Learned nothing and forgot nothing

 Fourteen years ago I wrote this:

Seven years after 9/11, we're stuck in Groundhog Day and I just don't care anymore. Bin Laden has become, like the flu or like natural male enhancement, something that cynical hucksters use to bilk the rubes. For the past two years I've posted the usual solemn reflection on the innocent people who died that day.

Fuck that.

We lost the right to parade that goddam bloody shirt when the first baby died in a mistaken bomb run over Baquoba or hapless taxi driver got sodomized at Bagram Air Base. 

Now we're just another Great Power on the make, another Smedley Butler racketeer using our dead and our grieving to justify our own damn greed and fear.

Fuck that. Fuck all that. Who'd have thought that we would let nineteen yay-hoos with boxcutters and screwdrivers and a bunch of panicked politicians yank a nation so far off the road of national self-interest and sanity?

I see not the slightest reason to retract or restate any of the above.

I've stayed away from the television and, largely, the internet today simply because I would be irked by the usual hypocritical wailing about the events of the day. I get a sense that they're more muted than ever outside the usual right-wing nimrods, which is both fortunate and long overdue.

But the bottom line is that Dubya and Deadeye Dick Cheney still live in cossetted retirement and Charles Gittings died with his mission of justice unfulfilled.

The End of the End of History

Hardly anyone now remembers Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, the 1992 publication that argued that the 20th Century had been, in effect, a massive, bloody, melodramatic argument over the question "what is the best way to govern human polities and organize human economic activities?" and that the collapse of the Soviet Empire proved that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were the answers.

Well, of course Mr. Fukuyama ended up walking that back a bit. But I think that we, especially here in the United States, still see Fukuyama's End of History as durable and desirable endpoints for society as well as the inevitable and immutable state of American society.

It might be well to consider, however, that perhaps the arc of history is bending a trifle, and not - at least, not for those of us who see both of those (in one form or another...) as, at the very least, preferable to autocracy - towards the End that Mr. Fukuyama - and many of us - hoped to see.

In Turkey the now-president-for-life has effectively become an autocrat. The Philippines - admittedly never exactly a global ideal of political stability - appears to be heading towards autocracy under Duarte. Poland has made a fairly hard turn towards some sort - there appears to be a disagreement as to whether this turn is harder-left or harder-right - of authoritarian rule. An outright neo-fascist has a considerably-less-than-zero chance of being elected President of the Fifth French Republic in 2017. Russia was never anything but an autocracy but has now abandoned even the pretense of being anything but a dictatorship; the romantic in me almost wishes that Trump's pal Putin would quit kidding around and become Tsar Vladimir the First.

And, speaking of Il Douche, arguably the United States has elected as President a man who has made some very autocratic statements on the stump (and elsewhere...) and who has appointed an openly white nationalist his "primary advisor".

Since 11/9/16 I have been hearing quite a bit of tut-tutting about the actual authoritarian content of the inside of President-elect's tangerine-combover and a fair bit of "there-there" at my raised hackles over the likely changes to come. I'm hearing about "veto points" and "the durability of democratic institutions" and "waiting for Trump to show his hand".

All of which sounds very reasonable.

It probably sounded reasonable in the general headquarters of the French Army in April of 1940.

But one of the first rules I learned when assessing military intelligence is to attempt to determine "What is the enemy's most dangerous course of action?" Because that would be the move that had the potential to utterly overset you. Other attacks might be dangerous, or do damage...but the real danger was that action that could completely unhinge your defenses, as the mounted attack through the Ardennes and the breakthrough at Sedan did to France the following May.

We the People tend to think of ourselves as a "democracy", a "republic" because that has been our default setting for generations. We like to think that we are immune to this sudden burst of authoritarian rule. But, you'll note, that the places that are getting (or are likely to get) autocrats thought (or think) that they had or have strong democratic institutions. And, in many cases, those institutions "remain". They just don't work anymore.

We've watched for years as the state Republican parties suppress the votes of anyone not likely to vote GOP. About 24% of the U.S. public has now elected a man whose entire public life has been a squalling tantrum of greed and thin-skinned anger, usually expressed in litigation. Now, of course, Trump has all the resources of a nation-state to pursue his vendetti, assuming that he doesn't change his thin-skin or his spots.

One difficulty with trying to assess what the incoming Administration's "most dangerous course of action" for liberalism and the America founded in the New Deal of the Thirties is assessing the difference between policy and political danger.

To me, as a child of that New Deal America, the policies pursued by Trump's Republican cronies in Congress are a fearful danger. People like Paul Ryan have had a boner for destroying the social safety net that is visible from space. The probability is overwhelmingly good that a Ryan-controlled House will send a President Trump bills that will attempt to throw Social Security to the Wall Street wolves (oh, and how is YOUR 401K these days..?) and voucherize Medicare represents to me the insane likelihood of returning America;s social fabric to 1930. Old people will be impoverished - not the genteel poverty of Social Security but the deadly poverty of the Depression - sicken and die. People unable to work because of injury or illness, physical or mental, will have no recourse but to hope for private charity or relatives probably themselves living precariously.

We look to have some sort of climate-change "skeptic" idiot in charge of our national environmental policy. Wall Street regulation - never the strictest under Obama - appears to be going to turned over to the Bank of America. The Trump cabinet so far is populated by some of the wingiest nuts in the wingnut basket, people who never met a public thing they didn't want to deregulate, privatize, sell off, or monetize.

And there are no "checks and balances" on all of this. The GOP controls the White House, Congress, and will soon have the Supreme Court back.

It's like an Ann Coulter wet dream, and I can't imagine anything more dangerous to the America I grew up in than that.

(Also, eeeew).

Because, like a sort of vindictive and petty tribe of Bourbons, the GOP has become the Party that learns nothing yet never forgets a slight. Still smarting from the public's loathing of their feudal politics and ridiculously-plutocratic "economics" they forget what a turbulent, dangerous place the United States was prior to the long capital-labor peace won by the New Deal.

Riots, strikes...troops sent into the mills, bomb-throwing "anarchists" under every bed, soldiers gassing Bonus Marchers, strikers and scabs and Pinkertons battling in the streets and frightened editorials about rage and revolt and anarchy in every newspaper. Remember that that cunning old aristo FDR didn't give pensions to the proles because he loved them. He gave them because knew that if he didn't ameliorate the miseries of vulture capitalism the bad examples of Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy stood as beacons for those who thought that the ends of hanging bankers from every lamppost justified the means of revolution.

So, to me, this Trumpist indifference to the GOP desire for a return to the oligarchic rule and the Dickensian capitalism of 1929 is, indeed, the "most dangerous course of action" that must needs be mobilized against. I have a hard time imagining anything more dangerous.

But Dan Nexon can.

"...the thing about institutions — domestic or international — is that you often don’t realize until too late that they’ve changed beyond recognition. Or how fragile they are until they collapse. The other thing about democratic norms and institutions is once they break, they’re very hard to put back together. What is true domestically is doubly true internationally.

In other words, we can change policies. If you’re a libertarian, you can hope to undo Trump’s likely military budgets. If you’re a liberal, you can rebuild the welfare state. If you’re a conservative, you can push for balanced budgets. Climate is a bigger problem—because major reversals now could make meeting optimistic targets very, very hard—but even here environmentalists can live to fight another day.

But if we lose our institutions, we are in serious trouble. Often, the United States has played the “White Knight” pushing democratization. What country can play that role for the United States if we head towards a hybrid regime? What all of this means seems to me quite clear: We should hope for the best—that Trump is a successful President who tames his worst impulses and receives wise council—but prepare for the worst.

That means building a broad political coalition with one goal: keeping these institutions alive. Doing so requires setting aside policy differences (in fact, on routine policy matters I see no problem with Democrats and country-first Republicans working with Trump). It requires putting country over party. And it requires doing this because of something basic we know about creeping authoritarianism and hybrid regimes—the strongest force for democracy is a united opposition; divide-and-rule tactics are the first resort of the autocrat."

So is the bigger danger not the destruction of the Paris Agreement and a massive federal coal subsidy, or the zeroing-out of the OSHA budget...but, rather, the institutionalization of the FBI as the D.B. Norton Motor Corps for the personal use of President Trump in hunting down and destroying people who are mean to him on Twitter, or the end of NATO?

This whole "most dangerous course of action" thing is beginning to look more complex than I originally thought.

I will say this, though; I still contend that the time is now to begin. We need to take the potential autocrat at his word. The Turks did not. The Filipinos did not. The French, apparently, will not. And as the Russians could tell them; once the autocrat is in charge resistance is futile. Russia never had the chance we have, Turkey seems to have lost what chance they had.

We have not, but the example of all this dictatorship should be like a firebell in the night for us who have no love for our country, as flawed, as much of an oligarchy as it is already, to go even further down that easy path to the Rule of One.

For by the time the sound of tank engines is heard in the forest, it's too late.

Choking on silver

In case you wanted more doom and gloom (and talk about the weather, Ael...) here's two related news items laying out in excruciating detail the killing blow awaiting us at the top of the dark ramp ahead.

First, the near-certainty that we are in the process of baking our world to a delicate crunch.

And, second, that we are ensuring that our New Oligarchic Masters will not give a flying fuck about that.

And despite the furious verbal and written smokescreen that the meeching coterie of remoras for the wealthy and powerful will emit, these are related, and unless We the People act decisively and swiftly mean that those of us not insulated by wealth and power are headed for an ugly future.

Simply put, since the advent of the Industrial Revolution we've been transforming our planet not so much to an unprecedented degree but at a hyperkinetic rate. Our average global temperature has both risen and fallen significantly before this, but these were part of the larger global/solar system heat cycles.

What we've done has been, in effect, to add a heat wave to the vast swells of insolation, ocean circulation, carbon sequestration and release that affect the Earth and have pretty much since the damn thing cooled enough to accumulate an atmosphere.

We con't be sure how big this wave is relative to the swells. But we can tell that it's there, and that it has the potential - assuming that the overall global climate isn't dropping back into a glacial period - to drive our planet towards the kind of climate that makes grasslands of forests and deserts of grasslands, raises oceans and otherwise creates some pretty impressive changes in our local flora and fauna.

And the critical factor is that this is happening fast; a couple of hundred years, a flick of geologic time.

Things like our food crops are the products of generations of selective breeding, and our food-producing regions developed of millenia of human history. And the same history shows that when those crops and regional conditions change, as they did for the Sumerians, as they did for the Anasazi, that can get very difficult and deadly for the humans involved.

Unless...you have the wealth and power to insulate you from that change.

If you can move freely about the globe, if you can pay for your own sources of food, of heating and cooling, if you can pay for your own armies to secure those things and to defend you from those who don't have the wealth and power to secure them for themselves, well, then...why should you care?

Why shouldn't you be more interested in your short-term wealth and power? Why should you give a flying fuck what happens, then?

That's one of the huge reasons that oligarchy and plutocracy are bad for everyone outside the oligarchs, plutocrats and their entourage and, eventually, for them, too.

When you put that much wealth and power into the small group that also controls the polity you produce a perfect storm of ignorance and indifference. The aristos don't know how bad it is for the proles and don't care.

We know what the inevitable result is. The ugly mess shambles along until finally some sort of unholy disaster unhinges everything. The society disintgrates into a war of all against all. The usual conclusion is either the ascent of a strongman, a Lenin or a Napoleon, or a descent into anarchy and barbarism as after the fall of Rome.

And for some reason we've managed to construct this meatgrinder and are ramming our collective dicks into it while we worry more about missing airliners and white girls and who's got the inside lane on this season's reality show.

I have absolutely no idea what the fuck to say about this except the dinosaurs had the excuse that their brains were the size of a fucking walnut.

The strong do what they can...

Interesting.

This is a "Wordle" word cloud of the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002:The application prepares a graphic measure of the number of times a word is used in a text. It is, then, a graph of the individual word density in the document.

Now, here is the same application product for the Obama Administration's 2010 NSS:I have to echo Robert Farley - I'm intrigued by the prominence of the word "must" in both documents:

"It’s interesting to me that “must” is so big in the tag clouds of both the Bush and Obama NSS." Farley says; “Must” implies a lack of freedom; it’s much different than “may” or “can.” It seems odd that the world’s sole superpower, hegemon, unipolar state etc. thinks strategically in terms of “must” rather than “can”."

Now part of this is, I think, a subset of the U.S. military habit of stating objectives in affirmative terms ("First battalion, Empty-empth Infantry WILL maneuver to secure such-and-such by 0700 21 JUNE 2010", for example).

But another part and, I think, the more substantive part, is the purpose this document and others like it have come to play in the propagandization of and psychological warfare directed towards the U.S. public.

Because of the very condition of our adventures in central and southwest Asia I suspect that the authors of this document intend it to hammer home the cruciality and centrality of military action as a means of enforcing national will and achieving national goals. "Must" is so much less negotiable than "can" or "should". "Must" sends the message that the Evil, Scary Bad People are going to taint our precious bodily fluids now, today, and MUST be defeated even if we have to sacrifice things like civil liberties and diplomatic finesses to do so.

So where I disagree with Farley is in my interpretation of the intent of the word "must". I don't think that "...psychologically, institutionally, and politically the imperative of “must” becomes real for policymakers..." I think that the policymakers know perfectly well that we have other options. But I think that they also know that those options do not have the potential for the optimal result they wish to obtain, regardless of the strong potential for a anti-optimal (that is, not merely less than the outcome that these policymakers wish completely for but a completely antithetical result; blowback, unanticipated outcome, disaster...call it what you wish) result.

They want to convince you, and me, that theirs is the ONLY option, much as BP wants you to believe that the only choice is between continued deepwater drilling using the current means and methods - and accepting the subsequent environmental disasters such as the one we're watching - and complete petroleum depletion and the End of the Industrial Era.

Farley seems to think cynically that the powers-that-be have been captured by their own apocalyptic rhetoric. I'm even more cynical; I think that the thrones and dominations are using these semantic smoke-and-mirrors tricks to continue to supinely ignore their foolery. He thinks that our leaders are fools. I think that our leaders are manipulative bastards who are playing us for fools.

I'm not sure which is truly worse, but I suspect that neither leads to a happy land of sparkle rainbows and fluffy puppies.

Hegemon's Dilemma

"As his troubles waxed, he became increasingly authoritarian and unapproachable, content to be set apart. (American general X) was not the only one who had difficulty making an appointment. Officials waited weeks to see him... By keeping rivals off balance through a technique of "fear and favor"...he appeared strong and indispensable, but he did not know how to make a government...his mind was narrow and his education limited.""His most serious handicap was the lack of competent government servants. He never allowed a really able man to reach an important post lest he become too strong. Because he made loyalty rather than ability the criterion of service he was surrounded by mediocrities.""The (ruling coalition) never succeeded in really uniting the country. Aware that the past had left too many pockets of doubtful loyalty, (he) could not trust all his armies. The opportunity for social change passed him by. Dependent more than ever on the (warlords)...he could not afford to antagonize them by reform measures. He governed by survival and ignored what he wanted to ignore. As a chief of a system without an exit he was, as (American general X) wrote, "in a hell of a fix.""The (U.S.) President could see no alternative to support for the (foreign leader). Fearing a vacuum after the defeat of (the external enemy) and repeatedly advised that only (foreign leader) could hold (the country) together, he gave him support in the form of a blank check. He was continually warned by (the country's) friends, who from sincere or self-interested motives wanted to get aid to (the country), that any slackening of support would lead to the collapse of the (capital city) government.""In a typical alarm of this kind, Dr. (conservative leader) of the (large conservative political organization), informed the President that (the country's) morale was "deteriorating rapidly", the "defeatist element was gaining support" and "danger grows of (the leader's) losing power and of a compromise between the (foreign country) and (the enemy power)."

So...is this Rajiv Chandrasekaran writing about Hamid Karzai and the Marjeh Offensive, 2010, or Barbara Tuchman writing about Chiang Kai-shek and the fall of Burma, 1942?

(Cross-posted to MilPub)

The End of History?

I nod in passing to my German friends celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall...

...and the end of more than four decades of partition of the land "von den Maas bis an die Memel".

Y'know what's interesting, tho? (and it's me, it IS just me and my woolgathering mind) But what comes to the front of my brain is that it was just this period that inspired Frank Fukuyama to pen "The End of History", that paean to Ayn Rand's panty-sniffers in the Mergers and Acquisition Department as the Big Winner in the Civilization Sweepstakes. In the Showdown the Evil Commies had to turn up a pair of deuces and Capitalist Goodness raked in the big pot of the historical triumph. Or so the story went.

Yet here we are, twenty years on and the Bullpen of Big Business is mired in pointless foreign wars with a ragged band of 12th Century wannabes, her roads, bridges and schools decaying whilst ignorant armies clash on shout-radio and that triumphant "unfettered free market" done went and shat the bed.

Well.

Well, well, well...

I'm sure glad I was wise enough to invest my Peace Dividend in my rock-solid 401K. Who can imagine what would have happened if my country had refused to seize the opportunity to completely reassess itself in the wake of the Soviet collapse and instead chose to embark on a program of self-impoverishment, reckless privatization, social stratification and foolish pseudoimperialism?


Erich Honecker laughs somewhere in Hell.

中國

Tomorrow is the official 60th anniversary of the establishment of the "People's Republic of China", the Marxist/Maoist/socialist-communist/whatever-the-hell-it-is-now edition of the great Middle Kingdom

mighty cultural and economic power of Asia and birthplace of my not-so-mighty little daughter, Missy Shaomei, whose power is almost entirely composed of thermonuclear adorability.

Having watched some of the last Summer Olympics, I'm sure the anniversary party will be quite a show...

But even in a digital age, there are times when I think that China is still perhaps the original riddle wrapped in a mystery surrounded by an enigma. Massive and complex, at times peculiarly weak, sometimes, and to some, frighteningly strong...it's worth considering the changes that the past 60 years have visited on it and its people.

While just floating around the Internets thinking about this, I came across this story over at China Bystander:

"...just after when Deng Xioaping turned his back on Mao’s revolution and launched the country on its present course of economic development. In the lobby of the Dong Fang Hotel in Guangzhou, just over the road from what we still then called the Canton Trade Fair, an elderly party cadre stood in tears. With his blue Mao suit and cap and weather beaten, careworn nut brown face he was the embodiment of the first 30 tumultuous years of the revolution. The cause of his tears, he said, was the installation of a one-armed bandit, the return of the pernicious evil of gambling, and the betrayal of all he had sacrificed his life for."

The next 60 years will have to be hard put to equal the past 60 for change. But we can be sure of this; change there will be, and throughout the change, China will be a force to be reckoned with across the world. Cliche, yes, I know. But it's hard to avoid that one. The Middle Kingdom is, well, in the midst of everything; its people in both numbers and human presence, it's political and economic power, it's position astride Asia. One can imagine many different futures for our own country, but it's hard to think of one in which China will not be a large part of it...Any thoughts?

While you're thinking, here's a link to some wonderful photographs of the preparations and parts of the celebration for the anniversary party.Did I tell you it'd be a helluva show?

Ignorance Abroad

Back at the end of May we talked a little about why it seemed that the United States had spent much of the preceding forty years flailing about the hustings of the globe, expending blood and treasure for reasons that appeared...specious at best and dubious at worst.

We concluded that the U.S. reputation as a rough beast was overblown, product of a unique confluence of political and social inequities. But we also decided that one real oddity was that although much or most of this foreign war was not really beneficial to the bulk of the American people (the supposed sovereign entity in their own polity) that said People seemed apathetic and even actively inimical to attempts to stop the wars or even, through questioning, enlighten the debate about their causes, conduct and goals.

Because on the face of it, a pretty large proportion of America's wars and police actions don't make a lot of sense if you're an auto salesman in Des Moines.Let's look at where we've fought since the end of our active roles in Vietnam.

1972-1983: For the decade after Vietnam we had a pretty quiet time, militarily. You can pretty much lump the Mayaguez Incident in with the fighting in SE Asia that was the "halo effect" from Vietnam (which includes the internal wars and genocides in Cambodia and Laos as well as the border wars between China and North Vietnam). The American people had pretty much had it with war for half a generation. For the first part we had His Accidency, Gerald Ford, who would have been dismembered by enraged soccer moms if he'd started a foreign war, and a Congress largely occupied with fighting inflation and the pernicious political effects of the Nation's Most Evil Presidency (Pre-Dubya Division).

Then we elected a peanut farmer who ran on the time-tested slogan "he kept us out of war" but whose entire administration was consumed in the gasoline fire of the Fuel Crisis and stagflation.By the time we remembered how we were supposed to be the Chosen People and elected a Hollywood cutout of a hero whose incipient Alzheimer's confused him about whether he actually fought in WW2, we were in no shape to fight the Maryknoll School For Girls and it took Ronnie several years to find a couple of patsies for us to bitchslap.

1983: Well, we finally found them. One, at least, in the form of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, up to that time known only for nutmeg and having the world's most endearingly whack dictator, Sir Eric Gairy, who ran his tiny country as a one-party state when he wasn't using his fifteen minutes of podium time at the UN to pass a resolution to welcome the UFO aliens. Grenada was in the middle of some unusually exciting political upheaval when Mr. Reagan sent in the gunboats; between political chaos and the typical Caribbean schlamperei the walkover took about four days longer than it should have. I should add that Grenada was my own little war, a disorganized tropical muddle only temporarily enlivened by the sudden arrival of the XVIII Airborne Corps commander, LTG "Fat Jack" MacMull to bitchslap my division commander, MG "Fast Eddie" Trobaugh, for - given two and a half brigades of airborne infantrymen to subdue a raggedy-ass band of Cuban construction troops and the elite Grenadian Army - moving like stagnant pond water on a cold day. (Not to say that Fat Jack had a point, but Eddie DID retire as a two-star, so obviously others up at the Five-Sided Fool Farm shared his opinion of Eddie's military genius.)

Nobody I've talked to or heard from really believes the Reagan line of "rescuing" the students from the cereal-box-top-quality "medical school" in Grenada, whose primary hazard was losing their bottle of Coppertone, and the military risk that Grenada, or Cuba for that matter, posed was always minuscule. The official Ronnie line was that the Point Salines airfield was a supposed "lily pad" for Soviet power projection, although where this power was to be projected to in the middle of the American lake of the Caribbean God alone knows.No, there was no profit for the American people in Grenada, as the subsequent 26 years have proved; outside of Disney Cruise Lines and myself nobody knows the place exists. In a moment of intensely private irony, the Grenadian and Cuban governments announced last autumn their intention to erect a marker to the 24 Cubans waxed back in October of '83 to match the similar geegaw honoring the 19 Yanks who bit the dust.

So far no one has proposed anything for the thirty or so Grenadians who were blown away as a cost of doing foreign policy business. Oh, well.

Mind you, the OTHER little adventure Ronnie dragged us into in '83 was Lebanon; an appallingly idiotic goatrope of a clusterfuck inside an enigma wrapped in a decorative tinsel of abject geopolitical fucktardry. What was the purpose was never clear.The Global Security website, parroting the official U.S. government line, says that "MNF forces returned to Beirut at the end of September 1982 as a symbol of support for the government." How squatting at Beirut Airport providing target practice for a pack of savage Muslim guerrillas on the roof of the Holiday Inn with a box of RPG rounds and two cartons of Camels is unclear, but what became of the moronic mission was a complete Fail for the U.S. along with the two-hundred odd Americans killed standing around while the government of Lebanon - in which we had no real geopolitical interest and no conceivable economic or social stake - went to hell.

So compared to Lebanon, Grenada seems like the Gadsen Purchase in political terms...

Everything was quiet on the western front for another six years until...

1989: Then President George Bush I sends in U.S. forces to eliminate that global threat to peace and stability...ummm...Panama.

Yeah, I know. It had The Canal. Which it was about as likely to use as a lever against the U.S. as Omar Torrijos was to rise from his dirt nap in the flossy mausoleum out on Fort Amador and do the Funky Chicken.

Manny "Pineapple Face" Noriega, while a loathsome dictator, was certainly no worse than a bunch of other Latin and South American leaders we were all kissy-huggy with in 1989, including Vicino Cerezo of Guatemala and Pinochet of Chile.

Drugs were going to go up noses in Brentwood and Grosse Point no matter who ran the show in Panama. Freighters were going to transit the canal. "Los Rabes Blancos" - the "white asses" - who owned and operated Panama were going to be the HMFIC regardless of who sat in the big chair in Panama City. The international bankers who used Panama as a piggy bank to cheat their nation's tax collectors and play Masters of the Universe were...well, given the past twelve months, who wouldn't want to see 98% of all international financiers hung up in hell being sodomized by a thousand burning devils employing their ruinously barbed erections, eh, so who gives a rat's ass about them, eh?The point is...what did the U.S. public get out of "Operation Just Cause" other than the lifetime cost of the care and feeding of Pineapple Face and the beginning of the idiotic Pentagon tradition of giving these things "code names" that wouldn't deceive a retarded gorilla? ("Operation Iraqi Freedom"; that'll fool the Iraqi intelligence services, boys - think they'll guess it's a plan for the liberation of fucking Andorra? Shrewd!)

1991: Financed by the freedom-loving sheiks of Kuwait, we trounced Saddam's sorry little army and made Kuwait free. -Ish. Democracy-like. Monarchy-lite-ian.

Whatever. The point was that finally we were fighting a war for the best reasons: economic gain and the defense of access to vital natural resources. And because of Daddy Bush's bold - though not election-winning - "line in the sand" we not only solved the Middle East's problems, chastened that Evil Saddam and protected the poor Shiites, and ensured that our gas prices would be low forever because we didn't have Saddam holding our commodities prices hostage.

Oops.

Well, at least we got "Three Kings" out of it.And in the end we got more out of the Kuwaitis (the Second Gulf War pretty much paid for itself) than we got out of the Somalis (1993) and the Bosnians (1995) and the Kosovars (1999). Nice folks, good people (OK, except for the Somalis, who are like the Scots in their delight in tribal war, treachery and murder) but beneficial to Joe and Mary American Lunchpail?

Not so much.

Which brings us up to today, and the apparently endless efforts to turn Iraq into Framingham, Massachusetts, with a tidy little democratic government, clean streets and plump, well-scrubbed schoolchildren, and to remake Afghanistan into...well, whatever isn't a barely-medieval, cordilleran pesthole ridden with factionalism, warlords, ancient tribal and religious animosities and the world's richest opium poppy crop (makes you wonder what "Harvest Home" is like in the Kandahar Valley, doesn't it?)

Clausewitz famously described warfare as a way of continuing a political argument once words had become ineffective. So the implication is that a war, to be worth even the loss of a single life and the expense of a single penny, should be for some purpose that benefits the polity, that is, the People of the nation involved.

Repelling invasion is a pretty straightforward one. Or defeating an enemy that presents an existential threat. Of course, this doesn't have to be a "hot" war; the U.S. managed to outlive the Soviet Union without ever going nuclear warhead-to-nuclear warhead with them. Punitive blows against those who have hurt you and show evidence of willingness to continue unless soundly beaten.

There are more subtle, less immediate reasons for fighting. Securing a political or economic advantage, such as control of (or the prevention of a threat to) some place that can choke off your goods (canals, say, or straits, or air routes) or throttle your economy (natural resources such as petroleum, minerals or even foodstuffs). Helping a strategic ally. Containing instability, war, or similar human disaster.

But think about it.

Did the fight in Grenada involve any of these things?
Panama (and recall that to close the Canal would have impoverished Panama before it even tickled the U.S. economy)?

Kuwait? Yes, indeed, it did, as I discussed.

Somalia?
Bosnia?
Kosovo?
Afghanistan? (I mean by this the Occupied Afghanistan - the initial punitive strike on Afghanistan is defensible in the "war as political argument" sense.)
Iraq certainly has strategic petroleum resources, but I would say that the combination of the fucking mess we've made of the occupation and the fundamentally disastrous post-Ottoman mess that is Iraq makes the probability of a happy ending - which is to say a stable, democratic, Western-allied, peaceful nation - coming out of the Third Gulf War no better than an even chance.Now ALL of these wars and police actions are valuable to, and understandable as the acts of, an economic and political ruling class; the sort of logic that drove the English kings to spend 116 years spending blood and treasure to rule France.

I'll wager that the average man-at-arms from Colchester, the archer from Little Doddering, the camp follower from Devon could have given half a nanoshit who sat on the throne of the Capets. But, being subjects at best and serfs at worst, they didn't have a choice but to follow their betters to war and hope to come home alive and perhaps with a bit o' loot. But the overall effect of the Hundred Years' War, for 99.7% of the people who fought in it, or were fought over, was useless and wretched if not actually fatal.

The single biggest factor in precipitating the foundation of the United States was the colonists' anger and resentment over their belief that they were having to pay for, as well as suffering the ill-effects and none of the benefits of, the French and Indian War. To the American colonists, this "cabinet war" was forced down them in a toxic brew of royal pride and noble venality. They resolved, once down to the business of setting up their own country, to prevent this sort of private cabal.

So our Constitution is written so that ONLY the People in Congress can declare a war. That being the case, the notion that the U.S. is a monstrous armed camp, a Leviathan bristling with weapons and engaged in fighting anywhere in the world for political aims either so vague, or without any discernible sane political end at all, that no air-breathing mammal could countenance them, should have by now produced a furious storm of public anger. Such a wind of rage should blow that no political figure should be able to stand before the demand that the United States - the putative Beacon of Liberty, the City on the Hill - cease rampaging about foreign people's homes, release those foreign peoples it has snatched up without charge and without explanation, leave those foreign people to their own business, and come home to live in as much peace as can be managed in a world without law above the selfish law of nations.
We seem to be spending a great deal of time and trouble to turn central and southwest Asia in Fragmingham, Mass. only with more goat kebabs. Just looking at the benefit to the U.S. public this would seem to be quixotic at best and MOronic at worst.

So - why DO we fight?

To this I can only perceive two explanations. They aren't "reasons", in that they are hardly reasonable to any hominid possessing a living brain. They don't really make sense, in the meaning of the term of making a coherent and logical case for a course of action. But they do explain the otherwise inexplicable passivity of the American electorate in the face of this obscenely expensive and moronic debacle so valueless to the body of the American public.

The first is IGNORANCE.And, by this, I don't mean stupidity. I don't think that Americans, on the whole, are any more or less intelligent than any other residents of any country on Earth. We certainly have our share of dummies - any listen to the call-ins to a Rush Limbaugh radio show will prove that - but no more than we deserve. We send our kids to decent schools - although I do wish that they spent more time learning HOW to think rather than WHAT to think - and we have unparalleled exposure to ideas and opinions.No, I mean ignorance. Lack of experience, vision, applied knowledge of the world, the people and places in it, and ideas about it.

Americans are, by and large, ignorant of the world around them. We can afford to be; in fact, our geography dictates that we are almost bound to be, unless we take the effort to transcend our limits. Perhaps only an Australian, a Chinese or a Russian are as isolated. A European, a Middle Easterner, a South or Central American, and most Asians can't drive or ride a train more than a day without being Somewhere Else. a place where the people speak at least a different dialect, if not a completely different language. Dress a little differently. Listen to different music, like different foods, play different sports. The closeness of these differences forces people in these places to pay closer attention to those who aren't like them. They may not like them - in fact, this proximity may contribute to cherished old loathings - but they can't act as if they are something in a TV war movie. No matter how far we go, we can't escape our Americanness. IT's vast, it's all around us. I think this is a huge factor in explaining, for instance, why we're still farting around in the Afghan Kush. The people driving the bus have their own agenda. But the rest of us, the plain, simple, ordinary Americans who aren't writing to their Congresscritter asking why the hell we're fighting over the fucking Korengal Valley...we just don't GET how really, truly, genuinely, fundamentally different a Hazara tribesman is from Jay Leno. We don't. We, a lot of us, subconsciously think that the whole world is like America - after all, OUR whole world is, isn't it? - and that all those "other" people are like Americans (only a little dirtier and smellier). We want peace and a nice lawn and Viagra and Angelina Jolie in buttless chaps...he does too, right? So, like the cartoon American tourists, if we just speak English LOUD enough and SLOW enough they'll "get" it and BE like us, right?We're also ignorant, pig-ignorant, criminally ignorant, of war and the effects of war. We were ignorant enough back in the Eighties, but by now the draft era has so far receded that only a handful of us have Seen the Elephant. And none of us, not even our Greatest Generation moms and dads or grandparents, really understand war the way the Europeans who lived through or were raised by the generations that survived the First and Second World Wars.

I chuckle bitterly when I hear some war-porn addict mocking the French for their pusillanimity. You just don't get it, do you, jackhole? You're talking about the fiercest beasts of a bestial continent, the Butchers of Europe, the blood-gluttons of History, who carved a gory trail of corpses from Tours to Verdun before the horrific nightmare of the Western Front knocked the savagery right out of them. Try offering some Freedom Fries to a sunken-eyed man-at-arms of Rocroi, a loot-burdened old grognard of Smolensk, a filthy poilu of Chemin-des-Dames and see what that gets you. No; we can warble along to "Iraq and I Roll" because we don't have a Dresden or a Verdun or a Somme or a Coventry or a Stalingrad in our memories of war, just idiotic Mel Gibson films and bad country music.

The second is SLOTH.We're just lazy.Our Framers handed us down a nation they intended to be run by the rich and the well-born. Men and women worked and fought hard, from 1789 until 1968 (When the Civil Rights Act was signed into law), to roll back the privilege and entitlement of the wealthy and the well-connected. Since the 1960's we could have taken the warning we were given by the example of Mister Nixon and his cronies, whose intention it was (and is) to return the power to the hands of the powerful, and continued the fight, continued to hold the wealthy, the famous and the powerful at arm's length with the skepticism of a born republican.

Instead, we, most of us, have chosen to abandon the public fora to the malefactors of great wealth, their corporate enablers and the bathtub scum they have purchased to do their legislating for them. We have more interest in the doings of Jon and Kate (and bad cess to me for even knowing who these worthless idiots are) than in compelling our own rulers to tell us the truth. We choose to be comforted by lies rather than be shamed by the truth.We are truly well on our way to becoming subjects rather than citizens.

So.

Are we monsters? Savages? Bloody-handed Huns rampaging throughout the weaker world around us because......we glory in slaughter and conquest, lust to crush our enemies, drive them before us, to hear the lamentations of their women?

No.We are, most of us, luxury- and trivia-loving lotos-eaters, slothful and ignorant followers along for the ride that the real rulers of our country are taking us on.

That doesn't call for much fire and brimstone, perhaps.But it doesn't say much praiseworthy about us, either.

All the troubles in the world...

Last week I posted a rumination about war and peace; specifically, the American way of war and what seems like the relative lack of peace we have lived through over the past fifty years or so.

It all started with the Wanderer's Daughter's question:

"I can't help but feeling a tiny bit of shame at our national ethnocentricity." she said, "Read: blindness. OK, it's more than a tiny bit of shame...but I don't want to be written off as unpatriotic. I'm not. I am genuinely fond of my country. Heaven knows, I had plenty of opportunities to leave it, and I turned them all down. Here's the thing: I love my country. I do! It's a beautiful country. There are many ways in which I love my country. But, how did we get so isolated and blindered? The horror. How do we break out of this inward-gazing cycle?"

And that got me to thinking about how it seemed that my country had been at war with someone, somewhere, pretty much all of my adult life - and most of my childhood, too, since the little fracas in Southeast Asia kicked off when I was two.I didn't like the idea that I was living in, and had spent much of my life in the uniform of, some sort of warrior state, the Sparta of the Western Hemisphere. Are we the warmongers of the West? Are we so egocentric, so violent towards anyone not "like us" that the rest of the world should be afraid, be very afraid?

So I sat down to read and think about this a bit.

Here's my conclusions, for what they're worth.

To sum up; I don't think that we in the U.S. are uniquely racist, blind or bellicose. I do think we have inherited an aggressive and inward-looking mindset from the European nations that produced us, and that we are in the midst of an odd period in which the U.S. is both disproportionally physically and militarily strong but intellectually weak, having been led from rational thought through the intent of knaves and fools. We do tend to blunder about overseas, but more from ignorance and fretfulness than malice or cupidity. So I think the answer is that we suffer from some social institution failures that make our overseas adventuring possible (especially when it coincides with the needs of our elites) - but that we're not typically imperial; we're just at the apogee of one of our policy cycles.

Here's the answer in detail:

1. We are Western Europeans, and as such have fallen heir to the Western European legacy: advanced technology, political unity and aggressive self-confidence. Western Europe is perhaps the single most unique example of hypertrophic technical, social and political development - a geopolitical Perfect Storm (at least you might think of it that way if you had been an Aztec, a Penobscot, a Ceylonese, a Zulu, a Burman or an Australian aborigine...) - in human history. The inhabitants of Eurasia were specially gifted by biology and technology, to start with.

A huge concentration of domesticatable animals - and in particular, chickens and pigs, who combined to bless us with infectious lethal diseases like influenza, smallpox and cholera - and plants are found only within Eurasia. This combination enabled concentrated agriculture and husbandry, the production of excess wealth, and the early development of soldiering as a trade as well as political sophistication.

The combination of technical and social innovation produced advanced metallurgy and woodcraft, creating everything from hinges and doors to arquebuses and caravels.

Just the right amount of external political pressure - in the form of the Islamic enemies to the east who were strong enough to menace but not to conquer - and intercene squabbling among the nations of Western Europe created politically centralized, fiscally and economically adventurous, socially cohesive and technically innovative nation-states at a time when most of the rest of the world was still at the feudal level or even no more organized than bands of hunter-gatherers. And then released these clenched fists of nations on the rest of the world long before it was ready for them.

In other words, starting in the 15th Century the Old World went through the rest of the world like a dose of fucking salts. The native civilizations of the New World were overwhelmed.However, being Spanish and Portugese, the Spanish and Portugese conquerors of Central and South America wanted only to mulct their new dominions of treasure. They didn't exterminate their native subjects; in fact, a Mexican acquaintance of mine once bemoaned his country's ongoing social and political problems as going back to the uncomfortable fusion of mostly-autochthenous proles being ruled by mostly-allocthonous nobles. "You got to kill all your Indians!" he griped, "And we just fucked ours..."

The North Americans did, in fact, largely exterminate the native peoples. Instead of a hybrid civilization of native and European - mestizo - the Norteamericanos are puro Anglo, the lineal descendants of those aggro, technical and tactical hard men who swarmed ashore in 1492 and 1620...

The past three hundred and eighty-some years we've been living off the social and political capital we inherited from our European procreators. So it's not surprising that, as a nation, we are both aggressive and self-involved. The people who created America weren't interested in hearing what Asians, Africans or native Americans had to say. They were interested in taking from those people what was good for them; what was theirs was theirs and what was yours was...negotiable.

2. We are in the midst of an extreme endmember of a Great Power cycle, in which our country is disproportionately powerful and engaged in global fiddling; we don't have the perspective to see ourselves in context regarding this - it seems like we're the Global Bully and always have been. Prior to 1945 our national aggressiveness was pretty much taken up with all that native American extermination I was talking about. We fought the British (to get free of the Daddy - all kids go through that), the French (just because), the Algerians (because they were pissing us off), the Mexicans (for the same reason we killed all the native Americans - they had some land we wanted), each other (over African slaves, which most of the white people fighting didn't much like, either), the Spanish (to prove we could) and the Filipinos (because they were brown and they had some land we wanted). Pretty small potatoes, really, and when you look at what the British, French and Germans were up to at the same time, well...we weren't much of a bully.By the 20th Century, though, we were throwing our weight around pretty good in our neighborhood; the Central Americans got pretty sick of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps by 1939, I can tell you. But it was WW2 and the resulting Cold War that really got us in the global meddling business. Suddenly the entire world was a combat zone; it was us, eyeball-to-eyeball with the godless Commies. And remember, the old European powers who had been doing all the dirty work in the Third World hustings?

Gone, baby.

No more British imperial satraps to murder a couple of hundred thousand Singhalese. Suddenly a pipsqueak popinjay in some craptacular principality a zillion miles from anywhere was a Major Diplomatic Incident. Suddenly the CIA was lurking everywhere, funding plots and plotters, assassinating dictators and generally meddling in other people's business.And when you are the global economic powerhouse and defender of the West? Your armies and navies are busy, busy...

Paul Kennedy, in his work "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", describes the process by which nation-states accumulate economic, political and military power, use that power to extend their geopolitical reach, eventually over-reach themselves (the term Kennedy uses is "imperial overstretch"), and then decline. Because we are in the "stretch" (or possibly in the early stages of "overstretch") we see ourselves as this colossus, bestriding the narrow world and seemingly fighting everywhere and endlessly.

But, in fact, the entire period of this "Imperial America" has been less than a human lifetime. And nowhere is there any indication that the nation trewed up in it has the moral, social, political or economic desire or will to continue this domination any sustained period of time.

Because...

3. The great imperial powers of the past profited (in the selfish sense) from something we generally lack: the social belief that they were literally superior to those they ruled. Human history until the last half of the 20th Century was pretty kind to conquerors. Attacking, overwhelming and ruling other peoples was considered the natural order of things. The conqueror was the better man, the conquered the inferior, branded by God and Nature with the forehead-L for Loser.From the earliest days of "civilization" (and by that I mean the coagulation of humans into organized social groups: farming communities, towns, cities, city-states, nations and so forth...) the "civilized" had never lacked the innate sense that they were "better"; smarter, more put-together, richer, cleaner, better-smelling than the "uncivilized".

Perhaps the oldest human conflict was between the "farmer" - the human who lived off crops and herds,who needed a fixed abode and a settled society - and the "nomad", who continued in the ancient ways of hunting, gathering and traveling. The farmer needed his "own" land, his "own" animals and plants, and was inevitably going to end up fighting the nomad, whose peregrinations in search of game and wild plants didn't respect the farmer's fields and flocks.To the farmer - and in the sense that we're ALL "farmers", that is, all of our civilizations are the lineal descendants of the first Euphrates River valley townspeople - the nomad is barely human; a wild, dirty, dangerous savage. He appears like the wolf and is hunted like the wolf.

Townspeople like dogs and cats.

But since the extermination of 99.9% of human nomads, and the explosion of written and now electronic communication that has allowed humans to get to know all variety of other human types and ways, the pose of cultural superiority has become increasingly hard to maintain. Certainly there are many people who resist the notion that their ways are not the "best". But, generally speaking, one of the few real changes in global human behavior is the cessation of casual, widely-accepted, offhand racial, social or sexual superiority.

Here's a good example.

More than one hundred years ago someone named Frank Norris wrote a story called "Moran of the Lady Letty" purporting to tell the story of coastal skulduggery in 19th Century California. The villains of the piece are the Chinese "coolies" who crew many of the vessels. The author, clearly sensible of his readership's taste, lets you know right away what you need to know about the "Chinamen": "Cowardly, superstitious rats"; "the evil glint in his slant, small eye..."; "...the yellow devils..."And women? Our heroine, Moran, enters as a self-confident ship captain and holds her own until she falls for our hero, delightfully named Wilbur. Then, in her own words: "I'm not proud and strong and independent...I'm just a woman now, dear..." There's worse to come. Moran is threatened by the eeeeevil coolie Hoang. Let's let our narrator describe the scene:

"Hoang slipped the knife from the sleeve of his blouse. For an instant the old imperiousness, the old savage pride and anger, leapt in Moran's breast - then died away forever. Only a few weeks ago, and she would have fought Hoang without hesitation and without mercy; she would have wrenched a leg from the table and brained him where he stood. But she had learned since to know what it was to be dependent; to rely for protection on someone who was stronger than she; to know her weakness; to know that she was at last a woman, and to be proud of it."

And Moran's reward for her learning, her newfound status as a Real Woman, her enlightenment to the joys of femininity?

"Instinctively she cried out "Mate- mate! Oh mate, where are you? Help me!" and Hoang's knife nailed the words within her throat."

Chinky-chinky Chinaman bad! Woman weak! White man ruler of the Earth! Got it?This sort of appalling crap was common currency in this country until well into the 1950's and 1960's. The notion that "civilized" white people were the natural masters of Chinamen, wogs, niggers, darkies of all sorts, dagoes, heatherns...well, it was just the natural way of the world. And with that way came the natural consequence: the willingness, even the eagerness, to take up the White Man's Burden. The notion of an American Empire would have seemed as natural as the British and French and Roman empires that preceded it.

But to proclaim an American Empire is to meet with loud and angry rebuttals. Outside of the C.H.U.D. wing of the Republican Party it is nearly impossible to hold this sort of opinion, support the ideal of Empire, out loud today. The old, formal, racist and imperialist rationales are almost completely discredited. The idea that a formal American "empire", where Americans physically rule over the ignorant, dusky heathen foreigners, cannot be intellectually justified by today's standards.

So by all rights, we should be a nation of interested bystanders, lending money and a patient ear when needed to our foreign friends in their difficult times, but maintaining our physical force and geopolitical influence only for our truly strategic national objectives, as decided by the People in Congress is open, informed debate? Why doesn't this happen?

Why are American troops posted so many places overseas? Why do American soldiers so often fight what, truthfully, should be other nations' civil wars and domestic uprisings? How can you make the American public - the notional "ruler" of their own country - so "isolated and blindered" as to support the prosecution of so many piddling, profitless foreign wars and police actions since 1980? Lebanon and Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Kuwait in 1991, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990's, Iraq and Afghanistan in the Oughts?

That's the subject of our next post.