So... you brilliant co-bloggers and esteemed readers. Based upon your own innate genius, unique insight, and tarot readings, how shall the United States and its allies best proceed in fostering a republican government in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, is that the best idea for them?
I know what I think. What do YOU think?
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Regarding Howard Dean's critiques of Bush's foreign policy towards libervaded nations, a caveat. Whereas it's all well and good for Dean to hope for egalitarian, non-gender-discriminatory, republican/democractic societies in the Middle East, it's quite unreasonable to actually expect such a thing anytime soon. And it may be for the better. I don't like the progress in Afghanistan or Iraq any more than Dean does (tho it's too soon to tell anything sure about Iraq), but I believe that trying to impose such a radical vision of equality in either nation would be a huge mistake.
Change happens in increments, and it's often painful. If it comes overnight, it's often catastrophic. Well, those nations have been through enough catastrophe without having us engineer one of our own for the sake being able to boast of a free election before it's time for one. If democratic government is going to come to the Middle East, the nations so choosing must find their own path. At the risk of sounding paternalistic, our job is to guide them and advise them when necessary, not to create by fiat institutions of democracy where none exist. Democracy must first make sense as a concept within the context of the nation, before it can thrive. That might happen in five years, and it might happen in fifty. But ideally when it happens, it will be because local leaders figured out how to adapt the principles of 1776 and 1792 to the Middle East in 2003. So, Dean riding Bush for not pushing for such a program now is a bit disingenuous, no matter how good it sounds. I hope that, if he is elected President, he has the sense to listen to his foreign policy advisors.
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Man, won't he ever stop? Every time I think Howard Dean is about to lose control of his finely-modulated Jekyll and Hyde act and become the vituperative beast he is whenever Kerry baits him, he redeems himself mightily. If he keeps it up, he just might be the next Democratic candidate for Pars-dent. Besides which, the man's incredibly fun! Via Aziz Poonawalla comes this interview. Mr. Poonawalla pulls out the super-money quotes, but I'm going to highlight a few other sections as well that I find compelling.
# On education:" "The people I am running against have mostly voted for 'No Child Left Behind,' which most teachers think should be called 'No Behind Left.' Or 'No School Board Left Standing' from the school board members point of view. It's a huge unfunded mandate and there's an awful lot of bad educational policy in there."
# On Media Regulation: "The media has clearly abused their privilege, and it is hurting our democracy. Deregulation in many areas has simply proved to be bad for America, bad for the American economy, bad for the average working person, and bad for democracy. We need to take a different view. Some deregulation is a good thing. We went too far, and now we need to cut back."
# On Oil Policy and Terror: "We've taken our eye off the ball because of the President's obsession with Iraq. We need a new oil policy, something other than "Let's drill in the national parks," because our oil money is being used to fund terrorism in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria. I might also add that there are these fundamentalist schools set up to teach children to hate Americans, Christians and Jews. That's a real problem for terrorism down the line. "
# On the Patriot Act:" I would do two things. First of all, I would remove the parts of the Patriot Act that are clearly unconstitutional. It can't be constitutional to hold an American citizen without access to a lawyer. Secondly, it can't be constitutional for the FBI to be able to go through your files at the library or the local video store, to see what you've taken out in the last week, without a warrant. The other thing I would do is appoint judges that would uphold the constitution. . . .I hate to agree with anything Dick Nixon said, but Dick Nixon used to say that he wanted strict constructionists for the bench. This President is appointing right-wing judicial activists. We need strict constructionists that believe in the constitution and will uphold it as written."
Zing! Well, if nothing else, this guy always speaks his mind. Even though it scares me a little bit when he talks about gun control at the local level (not excerpted here), at the end of the day, it just means that the barbarians will take the Liberal East, leaving the well-armed people in the middle firmly in control of their destinies. Northeasterner I may be, I can't get too exercised about that. Also, I think he may be wrong about the FBI not needing a warrant to search your files... if I'm correct they just don't have to tell anyone about it. I'll have to check that. I have to say, although he does not have national leadership experience as some of the other Democratic candidates have, neither did Lincoln, Washington, or Reagan. I dig this guy.
But the best part of the interview comes at the end, where Dean is asked about foreign policy and nation-building.
What Bush is doing in Afghanistan is a huge problem, and bodes very ill for what is going to happen in Iraq. The President has taken his eye off the ball in Afghanistan. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the elimination of the Taliban. I thought that group was a clear and present danger to the United States, and I supported what the President did. However, there's no follow-up. The best defense policy we could have in this country is not just to have a strong military, but it is to build middle-class nations with strong democratic ideals, where women fully participate in the government. Those countries don't go to war with each other, and they don't harbor groups like al Qaeda.
We're not doing that in Afghanistan. We're making deals with corrupt and crooked and undemocratic warlords in order to pacify Afghanistan. That is exactly the mistake the United States always makes. The notion of 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' is a huge mistake, and this administration is doing that. If they do that in Iraq, we're going to end up with an enormous problem, as we may well have in Afghanistan if the President doesn't add more peacekeeping people. The irony of this is that all the nations the President insulted before going to war in Iraq are the people we need now. We need more troops, which means we need NATO and the United Nations to get involved in rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq in a meaningful way. It has nothing to do with being nice to the French and the Germans. It has to do with protecting our soldiers who are going to be seen more and more every day as an occupiers and less as liberators.
Damn straight. We tried the "enemy of my enemy" approach in the Cold War and we're still cleaning up that mess. Even if he doesn't win the election, he'll have a heck of a career as a talking head if he wants it. Who else besides me wants to see Dean and John McCain together on a show? Hot stuff, you bet!
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As Nigel Tufnel said in This Is Spinal Tap,
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."
The surprising thing is not that bumfights.com is popular, it's that it's not more popular. I can understand your temptation to draw parallels between the late Roman Empire and the United States, but that would mean returning to the month-long discussion on empire I thought we'd settled. (Dear readers... if you can get the archives to work, look anywhere in late March. If you dare.)
Bloodsports are eternal. Did you know that the most popular sport in Pittsburgh at the end of the eighteenth century was eye-gouging? Well, wrestling, but eye-gouging was an accepted move. There are accounts of travellers from the East pulling into Pittsburgh in the 1780s and '90s, and coming away aghast, not only at the dirt and backwardness, but at the incredible number of one-eyed men. You can read about it too, in Thomas P. Slaughter's excellent "The Whiskey Rebellion." Leaving aside the fact that it was Pittsburgh, the residents of the area were no more than one or two generations removed from their ancestral homes in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland, where similar traditions prevailed.
Or even the code duello that claimed Aaron Burr's life-- that's a refined and codified version of a knife-fight. Or Andrew Jackson's famous temper-- same dealie. Hell, ever watch amateur hockey or rugby, or friday night fights?
My point is, although the modern age makes it easier than ever before for hooligans to entice insane homeless people to fight each other for money, the tendency toward such behavior has always been with us in Western civilization. Whether it's sublimated into fencing, Marquis of Queensbury rules boxing, and football, or out in the open like dog- or cockfights, blood spectacle is an integral part of our culture. For me, the remarkable thing is not that the United States is once again like Rome, but that we've come so far without actually, erm, "civilising." That's spelt with an "s" for full Victorian effect, please note, which is my signal that I don't wish to get into discussions of biological determinism or Whiggish progress.
* A note about the title: you really need to own this album by the Minutemen. Then you will understand. And your life will be changed, forever.
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Bumfights.com is either the worst thing, or the greatest thing I have seen this week. Everytime I get revved on American exceptionalism, something like this comes along to remind me of the parallels between us and the Roman Republic in the first century BC.
Just look at this.
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According to Knight-Ridder (Michael, I sense danger!), all documents relating to the Department of Homeland Security's involvement in the search for the fugitive Texas legislators last week have been destroyed.
Right. Because the legislators were terrorists. And because what state lawmakers do is the business of the Federal Government. Right. From the article:
One day before Democrats ended their boycott of the Texas House last week, the Texas Department of Public Safety ordered the destruction of all records and photos gathered in the search for them, documents obtained Tuesday show.
A one-sentence order sent by e-mail on the morning of May 14 was apparently carried out, a DPS spokesman said Tuesday. The revelation comes as federal authorities are investigating how a division of the federal Homeland Security Department was dragged into the hunt for the missing Democrats - at the request of the state police agency.
Addressed to "Captains," the order said: "Any notes, correspondence, photos, etc. that were obtained pursuant to the absconded House of Representative members shall be destroyed immediately. No copies are to be kept.
The piece also covers Tom Ridge's defense of the DHS involvement: "We thought it was very appropriate, based on the multiple inquiries that we received from members of Congress, that we deploy the means with which Congress has given us, and that's an inspector-general within our department."
Right. Because there was terror or something. And Congress asked you to.
Jackasses.
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I get high speed IN-TER-NET. Yeeeeehaaaa.
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If you find yourself completely in agreement with Chappaquiddick Ted, its time to worry. There is no military difference between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, except for explosive yield. People freak out over nukes, both the explosive and power generating kind. It is not a matter of reason, it is sentimentality. Of course, there are larger concerns over using nukes - but only because others react irrationally. If the military really has a need to develop weapons like this, then fine - there has long been a gap between the largest conventional explosives and the smallest nuclear explosives. The trend for the last two decades has been toward generally smaller explosives, if only because of greater precision. But the interplay between offensive and defensive technology means that people realize that we can drop a bomb exactly where we want, and will redouble their efforts to armor stuff they don't want blown up. Eventually, they will reach a point where an armored bunker target is largely immune to any conventional explosive device, no matter how accurately delivered. (Flip side of that is that armoring is very expensive.) A small nuclear device in a penetrating casing is the perfect bunker buster. The fact that there will be some radiation is not the horrifying spectre that some make it out to be. Chemical explosives have toxic residues. So does rocket exhaust. And car exhaust for that matter.
The daisy cutter of Afghanistan fame was 7.5 tons yield. Hiroshima was 2000 times larger, at 15 Kt. In all likelihood, 1/100 of Hiroshima would be more than adequate.
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The Senate today voted to resume development of smaller, more useable nuclear devices, citing as a reason the changing nature of American foreign conflicts and the need for a better bunker-buster.
I will try very hard to keep the sophomoric sarcasm at bay as I ask why this is really necessary. Should we be developing these devices because other nations are? Should we use them as bunker-busters because conventional weaponry aren't getting the job done? Is it worth scaring the hell out of half the world for the sake of some Strangelovian worst-case histogram that says it's a good idea?
Obviously, I would answer "no" to all my leading questions. I don't see the strategic utility of nuclear devices in any conflict except a cornered-rat scenario. Moreover, there's the very real risk that other nations may use this initiative to justify their own renewed efforts at evelopment. And, of course, after everything else, there's the moral issues. Senator Ted Kennedy summed it all up nicely, saying "Is half a Hiroshima OK? Is a quarter Hiroshima OK? Is a little mushroom cloud OK?"
But maybe there's something I'm missing. I urge you to read the article, decide for yourself, and let me know if I'm just doomey-eyed.
[update]: Jeez, I really gotta lay off the Doom 'n Gloom stuff for a while and post about puppies, topless dancers, and stupid hijinks. I'm a fairly unserious person-- I'm sure my compatriots would agree-- and analysis of global issues isn't exactly a market I can corner.
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Generated this poem, an ode to this webpage:
Johnny Good idea... Warren Buffett!!
To Johnny I
already be alien or
more
wrong. No longer be European
and c look hard bitter core
of my fist in
memory to eat a year from
the stinky ones will complete
if it is accounting, and over at the burning
that money gained. Enact a Cleveland
Indians, the war;
people died. no Good idea...
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