Empire Notes

July 20, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 11:20 am.

July 20, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- The Good War

Escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the essential component of Barack Obama's new, improved "war on terror." Current plans are to ramp up to a presence of 70,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and diplomatic efforts to increase the size of the NATO force are constantly underway.

This new offensive comes at a time when the American public is sick of far-away countries, the spending of imaginary funds on helping poor, benighted Muslims, and even of the continued absence of American troops; somehow, many have convinced themselves that they care about this even when they have no friends or family in the armed forces. As a result, even this goodest of all good wars has minimal support; indeed, a USA Today poll earlier this year found 42% of Americans saying that the Afghanistan war was a mistake.

Although elite opinion is much more unified in support of Obama's escalation, there are cracks in this facade as well. If nothing else, Stanley McChrystal's repeated emphasis on the fact that a solution in Afghanistan will have to be political more than military is an indirect reflection of these cracks; by the time this had become the dominant theme in public remarks about Vietnam, everyone knew the United States was losing.

Thus the need for a new propaganda offensive. Peter Bergen's widely-discussed essay "Winning the Good War" in the latest issue of the liberal Washington Monthly is a case in point.

It's structured as a refutation of the argument that Afghanistan will be Obama's Vietnam. First, he says, this is not a replay of the Soviets in Afghanistan -- they were brutal and hamhanded, resistance was much more widespread, and there was a fairly important outside power aiding that resistance.

Second, he says, Afghanistan is actually far more governable than Iraq, and violence even now is lower. Also, Afghans support the presence of international forces, while Iraqis opposed it.

Third, Afghanistan has been a unified nation for longer than the United States, and Afghans have a strong sense of nationalism -- for some reason, this augurs well for the occupation.

Fourth, it's not like Vietnam because the NLF was much larger and better armed than the neo-Taliban is -- see argument above.

Fifth, withdrawal can't be the answer because we tried it before and the result was disaster.

And, finally, more troops will decrease civilian casualties, not increase them, because it will enable us to cut down on bombing raids.

Most of his facts are accurate and some of the arguments he tries to refute are really silly -- if only I had a dime for every idiot column claiming that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires for 2500 years and that it will wreck the United States too.

It's also true that poll results show a significant majority of Afghans in support of the presence of U.S. and NATO forces. And that Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam.

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see that Bergen is caught up in the same blindness as say Thomas Friedman in 2005 regarding Iraq -- and untold liberal intellectuals in every counterinsurgency since the beginning of recorded history.

Here's a different reading of some of the same facts. The fact that in a recent ABC poll, 63% of Afghan respondents supported the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan while only 8% supported that of the neo-Taliban is a welcome indication that the 8-year occupation has not yet done irreparable damage -- and indicates an opportunity to move the policy in a very different direction than that of counterinsurgency.

That lack of irreparable damage does not mean that the United States has done much good -- indeed, 63% thought the US had done a "fair" or "poor" job and a slight majority has an unfavorable opinion of the US.

Furthermore, 18% favored escalation with 44% opposing, and an overwhelming 77% said the use of air strikes was "unacceptable." Hamid Karzai has also repeatedly gone on record opposing U.S. escalation and favoring attempts at a negotiated settlement.

Although there has been a flurry of stories about a new "kinder, gentler" approach in Afghanistan, the truth is that air strikes will remain a major component of the counterinsurgency and that whenever the Taliban is able to inflict significant casualties on American troops "force protection" will trump other considerations. The likelihood of doing further damage is great. The chance that some good will be done seems minuscule; I see in Washington neither the ability nor the political will to come up with and implement a strategy for a political solution.

Posted at 1:05 pm.

July 13, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara slipped away peacefully last week, leaving life with none of the turmoil he brought to the lives of so many others. Even at the end, a nation that could forgive the criminal Richard Nixon and the obtuse Gerald Ford couldn't quite do the same for the deeply reflective McNamara. Perhaps it was because of his reputation for icy logic, perhaps because of his habit of crying in public More likely, it was because, instead of stonewalling history and morality, he actually expressed doubts and regrets about his past actions -- such sins as he committed should not be compounded by repentance.

And yet I shed no tear for him.

He was among the last of a now dead breed of public servant: men of great integrity and exquisite morality whose rectitude remained unharmed through all the death and destruction they brought to other nations, who entered public service with no thought for public aggrandizement and maintained that selflessness as they enjoyed the multifarious perquisites of power in America.

Yeah, I really disliked him.

Actually, unlike me, a few of his critics, even those who remained unmoved by the publication of In Retrospect, his memoir of his involvement in Vietnam War policy, did finally forgive him for his mea culpa in Errol Morris's much-acclaimed film, The Fog of War.

After all, how often does one hear such a thing from a government official who has not been committing sexual peccadilloes or embezzling money? When Richard Clarke began his public testimony before the 9/11 Commission with an apology for failing in his duty to help prevent the attacks, for most of the political class his words just didn't compute. How could the concept of apology even apply?

How remarkable, then, that McNamara apologized for his role in the butchery of 3 million or more Vietnamese, when for so many years the country's stance has been that the only ones who should apologize for it are the Vietnamese who so heartlessly rent our society and the protesters who were so indecorous in their outcries against injustice.

Except, of course, that he didn't.

I watched Errol Morris's fascinating and inexplicable film a few years ago and came away annoyed in equal parts at McNamara and at Morris. Why would a liberal filmmaker interviewing a man so intimately involved with the atrocity that was the Vietnam War structure his film as a serious of ethical and practical pronouncements from on high, with the war criminal as the guru on the mountaintop and the rest of us as the earnest seekers for his wisdom?

The way that McNamara so blithely and naturally fell into the role as if it was what God had intended for him all along says all you need to know about his supposed repentance.

But it's also all there in black and white in his book, In Retrospect, right on the first page of the preface. The reason he finally came forward in 1995, so long after his words could have made a difference? He had "grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders."

To translate: he wrote the book to combat one of the key components of the so-called "Vietnam syndrome" -- the collapse of the unthinking tendency to believe our political leaders were men of great integrity and ability and that our institutions were designed for the best in this best of all possible worlds. I hold no brief for rampant cynicism, but surely it is better than the unthinking conformity of McNamara's salad days, for which he had such great nostalgia?

The most remarkable and revealing thing of all is that he thought that his description of his thoughts and actions at several crucial junctures in the war would work against this cynicism, perhaps that his example would inspire other future public servants.

In his memoirs, you will see many references to "mistakes" he made, none to crimes he was involved in committing. He waxes eloquent about his support for civil rights and his desperate fears that "someone would be hurt" when racist southern whites attacked Freedom Riders; the idea that people would be hurt by the decisions he and his colleagues so bloodlessly made about Vietnam does no enter into it.

The most striking moment in The Fog of War is when McNamara, aghast at the horror of it, says to a Vietnamese counterpart more or less "We killed three or four million of you. How could you make us do that? How can you go to sleep at night with that on your conscience?"

He went to his death, I am sure, blaming an intransigent world for its refusal to accept his grand moral vision.

Posted at 11:25 am.

July 6, 2009

The Good Die Young

Robert McNamara, 93.

July 6, 2009

Weekly Commentary -- Coup in Honduras and the Left

I understand only too well the perversity of those who are always on the outside. Alienated from a system of power that they see as fundamentally oppressive, skeptical of a flow of information that seems largely to serve the imperatives of that system, it is only too natural for them to reflexively doubt the true along with the false and to reflexively oppose the good along with the bad.

Understandable as this pathology may be, it is something that must be overcome if one is to be serious about making change in a complex, stable society like the United States.

A vocal segment of the left has jumped to the conclusion that the United States backs the military coup in Honduras, perhaps the most striking example being an op-ed in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot. With key facts outdated almost by the time it hit the Web, the title was dramatically changed from "Does the US back the Honduran coup?" to an acknowledgment that in fact the United States was on the right side here.

With some notable exceptions, there was little mention by the left of what a remarkable development this was. During the Cold War, of course, we never saw a right-wing military coup we didn't like. More recently, the United States supported and was likely involved in the 2002 coup in Venezuela and largely organized the 2004 coup in Haiti.

In the 1990s, the United States was at least nominally opposed to the coup in Haiti, although it was very slow to take serious measures and it made restoration of Aristide conditional on his agreement to a series of humiliating conditions. The U.S. did immediately and strongly oppose Fujimori's 1992 autogolpe in Peru and Serrano's copycat autogolpe in Guatemala in 1993.

The Honduras coup is quite different, however. The United States has always had a strained relationship with the most militaristic elements in Haiti, which have felt free to use anti-American rhetoric when it suited them. A militaristic right-wing president's coup against himself, likewise, is likely to lead to his being too independent and less controllable -- legions of State Department bureaucrats have occupied themselves with reining in dictators we support who have proved themselves unreliable.

The Honduran military, on the other hand, is well-organized and disciplined, with very close institutional ties to the U.S. military. They removed from power a semi-Chavista president who was embarked on an attempt to alter the constitution in a way that was, at least according to the Honduran Supreme Court, itself illegal. Any past U.S. administration would likely equivocate, explain that there were issues in the conduct of both sides, and suggest mutual concessions. This time, after a day or two to figure out what it was doing, the administration unequivocally stated that Zelaya was president and should be returned to power. It's true that Zelaya has said he now won't try to change the constitution, but we don’t know whether that is due to U.S. pressure or not.

Furthermore, the U.S. military immediately ceased contact with the Honduran military and the administration is studying whether to call this a military coup, which would require cessation of most aid to Honduras.

Obama has been criticized for not taking the lead and not issuing ultimata to the coup government. I believe that this is in part a deliberate decision to defer to the OAS and Latin American governments and to suggest that we no longer want to be the overbearing policeman barking orders to everyone. Of course, this is possible because Honduras doesn't matter to any current conception of U.S. strategic interests, but it is a welcome change.

For the rest, the Obama administration clearly doesn't want to jeopardize its ties with the Honduran military through any sort of precipitate action. Given the extreme polarization between the international community and the Honduran political elite on this issue, it's an open question whether an isolating move like that would cause capitulation or would simply harden the stance of the coup plotters. In Obama's position, I would be cautious too.

The unrelenting sameness of the war on terror, punctuated now and then by some controversy over torture or by assertions of independence by the Iraqi government, has led many on the left to believe that nothing has changed despite everything. On the contrary, I think there is a greater potential openness in the shaping of national security doctrine than there has been in over 20 years, but we will need an entirely different approach to realize those possibilities.

Posted at 10:45 am.