Moussavi, slowly growing into the role he was so randomly cast in, recently declared that events had grown past the simple issue of a stolen election. At stake is the fate of the Iranian republic, although not the overall system of theological rule, velayet-e-faqih. As have so many people in the streets, not just the young but the middle-aged and elderly and people from all walks of life, Moussavi declared his readiness to be martyred for the cause.

Given the deep-rooted legitimacy of the system introduced by Khomeini, it is natural that any attempt to challenge in a deep sense the way that system has evolved will involve a call to return to an earlier, putatively purer, form. Some critics of the opposition have made much of the fact that Moussavi cites Khomeini as his model, but this is as inevitable as the way Soviet reformers after Stalin cloaked themselves in the mantle of Lenin. Under Khomeini the repression was far more brutal than it has been since, but, despite Moussavi’s serving as Prime Minister under Khomeini it seems clear that he is not actually advocated a return to more authoritarianism but simply casting a call for more democracy in palatable terms.

It is worth noting that Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most notable clerical opposition sympathizer, has repeatedly called for an extension of women’s rights, an end to repression of the Bahai’I, and other liberal reforms. He was once the designated successor to Khomeini as Supreme Leader, but he lost the post after criticizing Khomeini’s execution of hundreds of political prisoners, saying he would follow the Imam to the gates of hell but would not enter it with him.

Western commentary has finally caught up with the fact that, far from signaling some putative lockstep consensus among Iran’s political elite, this election-related coup is, among other things, the playing out of an enormous power struggle. If nothing else, the arrest of five members of the family of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, eminence grise of the Islamic Revolution, should have tipped people off; as of the last report, his daughter, who campaigned for Moussavi, had not been released.

Other idiocies of American commentary continue. Neoconservatives and liberals alike have blasted Obama for not saying more to support the opposition movement. The fact that these days American advocacy in itself taints its object is too difficult for them; even when the most prominent Iranian opposition groups refused democracy-promotion money allocated by the Bush administration, they didn’t get it. The reductio ad absurdum of that dynamic is now playing out, as the powers-that-be in Israel endorse the Iranian opposition.

Overall, I actually give the left high marks. Although there are those mirroring the logic of the neoconservatives and support Ahmadinejad, the vast majority of left analysts have correctly perceived that a broad popular movement for Islamic democracy and human rights deserves support against a nascent theocratic police state.

Posted at 11:15 am.

June 15, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Coup Attempt in Iran?

Startling political developments abroad always have the regrettable effect in America of creating a class of instant experts; with the rise of the Internet, this tendency has only worsened. Without wishing to indulge in this game, and cognizant of the fact that very few of the facts are yet in, I feel reasonably confident that the election in Iran was stolen.

The announced results themselves seem suspicious; an unprecedented 86% turnout, with 63% going to Ahmadinejad and 34% going to his primary opponent Mir Hossein Mossavi, who is less of a reactionary fundamentalist. Normally in Iran, the rural vote is much higher than the urban vote; such a large turnout means that the share of the vote that is urban is much higher than normal. In addition, such huge numbers rarely come out to confirm the incumbent in office. Mossavi apparently also lost his hometown of Tabriz, and various other local irregularities have been pointed to.

Most striking, though, are a series of events in the aftermath of the election. Results were announced shortly after polls closed, even though Iran counts ballots by hand; police were out in force instantly and well over a hundred opposition politicians were rounded up or placed under house arrest shortly thereafter. More recently, Ahmadinejad has joked that Moussavi was apprehended because he ran a red light. There have been numerous interferences with communication; shutting down text messaging and later all cell-phone activities, jamming BBC’s Persian-language broadcasts, shutting down foreign press activities.

Polls beforehand suggested that Ahmadinejad would get more votes than Moussavi, although likely not enough to win outright. The most plausible speculation is that Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and allies wanted to avoid a runoff that might generate runaway momentum for Moussavi and also wanted results that suggested a fair amount of unity; Khamenei certainly was in it up to the hilt, immediately declaring the results a verdict from God well before they were to be certified by the Election Commission.

The campaigning was marked by extreme acrimony, with Moussavi and other candidates repeatedly denouncing Ahmadinejad as a dictator and with Ahmadinejad in return calling Moussavi and indeed all of the secular politicians in the history of the Islamic Republic corrupt. Long-time power-broker Hashemi Rafsanjani even wrote a letter to Khamenei complaining about Ahmadinejad’s actions; afterward, he warned that no one should tamper with the election results.

Altogether, this has the aspect of a coup attempt by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei against other elements of the political elite who posed a check on them. Coups by those in power are among the most dangerous kind, since they suggest that the plotters want no restrictions at all on their power.

Despite Khamenei’s declaration, Moussavi and his supporters refused to accept the official results. Since then, there has been a growing chorus of opposition, including street protests, declarations from workers at the Election Commission and an association of clerics, even reportedly a fatwa from an ayatollah. Khamenei’s decision to call for an investigation of the results, may be an attempt to blow smoke into the protester’s eyes or it may signal that he is climbing down from the path of transforming the theocratic Islamic Republic into a theocratic national security state.

Whichever is going on, it is a terribly unfortunate occurrence. I can’t go along with Hugo Chavez’s glee over Ahmadinejad’s supposed victory, and I don’t imagine too many will. Seeing the protesters being beaten down by the fundamentalist paramilitary basij and frequently by official security forces, it isn’t hard to figure out who to sympathize with, although some on the left may be confused by the fact that the protesters are mostly middle-class and the basijis largely from the poor and working-class.

For once, we have an administration in the United States that is doing the smart thing, from a purely pragmatic point of view. While this struggle goes on and the fate of the Iranian system hangs in the balance, it is best for the United States to say nothing, or at least as little as possible. This intelligent decision by the Obama administration was largely made possible by the achievements of George W. Bush; it is no longer possible for anyone not of the crazy right wing to believe that the world is well-disposed to American meddling and happy to go in whatever direction we point.

The relative balance of forces in Iran makes a victory by the opposition fairly unlikely. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that there is much anyone in the rest of the world can do to affect this.

Posted at 11:03 am.

June 8, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Obama in Cairo: "I Have Understood You"

I read the transcript of President Obama’s Cairo University speech twice and listened to it once. It was a difficult speech, combining aspects of his 2004 Democratic convention keynote and last year’s race speech, one that did not easily yield up its secrets.

The main purpose of the speech was clear -- to go into the heart of the Arab world and to say, as DeGaulle once memorably did in Algiers, “I have understood you.” The hopes, of course, was that showing empathy for “them” would make “our” policy easier for them to stomach.

Although the speech is associated with some policy shifts, particularly on settlements, it was primarily concerned with appearances and impressions. It was easy, therefore, to get lost in the formulaic platitudes and miss some of the more interesting remarks.

And it was strong on platitudes, from the supposed Islamic invention of algebra to the wonders of microfinance to the shared Abrahamicness of the Abrahamic faiths to, of course, the recognition that Muslims are human beings too and thus want many of the same things that other human beings want.

Still, there were several points that set it apart from what has gone before. I do not include in this Obama’s statement that we are not at war with Islam – Bush was equally clear about this, despite his unfortunate use of the word “crusade” shortly after 9/11.

Among the things I do include, perhaps most striking was the complete omission of the words “terror,” “terrorist,” and “terrorism,” which provided a much-needed change in tone.

It also had the most sustained statement I can remember hearing by a U.S. president of the ills to which the Palestinian people have been subject. From the Nakba to the present, he used vague and sanitized language, but he did mention the “daily humiliations … that come with occupation,” a concept largely foreign to our political class but undoubtedly somewhat easier for an African-American to grasp.

When talking about nuclear weapons, he acknowledged that most people are annoyed when the United States throws hissy fits about other countries but keeps a gigantic arsenal itself; he even talked about nuclear abolition, though only as something desirable at some point in the distant future.

And a couple of times, he showed again the brand of perspicacity that singles him out from any American president of recent memory. When talking about religious freedom, he said Western countries should not dictate what Muslim women can or can’t wear, adding, “We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.” The right wing ought to be happy about that jab at France, but somehow I don’t think they are.

Perhaps most brilliant of all, in the middle of a ringing denunciation of Palestinian violence (after all, they’ve killed several Israelis in the past year), he subtly connects the Palestinians cause with abolition and the civil rights movement, the end of apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia.

This was the first speech since the race speech where I could discern real thought going on. Of course, as always, whenever his thinking goes outside the box, he carefully buries the insight so that only the right kind of people can discern it. He also makes sure to remove specific references and active voice, to reduce the impact as much as possible. He mentions U.S. involvement in an anti-democratic coup in Iran, but doesn’t mention when or against whom; nor does he mention that the coup was conjured out of thin air by the United States. Although he has been excoriated by the right wing for “apologizing” for what America has done, in fact there is no apology, just vague hints that we have not always done the best thing; there is no hint that we ever had anything but the best motives.

The part on Iraq was perhaps the most offensive. While he did call the war a “war of choice,” this is a far cry from calling it, say, an illegal war. And his suggestion that the Iraqi people are “ultimately better off” would be disgusting if we had any moral or aesthetic standards worth mentioning. The Iraqi Holocaust was not a deliberate genocide and, indeed, the majority of killings were not done by the United States, but surely our culpability in the deaths of 500,000, 1 million, or more deserved mention?

Equally annoying was the omission of the Gaza assault. Apparently the hysterical bombardment of a defenseless people is too controversial for mention.

His speech was, overall, very well received by Arabs; this says, unfortunately, more about their expectations of us than it does about the speech.

Posted at 11:02 am.

June 2, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Credit Where Credit is Due: Obama and Settlements

Now that Barack Obama has connected himself so firmly to the Bush legacy with his major escalation in Pakistan and Afghanistan and his subtly delivered declaration that America will be dedicated to the “war on terror” for the foreseeable future, many on the left have suggested that his similarities to Bush outweigh his differences.

Even beyond the left, many liberals, while remaining caught up in the showy debate between Obama and Cheney over torture, have noted how disappointing Obama’s foreign policy has been.

Just as important as pointing out the similarities, however, is noting the differences. Not least among these is a different attitude toward the legacy of the Cold War in Latin America; Hillary Clinton’s attendance at the Inauguration of the FMLN’s Mauricio Funes dressed in red no less, though purely symbolic, was a powerful statement of that.

More profound and more perplexing is the new approach toward Israel. Obama is the first president since George Bush senior to state in no uncertain terms that he categorically opposes further settlement. The irony of using Hillary Clinton to deliver this statement could not be lost on serious Palestine observers; without saying it outright, she was repudiating the legacy of her husband, who presided over a doubling of the number of settlers under the auspices of the Oslo “peace process.”

It is generally not like Obama to stick his neck out even to this degree; he certainly avoids doing it without careful thought and preparation.

In one way, the call is simply a logical concomitant to the earlier declaration of commitment to what is generally called, in the delightfully euphemistic terminology of Israel-Palestine diplomacy, the “two-state solution,” despite the emergence of a far right government in Israel headed by arch-rejectionist Binyamin Netanyahu. The travesty of a “peace process” where the Palestinians have to make major concessions and abandon any independence even before they come to the table and the Israelis actively continue their encroachments even while both sides are negotiating just jumps out to any detached observer.

Even so, this represents real progress – contrast it with this recent statement by long-time U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller: “In 25 years of working on this issue for six secretaries of state, I can't recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity … does to the peacemaking process.”

It’s not hard to speculate about the potential causes of this shift.

For years, there has been a prominent and growing critique within the national security establishment to the effect that aggressive support for everything Israel does seriously detracts from the potential success of the broader “war on terror.” This is primarily a hard-core nationalist militarist argument, coming from people on the more realist side of the ideological spectrum. Early on, this viewpoint was openly expressed only by a handful of people, since most officials who held it were afraid of flak from advocacy organizations like AIPAC or congressional Democrats, but in the last few years more and more space has opened up for these critiques.

With Obama committed to a three-front “war on terror” at the moment, this move may just be seen as a necessary part of the broader charm offensive that must be waged on the Arab world.

The extremism of Israel’s recent actions, from advocacy of airstrikes on Iran to its unprecedented bombing of the Gaza strip prior to Obama’s inauguration, has also changed domestic and international considerations. While making the need for distancing the United States from current Israeli policy greater, it has simultaneously undercut support for that policy in the American Jewish community. This coincides with a repudiation of the Republicans by virtually every group but Southern whites, so that the potential political costs to Obama of this shift are very low.

At a deeper level, Obama is capable of looking at Israel and seeing the nightmare endpoint of dedication to a “war on terror” – a society that is now able to deal with its perceived enemy only in purely coercive terms. Just as he attempts to rescue American “soft power” from the damage of the Bush years, he is taking a tiny baby step to rescue Israel from the trap it has caught itself in.

There are strong limits to this shift. Obama is not considering measures with real teeth such as imperiling the flow of money to Israel, like Bush the Elder did. The farthest they may go, according to the New York Times, is to consider discontinuing the automatic Security Council veto that Israel has grown to depend on. Still, this is a welcome change and worth acknowledging.

Posted at 11:29 am.

May 25, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Guantanamo and American Culture

At first glance, the debate over the fate of detainees if or when the prison at Guantanamo Bay is shut down, is simply a meaningless theatre of the absurd.

After all, one can see politicians on both sides of the aisle, opinion leaders, and cable news talking heads who have obviously watched too many summertime blockbuster movies and seem to believe that these men have superpowers which would enable them to magically escape from supermax prisons in the United States and wreak death and destruction across the country. They have ample grassroots support for this, coming from a combination of the most idiotically reflexive “not in my backyard” mentality and a perception from the right wing that there is potential for political gain here and that their shock troops should be thrown into the battle.

There are voices of sanity. When this whole issue first came up months ago, liberal bloggers were out in front, as they often are, explaining that closing the prison did not mean letting the detainees go, a misrepresentation the right wing has been very fond of, that domestic supermax prisons would be just as secure as Guantanamo, that they couldn’t corrupt their naïve, idealistic fellow inmates because they would be on 23-hour lockdown.

Eventually, some Democratic politicians screwed up the courage to repeat the obvious. While conservatives like Max Baucus and Ben Nelson have been happy to repeat the nonsense of Republicans, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, and Carl Levin have all bucked the NIMBY trend; king of the influence-peddlers John Murtha happily followed, salivating at the thought of federal funding to build a supermax in his district.

Even so, the fact that this has become an issue would be shocking, if we were not all so inured to this kind of nonsense by now. After all, this controversy has nothing on the “War on Christmas.”

On more reflection however, I think that the controversy is important, because it illuminates some of the most detestable things about American culture.

One, of course, is the extreme stupidity of so many of our political debates. This is most noticeable on the Republican side, where there is a self-sustaining complex of utterly cynical self-serving ideologues, profoundly ignorant politicians, and a large public constituency that loves the idea of going through life without a new thought ever violating their minds. Indeed, it’s gotten so bad here that conservative intellectuals – those few that have any principles – are deserting in droves.

But the right has no monopoly on stupidity. Witness the main argument the liberals give for closing Guantanamo – that it makes us less safe because it creates more terrorists. Of course, it is true that every one of the loud, flashy crimes that we committed early in the “war on terror” contributed to the atmosphere of resentment and anger that is key to jihadist recruiting. Among them, let’s not forget the invasion of Iraq or the first assault on Fallujah. In Iraq itself, that last had more of an effect on the population than the Abu Ghraib torture photos.

On the other hand, Americans seem to be completely unaware of the level and nature of coverage of these crimes in the Arab world. People see pictures of civilians killed by drone strikes, testimony from former detainees, stories about treatment of prisoners in Bagram, all the things that are so easily forgettable here. Closing the prison at Guantanamo may make some small statement, but potential jihadis know what a minuscule piece of the whole picture it is; oddly enough, their opinions are not formed by the highly constrained debates so popular in the United States.

Even more fundamentally, though, the debate epitomizes the deeply American value of reflexive certainty that we should never even risk paying a price for any of the crimes we commit. The real issue over detainees is not the fate of those who are convicted of terrorist acts, but that of those who cannot be convicted.

Instead of patting ourselves on the back for being willing to entomb them in living death on the U.S. mainland, we need to address our actual obligations. Generally, we release prisoners who we think are guilty but whom we cannot convict. Apparently, that is unthinkable in this case, even though undoubtedly many of them are innocent and others “guilty” only of attacking foreign troops occupying their country.

Barack Obama wants to institutionalize the war on terror as a permanent part of our politics by articulating a policy of preventive detention; the alternative is to let go of our reflexive desire to smash anyone who might conceivably pose a threat and attempt to offer amends. It might even make us safer in the long run.

Posted at 11:!5 am.

May 18, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Obama's War

This is now Barack Obama's war. The juxtaposition last week of four key decisions by the Obama administration marked the passing of the torch in the "war on terror" more fundamentally than Election Day or Inauguration Day.

One of those, as I wrote about in my last commentary, was the Pakistani offensive in Swat, a product of a major increase in U.S. pressure to implement a full-on militaristic solution to their insurgent problem. As was Cambodia with the Vietnam War, this is a "sideshow" in which havoc is wreaked in one country merely to disrupt its use as an external haven for an insurgency in another.

A second was the firing of Afghanistan commander David McKiernan and his replacement with Gen. Stanley McChrystal from Special Operations. The reason given for this move, so drastic for the rarefied and unaccountable world of the military high command, is that McKiernan just doesn't get counterinsurgency, and remains fixed in a conventional war mindset. I'm not quite sure what this means in the context of Afghanistan, where very few tank battles are being fought and where a major component of what they're calling "counterinsurgency" is rather conventional-seeming air-strikes, but it is clear that Special Ops has always had much more of an emphasis on on-the-ground throat-slitting than other military branches. McChrystal is the guy on whose watch the lies about Pat Tillman were promulgated and has also been associated with serious detainee abuse.

The third is the decision to resurrect Bush's military commissions and resume trials of "war on terror" detainees. They will be "kinder and gentler," with innovations like a ban on information obtained through what they call "coercive interrogation" and what everybody with sense calls "torture." This is a great step for civilization, although it must be noted that even the Inquisition would not use evidence obtained through torture at trial. If a prisoner confessed guilt under torture, he had to repeat that confession in the courtroom.

The fourth is the decision to dispense with the American public's and the world's right to know about torture already committed. Specifically, to shut down the court-ordered release of more photographs from Abu Ghraib. It is silly to say that everything always comes out; in five years, these photographs and, more important, the videos, have not. The administration's argument for this decision, accepted by most liberal critics of the "war on terror," is that exposing U.S. crimes will cause problems in its ongoing military campaigns. This is precisely the reasoning used by every repressive regime in such a situation.

Overall, this still doesn't look much like Bush's first term, with its over-the-top rhetorical excess and panicked post-9/11 lashing out, but it looks awfully similar to the second term. All in all, a very unpleasant picture especially for the man who was going to reinvent America's role in the world.

How did we get to this point from the intoxicating hopemongering of a year ago? The entire story is too long and complicated to get into, but it's been clear since about last June that the chance of the Obama administration being anything but a very conventional American administration on foreign policy was almost nil.

Much of what happens is familiar and obvious. New presidential contenders who, like Obama and like Bill Clinton before him, know nothing about foreign policy, need to "learn" about it, and the only people to "teach" them are the very same blinkered small-minded and reflexive people who have made previous policies and been made by them.

This process seems to have impacted Obama particularly strongly, in part because he feels so beholden to the military high command. Like them, he betrays not the slightest breath of originality or dissidence in his analysis of the "war on terror." There is still a great deal of dissent even within national security circles on what is sensible to do; Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, a key adviser of Petraeus, even wrote an op-ed in the Times criticizing the almost universally-praised drone strikes in Pakistan. But, just like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz on the economic crisis, even people like this are not being listened to by the new administration.

The Obama administration is characterized by a relentless self-lobotomization, mostly invisible because it pales in contrast to the self-lobotimization of the Republican Party. At this juncture, the stimulation of thought is an inherently revolutionary act.

Posted at 11:30 am.

May 11, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi

Barack Obama has just had his first foreign policy triumph. And, as always, 500,000 poor people, victimized by all sides in what Sasha Baron-Cohen correctly called our “war of terror,” will pay the price.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, even before the major Pakistani offensive against the Taliban in Swat, previous battles had left 555,000 people displaced (this is the number registered by the UNHCR; the total number is likely larger). Add to that at least 360,000 already because of this latest assault, and perhaps 500,000 by the time it’s done.

Make no mistake, this is a result of substantial U.S. pressure, a higher level than any brought to bear on Pakistan since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Obama has fully completed the transition from offering a new vision of America’s role in the world to the traditional mode of hard-nosed back-room arm-twisting in pursuit of questionable goals that are not linked to any coherent strategy.

Of course, there are other reasons why the Pakistani government might want to engage in this attack and why decent people might even support it. The neo-Taliban considerably overstepped the bounds of their face-saving agreement with the government regarding the Swat Valley and they apparently shocked the conscience of the country by engaging in the sorts of acts they and their predecessors have been famous for ever since the initial takeover of Afghanistan in the 1990’s.

Seemingly, many of the refugees blame the Taliban more than any other force for what has happened to them, and this is not surprising. The problem, of course, is that they were put in this position in the first place.

And that problem owes entirely to the dynamics unleashed by the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad of the 1980’s and more recently to everything that has come in the wake of the 2001 war. Contrary to the popular image among American liberals, that Pakistan has just sat on its hands while the neo-Taliban emerged, in fact, under pressure from the United States, the Pakistani military has engaged in numerous major offensives, until recently primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas – unfortunately.

Thousands were killed on both sides, hundreds of thousands displaced, and through the whole process, various Islamic extremist groups gained greater and greater control of various localities. This is the dynamic of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Although violence may eventually beat an insurgency – there is no iron-clad rule that says it is always “counterproductive” – in the initial phase it almost always makes things worse, unless the insurgency was extremely weak and had very poor ties to the population.

Oddly, the same bien pensants who claim to have become so aware that violence can cause more problems than it solves with regard to Iraq continue to view Afghanistan to some extent and Pakistan almost completely as special magical areas in which military violence will solve the problem of insurgency unproblematically.

Watching the commentary emerge over the past week or so would have been comical if it were not so tragic. And if it weren’t such stale material.

The preternaturally banal Fareed Zakaria goes on the Daily Show to relate the conventional wisdom, which is his main role in life. We gave $10 billion in military aid to Pakistan, but we were such naïve, virtuous innocents, we accepted their assurances that the money would be spent on counterinsurgency, not on high-tech weapons systems; no mention of the fact that, until Robert Gates started making waves a few months back, we’d been doing exactly the same with our military spending.

We need to pressure Pakistan to start fighting the insurgents like we’re doing in Afghanistan; no mention of the fact that our counterinsurgency in Afghanistan has been a colossal failure.

David Gregory has Zardari and Karzai on Meet the Press to hector them in the grand old tradition of American media and third world heads of state; no acknowledgment that we’re the ones who have consistently screwed up not just our foreign policy but their countries.

Barack Obama adds the piece de resistance; in grand Bushian style, he holds a press availability, with the two men as background props; near the end, he praises them by saying that they “fully appreciate the seriousness of the threat that we face.” Really? Somehow, by living there and seeing their countries in disarray they are able to appreciate the threat almost as well as people living in a bubble in Washington DC?

The unthinking arrogance, the casual playing with other people’s lives, the reflexive resort to violence to solve our problems; it’s all back. The king is dead; long live the king.

Posted at 11:48 am.

May 5, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

While our attention is relentlessly focused elsewhere, Iraq has temporarily regained its position as the suicide bombing capital of the world. Apparently, it is not quite the bastion of peace, freedom, and light we might have thought; in April, over 300 people, almost all Shi�a, were killed in sensational mass-casualty suicide bombings, including over 160 in one two-day stretch that was reminiscent of 2005 or 2006.

Hillary Clinton�s immediate statement that these bombings didn�t mean anything, that they were a sign that al Qaeda in Iraq is weak and on the run, is a textbook example of the stopped watch that sometimes tells the correct time. Identical to every Bush administration statement every time anything happened in Iraq, statements like hers carry no information content whatsoever.

I think, however, in this case she is right. These do not signal a significant resurgence of Sunni militant activity in Iraq or a full-scale shattering of the tenuous calm that has gripped the country. In part, they may be a response to the Iraqi government�s recent announcement that they captured AQI�s supposed chief of operations, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

They are also enabled in part by the fact that the Iraqi government has been going after some of their natural predators. The Mahdi Army has been essentially disbanded, except supposedly for a hard core of fighters around Sadr.

More interesting, the Sahwa, the formerly 100,000-strong force of tribal Sunnis and ex-insurgents assembled by the United States to destroy the insurgency, is in trouble. In Anbar, they won the January elections and have formed the provincial government, but in general they have not fared well.

They have been essentially abandoned by their American sponsors to the tender mercies of the Shi�a-dominated government. Promises to integrate a significant portion of them into the Iraqi army have gone largely unimplemented. In an important article about them, Nir Rosen concludes that the Sunnis have lost the civil war and that the Sahwa has no chance of rekindling it; he also hints that from the beginning the Americans intended to let their allies be imprisoned once the job at hand � the destruction of the insurgency � was done.

This is not surprising in a certain sense; the United States has a very poor record of standing by the various tools that it uses, not least in Iraq.

In another sense, it ought to be. For years, I have noted with surprise the almost total lack of any coherent planning by the United States in Iraq to serve any interests at all, beyond the narrow one of defeating whichever enemies happen to be shooting at its forces � and with considerably less surprise the inability of much of the left to alter its consistent analysis of overarching American plans for geopolitical domination.

An elementary lesson in the calculus of power: the Sahwa was more than a way to destroy the insurgency, it was a significant political foothold for the United States. Given the overwhelming political weakness of the U.S. position in Iraq, the logical thing to do would have been to hang on to it, keep it a coherent force, continue to pay its monthly salaries from U.S. coffers. Instead, for over a year now the United States has been lowballing them, trying to get the Iraqi government to pay for them, trying to get some integrated into the Iraqi army, and rather explicitly talking about turning most of them into garbage collectors.

If political domination of or at least strong political influence over Iraq was one of the key goals of the invasion, why would you throw away such a valuable asset, as the United States has done?

In truth, for some years now U.S. policymakers have been unable to articulate coherent interests in Iraq, beyond the obvious and reflexive one of not being beaten and leaving the field completely open to forces that are not well-disposed to us.

This fact is also in part why there is no talk about altering the withdrawal schedule despite the violence; the other reason, of course, is Afghanistan, which, says the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, �has been an 'economy-of-force' operation for far too long.�

It is precisely when conceptions of interests are in such flux that new ways of thinking can most easily be introduced. So far, the only �new� way of thinking on foreign policy that has gotten a wide hearing has been to go back to pre-Bush business as usual � but there is still an opening for other ideas.

Posted at 10:26 am.

April 27, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Banality and Accountability

If you were a prosecutor, would you have tried Robert Duvall but let Al Pacino go? In the growing recent debate about torture, heavily fueled by the Obama administration�s recent release of four legal memos, the only consensus position, at least on the side of those who want accountability, is that the consiglieres should be tried while the Mafia dons are let off.

It�s as if evil is to be punished more the more banal it is; neither the men and women actually brutalizing prisoners nor the men at the top who decided they wanted to torture prisoners are to be in the dock, just the lawyers who were told to come up with a legal justification of torture.

And, in fact, the memos are all about the banality of evil. You�ll all have your favorite parts; perhaps it is the idea of erecting cardboard walls and putting cervical collars on the prisoners to lessen the risk of permanent injury when their heads are slammed into said walls. Or the fact that waterboarding is to be done with saline solution, not pure water, to lessen the risk of hyponatremia if prisoners swallow too much.

Personally, if I had to pick, it would be in Steven Bradbury�s discussion of sleep deprivation (which he scrupulously notes is never done for more than 96 hours at a time). Prisoners subjected to sleep deprivation are also often put in adult diapers, but, as Bradbury says, �You have informed us that diapers are used solely for sanitary and health reasons and not in order to humiliate the detainee.�

After reading that, one feels like Seymour Hersh when he told audiences that he hoped the Bush administration was lying about WMD, because the alternative, that they were that far out of touch with reality, was scarier. I hope Bradbury and his colleagues were smirking, even sadistically, as they wrote that; the alternative is that they were utterly incapable of empathy with the prisoners.

While the argument of the anti-accountability forces that giving one�s honest legal opinion should not be criminalized is correct, this is not all that lawyers do. It is not exactly unknown for lawyers representing criminals � gangsters, corporations, states � to spend their effort strategizing on how to break the law and construct legal arguments to get away with it. Did Bradbury really think that, as he argued, signing the Convention against Torture placed no new obligations on U.S. conduct than those in the Constitution? In any case, legal culpability of the lawyers is for a court to decide.

Obviously, Bybee, Yoo, Bradbury, and others should be investigated; in the process, it shouldn�t be difficult to turn up evidence linking them to Rumsfeld, Cheney, and, dare I say it, Bush. In fact, I�d be happy to offer some of the consiglieres immunity if they squeal on their dons.

Barack Obama has, characteristically, tried to �put this all behind us� and forgive and forget, but he has also, even more characteristically, waffled. After first saying there would be no prosecutions, someone reminded him that traditionally these decisions are the Attorney General�s prerogative, at which point he backtracked.

Currently, what�s undubtedly on his mind is that any blanket refusal to investigate will invigorate international efforts at accountability. While the Spanish attempt to indict six Bush administration lawyers (including Douglas Feith, who was not actually involved) seems dead, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Torture Manfred Nowak recently made headlines when he said that the Convention against Torture requires that there be an investigation.

Although the United States is of course not a party to the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, it can be argued that these cases are within the ICC�s jurisdiction � and this jurisdiction applies precisely when a state�s legal system is found to be unwilling or unable to provide accountability.

While it is worth noting that one of the primary fears of Bush administration officials while they were committing their various crimes was that they might someday be brought to trial, the truth is that Obama is not going to allow international jurisdiction over American officials. But he has been selling himself, and has been sold, as the new internationalist, the anti-Bush, the man who has respect for international law and the international community. The last thing he wants is a bruising political fight in which he repeatedly asserts American sovereignty and legal exceptionalism. If there is too much noise about this, he may just cave and open an investigation himself.

There is a real political opening here for those who are looking for something to do.
Posted at 10:56 am.

April 20, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Tortured Moralizing about Torture

The Obama administration�s recent release of four Bush-era torture memos has unleashed a new flood of outraged commentary and denunciations of their inherent vileness in the media � primarily in the Democratic partisan media.

I feel torn between being glad that the crimes of the Bush administration are getting renewed attention, with even a few calls for accountability, and irritation at what our moral commentariat choose to focus on and why, but the irritation is winning out.

To start with, all these documents do is add a little detail to what has been known for years. The renewed calls to impeach Jay Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, are well and good, but the original Bybee torture memo has been out in the public for many years. The new documents add some gruesome details about the various practices authorized � such as the fact that waterboarding was used 266 times on Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, but it is still true that the practices authorized fall far short of what was actually done to detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the past three years or so, the two issues that have received by far the most attention of the condemnatory kind are waterboarding and shutting down Guantanamo. According to the CIA and to all documents actually released, waterboarding was done on three people, including KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks (whose waterboarded testimony anchored the 9/11 Commission report, which at the time occasioned hardly any comment). And treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, while atrocious, has been for many years much superior to treatment of detainees first at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in Iraq and all along at Bagram and other sites in Afghanistan.

As of early 2005, the Associated Press had already found that at least 108 people had died in American custody; accountability for those deaths has remained virtually nonexistent, as has public curiosity about whether those numbers continue to mount. There seems also to be no curiosity about how many people have died because of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or how many of those were killed by
Americans. Some have tabulated the number of civilians killed in reported airstrikes in Afghanistan, but this gets hardly any attention.

Recently, the Times actually ran a short article speculating on the reason that the ongoing Predator drone attacks in Pakistan are gleefully accepted, while the torture memos have caused �years of recriminations, calls for prosecution and national soul-searching.�

Of course, the premise is nonsense; there is no indication that �the nation� is soul-searching; it�s merely a portion of the commentariat.

The answer the article attempts to pose, that torture is somehow more intimate and immediate and that it is easier to imagine it used on oneself is not terribly plausible. This is true in a general sense, and the anti-torture outcries of the early 1980�s were so intense in part for this reason � then, the tortured included intellectuals, writers, and journalists.

This time around, the top levels of our journalistic class are thoroughly insulated from the vicissitudes of life and quite unable to put themselves in the shoes of an Afghan taxi driver. Even the various bloggers who have taken up the cause do not seem to be acting out of any sort of personal identification/empathic response.

So what are the reasons behind it? First, there is the precondition that liberals have completely accepted their numerous arguments that torture is of no use, since it only elicits false confessions. This happens to be nonsense, as anyone who watches the Battle of Algiers could figure out, but they believe it nonetheless. Drone attacks and bombing of Afghan villages, on the other hand, might be advancing important goals in those countries � whatever the hell those goals are.

Given this precondition, torture became several years ago a convenient issue for partisan differentiation and alignment. It is true that a great deal of commentary had to come out before Democratic politicians found the grit to say anything meaningful about it, but partisan Bush-hating had already become intense.

Equally important is the fact that opposing torture is a cheap way to recapture one�s own sense of smug morality. Even more than the Iraq war, it has been externalized and associated with a handful of actors � not even, in general, the legions of soldiers who abused and tortured people in Iraq, or the torturers themselves, or the on-the-ground CIA operatives, but simply a few Bush administration operatives. It is easy to deal with, while our role in the destruction of one country and the ongoing chaos in another, is not.

Posted at 10:59 am.

April 13, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Roots of Somali Piracy

On the surface, the recent contretemps with Somali pirates is a nice little morality play. It showcases the bravery of Captain Richard Phillips, who seized the opportunity to escape, the legendary sharpshooting skills of Navy snipers, and the resolution of a new president who wants to engage the world but is no one�s patsy. Three pirates were killed, but, after all, this is the end you ought to expect if you go into the business. The fourth pirate, who surrendered, may actually not end up in Guantanamo or in the secret CIA prisons now reportedly closed.

There are already news articles hailing Obama�s first military victory and contrasting it with Bill Clinton�s initial failure at landing troops in Haiti. There�s even a noxious op-ed by Robert Kaplan calling for a global sea-based counterinsurgency to complement our wonderfully successful land-based efforts.

It�s easy enough to stick to that story if you know nothing about history or if you get the sort of historical background common in newspaper coverage � bad as Black Hawk Down was, sometimes even a Hollywood movie gives a more realistic sense of U.S. military engagements than the New York Times does.

So here�s a brief recap. Throughout the 1980�s, the United States backed the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, sending him $600 million worth of arms in return for obtaining the right to build military bases (and incidentally for oil concessions for Chevron and other American oil companies). After Siad Barre fell, and with the end of the Cold War, at least in the short-term calculus of the times, Somalia fell in importance to the United States and it was ignored while we pursued important business in Iraq.

Then in 1992, there was a humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the fact that clan violence was often keeping humanitarian aid from getting to the people who needed it most. George Bush decided to invade Somalia and we were treated to a spate of stories about how much we had helped the Somalis.

In truth, the motivations for the U.S. invasion are unclear. What can be established is that it occurred well after the height of the crisis, as conditions were improving. Part of the strategy to attempt to restore order in Somalia involved attempts to create and prop up a central state in a country where authority had completely fragmented; incidentally, such a state would have been needed to enforce existing agreements with the U.S. military and oil companies. No such state was created, but existing UN efforts to work with the clan-based system of authority to damp down the violence and allow for aid to get through were completely disrupted by the Americans� militaristic approach.

You�d never get a sense from the news coverage that the main activity of the troops in Somalia was killing Somalis. Black Hawk Down at least points out that over 1000 Somalis were killed in the Mogadishu firefight; according to a 1995 article in Foreign Policy, the CIA estimated that we killed 7-10,000 Somalis.

Under Clinton, the strategy morphed first into a manhunt for Mohammed Farah Aidid, the next in a long line of Middle Eastern and North African Hitlers, followed by a precipitous withdrawal.

We ignored Somalia again until after 9/11, but operations in North Africa have been a significant part of the �global war on terror.� These include aerial bombings of �high-value targets� and numerous shadowy operations involving Special Forces. In 2006, a radical fundamentalist group called the Islamic Courts Union captured Mogadishu; no doubt they were helped in their quest to win support by the fact that the United States made it very clear that they considered the ICU to be our enemies.

In late 2006, Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia, with the full backing of the United States, and forces from this 2/3 Christian nation occupied the almost entirely Muslim country. Oddly enough, an anti-occupation insurgency grew up and was repressed. Well over 10,000 civilians were killed before Ethiopia finally withdrew two years later. Don�t worry, though; this kind of thing won�t happen again, because we have renamed the global war on terror.

Somali pirates are always good for a joke on the Daily Show, but across the board there is virtually no acknowledgment of the U.S. role in fostering the anarchy and violence in Somalia, let alone of any responsibility we might have to the country. This is, of course, hardly surprising; just as with Vietnam or Iraq, we are the victims. Somehow, we always manage to be victimized in somebody else�s country.

Posted at 10:35 am.

April 6, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- American Exceptionalism, Obama-Style

Remember back when Barack Obama�s ascension was supposed to revolutionize America�s relations with the rest of the world?

I was never exactly clear on either the reasoning behind this claim or the implicit conception of American relations with the world that it embodied. There was something about him being black, being cosmopolitan, not being a stumbling, bumbling idiot, not employing people who derived pleasure from being pointlessly abrasive, and maybe even being able to admit that America was wrong now and then.

What this was supposed to lead to, I really can�t recall. The people who desperately believed in this idea seemingly mostly wanted a model where the United States gets its traditional allies to help it in achieve its predetermined aims and talks to its traditional enemies to get them to acquiesce to its predetermined conditions.

This is very much like what have always been the official conceptions of American �diplomacy.� It�s true that the Bush administration had a few aberrations. In 2001, it actually rejected the aid of NATO in the Afghanistan war, and, throughout its first term, its policy toward North Korea was to talk very tough and do nothing. But Bush�s second term, though still marred by silly refusals to communicate directly with the Iranian government, was actually mostly a return to business as usual.

What are we seeing early in Obama�s term? There has been no thaw with Iran and minimal change in policy. The Bush administration, after all, spent years pursuing U.N. sanctions on Iran. Obama has recently called for U.N. sanctions on North Korea, a measure likely to have no discernible effect on North Korea�s isolated, insular, and dysfunctional government.

What about changes in the all-important �tone� of official U.S. pronouncements? Certainly, there have been some; Obama, after all, is an adult.

But the tenor of things to come was shown early when he chose to hector the Europeans for insufficient support of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, a note the Bush administration had already been sounding for several years.

In his remarks last week at a Town Hall in Strasbourg, speaking about the financial crisis, he did make a lukewarm admission of blame, saying the United States �shares blame for what has happened.� While making sure to point out that there is �plenty of blame to go around,� he quickly went on to add, �every nation bears responsibility for what lies ahead.�

If there is anything other than the war on Iraq for which the United States should bear undisputed blame, it�s the financial crisis. It�s the United States which developed the anything-goes financial culture that constantly creates instruments designed keep investment banks one step ahead of regulations as they maximize extremely short-term profit and it is the United States that has single-mindedly pushed financialization on the rest of the world in the past 20 years through every persuasive and semi-coercive means it has in its arsenal.

And yet the world�s takeaway is supposed to be that �America is changing, but it cannot be America alone that changes� � i.e., we are still the leader we always were, now somehow deserving credit for being the first to address the problem we created.

On Saturday, a reporter asked Obama whether he believed in American exceptionalism, and his answer was, �I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.� He then went on to a paean to our great democratic values and our �unmatched military� and asserting our �continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity.�

A much cleverer answer than Bush could have given. We�re supposed to ignore the fact that Greek exceptionalism has to do with what it accomplished 2500 years ago, that British exceptionalism is now a mere epiphenomenon of the American brand, and that, in general, high levels of nationalist feeling in most countries rarely translate into a feeling of an extraordinary mission to tell other countries what to do and concentrate on the fact that Obama recognizes the feeling is subjective and not a truth revealed by God when he caused his son to be born American.

After the United States has totally wrecked one country, is making things go from bad to worse in another, and has helped usher in a global recession through mindlessly short-sighted games, this is the best we can get? America has apparently become invulnerable to moral learning; though almost nobody sees this here, it is not lost on the rest of the world.

Posted at 10:51 am.

March 25, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- What use are experts?

It was just a throwaway line in President Obama�s �60 Minutes� interview on Sunday. He was giving Steve Kroft the new conventional wisdom on Afghanistan � �Iraq was actually easier than Afghanistan. It's easier terrain. You've got a-- much better educated population, infrastructure to build off of� � and I suddenly said to myself, �Do they know anything at all about anything?�

It�s very odd. There has been a great flurry of books, articles, media reports about all the things the United States has learned about counterinsurgency, about how to combine offers of development aid with demands for �actionable intelligence,� about how a �kinder, gentler� approach toward the population helps the occupier in the long run, you name it. In fact, U.S. military officials like General David McKiernan have castigated the Europeans for not having learned all the wonderful things we have.

Now, I don�t know whether Afghanistan is actually �harder� than Iraq, especially since I don�t know what �Afghanistan� as a problem rather than a country is. But surely it�s obvious that the better educated population and better infrastructure in Iraq were reasons that �Iraq� was harder � it led to a much quicker growth of resistance and a much wider dissatisfaction with American inability to repair the infrastructure it destroyed. And what exactly does Obama think we�re in Afghanistan to do? Build infrastructure?
One of the main lessons most people have drawn from the Iraq occupation is that we need to understand the Middle East better and concomitantly we need to go back to the tried-and-true methods that the foreign policy experts of our prelapsarian days applied so well.

That has not been the lesson I�ve drawn. It is true that the cabal that plotted the insane venture of destroying a country�s government without an agreed-on plan to replace it with something else knew nothing about the Middle East. And it certainly would have been nice to have the input of experts on the region who could explain to us that Arabs, apparently unlike others, don�t like being herded into prison for no reason, stripped naked, taunted, made to simulate masturbation and copulation with each other, and formed into pyramids. And, of course, soldiers could have benefited from experts explaining to them that beating helpless prisoners to death was immoral.

But the fact is that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others were the epitome of the foreign policy expert. Doug Feith points out in his book, I think correctly, that in fact the Rumsfeld wing of things was smarter and more �expert� than the Colin Powell wing. It just so happens that foreign policy expertise had and has a lot more to do with encyclopedic knowledge of weapons systems, expertise at bureaucratic infighting, and delineation of strategic contingencies in carefully bullet-pointed memos than it has to do with understanding human beings and the world.

The other pillar of the ongoing American debacle, the economic and financial crisis, has occasioned some grumbling about Wall Street�s expertise from the margins, but again no sustained critique of the concept of expertise and how it is conceived.

It�s paradoxical, because all of us who are not economists trying to make head or tail of Paulsen�s and Geithner�s various plans to spend trillions of dollars have surely experienced the fugitive thought that expertise is very important. We all know that maintaining the status quo and pretending that it can be maintained is the main wellspring of these policies, but it�s not that easy to figure out what should be done instead.

And yet what a farce financial and economic expertise is. It�s very difficult not to laugh when companies like AIG tell us that they need to dole out $165 million in bonuses so they can keep their best and brightest happy and still working for them. Perhaps they and we would have done better if they had populated those posts with people randomly drawn from prison.

When Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and the powers-that-be try to maintain the fiction that they, the macho men of Wall Street, the touts on CNBC, the raters at Moody�s who gave AAA ratings to junk, and the whole sordid kit and caboodle of them are still the holders of an expertise that we desperately need, it�s difficult not to scream.

Expertise is important. I am not advocating Cultural-Revolution-style Maoism or Palin-style Republicanism. The ignorant might well have gotten Iraq right � don�t invade � but figuring out how to deal with possible widespread bank failure probably requires some knowledge and understanding.

One thing is crystal clear: we need a public dialogue about how it is that in so many vitally important spheres we construct experts and expertise who are so detached from reality and from human considerations � and what can be done about it.

Posted at 3:02 am.

March 16, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Jon Stewart and the Poverty of American Satire

Everyone is raving about John Stewart�s supposed takedown of Jim Cramer. Personally, I admit to being deeply unimpressed. Indeed, I think that the video should serve as a warning of what happens when a society leaves its trenchant social commentary to comedians.

It�s important to be fair to Stewart. He�s no mere funnyman; like the best comedians, he�s smart and knowledgeable and funny. His show was one of the few lifelines that helped angst-filled liberals make it through the Bush years. It relentlessly skewers pretension and is about the only thing that, in video form, holds public figures accountable for the nonsense they spew. Politically, the show has run the gamut from prejudice and cheap sneers at Arabs to an actual link of Israel�s occupation and siege with Palestinian violence.

Overall, the show has on occasion been criticized by the left because it moves people toward demobilization and cynicism. It certainly does. And it�s no coincidence that its rise in popularity coincides with the collapse in mobilized political opposition by ordinary people. What�s the cause, however, and what the effect? Stewart is the spokesman for an important social constituency � the effortlessly cynical young and middle-aged who can�t really imagine doing anything about anything. The fact that it�s the main news source for much of its viewership betokens rather clearly its audience�s lack of effort.

But I don�t particularly blame the show for this; it�s simply the low channel that cynicism and inertia find in order to flow to the sea. No, what annoys me about the show is its constant search, in opposition to the spirit of the best social satire, for some comforting conventional wisdom to fall back on, perhaps rooted in some rosily glowing past.

This is part of why the interviews are almost always such a big disappointment. One shouldn�t discount Stewart�s ego or the general chumminess that is required to get people to come on your show; but the obsequiousness that he showed to Colin Powell or the kid gloves with which he�s treated various Bush administration spokespeople in the past stem also from deeper roots.

But, of course, this is supposedly what was different about the Cramer interview. He went after Cramer and the financial TV industry that he represents relentlessly. And there was a different tone. You can see it on other shows as well. The bombing of various Arabs and people we think are Arabs may matter to you in some abstract sense, but people � even the rich and famous � lost lots of money in the financial collapse. So it�s natural that beating up on Cramer, who proffered one meek mea culpa after another, felt good, both to Stewart and a lot of people watching.

Financial TV shows that pimp stocks under the pretense of being �analysis,� next cousin to boiler rooms and chop shops, are an easy and a deserving target. And clowns like Cramer are even easier. I�d like to see Alan Greenspan and Tim Geithner get the same treatment. After all, their claims to expertise and understanding based on inside knowledge seem just as empty as Cramer�s. And why not drag Moody�s and Standard and Poor�s and 95% of the country�s economists into this as well?

And what about the tens of millions of enablers, who not only gave their money to the Bernie Madoffs and their barely legal equivalents, but still just want that world restored? Are they really just victims? These all seem natural questions for a satirist.

Even Stewart�s potentially deepest criticism remains mired in his centrist muddle. He criticizes financial TV for �Selling this idea that you don�t have to do anything, � you�ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, � When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work.�

Assuming that Stewart has not independently come to believe in the labor theory of value, he seems to be unclear on the �capital� part of �capitalism.� What exactly does he think it involves but making money by having money?

I�m not really criticizing Stewart, I suppose, but pointing out how much is lost by the abdication of social commentary to him and his like.

According to the Ayn Rand Institute, sales of Atlas Shrugged, already climbing in 2008, have tripled in the early months of 2009; everybody�s talking about its hero John Galt�s stratagem of recusing himself from society and denying it the benefits of his brilliance. Economic crises do make people search for new answers and new methods, but they don�t have to make sense and they really don�t have to be progressive.

Posted at 11:09 am.

March 9, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Capitalism's Remedy -- "Go Shopping"

As criticism of the unlamented George Bush matured during his interminable presidency, one of the statements for which he was most derided was his response to a question a few weeks after 9/11 about what ordinary Americans could do to contribute � supposedly, he said we should �go shopping.� Respectable opinion across the spectrum from Barack Obama to Thomas Friedman to John McCain concurred � instead of seizing the moment to call us to national responsibility and national sacrifice, he played to the lowest common denominator of American society.

Actually, Bush said, �Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida,� but the intent was clearly the same. And Rudy Giuliani, still universally praised for his response to 9/11, did indeed say "Show you're not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping,� as did many others.

Now, let�s leave aside the fact that, had he called us to sacrifice, the main difference would have been that we spent the next month being even more insufferably self-righteous than we already were, while still concentrating on shopping. And the fact that there was really no reason to donate even more blood.

What�s truly fascinating is that this time around, when we�re faced with a crisis whose effects are far more wide-ranging, and one whose cause can be directly traced not just to the mindless greed of the clay-footed titans of Wall Street but to the thoughtless profligacy of an entire nation, this time the remedy universally agreed on is �Go shopping.�

In that �universally� I don�t include the Republicans, who are playing their traditional game: after 8 or 12 years of Republican waste and excess that leads to a Democratic victory, rediscover the great heartland American value of frugality (which goes naturally with other heartland values like obesity, SUVs, and giant houses that you can�t afford).

Well, you will say, now is not the time for austerity; indeed, artificially stimulated consumption is necessary to mitigate this economic collapse. And you�re absolutely right; this is one of the few (very few) conclusions of economics that still hold up. Indeed, Bush�s much-ridiculed statement was made in the context of widespread fear of economic collapse.

Barack Obama, who I predict will not be maligned by history for not calling us to sacrifice, is so clear about stimulating consumption that the tax credit in his stimulus package will not, as in previous years, be delivered in a lump-sum. When people get a $600 check from the government, they are apparently far too likely either to save it or to pay down debt.

And that is no good; they must spend the money. So the stimulus cleverly gives you the money by reducing federal withholding from your paycheck. The calculation is that, with your extra money coming in little bits here and there you are more likely to spend it. Note that this is not so people will spend more on necessities; those who really need to would likely spend a lump-sum in the same way. No, this is so the people who would pay down debt instead buy more useless crap.

Capitalism will be saved on top of a mound of 50-inch flat-panel TVs, home furnishings that are never used, Ronco salad shooters, and nights out drinking six-dollar beers. The remedy for the result of 15 years spending most of China�s GDP as well as our own is more spending of China�s GDP.

The problem is not even that we are supposed to spend our way out of this crisis, although it really isn�t clear how long the rest of the world will continue to pay our bills; the problem is that we have a system that structurally requires this kind of behavior. We must always have economic growth, because the alternative is contraction and dislocation. Individual frugality, supposedly such a great virtue, leads to stagnation or contraction on the national level � check out a recent New York Times article on how those stupid Japanese responded to their economic crises of the early 90�s by reducing consumption and living more simply.

The stimulus package is a perfect example of behavior that is locally sensible but globally senseless. Capitalism abounds in eliciting such behavior. Everybody knows the bill is coming due, in this generation. It�s truly disheartening that a crisis that should shake the legitimacy not just of American-style capitalism but of all mainstream economic analysis has led virtually no one to talk about fundamental change of the system. People need to start. It is no good to wait until the crisis has passed; at that point, as the pundits hail another great victory of American capitalism, nobody will be listening.

Posted at 10:49 am.

March 2, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- The Forever War: is the End in Sight?

Is the forever war coming to an end? In a speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune on Friday, President Obama pledged that combat troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of August 2010. Democrats and antiwar organizations have focused on the extremely large size of the �residual force� � 35 to 50,000, oddly, roughly the number that the Bush administration likely envisioned, insofar as it envisioned anything, as a semi-permanent garrison � but surely at least equally worthy of note is his claim that all troops will be gone by the end of 2011, as per the text of the Status of Forces agreement.

What does it all mean? The reaction of many in the antiwar movement, I imagine, will be skepticism. We have been hearing words to this effect almost since March 2003; the only period during which talk about imminent withdrawal was shelved was during the so-called �surge,� when the decision was made that ensuring U.S. credibility as a force to be reckoned with in Iraq required not appearing too eager to leave.

Furthermore, dialogue across the spectrum on the war has been imbued with what is, to say the least, a view of time that is very different from the Western notion of time as a line that one progresses through. From Thomas Friedman�s incessant invocations of the �next six months� as the crucial make-or-break time in Iraq, immortalized by the work of FAIR and others as the Friedman unit to the proliferation of �withdrawal plans,� the key about them was always that the reference point changed every day. If you called for troops to be gone from Iraq in 16 months today, a year from now you would still be saying 16 months; insofar as it had a concrete meaning, you meant that you weren�t calling for troops to be gone in less than 16 months. In what had become an annual pre-spring ritual, newspapers would report in January or February Bush administration plans to severely draw down troops by August or September. At some point even mainstream media commentators stopped pretending to believe them.

This time is fundamentally different, though � and not because Obama is a sincere man unlike the Bush administration and various untrustworthy politicians (although I think he is). The shifting 16-month timeline was in fact Obama�s during a campaign that lasted longer than 16 months. His recent statement to Jim Lehrer that he was essentially sticking to his guns, only changing the 16 months to 18 now, makes sense only within that constantly updating notion of time that is peculiar to extended counterinsurgencies and financial crises.

Finally, though, we are back in ordinary linear time. One reason Obama�s pronouncement is different from the myriad Bush administration ones is straightforward; the vast majority of them were based on the vague hope that things in Iraq would turn around quickly and that then the United States would be able to transition from an occupation to a long-term semi-client setup. For years, it was a hope without any semblance of a politico-military strategy behind it. Those newspaper articles we all remember simply meant that the people in power retained the illusion that one more offensive like all the others would somehow break the resistance and magically give Iraq the state capacity it has not had ever since the invasion.

Another reason, of course, is the Iraqi government�s assertion of independence with the SOFA, which contains actual dates. By some mysterious alchemy, the United States has become committed to upholding at least some minimal notion of Iraqi sovereignty, even as it completely ignores Afghanistan�s and erodes Pakistan�s piece by piece; specific details are very important here. And, no doubt, it is the actual black-and-white of a quasi-legal commitment that is overcoming what would be Obama�s natural tendency to equivocate and temporize over withdrawal.

As I have mentioned numerous times before, the final reason that all of these commitments actually bind this time is the need to divert many of these troops to Afghanistan.

Two wildcards could still affect this withdrawal; the composition and attitude of the Iraqi government and powers-that-be after national elections and a potential resurgence of violence as the United States goes through a loud and messy procedure of dismantling built-up areas and shipping materiel home.

It is no accident that this occupation is ending just as the military need to make more messes in Iraq is dying down almost to nothing and the priority is on building something out of the wasteland that has been created. Ever since the Marshall Plan, that is not really a business that the United States gets into unless it is forced to.

Posted at 10:58 am.

February 2, 2006

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