Monday, July 04, 2005
If We Fail in Iraq
Last Tuesday President Bush went on television to explain to the nation why we must, and will, succeed in Iraq. In another shift of emphasis, he stressed the need to deny terrorists a major victory in the ongoing campaign against terror--which is, in fact, a campaign against Muslim political extremism. Victory, he said quite rightly, depends upon the development of Iraqi security forces that can deal with the terrorists themselves, and the emergence of a stable Iraqi government. The President's speech drew a good deal of criticism, as has the Iraqi effort in general, based upon the claim that his strategies have been ineffective. Nearly every critic, however, especially elected officials in Washington, continues to accept the premise that we have to succeed. Today, in my own small way, I would like to help begin what may be a critical task: to put together an intellectual framework, and a different view of our needs around the world, that will allow us to accept what is becoming a very possible defeat.
Promoting democracy has, of course, been a pillar of American foreign policy at least since 1917, even though our success rate has been quite erratic. Most of the new democracies created after the First World War gave way to one form or another of authoritarian rule within twenty years. The Second World War saved democracy in Western Europe and made it possible in a good deal of the Third World, but spread Communist rule over Eastern Europe and much of Asia. The Cold War induced the United States to tolerate or, often, promote authoritarian rule as an alternative to democracies that seemed vulnerable to communism. When Communism collapsed, promoting democracy officially became the cornerstone of our foreign policy under President Clinton. The current Administration, obviously, has taken a much more aggressive tack.
The premise of our policy, which is rarely articulated directly, has been developed by the Russian-Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his book The Case for Democracy, which is a favorite of President Bush's. It holds that people--all people--yearn to live in democracies, and that democracies will never disturb the peace. War has, according to him, one main cause--it is how dictators distract their people from their oppressive rule. "Realism," in this view, actually increases the danger to peace by accepting authoritarian rule in other countries, rather than treating it as an aberration that must go. It is an astonishingly simple view of international relations and politics, and its divergence from reality is becoming clear in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where American-sponsored elected governments are contending with a host of warlords, ethnic and religious militias, and ideological revolutionaries as they try to establish real control.
An alternative view would suggest that democracy is an inspiring idea that has been put into practice in a variety of nations, generally with the help of armed struggle. It certainly has appealed to a wide variety of peoples around the globe, but it has also periodically fallen into disrepute--in Europe after the French Revolution and again after the First World War, and even among large numbers of Americans in the 1790s, the 1850s, and the 1930s. We have been fortunate that leaders like Lincoln and FDR managed to revive and re-establish it on slightly different principles. Today we are faced with the huge challenge of renewing our own democracy again. But meanwhile, we have launched ourselves on the extraordinary mission of determining the political future of hundreds of millions of Muslims.
That mission has now turned into a military one. Here the paradox of current American policies and strategies emerges. Our conventional arsenal could easily defeat any possible competitor in the air or at sea, and probably on land as well; but our conventional military edge is not much use in winning the political struggle in Iraq. A large and evidently growing insurgency has been able to maintain or increase the number of attacks it makes upon coalition soldiers and especially upon agents of the new Iraqi government which are trying to put together. Although hard data is difficult to come by (senior Pentagon officials, for instance, refused to tell the Senate how many of the new Iraqi troops are combat ready), individual stories suggest that the training of Iraqi forces is not going very well. A recent Washington Post article by a reporter who had seen it in action described a high level of mutual distrust and low morale and motivation among the Iraqis. Hundreds of recruits and new police have been killed in terrorist attacks. Few units have shown the ability to engage the enemy.
Why is this so? The insurgency includes dedicated fighters and a good many former leaders of Iraq. It draws on resentment against the occupation and economic privation, which it in turn manages to continue by disrupting reconstruction. The new American-assisted government, like the various governments of South Vietnam, is having trouble generating the same kind of loyalty, and it suffers from the huge disadvantage of having to operate in the open. While Kurds and many Shi'ites clearly oppose the insurgency (and the Kurds have militias that can apparently take care of themselves), no real political counterweight has emerged among the Sunnis.
And thus, it is possible that, with the military suffering more and more damage from the war, we may eventually be forced to announce, too soon (as we did in Vietnam) that the job is now up to the Iraqis, and withdraw. That could lead to an anti-American victory in much or all of Iraq. That in turn would enormously energize anti-American feeling all over the region, and we would have proven that we could not stop the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
That does not mean that fundamentalism would inevitably take over the whole region, any more than Communism took over all Europe in the late 1940s or all Asia in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. As always, and contrary to the presumed "domino effect," political change in one country can have many different effects among its neighbors, ranging from imitation to heightened aversion and more effective defense. But it does mean that the United States would have to abandon the fantasy that resolute policy, including the use of force, can topple any hostile regime and spread democracy further. It means re-establishing national sovereignty as a value we have to respect; it means recognizing diplomacy as a means of moderating conflicts with enemies, as well as forcing friends to fall in line; it means being realistic about American power.
Leaving aside the issue of our economic vulnerability, it is time, I think, to understand that in some crucial respects our power is declining, not rising. The key here is population--the United States, while larger in absolute terms, is much smaller relative to the rest of the world today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. When the British took control of Iraq in the early 1920s it had less than 2 million people; it has about 25 million today. Iraq's population, in short, as increased tenfold while ours has perhaps doubled (and the major European countries have increased much less.) Numbers count when an army is trying to impose order over a whole population, rather than destroying an enemy army with superior technology. We have never had the requisite numbers in Iraq, and we still do not.
The realization that much of world will pass out of our sphere of influence will certainly come as a shock, just as it did in 1979 at the time of the Iranian revolution, but if we can escape our denial and accept it, it could lead to a healthier America. The idea of reducing our energy consumption (and, along with it, global warming) would become more attractive as an alternative to the idea of transforming the politics of the Middle East. We might begin once again to focus more realistically upon the defense of the United States, rather than finding new excuses to project power around the globe. We might, as Andrew Bacevich suggested in his book The New American Militarism, conclude that military power will not, and cannot, solve the biggest problems the United States faces today. None of this means the end of American democracy. It might, in fact, help re-invigorate it.
Two historical observations, it seems to me, may appropriately be made on this Fourth of July. The first relates to Athens, which in 431 B.C. became involved in a war with Sparta to preserve its large empire. After 10 years of war, in which both sides had suffered major setbacks, they concluded a truce that left Athens with almost all its empire. The Athenians would not stop there, however, and a few years later they launched a huge and disastrous expedition to Sicily. The destruction of their forces led to revolts throughout their empire, which they had to try to put down while fighting the Spartans. Even then, in the third decade of war, they had some successes, but they refused to make peace without having reconquered the whole empire. In 404 their fleet was destroyed at Aegespotami, and they lost everything. That is the scenario we must avoid--to exhaust ourselves and come to complete catastrophe because we will not settle for anything less than maximum objectives.
The second even more apposite incident comes from June 1826, when Thomas Jefferson was invited to Washington to participate in a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, whose only remaining ambition (which he shared with John Adams) was to survive until that day, replied that his health, unfortunately, made it impossible to attend. "I should indeed, with particular delight," he wrote, "have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made." The Declaration, he believed, would "be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. . . The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."
Rationalist that he was, Jefferson could not imagine that the triumph of reason was impermanent, and that the battles of his lifetime would have to be fought again, with uncertain results, every eighty years or so. Like Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, he would surely have been appalled to find from today's newspapers that something very near a religious test is being applied to new candidates for the Supreme Court, and that science is actually losing battles to religious superstition in much of the country today. But he understood that the spread of democracy, while perhaps, as he wrote, foreordained, was not automatic, and he never expressed the slightest faith in attempts to impose it by force of arms. A nation that will not rest until it has imposed its values on the world, one might argue, really has no faith in them, since it cannot bear subjecting them to the test of comparison. We have come dangerously near that point, and we must draw back to preserve the extraordinary contribution which our forefathers made to civilization almost 230 years ago.
Promoting democracy has, of course, been a pillar of American foreign policy at least since 1917, even though our success rate has been quite erratic. Most of the new democracies created after the First World War gave way to one form or another of authoritarian rule within twenty years. The Second World War saved democracy in Western Europe and made it possible in a good deal of the Third World, but spread Communist rule over Eastern Europe and much of Asia. The Cold War induced the United States to tolerate or, often, promote authoritarian rule as an alternative to democracies that seemed vulnerable to communism. When Communism collapsed, promoting democracy officially became the cornerstone of our foreign policy under President Clinton. The current Administration, obviously, has taken a much more aggressive tack.
The premise of our policy, which is rarely articulated directly, has been developed by the Russian-Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his book The Case for Democracy, which is a favorite of President Bush's. It holds that people--all people--yearn to live in democracies, and that democracies will never disturb the peace. War has, according to him, one main cause--it is how dictators distract their people from their oppressive rule. "Realism," in this view, actually increases the danger to peace by accepting authoritarian rule in other countries, rather than treating it as an aberration that must go. It is an astonishingly simple view of international relations and politics, and its divergence from reality is becoming clear in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where American-sponsored elected governments are contending with a host of warlords, ethnic and religious militias, and ideological revolutionaries as they try to establish real control.
An alternative view would suggest that democracy is an inspiring idea that has been put into practice in a variety of nations, generally with the help of armed struggle. It certainly has appealed to a wide variety of peoples around the globe, but it has also periodically fallen into disrepute--in Europe after the French Revolution and again after the First World War, and even among large numbers of Americans in the 1790s, the 1850s, and the 1930s. We have been fortunate that leaders like Lincoln and FDR managed to revive and re-establish it on slightly different principles. Today we are faced with the huge challenge of renewing our own democracy again. But meanwhile, we have launched ourselves on the extraordinary mission of determining the political future of hundreds of millions of Muslims.
That mission has now turned into a military one. Here the paradox of current American policies and strategies emerges. Our conventional arsenal could easily defeat any possible competitor in the air or at sea, and probably on land as well; but our conventional military edge is not much use in winning the political struggle in Iraq. A large and evidently growing insurgency has been able to maintain or increase the number of attacks it makes upon coalition soldiers and especially upon agents of the new Iraqi government which are trying to put together. Although hard data is difficult to come by (senior Pentagon officials, for instance, refused to tell the Senate how many of the new Iraqi troops are combat ready), individual stories suggest that the training of Iraqi forces is not going very well. A recent Washington Post article by a reporter who had seen it in action described a high level of mutual distrust and low morale and motivation among the Iraqis. Hundreds of recruits and new police have been killed in terrorist attacks. Few units have shown the ability to engage the enemy.
Why is this so? The insurgency includes dedicated fighters and a good many former leaders of Iraq. It draws on resentment against the occupation and economic privation, which it in turn manages to continue by disrupting reconstruction. The new American-assisted government, like the various governments of South Vietnam, is having trouble generating the same kind of loyalty, and it suffers from the huge disadvantage of having to operate in the open. While Kurds and many Shi'ites clearly oppose the insurgency (and the Kurds have militias that can apparently take care of themselves), no real political counterweight has emerged among the Sunnis.
And thus, it is possible that, with the military suffering more and more damage from the war, we may eventually be forced to announce, too soon (as we did in Vietnam) that the job is now up to the Iraqis, and withdraw. That could lead to an anti-American victory in much or all of Iraq. That in turn would enormously energize anti-American feeling all over the region, and we would have proven that we could not stop the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
That does not mean that fundamentalism would inevitably take over the whole region, any more than Communism took over all Europe in the late 1940s or all Asia in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. As always, and contrary to the presumed "domino effect," political change in one country can have many different effects among its neighbors, ranging from imitation to heightened aversion and more effective defense. But it does mean that the United States would have to abandon the fantasy that resolute policy, including the use of force, can topple any hostile regime and spread democracy further. It means re-establishing national sovereignty as a value we have to respect; it means recognizing diplomacy as a means of moderating conflicts with enemies, as well as forcing friends to fall in line; it means being realistic about American power.
Leaving aside the issue of our economic vulnerability, it is time, I think, to understand that in some crucial respects our power is declining, not rising. The key here is population--the United States, while larger in absolute terms, is much smaller relative to the rest of the world today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. When the British took control of Iraq in the early 1920s it had less than 2 million people; it has about 25 million today. Iraq's population, in short, as increased tenfold while ours has perhaps doubled (and the major European countries have increased much less.) Numbers count when an army is trying to impose order over a whole population, rather than destroying an enemy army with superior technology. We have never had the requisite numbers in Iraq, and we still do not.
The realization that much of world will pass out of our sphere of influence will certainly come as a shock, just as it did in 1979 at the time of the Iranian revolution, but if we can escape our denial and accept it, it could lead to a healthier America. The idea of reducing our energy consumption (and, along with it, global warming) would become more attractive as an alternative to the idea of transforming the politics of the Middle East. We might begin once again to focus more realistically upon the defense of the United States, rather than finding new excuses to project power around the globe. We might, as Andrew Bacevich suggested in his book The New American Militarism, conclude that military power will not, and cannot, solve the biggest problems the United States faces today. None of this means the end of American democracy. It might, in fact, help re-invigorate it.
Two historical observations, it seems to me, may appropriately be made on this Fourth of July. The first relates to Athens, which in 431 B.C. became involved in a war with Sparta to preserve its large empire. After 10 years of war, in which both sides had suffered major setbacks, they concluded a truce that left Athens with almost all its empire. The Athenians would not stop there, however, and a few years later they launched a huge and disastrous expedition to Sicily. The destruction of their forces led to revolts throughout their empire, which they had to try to put down while fighting the Spartans. Even then, in the third decade of war, they had some successes, but they refused to make peace without having reconquered the whole empire. In 404 their fleet was destroyed at Aegespotami, and they lost everything. That is the scenario we must avoid--to exhaust ourselves and come to complete catastrophe because we will not settle for anything less than maximum objectives.
The second even more apposite incident comes from June 1826, when Thomas Jefferson was invited to Washington to participate in a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, whose only remaining ambition (which he shared with John Adams) was to survive until that day, replied that his health, unfortunately, made it impossible to attend. "I should indeed, with particular delight," he wrote, "have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made." The Declaration, he believed, would "be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. . . The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."
Rationalist that he was, Jefferson could not imagine that the triumph of reason was impermanent, and that the battles of his lifetime would have to be fought again, with uncertain results, every eighty years or so. Like Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, he would surely have been appalled to find from today's newspapers that something very near a religious test is being applied to new candidates for the Supreme Court, and that science is actually losing battles to religious superstition in much of the country today. But he understood that the spread of democracy, while perhaps, as he wrote, foreordained, was not automatic, and he never expressed the slightest faith in attempts to impose it by force of arms. A nation that will not rest until it has imposed its values on the world, one might argue, really has no faith in them, since it cannot bear subjecting them to the test of comparison. We have come dangerously near that point, and we must draw back to preserve the extraordinary contribution which our forefathers made to civilization almost 230 years ago.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Whither the USA?
Today I shall combine material from a few other sources to further assess and evaluate the foreign policy course that the United States seems to be on. To begin with, The Guardian--which along with its British cousin The Independent has repeatedly put the American press to shame in breaking stories about the Bush Administration--reports that military plans for an air attack on Iran are well advanced, and that while the State Department and the Pentagon oppose this step, Vice President Cheney, supported by a vocal neoconservative lobby outside the government (see "The Neoconservative President," below), favors it. Meanwhile, Bloomberg.com has a good story about the State Department, where deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, counselor Philip Zelikow, communications strategist Jim Wilkinson, Robert Joseph, undersecretary for arms control and international security, and John Hillen, the assistant secretary for political-military affairs, have all left during the last year. (Spokesman Sean McCormack nonetheless declares that Rice is "actually a terrific manager" and calls State Department morale "actually very high.'' We are reaching the point where no official of the Administration can speak the truth in public.) And the Administration is trying to identify Iran as the source of the most dangerous IED's in Iraq, surely in order to drum up support for the planned attack. Our leadership is both more isolated and more determined in its ways than ever.
I have remarked many times here during the last two and a half years on how few actual challenges to the overall direction of American foreign policy can now be heard. Yes, everyone outside the Administration and its band of think-tank acolytes realizes that the Iraq war has been a disaster and that Afghanistan is falling as well, but how many are willing to acknowledge that the Middle East is going to be largely lost to American influence for a long time to come? How many challenge the assumption that the U.S. has a destiny to impose its will upon the world and cannot countenance any more setbacks? It turns out that one such person has newly spoken up: William Pfaff, a 78-year old columnist for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, who has an excellent article on America's manifest destiny in the current New York Review of Books. (The link is http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19879). Pfaff initially traces our Messianic spirit back to the Puritans and notes that Woodrow Wilson revived it (although Wilson, as I discovered while teaching about him last fall, was actually somewhat more ambivalent about imposing American will upon other countries than is usually supposed.) Now it has been revived again, in a new form, by the Bush Administration.
Pfaff pointed out something that I had completely missed: a speech by Condoleeza Rice in London in June 2003, in which she rejected the idea of "multipolarity" in international affairs. Pfaff actually overstates the case in the article: Rice did not specifically disown the idea of sovereign states embodied in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, although the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy certainly does so by endorsing, indeed requiring, preventive wars. But she did indeed make some striking proposals and claims, as follows.
Benevolent hegemony, it seems, will cure the world's ills and establish a lasting reign of freedom and peace. The idea that different states might make different decisions about questions of war and peace must be rejected, because in the past it has led to (among other things) great wars. We need fear nothing because the hegemon is a democracy. Unfortunately, it is more than scoring debating points today to note how Rice's argument that democracy checks excesses has been decisively undermined by the Administration of which she is a part. Our democracy, as Pfaff notes, has re-introduced torture and indefinite detention without trial into the civilized world, now with the concurrence of the Congress. The American people democratically voted against the Administration's foreign policy last November and the Vice President immediately made clear the Administration's intention to ignore their views. The President's subsequent conduct has confirmed this. Moreover, in perhaps the most troubling development, he has ordered surge not only in opposition to both American and Iraqi public opinion and the opinions of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, but against the advice of the entire permanent government, including both the State Department and the Pentagon. Only neoconservatives outside the government vocally pushed for the policy. As I have shown in an earlier post on the Bill of Rights, our founders were too smart to believe that simply establishing a democratic republic would put an end to the abuse of power. In Federalist no. 6, moreover, Alexander Hamilton disposed cogently and brilliantly of the argument that democracies tended towards peace.
Is it not (we may ask these projectors in politics) the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interest, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships [sic], and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.
Pfaff hopes that the United States might actually begin contemplating a non-interventionist policy that leaves other nations free to deal with their domestic affairs, withdraws absolute American support for Israel (which obviously can defend itself), and stop trying to overturn foreign regimes. He is very worried, as I am, that we might even break the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons in a war against Iran. (The other day, starting a new class on Vietnam, I shared with my students some Eisenhower Administration documents stating that nuclear weapons "should be treated as conventional weapons from a military point of view." They were shocked, but they don't seem to have much idea of how near our leadership is to adopting that view again.) But Pfaff has to note the total absence on the political scene of any major figure openly calling for such a shift in outlook.
Pfaff quotes extensively from George F. Kennan, for whom he obviously has as much respect as I do. But he does not cite what remains for me Kennan's most trenchant observations on how the United States had to conduct itself in the emerging Cold War. Taken from the X Article of 1947, these words make clear how much more faith Kennan put in political than military factors--and they state as well as anyone ever could the nature of the problem confronting any great power, and the test which the United States has so disastrously failed for the last six years.
But in actuality the possibilities for American policy are by no means limited to holding the line and hoping for the best. It is entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions the internal developments, both within Russia and throughout the international communist movement, by which Russian policy is largely determined. This is not only a question of the modest measure of informational activity which this government can conduct in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, although that, too, is important. It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.
The world today knows that the United States wants to crush those who oppose its Middle Eastern policies and decide which countries should and should not have nuclear weapons, and it rejects those goals. While our internal life is relatively steady, we are hardly regarded any more as a model, and we could enter an internal crisis at almost any moment. We have behaved with unbelievable irresponsibility on the world scene, and we have repudiated our legal and spiritual traditions. If Kennan was right all of this will have serious consequences--and I believe that he was.
P.S. (Sunday, February 11): Vladimir Putin's speech in Munich yesterday, which he was giving as I was writing this post, certainly tends to confirm it. Nor can the United States effectively criticize Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule while we are holding hundreds of captives in indefinite detention ourselves.
I have remarked many times here during the last two and a half years on how few actual challenges to the overall direction of American foreign policy can now be heard. Yes, everyone outside the Administration and its band of think-tank acolytes realizes that the Iraq war has been a disaster and that Afghanistan is falling as well, but how many are willing to acknowledge that the Middle East is going to be largely lost to American influence for a long time to come? How many challenge the assumption that the U.S. has a destiny to impose its will upon the world and cannot countenance any more setbacks? It turns out that one such person has newly spoken up: William Pfaff, a 78-year old columnist for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, who has an excellent article on America's manifest destiny in the current New York Review of Books. (The link is http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19879). Pfaff initially traces our Messianic spirit back to the Puritans and notes that Woodrow Wilson revived it (although Wilson, as I discovered while teaching about him last fall, was actually somewhat more ambivalent about imposing American will upon other countries than is usually supposed.) Now it has been revived again, in a new form, by the Bush Administration.
Pfaff pointed out something that I had completely missed: a speech by Condoleeza Rice in London in June 2003, in which she rejected the idea of "multipolarity" in international affairs. Pfaff actually overstates the case in the article: Rice did not specifically disown the idea of sovereign states embodied in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, although the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy certainly does so by endorsing, indeed requiring, preventive wars. But she did indeed make some striking proposals and claims, as follows.
In recent months some have questioned whether this is possible -- or even desirable. Some argue that Europe and America are more divided by differing worldviews than we are united by common values. More troubling, some have spoken admiringly -- almost nostalgically -- of "multipolarity," as if it were a good thing, to be desired for its own sake.
The reality is that "multi-polarity" was never a unifying idea, or a vision. It was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but it did not promote the triumph of peace. Multi-polarity is a theory of rivalry; of competing interests -- and at its worst -- competing values.
We have tried this before. It led to the Great War -- which cascaded into the Good War, which gave way to the Cold War. Today this theory of rivalry threatens to divert us from meeting the great tasks before us.
Why would anyone who shares the values of freedom seek to put a check on those values? Democratic institutions themselves are a check on the excesses of power. Why should we seek to divide our capacities for good, when they can be so much more effective united? Only the enemies of freedom would cheer this division.
Benevolent hegemony, it seems, will cure the world's ills and establish a lasting reign of freedom and peace. The idea that different states might make different decisions about questions of war and peace must be rejected, because in the past it has led to (among other things) great wars. We need fear nothing because the hegemon is a democracy. Unfortunately, it is more than scoring debating points today to note how Rice's argument that democracy checks excesses has been decisively undermined by the Administration of which she is a part. Our democracy, as Pfaff notes, has re-introduced torture and indefinite detention without trial into the civilized world, now with the concurrence of the Congress. The American people democratically voted against the Administration's foreign policy last November and the Vice President immediately made clear the Administration's intention to ignore their views. The President's subsequent conduct has confirmed this. Moreover, in perhaps the most troubling development, he has ordered surge not only in opposition to both American and Iraqi public opinion and the opinions of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, but against the advice of the entire permanent government, including both the State Department and the Pentagon. Only neoconservatives outside the government vocally pushed for the policy. As I have shown in an earlier post on the Bill of Rights, our founders were too smart to believe that simply establishing a democratic republic would put an end to the abuse of power. In Federalist no. 6, moreover, Alexander Hamilton disposed cogently and brilliantly of the argument that democracies tended towards peace.
Is it not (we may ask these projectors in politics) the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interest, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships [sic], and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.
Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics; two of them, Athens and Carthage, of the commercial kind. Yet were they as often engaged in wars, offensive and defensive, as the neighboring monarchies of the same times. Sparta was little better than a well-regulated camp; and Rome was never sated of carnage and conquest.
Pfaff hopes that the United States might actually begin contemplating a non-interventionist policy that leaves other nations free to deal with their domestic affairs, withdraws absolute American support for Israel (which obviously can defend itself), and stop trying to overturn foreign regimes. He is very worried, as I am, that we might even break the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons in a war against Iran. (The other day, starting a new class on Vietnam, I shared with my students some Eisenhower Administration documents stating that nuclear weapons "should be treated as conventional weapons from a military point of view." They were shocked, but they don't seem to have much idea of how near our leadership is to adopting that view again.) But Pfaff has to note the total absence on the political scene of any major figure openly calling for such a shift in outlook.
Pfaff quotes extensively from George F. Kennan, for whom he obviously has as much respect as I do. But he does not cite what remains for me Kennan's most trenchant observations on how the United States had to conduct itself in the emerging Cold War. Taken from the X Article of 1947, these words make clear how much more faith Kennan put in political than military factors--and they state as well as anyone ever could the nature of the problem confronting any great power, and the test which the United States has so disastrously failed for the last six years.
But in actuality the possibilities for American policy are by no means limited to holding the line and hoping for the best. It is entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions the internal developments, both within Russia and throughout the international communist movement, by which Russian policy is largely determined. This is not only a question of the modest measure of informational activity which this government can conduct in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, although that, too, is important. It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.
The world today knows that the United States wants to crush those who oppose its Middle Eastern policies and decide which countries should and should not have nuclear weapons, and it rejects those goals. While our internal life is relatively steady, we are hardly regarded any more as a model, and we could enter an internal crisis at almost any moment. We have behaved with unbelievable irresponsibility on the world scene, and we have repudiated our legal and spiritual traditions. If Kennan was right all of this will have serious consequences--and I believe that he was.
P.S. (Sunday, February 11): Vladimir Putin's speech in Munich yesterday, which he was giving as I was writing this post, certainly tends to confirm it. Nor can the United States effectively criticize Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule while we are holding hundreds of captives in indefinite detention ourselves.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Styles of empire
Late in the 5th century B. C. E., Sparta and Athens, who had together defeated the Persians some decades earlier, were on the verge of war. The Athenians enjoyed a huge empire all over the Aegean, which they ruled with the help of democratic parties in their client states, while the Spartans led the Peloponnesian League, which included most of the states of southern Greece. In 431, three separate issues were coming to a head. On the west coast of Greece, Corinth, a Spartan ally, was trying to subdue Corcyra, which Athens had decided to support because Corcyra (today, Corfu) had a substantial navy. Close to Athens, Megara, strategically located on the isthmus between Athens and the Peloponnese, was involved in disputes with Athens that had led the Athenians to bar the Megarians from Athenian marketplaces--an ancient form of economic sanctions. And in Thrace, in the northwest, the aristocratic party of Potidea had revolted against the Athenian-allied democratic party, and had asked for an received some help from Sparta--a precedent which the Athenians wanted to nip in the bud. As Thucydides the Athenian reported years later, the Spartans held a Congress of their allies to decide whether to agree to Corinth's demand that they go war with Athens, and some Athenian businessmen who happened to be in Sparta were allowed to present their city's case. Here is some of what they said, as translated in the 19th century by Crawley (I would rather have quoted the Penguin translation by Rex Warner, but it is not on line.)
"Surely, Spartans, neither by the patriotism that we displayed
at that crisis, nor by the wisdom of our counsels, do we merit our
extreme unpopularity with the Greeks, not at least unpopularity
for our empire. That empire we acquired by no violent means, but
because you were unwilling to prosecute to its conclusion the war
against the barbarian, and because the allies attached themselves to
us and spontaneously asked us to assume the command. And the nature of
the case first compelled us to advance our empire to its present
height; fear being our principal motive, though honour and interest
afterwards came in. And at last, when almost all hated us, when some
had already revolted and had been subdued, when you had ceased to be
the friends that you once were, and had become objects of suspicion
and dislike, it appeared no longer safe to give up our empire;
especially as all who left us would fall to you. And no one can
quarrel with a people for making, in matters of tremendous risk, the
best provision that it can for its interest.
"You, at all events, Spartans, have used your supremacy to
settle the states inPeloponnese as is agreeable to you. And if at the
period of which we were speaking you had persevered to the end of
the matter, and had incurred hatred in your command, we are sure
that you would have made yourselves just as galling to the allies, and
would have been forced to choose between a strong government and
danger to yourselves. It follows that it was not a very wonderful
action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we did
accept an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up
under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honour,
and interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always
been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. Besides,
we believed ourselves to be worthy of our position, and so you thought
us till now, when calculations of interest have made you take up the
cry of justice- a consideration which no one ever yet brought forward
to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by
might. And praise is due to all who, if not so superior to human
nature as to refuse dominion, yet respect justice more than their
position compels them to do."
We too have lived in an age of empires, but few if any of them, for many centuries, have dared to speak so frankly. Both Christianity and the Enlightenment have committed western man, at least, to some idea of the common good, which even the strong are supposed to work for--and thus the French under Napoleon, the various European powers in Africa in the nineteenth century, the Soviet Union in the twentieth, and the United States since the Second World War have never acknowledged such selfish motives, nor appealed to raw human emotion to justify their conduct. (The Nazis and the Japanese were certainly at least partial exceptions, and Hitler was particularly blunt, privately at least, in arguing that history was nothing but a Darwinistic struggle among peoples.) Are we in fact wiser than the Greeks? On the one hand, the theoretical commitment to the common good does strike me as an advance for civilization, but since it never wholly explains the behavior of powerful states (the Athenian delegates were surely right about that), it also leads to greater hypocrisy. Today, as I have pointed out, the United States government simply declares (as Condoleezza Rice did in 2003) that the world must coalesce behind American policy for the good of all, and President Bush insists that we are simply promoting freedom and democracy around the world. To many others around the world, however, things look very different. Many Muslim activists, moreover, have no even theoretical commitment to the common good, since they make no provision for the interests of heretics and unbelievers.
The specifics of our policies suggest that we, like the Athenians, are most interested in rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies--even when democracy turns out to put our enemies in power. The Hamas victory in Palestine has made us cling more tightly to Mahmoud Abbas, even though we cannot offer him anything more than the Israeli government is willing to give him. In Pakistan we are now frantically trying to balance our desire for democracy (which could easily have completely unintended consequences there, too) with our terror lest the Pakistani government and its nuclear arsenal fall into unfriendly hands. (Press reports over the last few days have said, first, that we are picking out possible new Pakistani leadership from within the Pakistani Army, and second, that we encouraged the return of Benazir Bhutto, which has triggered the state of emergency.) Meanwhile we still continue to refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Castro regime in Cuba--which has been in power for a mere 48 years--and which President Bush, in a speech at the State Department, openly invited the Cuban Army to overthrow. In Afghanistan six years of American occupation have not managed to prevent an impressive resurgence of the Taliban, which now rules parts of the countryside. In Iraq, 155,000 American troops (which will in the next year be reduced once again to about 130,000) have succeeded in reversing unfavorable security trends in Sunni areas, but only by taking on the traditional role of an imperial power, that is, by striking up alliances with local tribal elites. Meanwhile, the dollar during the Bush Administration has lost half its value, the price of oil has tripled, and our credit structure is cracking.
I have been noting here for weeks that the idea that the United States must get whatever it wants all around the world has not really been challenged by any of the major candidates. (Barack Obama has at least suggested we might talk to our enemies, but that is only a small step away.) This mindset has plagued us for about sixty years--the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe, the Communist victory in China, the Castro revolution, the fall of South Vietnam and the fall of the Shah, as well as numerous other setbacks, have struck far too many Americans as deviations from the natural order of things that should never have been allowed to happen (and which therefore have been blamed on treachery within the United States.) But the experiment of the last seven years proves, at least to me, that the United States cannot get whatever it wants, and that further attempts to do so will further erode our position. That has indeed been the fate of most previous empires, from the Athenians (whose catastrophe began with the expedition to Sicily, of which more later), to Napoleon, to the Germans in the twentieth century. We can perhaps take some encouragement that the British, our nearest relations politically and constitutionally, managed to give up their empire peacefully and without sacrificing their political and cultural legacy. But whether we can realistically assess our world position--which could still be one of leadership, if we can accept something less than complete hegemony--remains a very open question, and I am not particularly hopeful.
"Surely, Spartans, neither by the patriotism that we displayed
at that crisis, nor by the wisdom of our counsels, do we merit our
extreme unpopularity with the Greeks, not at least unpopularity
for our empire. That empire we acquired by no violent means, but
because you were unwilling to prosecute to its conclusion the war
against the barbarian, and because the allies attached themselves to
us and spontaneously asked us to assume the command. And the nature of
the case first compelled us to advance our empire to its present
height; fear being our principal motive, though honour and interest
afterwards came in. And at last, when almost all hated us, when some
had already revolted and had been subdued, when you had ceased to be
the friends that you once were, and had become objects of suspicion
and dislike, it appeared no longer safe to give up our empire;
especially as all who left us would fall to you. And no one can
quarrel with a people for making, in matters of tremendous risk, the
best provision that it can for its interest.
"You, at all events, Spartans, have used your supremacy to
settle the states in
period of which we were speaking you had persevered to the end of
the matter, and had incurred hatred in your command, we are sure
that you would have made yourselves just as galling to the allies, and
would have been forced to choose between a strong government and
danger to yourselves. It follows that it was not a very wonderful
action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we did
accept an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up
under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honour,
and interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always
been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. Besides,
we believed ourselves to be worthy of our position, and so you thought
us till now, when calculations of interest have made you take up the
cry of justice- a consideration which no one ever yet brought forward
to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by
might. And praise is due to all who, if not so superior to human
nature as to refuse dominion, yet respect justice more than their
position compels them to do."
We too have lived in an age of empires, but few if any of them, for many centuries, have dared to speak so frankly. Both Christianity and the Enlightenment have committed western man, at least, to some idea of the common good, which even the strong are supposed to work for--and thus the French under Napoleon, the various European powers in Africa in the nineteenth century, the Soviet Union in the twentieth, and the United States since the Second World War have never acknowledged such selfish motives, nor appealed to raw human emotion to justify their conduct. (The Nazis and the Japanese were certainly at least partial exceptions, and Hitler was particularly blunt, privately at least, in arguing that history was nothing but a Darwinistic struggle among peoples.) Are we in fact wiser than the Greeks? On the one hand, the theoretical commitment to the common good does strike me as an advance for civilization, but since it never wholly explains the behavior of powerful states (the Athenian delegates were surely right about that), it also leads to greater hypocrisy. Today, as I have pointed out, the United States government simply declares (as Condoleezza Rice did in 2003) that the world must coalesce behind American policy for the good of all, and President Bush insists that we are simply promoting freedom and democracy around the world. To many others around the world, however, things look very different. Many Muslim activists, moreover, have no even theoretical commitment to the common good, since they make no provision for the interests of heretics and unbelievers.
The specifics of our policies suggest that we, like the Athenians, are most interested in rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies--even when democracy turns out to put our enemies in power. The Hamas victory in Palestine has made us cling more tightly to Mahmoud Abbas, even though we cannot offer him anything more than the Israeli government is willing to give him. In Pakistan we are now frantically trying to balance our desire for democracy (which could easily have completely unintended consequences there, too) with our terror lest the Pakistani government and its nuclear arsenal fall into unfriendly hands. (Press reports over the last few days have said, first, that we are picking out possible new Pakistani leadership from within the Pakistani Army, and second, that we encouraged the return of Benazir Bhutto, which has triggered the state of emergency.) Meanwhile we still continue to refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Castro regime in Cuba--which has been in power for a mere 48 years--and which President Bush, in a speech at the State Department, openly invited the Cuban Army to overthrow. In Afghanistan six years of American occupation have not managed to prevent an impressive resurgence of the Taliban, which now rules parts of the countryside. In Iraq, 155,000 American troops (which will in the next year be reduced once again to about 130,000) have succeeded in reversing unfavorable security trends in Sunni areas, but only by taking on the traditional role of an imperial power, that is, by striking up alliances with local tribal elites. Meanwhile, the dollar during the Bush Administration has lost half its value, the price of oil has tripled, and our credit structure is cracking.
I have been noting here for weeks that the idea that the United States must get whatever it wants all around the world has not really been challenged by any of the major candidates. (Barack Obama has at least suggested we might talk to our enemies, but that is only a small step away.) This mindset has plagued us for about sixty years--the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe, the Communist victory in China, the Castro revolution, the fall of South Vietnam and the fall of the Shah, as well as numerous other setbacks, have struck far too many Americans as deviations from the natural order of things that should never have been allowed to happen (and which therefore have been blamed on treachery within the United States.) But the experiment of the last seven years proves, at least to me, that the United States cannot get whatever it wants, and that further attempts to do so will further erode our position. That has indeed been the fate of most previous empires, from the Athenians (whose catastrophe began with the expedition to Sicily, of which more later), to Napoleon, to the Germans in the twentieth century. We can perhaps take some encouragement that the British, our nearest relations politically and constitutionally, managed to give up their empire peacefully and without sacrificing their political and cultural legacy. But whether we can realistically assess our world position--which could still be one of leadership, if we can accept something less than complete hegemony--remains a very open question, and I am not particularly hopeful.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Why the Middle East Only Gets Worse
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides the Athenian showed how wars break out from a confluence of immediate and long-term causes. Sparta and Athens in 431 B.C. had at least three minor points of disagreement between them, but "what made war inevitable," he wrote, "was the growth of Athenian power and the fear that that occasioned in Sparta." The same analysis can be applied to any war, because nations never actually fight over trivial matters. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was part of Serbian intelligence officers' long-term effort to disrupt Austria-Hungary, and Germany's assent to an Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia was an attempt to break, or defeat, the Franco-Russian alliance against Germany. What Thucydides did not say was that the failure of certain wars to occur--at least for the time being--represents a similar mix of long- and short-term causes. That is illustrated by a remarkable piece of journalism in today's New York Times, the account of Israel's failed attempt to get American approval for a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities during the last year. The essentials of the story are simple: the Bush Administration refused sometime during 2008 to agree to an Israeli strike but instead undertook a broader covert effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear weapons program. But the details introduce a series of much larger issues, issues which I have been treating intermittently here for the last four years.
Since the states of the Middle East secured their full independence since the Second World War the United States has cherished various fantasies of turning some or all of them into friendly clients. Ironically it scored its first major "success" in Iran itself in 1953 when it orchestrated the overthrow of an elected but nationalist government in favor of the Shah of Iran. Meanwhile the sale of oil allowed us to develop a long-term relationship with Saudi Arabia. Jordan, where colonial British interest had been strongest, remained relatively pro-western, as did Lebanon, with its largely Christian population, until the mid-1970s. But the new nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria, and eventually Iraq became violently anti-western, anti-American, and anti-Israel. In 1967 Egypt and Syria managed to pull Jordan along with them into a confrontation with Israel that resulted in an Israeli pre-emptive attack. Recently released documents show an Israeli envoy in Washington telling American officials, on the eve of the war, that they should diplomatically support Israel in a pre-emptive attack not because Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran--the ostensible cause of the war--but because of Nasser's intention of dominating the Middle East. Nasser indeed lost the war and resigned, but returned 24 hours later to popular acclaim. Meanwhile the 1967 war re-ignited the Palestinian issue and put the PLO on the world political map.
During the next decade a spectacular change took place, as Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat re-established Egyptian prestige with his 1973 attack on Israel and eventually made peace with the Jewish state. That turned out to be a false dawn. Peace with the Palestinians did not follow, Sadat was assassinated two years after the peace treaty, and meanwhile, Shi'ite fundamentalism overthrew the Shah of Iran. Iranian-sponsored terrorists took over a good deal of Lebanon. Saddam Hussein tried to replace Nasser as the leader of militant Sunni Islam. In 1990 he overreached himself by occupying Kuwait. The resulting war enhanced American and moderate prestige again, and restarted the Arab-Israeli peace process, but that collapsed again around 2000.
After 9/11 the Bush Administration decided that it was going to redraw the political map of the Middle East by force, beginning with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. (There is plenty of evidence that they wanted to move on to Iran and Syria after taking care of Iraq, but things did not turn out to be so simple.) The Administration also decided to discredit and remove what turned out to be relatively moderate Palestinian leadership under Yassir Arafat. This was a Boomer-led policy based upon absolute truths--the idea that democracy and free markets would solve any problem anywhere, any time. It has had further negative effects. Two militant, broad-based, well-organized political parties, Hezbollah and Hamas, control much of Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, largely because of elections the US demanded. Israel has taken a variety of steps (now including the Gaza invasion) that will probably make peace impossible for a long time to come. The government of Egypt would undoubtedly lose a free Egyptian election and give way to a radical regime. Jordanian youth are increasingly drawn to fundamentalism. And Iran now has enormous influence over Iraq and has been working hard on increasing its capacity to enrich uranium.
Now as President Bush and Vice President Cheney made clear many times, the logic of their policy seemed not only to favor but to demand an attack on Iran. Having invaded Iraq based upon false claims that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, they surely could have been expected to attack Iran to stop a real program, or to allow Israel to do so when the Israelis asked permission. Why they did not, however, turns out to reflect both contradictions within the American government, and a recognition of the contradictory effects of their own policies.
To begin with, as I pointed out about a year ago, the American intelligence community, in its Iran NIE, struck a blow for sanity. Today's Times story says something that I do not remember from reports at the time. That estimate based its key conclusion--that Iran had stopped working to develop a nuclear weapon--on evidence, good evidence, that Iranian scientists had stopped working on the design of a nuclear warhead. They had not, however, stopped enriching uranium--that program, which could indeed be designed for peaceful purposes as the Iranians claim, has been going on at full speed ahead. The intelligence community was probably doing two things at once: raising justified doubts about how close Iran was to getting nuclear weapons on the one hand, and trying to head off an attack that would set the rest of the Middle East aflame and vastly increase the chances of mass terror in the US on the other. President Bush, who relies famously on his "instincts," didn't really accept the conclusion, but it did make it impossible for the United States itself to launch an attack.
The Israeli request for permission and assistance to make an attack on Iranian facilities themselves put the US in exactly the same position as the government of imperial Germany in 1914, when the Austro-Hungarians asked for permission to attack Serbia. The Germans, as I showed many years ago, told them to go ahead because they had decided that this was an opportune moment for a trial of strength with France, Russia, and, if necessary, Britain. But Austria-Hungary was actually more of an independent actor then than Israel, apparently, is now. It needed only permission, while the Israelis needed both bunker-busting bombs that only the US could supply, and more specific permission to overfly American-occupied Iraq. The American rejection of the latter request illustrated the dilemma into which we have been thrown.
By now even President Bush has had in effect to abandon the fantasy of a truly democratic and pro-American Iraq, and has had to content himself--like Lyndon Johnson in South Vietnam in 1965--with a much lesser objective: an Iraqi government that will not throw the United States out. In the lengthy negotiations that led to the Status of Forces agreement the Iraqis insisted that the United States could not use Iraq as a base for an attack on another country. The new government, moreover, is determinedly anti-Israel (at one time, Ahmed Chalabi had promised the Bush Administration to fix even that problem, but he proved a false hope). The Times reports bluntly that the Administration thought the Iraqis would throw us out if we allowed Israeli aircraft to overfly Iraqi territory to attack Iran. The President was not about to sacrifice what he still hopes will be his most enduring contribution to history.
That, however, was not all. In late 2006 the President had to make what now looms as a rather bizarre compromise. Donald Rumsfeld, as I have pointed out, was not removed because of the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections or because he was too warlike: he was removed to make the surge possible. But to replace him the President was induced to pick a man from the Silent generation, Robert Gates, who had been a member of the Baker-Hamilton Commission and who was probably recommended by President Bush's father. (Bob Woodward, in State of Denial, seems to indicate this at one point, partly with the help of a conversation in which the President told him that Gates had been recommended by a prominent Texan whose name he could not remember.) Gates evidently understands that attacking Iran would create a regional catastrophe. Admiral Fallon was sacrificed partly for stating publicly that the US would not attack Iran, but the policy he favored has prevailed. Meanwhile, Gates will stay in office.
As matters stand now Iran may well get a nuclear weapon within five years or so, even if Israel does attack Iran on its own. There is in my opinion only one way to prevent it, and that is a long shot: a serious proposal from the Obama Administration to de-nuclearize the entire region, including Israel. Meanwhile, the anti-western political trends in the Arab world seem likely to continue. Israel, whatever it does, is unlikely to have genuine peace with its neighbors. It would do best, in my opinion, to ask what kind of co-existence it wants, and how it can help keep violence between it and its neighbors (including Hamas and Hezbollah) at a minimum. That violence has turned out to be the price of the decision to create and maintain Israel, and nothing that Israel or the US can do can stop it. They can, however, make decisions that will either increase or lessen it.
Germany in 1914 did not need to assure the survival of Austria-Hungary by telling it to go ahead and attack Serbia--a move which as it turned out did not even achieve its objectives for Austria-Hungary. In the same way, the existence of the United States is simply not at stake in the Middle East, unless we put it at risk by endless, useless involvement. Ironically, because the Bush Administration was as irresponsible at home as it has been abroad, our economic situation will provide another reason to reverse course in that region. But what the new Administration will do remains entirely unclear.
Since the states of the Middle East secured their full independence since the Second World War the United States has cherished various fantasies of turning some or all of them into friendly clients. Ironically it scored its first major "success" in Iran itself in 1953 when it orchestrated the overthrow of an elected but nationalist government in favor of the Shah of Iran. Meanwhile the sale of oil allowed us to develop a long-term relationship with Saudi Arabia. Jordan, where colonial British interest had been strongest, remained relatively pro-western, as did Lebanon, with its largely Christian population, until the mid-1970s. But the new nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria, and eventually Iraq became violently anti-western, anti-American, and anti-Israel. In 1967 Egypt and Syria managed to pull Jordan along with them into a confrontation with Israel that resulted in an Israeli pre-emptive attack. Recently released documents show an Israeli envoy in Washington telling American officials, on the eve of the war, that they should diplomatically support Israel in a pre-emptive attack not because Nasser had closed the Straits of Tiran--the ostensible cause of the war--but because of Nasser's intention of dominating the Middle East. Nasser indeed lost the war and resigned, but returned 24 hours later to popular acclaim. Meanwhile the 1967 war re-ignited the Palestinian issue and put the PLO on the world political map.
During the next decade a spectacular change took place, as Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat re-established Egyptian prestige with his 1973 attack on Israel and eventually made peace with the Jewish state. That turned out to be a false dawn. Peace with the Palestinians did not follow, Sadat was assassinated two years after the peace treaty, and meanwhile, Shi'ite fundamentalism overthrew the Shah of Iran. Iranian-sponsored terrorists took over a good deal of Lebanon. Saddam Hussein tried to replace Nasser as the leader of militant Sunni Islam. In 1990 he overreached himself by occupying Kuwait. The resulting war enhanced American and moderate prestige again, and restarted the Arab-Israeli peace process, but that collapsed again around 2000.
After 9/11 the Bush Administration decided that it was going to redraw the political map of the Middle East by force, beginning with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. (There is plenty of evidence that they wanted to move on to Iran and Syria after taking care of Iraq, but things did not turn out to be so simple.) The Administration also decided to discredit and remove what turned out to be relatively moderate Palestinian leadership under Yassir Arafat. This was a Boomer-led policy based upon absolute truths--the idea that democracy and free markets would solve any problem anywhere, any time. It has had further negative effects. Two militant, broad-based, well-organized political parties, Hezbollah and Hamas, control much of Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, largely because of elections the US demanded. Israel has taken a variety of steps (now including the Gaza invasion) that will probably make peace impossible for a long time to come. The government of Egypt would undoubtedly lose a free Egyptian election and give way to a radical regime. Jordanian youth are increasingly drawn to fundamentalism. And Iran now has enormous influence over Iraq and has been working hard on increasing its capacity to enrich uranium.
Now as President Bush and Vice President Cheney made clear many times, the logic of their policy seemed not only to favor but to demand an attack on Iran. Having invaded Iraq based upon false claims that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, they surely could have been expected to attack Iran to stop a real program, or to allow Israel to do so when the Israelis asked permission. Why they did not, however, turns out to reflect both contradictions within the American government, and a recognition of the contradictory effects of their own policies.
To begin with, as I pointed out about a year ago, the American intelligence community, in its Iran NIE, struck a blow for sanity. Today's Times story says something that I do not remember from reports at the time. That estimate based its key conclusion--that Iran had stopped working to develop a nuclear weapon--on evidence, good evidence, that Iranian scientists had stopped working on the design of a nuclear warhead. They had not, however, stopped enriching uranium--that program, which could indeed be designed for peaceful purposes as the Iranians claim, has been going on at full speed ahead. The intelligence community was probably doing two things at once: raising justified doubts about how close Iran was to getting nuclear weapons on the one hand, and trying to head off an attack that would set the rest of the Middle East aflame and vastly increase the chances of mass terror in the US on the other. President Bush, who relies famously on his "instincts," didn't really accept the conclusion, but it did make it impossible for the United States itself to launch an attack.
The Israeli request for permission and assistance to make an attack on Iranian facilities themselves put the US in exactly the same position as the government of imperial Germany in 1914, when the Austro-Hungarians asked for permission to attack Serbia. The Germans, as I showed many years ago, told them to go ahead because they had decided that this was an opportune moment for a trial of strength with France, Russia, and, if necessary, Britain. But Austria-Hungary was actually more of an independent actor then than Israel, apparently, is now. It needed only permission, while the Israelis needed both bunker-busting bombs that only the US could supply, and more specific permission to overfly American-occupied Iraq. The American rejection of the latter request illustrated the dilemma into which we have been thrown.
By now even President Bush has had in effect to abandon the fantasy of a truly democratic and pro-American Iraq, and has had to content himself--like Lyndon Johnson in South Vietnam in 1965--with a much lesser objective: an Iraqi government that will not throw the United States out. In the lengthy negotiations that led to the Status of Forces agreement the Iraqis insisted that the United States could not use Iraq as a base for an attack on another country. The new government, moreover, is determinedly anti-Israel (at one time, Ahmed Chalabi had promised the Bush Administration to fix even that problem, but he proved a false hope). The Times reports bluntly that the Administration thought the Iraqis would throw us out if we allowed Israeli aircraft to overfly Iraqi territory to attack Iran. The President was not about to sacrifice what he still hopes will be his most enduring contribution to history.
That, however, was not all. In late 2006 the President had to make what now looms as a rather bizarre compromise. Donald Rumsfeld, as I have pointed out, was not removed because of the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections or because he was too warlike: he was removed to make the surge possible. But to replace him the President was induced to pick a man from the Silent generation, Robert Gates, who had been a member of the Baker-Hamilton Commission and who was probably recommended by President Bush's father. (Bob Woodward, in State of Denial, seems to indicate this at one point, partly with the help of a conversation in which the President told him that Gates had been recommended by a prominent Texan whose name he could not remember.) Gates evidently understands that attacking Iran would create a regional catastrophe. Admiral Fallon was sacrificed partly for stating publicly that the US would not attack Iran, but the policy he favored has prevailed. Meanwhile, Gates will stay in office.
As matters stand now Iran may well get a nuclear weapon within five years or so, even if Israel does attack Iran on its own. There is in my opinion only one way to prevent it, and that is a long shot: a serious proposal from the Obama Administration to de-nuclearize the entire region, including Israel. Meanwhile, the anti-western political trends in the Arab world seem likely to continue. Israel, whatever it does, is unlikely to have genuine peace with its neighbors. It would do best, in my opinion, to ask what kind of co-existence it wants, and how it can help keep violence between it and its neighbors (including Hamas and Hezbollah) at a minimum. That violence has turned out to be the price of the decision to create and maintain Israel, and nothing that Israel or the US can do can stop it. They can, however, make decisions that will either increase or lessen it.
Germany in 1914 did not need to assure the survival of Austria-Hungary by telling it to go ahead and attack Serbia--a move which as it turned out did not even achieve its objectives for Austria-Hungary. In the same way, the existence of the United States is simply not at stake in the Middle East, unless we put it at risk by endless, useless involvement. Ironically, because the Bush Administration was as irresponsible at home as it has been abroad, our economic situation will provide another reason to reverse course in that region. But what the new Administration will do remains entirely unclear.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Immediate causes and long-run causes
About 2500 years ago, Thucydides the Athenian posited the difference between the immediate and long-term causes of wars. The war between Athens and Sparta ostensibly began because of a war between Corinth and Corcyra, a revolt in the Athenian client of Potidea, and Athens' blockade of neighboring Megara, but Thucydides adds that what really made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear that that occasioned in Sparta. In the same way, the video The Innocence of Muslims and the killing of three American diplomats, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, is merely the tip of a very large iceberg that broke away from an arctic glacier many decades ago, and a frightening symptom of what two related trends have made possible.
After nearly 70 years of relative peace around the world, we have forgotten that our civilization was originally established by force. Violence ruled the world directly for much of mankind's history, and there was no taboo against the use of private violence even as recently as 1000 years ago or less in Europe. As university students once learned in western civilization courses, monarchies established bureaucratic forms of government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the English-speaking world established genuine traditions of self-government. A parallel development occurred in the Ottoman empire, which ruled an astonishing conglomeration of peoples, including millions of Christians and Jews, for centuries. Then the American Revolution gave the world the idea of individual rights and true self-government, which repeatedly set the world on fire over the next 150 years. In the first half of the twentieth century those ideas tore apart one empire after another in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The new nations that emerged all followed some form of the western bureaucratic or democratic model, but the process was not accomplished without millions of deaths. Then in the 1990s threev more multinational states disintegrated--two of them, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, without significant bloodshed.
The Arab world for half a century has been ruled by bureaucratic and military dictatorships, some of them heavily supported by western nations, including the United States. Meanwhile, thanks largely to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the west in general and the United States in particular have become more and more unpopular among the Arab masses. In the 1990s, the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, who was never afraid to take a big idea and run with it, foresaw a clash of civilizations. Tragically, in the first decade of this century, an American President, George W. Bush, did his best to make that prophecy come true. I was struck that one of the two people behind the video that has outraged so many Muslims, Steve Klein, is a Vietnam veteran with a son who was wounded in Iraq. No matter how noble George W. Bush's purposes, the conquest of a Muslim nation was certain to arouse hatred throughout a region where memories of colonialism are still fresh. Barack Obama tried to show in his first year that his heart was in the right place, but he esa\calated the war in Afghanistan nonetheless. Meanwhile, among the tens of thousands of American casualties are a certain number who have come home bitter, or who have aroused bitterness among their families. The filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, has now been revealed as a Coptic Christian--a minority in genuine danger in Egypt--and a petty criminal. And that leads us to the truly novel and terrifying aspect of these events.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revolutionaries and anarchists often tried to set revolutions off with violent acts. The most successful, undoubtedly, was Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian terrorist who assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, triggered the First World War, and, although he did not live to see it, helped bring about the creation of Yugoslavia. But as late as 9/11/2001, such an act had either to kill a leading political figure, or several of them, or kill a large umber of innocents to have widespread consequences. That is no longer the case. A single internet video or cartoon from a newspaper is enough to send thousands into the streets, threatening the safety of westerners in much of the Muslim world and making a mockery of international law. It seems inconceivable that this will be the last such incident.
And these demonstrations are happening, of course, because the new governments in nations that have overthrown dictatorships lack the authority of their predecessors. It will take years for them to establish legitimacy, and the process, as in the great transformations of the past, is likely to be violent. Crucially, many Muslims obviously do not respect western ideas of free speech where religion is concerned. Attacks on Mohammed strike thousands as deadly insults reflecting shame not only on their perpetrators but upon foreign authorities who allow them to happen. In the age of the internet we cannot stop such attacks from arousing notice.
Two trends within the United States will also make things worse. The Republican Party is so desperate to return to power that it will try to exploit any setback for the US abroad and blame it on President Obama. He is in no way to blame for any of this, but we are already hearing that greater firmness would have avoided these problems. One would have thought that Republicans would know by now that attempts to impose our will and our values on Muslim nations do not work. Prominent Americans, however, cannot shake their sense of superiority. In a column two weeks ago Thomas Friedman bitterly criticized the new Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi, for attending a non-aligned summit in Teheran. I felt like screaming in Friedan's ear that Morsi does not care what he thinks, and that to Muslim nations the pariah in the Middle East is not Iran, but Israel.
The other American trend is now forty years old, and relates to our changing attitude towards free speech. I remain totally opposed to any restrictions on free speech, include laws against hate speech, but the time has come to face a necessary truth: free speech has to be exercised responsibly to work. Beginning in the 1960s the idea has grown that the purpose of speech is to be outrageous, and that the more outrageous speech might be, the more protection--if not celebration--it deserves. Free speech that, for instance, points out abuses by our own government or calls attention to real dangers overseas has enormous value, but free speech that simply insults millions of Muslims does not. Yet Mitt Romney initially criticized the Embassy in Egypt for attacking the video that caused the trouble.
The United States in my opinion is in for a rude awakening, because we simply have no means of imposing our values upon the rest of the world any more. As I have mentioned many times, governmental authority is in the midst of a huge long-term decline that began in the 1980s, if not the 1960. Populations have grown worldwide while armies have shrunk. (One of the half-dozen nations remaining with a large army by historical standards is, not coincidentally, Syria.) For the first time, the mass of people in nations like Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq are asserting their rights--and they do not share our values. That, sadly, will make effective, informed diplomacy all the more necessary. We could not afford the loss of Christopher Stevens.
After nearly 70 years of relative peace around the world, we have forgotten that our civilization was originally established by force. Violence ruled the world directly for much of mankind's history, and there was no taboo against the use of private violence even as recently as 1000 years ago or less in Europe. As university students once learned in western civilization courses, monarchies established bureaucratic forms of government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the English-speaking world established genuine traditions of self-government. A parallel development occurred in the Ottoman empire, which ruled an astonishing conglomeration of peoples, including millions of Christians and Jews, for centuries. Then the American Revolution gave the world the idea of individual rights and true self-government, which repeatedly set the world on fire over the next 150 years. In the first half of the twentieth century those ideas tore apart one empire after another in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The new nations that emerged all followed some form of the western bureaucratic or democratic model, but the process was not accomplished without millions of deaths. Then in the 1990s threev more multinational states disintegrated--two of them, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, without significant bloodshed.
The Arab world for half a century has been ruled by bureaucratic and military dictatorships, some of them heavily supported by western nations, including the United States. Meanwhile, thanks largely to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the west in general and the United States in particular have become more and more unpopular among the Arab masses. In the 1990s, the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, who was never afraid to take a big idea and run with it, foresaw a clash of civilizations. Tragically, in the first decade of this century, an American President, George W. Bush, did his best to make that prophecy come true. I was struck that one of the two people behind the video that has outraged so many Muslims, Steve Klein, is a Vietnam veteran with a son who was wounded in Iraq. No matter how noble George W. Bush's purposes, the conquest of a Muslim nation was certain to arouse hatred throughout a region where memories of colonialism are still fresh. Barack Obama tried to show in his first year that his heart was in the right place, but he esa\calated the war in Afghanistan nonetheless. Meanwhile, among the tens of thousands of American casualties are a certain number who have come home bitter, or who have aroused bitterness among their families. The filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, has now been revealed as a Coptic Christian--a minority in genuine danger in Egypt--and a petty criminal. And that leads us to the truly novel and terrifying aspect of these events.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revolutionaries and anarchists often tried to set revolutions off with violent acts. The most successful, undoubtedly, was Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian terrorist who assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, triggered the First World War, and, although he did not live to see it, helped bring about the creation of Yugoslavia. But as late as 9/11/2001, such an act had either to kill a leading political figure, or several of them, or kill a large umber of innocents to have widespread consequences. That is no longer the case. A single internet video or cartoon from a newspaper is enough to send thousands into the streets, threatening the safety of westerners in much of the Muslim world and making a mockery of international law. It seems inconceivable that this will be the last such incident.
And these demonstrations are happening, of course, because the new governments in nations that have overthrown dictatorships lack the authority of their predecessors. It will take years for them to establish legitimacy, and the process, as in the great transformations of the past, is likely to be violent. Crucially, many Muslims obviously do not respect western ideas of free speech where religion is concerned. Attacks on Mohammed strike thousands as deadly insults reflecting shame not only on their perpetrators but upon foreign authorities who allow them to happen. In the age of the internet we cannot stop such attacks from arousing notice.
Two trends within the United States will also make things worse. The Republican Party is so desperate to return to power that it will try to exploit any setback for the US abroad and blame it on President Obama. He is in no way to blame for any of this, but we are already hearing that greater firmness would have avoided these problems. One would have thought that Republicans would know by now that attempts to impose our will and our values on Muslim nations do not work. Prominent Americans, however, cannot shake their sense of superiority. In a column two weeks ago Thomas Friedman bitterly criticized the new Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi, for attending a non-aligned summit in Teheran. I felt like screaming in Friedan's ear that Morsi does not care what he thinks, and that to Muslim nations the pariah in the Middle East is not Iran, but Israel.
The other American trend is now forty years old, and relates to our changing attitude towards free speech. I remain totally opposed to any restrictions on free speech, include laws against hate speech, but the time has come to face a necessary truth: free speech has to be exercised responsibly to work. Beginning in the 1960s the idea has grown that the purpose of speech is to be outrageous, and that the more outrageous speech might be, the more protection--if not celebration--it deserves. Free speech that, for instance, points out abuses by our own government or calls attention to real dangers overseas has enormous value, but free speech that simply insults millions of Muslims does not. Yet Mitt Romney initially criticized the Embassy in Egypt for attacking the video that caused the trouble.
The United States in my opinion is in for a rude awakening, because we simply have no means of imposing our values upon the rest of the world any more. As I have mentioned many times, governmental authority is in the midst of a huge long-term decline that began in the 1980s, if not the 1960. Populations have grown worldwide while armies have shrunk. (One of the half-dozen nations remaining with a large army by historical standards is, not coincidentally, Syria.) For the first time, the mass of people in nations like Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq are asserting their rights--and they do not share our values. That, sadly, will make effective, informed diplomacy all the more necessary. We could not afford the loss of Christopher Stevens.
Thursday, August 03, 2017
Dark Money and the new American politics
Last weekend I finished Dark Money by Jane Mayer, which appeared last year. It was marketed, largely, as a history of the involvement of the fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch in American politics over the last few decades, but it is much more than that. I intend in what follows to summarize what I found in the book, but from a slightly different perspective than Mayer’s, and without much of any attention to the voluminous, and fascinating, personal data that she provides about the Kochs and other financiers of our new “conservative” political movement. Instead I am going to treat the book as the first draft, as it were, of a genuine political history of the last 40 or 50 years—because it explains more about where we are and how we got here than anything else that I have ever read. Mayer leads her readers through the story in rough chronological order, and I recommend the book to everyone. I on the other hand am going to try to identify its major features in an effort to explain how we got to the miserable point at which we find ourselves.
Charles and David Koch are the most striking example of extraordinarily wealthy Americans who have had an outsized impact on the politics of the last forty years—and whose impact is reaching a new peak right now. They followed in the footsteps of their father Fred, who in the 1950s was one of the founding members, along with candy manufacturer Robert Welch, of the John Birch Society. Nothing illustrates what has happened to American politics in my lifetime in more striking fashion than this. The ideas of the John Birch Society, a group of fanatically anti-government lunatics who in the 1950s identified Dwight D. Eisenhower as a member of the international Communist conspiracy, are now the single most influential set of ideas in American political life. Their main tenets are an unlimited faith in free enterprise and a conviction that government attempts to moderate the negative impacts of capitalism are simply a power grab designed to establish dictatorship. And because of the success of their political movement, their fortunes have grown by orders of magnitude over the last few decades.
In addition to the Kochs, the superrich political elite has included John Olin, a chemical manufacturer; Richard Mellon Scaife, a scion of a Pittsburgh family prominent in banking and industry; and Harry Bradley, another Birch Society acolyte who ran the Allen-Bradley Electronics Company in New York. In the middle of the twentieth century, when marginal income tax rates topped out at 91%, these men had all taken advantage of a provision in the tax code—first used by the Rockefeller family—to create a “philanthropic” foundation to shield substantial portions of their enormous income from taxes. Unfortunately, the definition of philanthropy has been broad enough to include the subsidy of a particular ideology—and ultimately, direct intervention in politics. That one tragic flaw in our tax code has reshaped opinion and redistributed power at every level of American government.
Now I have rarely been impressed by any of the ideas coming out of the new Right during the last few decades, but like many liberal Democrats, I suspect, I have assumed that conservative intellectuals had honestly come by their ideas. I am not suggesting now that they have lied about them, but Mayer leaves no doubt that the entire new right wing intellectual establishment was created from the ground up by the handful of major benefactors listed above. Both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation—the two centers of conservative “thought” in Washington—were originally funded largely by Richard Mellon Scaife. The Bradley and Olin Foundations were also powers behind the Heritage Foundation, and the Kochs have been involved as well. I have always thought of the Cato Institute as a nest of principled libertarians—partly because it tends to oppose foreign interventions—but it turns out to have been started by Charles Koch. Charles Murray was an unknown writer before the Olin foundation adopted him and subsidized his first book, Losing Ground, arguing that social programs were hurting the poor. (Spoiled, perhaps, by success, Murray went a bridge too far when he and Richard Herrnstein argued in The Bell Curve that black people were intellectually inferior to whites.) And I was amazed to learn from Mayer that the Bradley foundation gives four annual awards of $250,000 each to leading conservative journalists, activists, and intellectuals. Winners have included George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Heather MacDonald, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, John Bolton, William Kristol, Paul Gigot, Michael Barone, Jeb Bush, Harvey Mansfield, Edwin Meese, Roger Ailes of Fox News, General John Keane, and Charles Murray.
Changing the intellectual climate was step 1 in the program. Another spectacularly successful front was opened within the American legal system, Started in 1982 with money from the Olin Foundation and affiliates of the Scaifes and the Kochs, the Federalist Society has become a behemoth, an organization of conservative legal thinkers that includes all the conservative members of the US Supreme Court. That is not all. The Olin Foundation has sponsored two week seminars on Law and Economics for sitting judges, somewhat reminiscent of the seminars drug companies hold for physicians at major resorts. There they have exposed sitting judges to the evils of regulation and the glories of the free market—and this may explain some of the more extraordinary decisions that federal courts have handed down lately, such as one that limited the legal definition of insider trading to narrowly as to make most prosecutions for it impossible.
Nor is this all: the foundations have not hesitated to challenge liberal intellectuals in their own presumed stronghold, universities. Using the irresistible lever of their wealth—which no American university, in this day and age, can resist—they have established beachheads such as the Olin Center at Harvard University (promoting conservative ideas on foreign policy) and several institutes at George Mason University, conveniently located in the Washington suburbs. These have opened career paths for conservative public policy intellectuals—at the same time that mainstream academic departments have been going in directions largely irrelevant to real politics.
This vast intellectual infrastructure works in tandem, of course, with the right wing media, led by Fox News and Clear Channel Radio, to shift public opinion on key events. The alternative media outlets are largely self-financing, of course, but I was very surprised that another key rightwing organization, Freedom Works—funded largely by the Scaife foundation—had paid Glenn Beck more than $1 million a year to allow them to write his monologues. And this infrastructure has not only convinced many Americans, and probably most better-off Americans, that social programs do more harm than good, but it has also convinced millions that lower taxes on the wealthy increase economic growth—and, critically, created real doubt as to whether man-made global warming exists. Mayer traces the campaign against global warming effectively. It employed some of the same personnel and used the same playbook as the tobacco companies’ earlier effort to create doubt as to whether cigarettes caused cancer—but evidently with far more significant results. (I am leaving out of this essay the names of many key operatives within the network who have organized particular legal, lobbying and electoral campaigns. They are the battlefield commanders of our new political struggle.) The intellectual infrastructure also carries out campaigns against academics and journalists who stand in its way—including Mayer herself.
The other long-running campaign waged by the new right was the attempt to undo a century of regulation of spending on political campaigns. At the dawn of the Progressive Era a consensus emerged that the influence of money on politics had to be restricted, and Watergate had reinforced that lesson. But the counteroffensive against regulation began in the decade after Watergate, won various victories, and culminated in the Citizens United decision, the Kochs’ and their allies’ greatest and perhaps most influential triumph. The floodgates are now open, and the results are clear for all to see.
The right wing network gained much power over the Republican Party by 2000 and was rewarded by very friendly Bush Administration policies towards the energy industry, which turned fracking loose and set the US on the path to energy independence. It could not prevent a groundswell of negative feeling against the Bush Administration in its second term, however, or stop the election of a Democratic Congress and Barack Obama. But it went into high gear to stop Obama from accomplishing very much. To begin with, implementing a long standing plan to form a mass base, the Kochs and their allies took advantage of the financial crisis to get the Tea Party movement going in 2009. Their newly won financial power under Citizens United allowed them to intimidate virtually every Republican Senator and Representative with the threat of primary opposition, bringing them all into line for total opposition to the President. The Kochs now hold seminars every year for Republican officeholders, where they are informed in secret of the party line. They convinced millions of Americans that the financial crisis was really the fault of the federal government. When Obama threatened the carried interest tax loophole, their lobbying organizations found new allies among private equity titans and hedge fund managers on Wall Street. All this enabled the Republicans, backed by this network of plutocrats, to win their extraordinary victory in the 2010 elections. After redistricting was finished with the help of techniques provided by the same set of conservative donors, the Republicans probably had secured control of the House of Representatives for the rest of this decade.
The Koch network has also made a huge and successful effort at the state level, making the Democratic Party irrelevant in large parts of the nation. Originally founded with Scaife money in the 1970s, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) now writes draft anti-government, pro-business legislation for state legislatures all over the country. Local Kochs have also sprung up, such as Art Pope, a North Carolina discount store owner who in the last decade has taken over the state Republican Party and orchestrated its (now partial) takeover of the North Carolina state government. At the national level, ideological loyalties are still strong enough to allow Democratic candidates to win the popular vote in 4 of the last five Presidential elections, but at the local level, in red and some purple states, there is no alternative force that can stand up to the Koch-led network. And the ultraconservative domination of state legislatures poses perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy of all: a constitutional convention called by those legislatures which could rewrite key provisions of the Constitution along more “libertarian” lines.
Another chapter of this story does not appear in Mayer’s book. She finished it when Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy had just begun, and he initially exchanged insults with the Kochs, who did not trust him. Six months into his Administration it seems to represent an unqualified victory. The Kochs had a long-standing connection to Mike Pence. The DeVos family—the founders of Amway, an organization that has escaped serious legal trouble more than once—has also been a long-standing member of the megadonor network with a particular interest in education, and they have provided Trump with his education secretary. The EPA and the Department of Energy and firmly in the hands of Koch allies and are now taking the skeptical line on climate change. New rounds of tax cuts are being prepared. The Kochs are undoubtedly unhappy about the failure to repeal the ACA, but they now hold more levers of power than they ever did.
A political revolution has been in progress for more than four decades, a reaction to the New Deal and the more just society that it created. Fueled by successive rounds of tax cuts, this revolution has created a tiny group of billionaires that now control most of our political life. This is way, as a widely cited study by Marin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page discovered, the beliefs of average American citizens and broad-based activist groups on key issues have very little influence on policy outcomes, while the beliefs of interest groups have a great deal. It's also why most Republicans will vote for legislation that will clearly hurt far more of their constituents than it will help. This is, I believe, the new America that our current Fourth Turning has created, and like the Gilded Age, it will not be overturned, in all probability, for a very long time. DK
I have my own criticisms of Sowell and Hanson, but they are not necessarily those of DK.
The Gilded Age was that of the long 70 year hegemony of the white only Lincoln Republican North.
The hay day of the queer negro decadent capitalist Whig history "Bowery Boys" WNYC boom story of New York City, Chicago, etc., and the corresponding guilty white man permanent bust of the South, for example, corresponded with the Gone With The Wind "Reconstruction", and post Reconstruction "Jim Crow", long, desolate, whites only Republican Aftermath.
The Civil War and long yankee occupation of the South did not equalitarianize those freed negroes nearly enough.
To really equalitarianize negroes, one needs to equalitarianize all Africans everywhere, not just one or two, or a few hundred thousand in the US, but, as W said (see below), 'this principle is right for all negroes everywhere!':
"...The premise of our policy, which is rarely articulated directly, has been developed by the Russian-Israeli politician Natan Sharansky in his book The Case for Democracy, which is a favorite of President Bush's ("W's"). It holds that people--all people--yearn to live in democracies..." DK
....and that they are equalitarian...
The same kind of Whig historians who claim American history is really The 1619 Project also claim that Rome never fell at all. See the refutation of that in Ward-Perkins, etc.
The modern Whig: The Holocaust was pivotal, Rome fell because of Christianity, capitalism, and/or overstretch, not barbarians.
Dueling postmodern Whigs: Holocaust may or may not have happened, Rome may or may not have fallen, Athens actually won the Peloponnesian War. (I had a guy actually tell me this who had claimed to have read Hanson's book.)
Boomerbuster
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