Conservatives love to complain about double standards in the media, and sometimes it’s just whining and then every once and a while something comes along that makes you think they’ve got a point.
Sandra Bernhard, in a performance her one-woman show in Washington, D.C., last week said that Sarah Palin would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers” if she tried to campaign in New York city.
Hmmm. OK, let’s admit that Sandra Bernhard is an “edgy” comedienne and that she makes a living by provoking and that sometimes we need to be provoked and sometimes we even enjoy it. But still. That’s a contemptible remark. There’s no other word for it. Besides the almost pathological level of vituperation toward a mere political candidate, I think if I were a black man living in New York I might wish Bernhard had consulted me before making that claim on my behalf. A joke about black men gang-raping a white woman? You’ve got to be kidding me. Can Sandra Bernhard really get away with that?
When Don Imus made a vapid, offensive crack about “nappy-headed ho’s” he was run out of town on a rail. And the reaction to Bernhard’s remark? “The fact that the show has a few riffs like this does not — to my mind — make it a "disgusting show...," says Ari Roth of Theater J, the venue hosting Bernhard’s show. “We’re proud that she’s a new emblem and ambassador for our theater and our center... her large heart, her generous talent, and her big mouth are all a big part of who we are.”
As for Bernhard, she explained by saying, "I certainly wish Governor Palin no harm. I'd just like her to explain to me how she can hold such outrageous views - and then go back to Alaska."
Well, thanks for that. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether Sarah Palin’s views are more outrageous than Bernhard’s joke. Maybe you can catch Bernhard’s show in Chicago, where the Tribune gave her an extensive admiring profile on the eve of her appearance there. Apparently the consequences for Sandra Bernhard’s career are going to be, if anything, positive.
That’s too bad. It remains a truly appalling remark. Why are liberals, supposedly differentiated from conservatives by their greater compassion and decency, prone to such rants when faced with conservative females or blacks? Maybe because some liberals are shallow thinkers who cannot conceive of women or blacks starting from different assumptions or interpreting the world in a different way. They are outraged when blacks and women don't conform to their expectations of the correct political view. They assume that blacks and women must be liberals or else they're hypocrites and scoundrels. And if you’re a hypocrite or a scoundrel, you are beyond the pale.
I don’t mind Sandra Bernhard being edgy. I just want her held to the same standards as anybody else. Forget Sarah Palin-- if you’re a black man living in New York, Sandra Bernhard owes you an apology.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Free Market Free Fall
It’s a tough time to be a proponent of free-market economics, with the financial system in crisis and the real economy heading into a recession. As markets plunge and the government reaches into taxpayers’ pockets to bail out the Wall Street crapshooters who got us into this mess, the triumphalism on the political left is growing. The narrative is that the ascendancy of free-market ideology beginning in the eighties has led to a worldwide crisis and a wholesome political backlash (as exemplified in Latin America), as victims of global capitalism begin to fight for their alienated rights.
A good summation of this position was the speech by Naomi Klein at the University of Chicago on October 4th opposing the establishment of an economics think tank named for Milton Friedman. In essence Klein accuses Friedman and his followers of peddling a utopian vision which has not stood the test of reality but has been imposed by force around the world to allow the rich to get richer while further impoverishing the poor. She calls it a “class war” and says that the rich have won but the poor are fighting back.
There’s no question that income disparities have grown as real wages have stagnated and tremendous benefits have accrued to the top income levels over the past couple of decades. Whether or not this constitutes a war on the poor depends on whether you are inclined to perceive intentional malice behind every negative social development. Karl Popper warned against this “conspiracy theory of society”, and I am inclined to agree with him.
One of Popper’s key philosophical insights was that we cannot, as a point of logic, know all possible implications of our statements, and in the real world this is amply reflected in the myriad “unintended and unforeseen consequences of our actions.” So I’m not inclined to believe that people in corner office suites on Wall Street sat there plotting to impoverish people; I’m rather inclined to believe that they sat there looking for ways to make lots of money. You don’t need a cackling, moustache-twirling villain to explain this scenario. You just need ordinary human failings.
I even believe that at least some of those Wall Street titans thought about the poor occasionally. They probably thought that by paying taxes, giving to charity, and, most importantly, helping to mobilize capital to create new jobs, they were helping the poor. This may well have been self-serving delusion. But the only sensible question to ask is whether, in fact, they were right or wrong in their belief. I don’t think that talking about a war on the poor contributes to our understanding of what alleviates poverty. But it gets a gratifying reaction from an audience.
I don’t know whether Naomi Klein endorses the conspiracy theory of society, but she certainly believes that Milton Friedman’s ideas have served primarily to justify an illegitmate, anti-democratic wealth grab. She is raising legitimate questions about the consequences of the ideas Friedman espoused, and those of us who tend to agree with Friedman have to answer them. We have to take a hard look at what we believe and whether real-world experience bears it out. Another thing Karl Popper said was that the scientific attitude is the critical attitude, and we can (and should) subject even our basic assumptions to criticism.
Whether you think current events are refuting your position, of course, depends on how you frame your position, and the temptation always is to do some rapid tailoring of your position as events overtake it. (“I never said that! I only claimed...“ etc.) I’ll try to be as honest as possible about what I believe and how events are affecting that.
There’s no doubt that the current financial crisis has to make us think twice about the wisdom of the current regulatory structure. In particular, it’s getting tougher to defend the decision in 1999 to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking from commercial banking. When the act was repealed, I remember thinking, “Well, why not? Won’t this allow banks more freedom to innovate?” Well, I guess it did. If you’re paying attention to the real world, I think you have to reconsider this one.
But I’m going to plead innocent, on behalf of market advocates, to one big charge that Klein implicitly made in her U. of C. speech. At several points she seems to conflate two different propositions: that markets are the best way to allocate economic resources and that markets should be totally unregulated. These are two very different propositions, and I only support the first one.
The first proposition has, I think, been amply borne out in the real world. Centralized economic planning has failed wherever it has been tried, because no bureaucracy can possibly match the demand for and supply of the millions of products that modern life involves. Only a relatively untrammeled price system can do that. (Friedman was far from the only economist to make this point and it is, I think, not widely contested among the economically literate.) Further, the attempt to exercise serious control of an economy must at some point devolve to authoritarianism because it criminalizes consensual economic acts.
This is the proposition I have come to support—that the free market is, by and large, allowing for some real-world cases of market failure that can be remedied without vitiating the principle, the best way to provide for people’s material needs. And I think real-world experience bears this out. Millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past couple of decades as planned economies have been liberalized and market principles have spread.
But I have never believed that markets should be completely unregulated. And I don’t know of many who do. There is a faction of capitalist anarchists out on the libertarian right (or would that be left?) who oppose any kind of state whatsoever, but they are a lonely few.
Laissez-faire does not mean no regulation, as Klein seems to believe. It means that the government should let the price system work to direct resources to where they are most in demand. It means, for example, that the government should not subsidize some products (like ethanol) and penalize others (like textiles from poor African countries). There’s a lot in the free-market position that even the left should be able to get on board with, like opposition to corporate welfare. The phrase laissez-faire applies to resource allocation. It doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to abuses.
Even most Wall Street capitalists think they should be regulated. Here’s what one of them has to say in the current edition of the National Review: “...to proclaim that free markets are always their own best regulator is not only to fly in the face of history and common sense but also to ensure that the debate will be lost.” That’s Andrew Stuttaford, in a good discussion of right and wrong regulatory responses to the crisis.
The current crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure of regulation. And it’s possible that it was the product of the same mistaken conflation of propositions by people on the right that Klein makes out on the left. If our politicians took the free-market position to mean that the government should abdicate its responsibility to oversee our financial and economic system to insure its smooth and honest functioning, they were in error. But nothing in the current crisis makes me doubt the basic wisdom of Adam Smith’s or Milton Friedman’s insights into the efficiency of markets in providing for our needs.
The problem is to get regulation right. Financial innovators are always one step ahead of the regulators. And sometimes they need to be reined in. But regulation can be too heavy. And deregulation is not always bad. Real life involves trade-offs, and there’s an optimal point in the trade-off between freedom and prudent restriction which is hard to locate. Whether you incline more to the freedom end of the scale or the restriction end is part of what defines you politically. People can differ about this in good faith. It ought to be an empirical question. The right and the left can talk to each other if they avoid demonizing each other.
In her speech at the University of Chicago, Naomi Klein talked about the way Marxists were disillusioned by the Gulag, how the left had to undergo a healthy process of re-thinking in the wake of the manifest failure of communism. That doesn’t seem to have made her abandon the left; she just wants the left to be smarter. In the same way, those of us who believe that a great degree of economic freedom is a good thing need to be alert to real-world wake-up calls. We can re-think some things without abandoning the central insights of the free-market position. When all the shouting is over, I think we’ll still be on firmer ground than those that think the government should be in charge of distributing economic resources.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
A good summation of this position was the speech by Naomi Klein at the University of Chicago on October 4th opposing the establishment of an economics think tank named for Milton Friedman. In essence Klein accuses Friedman and his followers of peddling a utopian vision which has not stood the test of reality but has been imposed by force around the world to allow the rich to get richer while further impoverishing the poor. She calls it a “class war” and says that the rich have won but the poor are fighting back.
There’s no question that income disparities have grown as real wages have stagnated and tremendous benefits have accrued to the top income levels over the past couple of decades. Whether or not this constitutes a war on the poor depends on whether you are inclined to perceive intentional malice behind every negative social development. Karl Popper warned against this “conspiracy theory of society”, and I am inclined to agree with him.
One of Popper’s key philosophical insights was that we cannot, as a point of logic, know all possible implications of our statements, and in the real world this is amply reflected in the myriad “unintended and unforeseen consequences of our actions.” So I’m not inclined to believe that people in corner office suites on Wall Street sat there plotting to impoverish people; I’m rather inclined to believe that they sat there looking for ways to make lots of money. You don’t need a cackling, moustache-twirling villain to explain this scenario. You just need ordinary human failings.
I even believe that at least some of those Wall Street titans thought about the poor occasionally. They probably thought that by paying taxes, giving to charity, and, most importantly, helping to mobilize capital to create new jobs, they were helping the poor. This may well have been self-serving delusion. But the only sensible question to ask is whether, in fact, they were right or wrong in their belief. I don’t think that talking about a war on the poor contributes to our understanding of what alleviates poverty. But it gets a gratifying reaction from an audience.
I don’t know whether Naomi Klein endorses the conspiracy theory of society, but she certainly believes that Milton Friedman’s ideas have served primarily to justify an illegitmate, anti-democratic wealth grab. She is raising legitimate questions about the consequences of the ideas Friedman espoused, and those of us who tend to agree with Friedman have to answer them. We have to take a hard look at what we believe and whether real-world experience bears it out. Another thing Karl Popper said was that the scientific attitude is the critical attitude, and we can (and should) subject even our basic assumptions to criticism.
Whether you think current events are refuting your position, of course, depends on how you frame your position, and the temptation always is to do some rapid tailoring of your position as events overtake it. (“I never said that! I only claimed...“ etc.) I’ll try to be as honest as possible about what I believe and how events are affecting that.
There’s no doubt that the current financial crisis has to make us think twice about the wisdom of the current regulatory structure. In particular, it’s getting tougher to defend the decision in 1999 to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking from commercial banking. When the act was repealed, I remember thinking, “Well, why not? Won’t this allow banks more freedom to innovate?” Well, I guess it did. If you’re paying attention to the real world, I think you have to reconsider this one.
But I’m going to plead innocent, on behalf of market advocates, to one big charge that Klein implicitly made in her U. of C. speech. At several points she seems to conflate two different propositions: that markets are the best way to allocate economic resources and that markets should be totally unregulated. These are two very different propositions, and I only support the first one.
The first proposition has, I think, been amply borne out in the real world. Centralized economic planning has failed wherever it has been tried, because no bureaucracy can possibly match the demand for and supply of the millions of products that modern life involves. Only a relatively untrammeled price system can do that. (Friedman was far from the only economist to make this point and it is, I think, not widely contested among the economically literate.) Further, the attempt to exercise serious control of an economy must at some point devolve to authoritarianism because it criminalizes consensual economic acts.
This is the proposition I have come to support—that the free market is, by and large, allowing for some real-world cases of market failure that can be remedied without vitiating the principle, the best way to provide for people’s material needs. And I think real-world experience bears this out. Millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past couple of decades as planned economies have been liberalized and market principles have spread.
But I have never believed that markets should be completely unregulated. And I don’t know of many who do. There is a faction of capitalist anarchists out on the libertarian right (or would that be left?) who oppose any kind of state whatsoever, but they are a lonely few.
Laissez-faire does not mean no regulation, as Klein seems to believe. It means that the government should let the price system work to direct resources to where they are most in demand. It means, for example, that the government should not subsidize some products (like ethanol) and penalize others (like textiles from poor African countries). There’s a lot in the free-market position that even the left should be able to get on board with, like opposition to corporate welfare. The phrase laissez-faire applies to resource allocation. It doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to abuses.
Even most Wall Street capitalists think they should be regulated. Here’s what one of them has to say in the current edition of the National Review: “...to proclaim that free markets are always their own best regulator is not only to fly in the face of history and common sense but also to ensure that the debate will be lost.” That’s Andrew Stuttaford, in a good discussion of right and wrong regulatory responses to the crisis.
The current crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure of regulation. And it’s possible that it was the product of the same mistaken conflation of propositions by people on the right that Klein makes out on the left. If our politicians took the free-market position to mean that the government should abdicate its responsibility to oversee our financial and economic system to insure its smooth and honest functioning, they were in error. But nothing in the current crisis makes me doubt the basic wisdom of Adam Smith’s or Milton Friedman’s insights into the efficiency of markets in providing for our needs.
The problem is to get regulation right. Financial innovators are always one step ahead of the regulators. And sometimes they need to be reined in. But regulation can be too heavy. And deregulation is not always bad. Real life involves trade-offs, and there’s an optimal point in the trade-off between freedom and prudent restriction which is hard to locate. Whether you incline more to the freedom end of the scale or the restriction end is part of what defines you politically. People can differ about this in good faith. It ought to be an empirical question. The right and the left can talk to each other if they avoid demonizing each other.
In her speech at the University of Chicago, Naomi Klein talked about the way Marxists were disillusioned by the Gulag, how the left had to undergo a healthy process of re-thinking in the wake of the manifest failure of communism. That doesn’t seem to have made her abandon the left; she just wants the left to be smarter. In the same way, those of us who believe that a great degree of economic freedom is a good thing need to be alert to real-world wake-up calls. We can re-think some things without abandoning the central insights of the free-market position. When all the shouting is over, I think we’ll still be on firmer ground than those that think the government should be in charge of distributing economic resources.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Misery
The Chicago Cubs have done it again, collapsed in futility in their first playoff series for the second year in a row after winning the National League Central Division race. After a lot of hoopla about how things were different now and a genuinely good Cub team had a chance to break the century-long curse and go all the way, the whole thing turned sour and depressingly familiar.
I watched the second and third games in a bar, surrounded by twenty-somethings who reacted to the unfolding disaster with curses, bowed heads, hands thrown up in despair. Me, I laughed. And I was rooting for the Cubs. I told one of them, “Son, I’ve been watching this kind of thing for forty years.”
I decided in 2003 that I wasn't ever going to let this team depress me again. I’ve been a Cub fan since 1967, when my father took my brothers and me to a game in Wrigley Field and the Cubs beat Juan Marichal and the Giants on two Billy Williams homers and a clutch Ron Santo triple. I was hooked, and I thought I was on to a good thing. Little did I know. I lived through the 1969 collapse, the 1984 collapse, the 2003 collapse. I’ve been watching the Cubs collapse for a long time. I finally realized I don’t have to let it affect me. I'm happy when they win, but when they lose I don't have to care. My kids still love me, I don't have any less money in the bank... I don't give a damn. Life is easier that way.
The Florida Marlins have won two World Series titles in little more than a decade of existence; the Arizona Diamondbacks have won once. Meanwhile the Cubs have had one miserable season after another, with occasional brief spasms of competence ending in excruciating failure in post-season action. How do you explain this? What gives? How can this happen again and again? This is anomalous, eye-catching, epic, spooky failure.
I don’t think there are any curses involved. I think at this point the weight of past failures is so heavy that any Cub team going into the playoffs just can't avoid being tight. They can't just relax and play the game like any other team. It's like thinking about breathing. When you start to scrutinize what you normally do on reflex and muscle memory, it's over. And that's where the Cubs are at this point. Any little thing that goes wrong makes them start to think about what they are doing, and it just goes downhill from there.
I don't expect to see a Cub title in my lifetime. It's just not ever going to happen. It's not a curse, it's just psychology. Each failure makes further failures more inevitable.
But, of course, I don't care any more.
The pity is that this was a really good Cub team-- they won the division, and that's what you put a team together to do. There is a large element of chance in baseball-- you can nail one and have it go into a fielder's glove or nub a dribbler that gets through for a hit. That's why they play series-- one game can be decided by chance, but over a series of games the breaks are supposed to even out. And the more games are involved, the more chance there is that the best team actually wins. That's why the old-fashioned pennant race was a better test of who the most talented team really was. In a short series, anything can happen, and mistakes get magnified.
So give the Cubs credit for being the best team in the National League over the course of the year, and the worst in baseball at handling pressure that will only get worse each time they make the playoffs. I’m not making excuses for them—it’s called choking, and they choked big-time, once again. But I’m starting to think that choking comes with the territory for this old, tired, sad franchise. If this Cub team couldn’t handle the pressure, what Cub team ever will?
If you are a Cub fan, you just have to accept this.
But, of course, I don’t care any more. I’m laughing...
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
I watched the second and third games in a bar, surrounded by twenty-somethings who reacted to the unfolding disaster with curses, bowed heads, hands thrown up in despair. Me, I laughed. And I was rooting for the Cubs. I told one of them, “Son, I’ve been watching this kind of thing for forty years.”
I decided in 2003 that I wasn't ever going to let this team depress me again. I’ve been a Cub fan since 1967, when my father took my brothers and me to a game in Wrigley Field and the Cubs beat Juan Marichal and the Giants on two Billy Williams homers and a clutch Ron Santo triple. I was hooked, and I thought I was on to a good thing. Little did I know. I lived through the 1969 collapse, the 1984 collapse, the 2003 collapse. I’ve been watching the Cubs collapse for a long time. I finally realized I don’t have to let it affect me. I'm happy when they win, but when they lose I don't have to care. My kids still love me, I don't have any less money in the bank... I don't give a damn. Life is easier that way.
The Florida Marlins have won two World Series titles in little more than a decade of existence; the Arizona Diamondbacks have won once. Meanwhile the Cubs have had one miserable season after another, with occasional brief spasms of competence ending in excruciating failure in post-season action. How do you explain this? What gives? How can this happen again and again? This is anomalous, eye-catching, epic, spooky failure.
I don’t think there are any curses involved. I think at this point the weight of past failures is so heavy that any Cub team going into the playoffs just can't avoid being tight. They can't just relax and play the game like any other team. It's like thinking about breathing. When you start to scrutinize what you normally do on reflex and muscle memory, it's over. And that's where the Cubs are at this point. Any little thing that goes wrong makes them start to think about what they are doing, and it just goes downhill from there.
I don't expect to see a Cub title in my lifetime. It's just not ever going to happen. It's not a curse, it's just psychology. Each failure makes further failures more inevitable.
But, of course, I don't care any more.
The pity is that this was a really good Cub team-- they won the division, and that's what you put a team together to do. There is a large element of chance in baseball-- you can nail one and have it go into a fielder's glove or nub a dribbler that gets through for a hit. That's why they play series-- one game can be decided by chance, but over a series of games the breaks are supposed to even out. And the more games are involved, the more chance there is that the best team actually wins. That's why the old-fashioned pennant race was a better test of who the most talented team really was. In a short series, anything can happen, and mistakes get magnified.
So give the Cubs credit for being the best team in the National League over the course of the year, and the worst in baseball at handling pressure that will only get worse each time they make the playoffs. I’m not making excuses for them—it’s called choking, and they choked big-time, once again. But I’m starting to think that choking comes with the territory for this old, tired, sad franchise. If this Cub team couldn’t handle the pressure, what Cub team ever will?
If you are a Cub fan, you just have to accept this.
But, of course, I don’t care any more. I’m laughing...
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Oops, again
The Afghan government is protesting again that a U.S. airstrike has killed a large number of civilians. The U.S. military says the strike in Azizabad in Shindand district took out 30 Taliban fighters and a long-sought commander; local villagers claim that more than 70 civilians were killed. The military says it is investigating and that “All allegations of civilian casualties are taken very seriously.”
Not seriously enough to consider changing our approach, apparently. This report could be a Xerox of numerous previous incidents; I wrote about this a year ago. Again and again we have killed civilians in airstrikes aimed at the Taliban, provoking protests among the people we are supposedly trying to protect. Now, I am aware that we are at war and that a certain amount of collateral damage is unavoidable. But damage remains collateral only as long as it is accepted by the population supposedly being protected. As long as there is a consensus that deaths are accidental and part of the price paid for the benefits of military action, the term “collateral damage” can be used with a straight face. When that damage reaches the point where the population rises in protest against it, it’s not collateral any more. It’s indistinguishable from hostile action. And the Afghans start to wonder who their real enemy is, undermining everything good we’re trying to do in Afghanistan.
Here’s a thought: maybe airstrikes are not a very good tool in counter-insurgency warfare. Maybe when the enemy is not a massed conventional army but rather an irregular force operating among the population of the country supposedly being liberated, airstrikes can do more harm than good. Counter-insurgency, as the U.S. military is rapidly learning, is a whole different ball game from conventional warfare, requiring a patient approach that gets the population of the country working with us. And reducing a village to a smoking ruin seems a poor way to win the villagers over.
This is a tactical question. I don’t question our goals in Afghanistan. The Taliban need to be defeated so they don’t come back and kill all the Afghan girls who have learned to read. But the Taliban are not considerate enough to operate on clearly demarcated battlefields. They hide in villages. And taking out the whole village only turns the next village over the ridge against us.
Forgoing airstrikes, of course, will mean a certain amount of pain for U.S. troops on the ground. Counter-insurgency is slower, harder and more dangerous to infantry and special forces than the airstrike approach. It’s a tough way to win a war. But in the long run it’s the only way. Look at the successful counter-insurgency campaigns in recent history (e.g. the British effort in Malaya), and there’s no mystery about what works, as laid out in an article by Kalev I. Sepp in the Military Review. Better military minds than mine have looked at this problem.
Somebody in the Pentagon needs to think about this. It’s not too late to save Afghanistan, but if we keep on treating Afghan villagers like furniture, it might be before too long.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Not seriously enough to consider changing our approach, apparently. This report could be a Xerox of numerous previous incidents; I wrote about this a year ago. Again and again we have killed civilians in airstrikes aimed at the Taliban, provoking protests among the people we are supposedly trying to protect. Now, I am aware that we are at war and that a certain amount of collateral damage is unavoidable. But damage remains collateral only as long as it is accepted by the population supposedly being protected. As long as there is a consensus that deaths are accidental and part of the price paid for the benefits of military action, the term “collateral damage” can be used with a straight face. When that damage reaches the point where the population rises in protest against it, it’s not collateral any more. It’s indistinguishable from hostile action. And the Afghans start to wonder who their real enemy is, undermining everything good we’re trying to do in Afghanistan.
Here’s a thought: maybe airstrikes are not a very good tool in counter-insurgency warfare. Maybe when the enemy is not a massed conventional army but rather an irregular force operating among the population of the country supposedly being liberated, airstrikes can do more harm than good. Counter-insurgency, as the U.S. military is rapidly learning, is a whole different ball game from conventional warfare, requiring a patient approach that gets the population of the country working with us. And reducing a village to a smoking ruin seems a poor way to win the villagers over.
This is a tactical question. I don’t question our goals in Afghanistan. The Taliban need to be defeated so they don’t come back and kill all the Afghan girls who have learned to read. But the Taliban are not considerate enough to operate on clearly demarcated battlefields. They hide in villages. And taking out the whole village only turns the next village over the ridge against us.
Forgoing airstrikes, of course, will mean a certain amount of pain for U.S. troops on the ground. Counter-insurgency is slower, harder and more dangerous to infantry and special forces than the airstrike approach. It’s a tough way to win a war. But in the long run it’s the only way. Look at the successful counter-insurgency campaigns in recent history (e.g. the British effort in Malaya), and there’s no mystery about what works, as laid out in an article by Kalev I. Sepp in the Military Review. Better military minds than mine have looked at this problem.
Somebody in the Pentagon needs to think about this. It’s not too late to save Afghanistan, but if we keep on treating Afghan villagers like furniture, it might be before too long.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Sunday, August 10, 2008
This Just In
Somehow the desire to wrestle with Big Ideas evaporated in the summer heat, but I keep on reading the papers. Some random news items and the thoughts they provoke:
Pinocchios in Politics: Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is self-destructing, charged now with 10 felony counts in two separate cases after he allegedly assaulted two sheriff’s deputies trying to serve a subpoena on a friend of his. Kilpatrick had previously been tossed in the clink for violating bond conditions on a perjury rap. I think the pressure’s getting to him.
It’s a sad spectacle any way you look at it. What’s interesting to me is how the whole thing started: with accusations of adultery which emerged in the course of a lawsuit against Kilpatrick brought by a police official he had fired. The suit had nothing to do with Kilpatrick’s love life, but he denied the accusations under oath and was promptly indicted for perjury, starting his death spiral.
Meanwhile, the papers today are full of John Edwards’s confession after repeated denials that he conducted an affair with a staffer while his wife was suffering from cancer. There goes his political career. Maybe he and Kilpatrick can open a hot dog stand together. Then there was Eliot Spitzer. Oh, and the last time a U.S. President was impeached it was all about hanky-panky in the Oval Office, wasn’t it?
The worldly Europeans laugh at us about this. The fact that a political career in the United States can founder on an illicit love affair leaves them shaking their heads. France’s former president Mitterand fathered an illegitimate daughter and lived with his mistress, and the current guy, Nicolas Sarkozy, ditched his wife and hooked up with a fashion model in the middle of his first year in office, all under the glare of the flashbulbs. Nobody’s calling for his resignation, not for that, anyway.
Are we hopeless Puritan boobs in this country? Does a man’s philandering have anything to do with his competence as an administrator, his vision as a statesman? When Georgia and Russia are at war and Pakistan is about to fly into a thousand pieces, is John Edwards really the most important news story? What gives with this?
There’s no question that there’s a strong Puritan strain in our culture; the country was settled by folks who came here because they thought Europe was hopelessly Godless and decadent. There’s no Religious Right anywhere near as strong as ours in Europe. And that’s reflected in our politics.
But there’s more to it than that. Look at what people are actually getting indicted for. Kilpatrick’s original crime was perjury. And Bill Clinton was impeached not for shtuping the help when he should have been attending to matters of state but, again, for lying about it under oath. As for Spitzer, he knew his career was over because he campaigned as a paragon of virtue and then got caught with his pants down.
In other words, Americans don’t like liars and hypocrites. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that JFK was a lousy president because he cheated on Jackie. And Barney Frank is still in Congress despite his dalliance with the head of a male prostitution ring because he admitted everything and threw himself on the mercy of his constituents. At least in Massachusetts, voters can be very forgiving. It’s getting caught and not fessing up that’s fatal.
So if you’re up to no good, whether cheating on your wife or cheating on your taxes (remember, Martha Stewart didn’t go to the Big House because of insider trading but because she lied about it to investigators), whatever you do, just don’t try and deny it. When the snoops kick in the door and catch you with your pants down, you’ll probably be OK if you schedule a press conference the next day, haul your wife in front of the cameras to stand beside you, muster up a few tears and apologize to all and sundry. Americans will forgive just about anything except trying to weasel out of the spanking you know you richly deserve.
Oops: Police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, raided the house of a small-town mayor, shot his two dogs, and kept him in handcuffs for a couple of hours before determining that they had made a mistake in identifying him as a drug dealer. The mayor has been exonerated and received an apology, but the dogs are gone for good.
The War on Drugs keeps producing mistakes like this. When you criminalize actions that are essentially non-predatory, consensual and private, you make everyone’s private life police business. This is a violation of so many American ideals it’s hard to know where to start in listing them. In a country which for the most part does pretty well by world standards at leaving its citizens alone, the drug war is a hideous exception, with Gestapo-like raids, high-handed seizures of property and harsh prison sentences for non-violent actions.
Drugs can do great harm. But drug abuse should be regarded as the user’s problem, like, say, alcohol abuse. Drugs should be regarded as a public health problem rather than a criminal problem. Legalize and regulate, and stop kicking in people’s doors.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Pinocchios in Politics: Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is self-destructing, charged now with 10 felony counts in two separate cases after he allegedly assaulted two sheriff’s deputies trying to serve a subpoena on a friend of his. Kilpatrick had previously been tossed in the clink for violating bond conditions on a perjury rap. I think the pressure’s getting to him.
It’s a sad spectacle any way you look at it. What’s interesting to me is how the whole thing started: with accusations of adultery which emerged in the course of a lawsuit against Kilpatrick brought by a police official he had fired. The suit had nothing to do with Kilpatrick’s love life, but he denied the accusations under oath and was promptly indicted for perjury, starting his death spiral.
Meanwhile, the papers today are full of John Edwards’s confession after repeated denials that he conducted an affair with a staffer while his wife was suffering from cancer. There goes his political career. Maybe he and Kilpatrick can open a hot dog stand together. Then there was Eliot Spitzer. Oh, and the last time a U.S. President was impeached it was all about hanky-panky in the Oval Office, wasn’t it?
The worldly Europeans laugh at us about this. The fact that a political career in the United States can founder on an illicit love affair leaves them shaking their heads. France’s former president Mitterand fathered an illegitimate daughter and lived with his mistress, and the current guy, Nicolas Sarkozy, ditched his wife and hooked up with a fashion model in the middle of his first year in office, all under the glare of the flashbulbs. Nobody’s calling for his resignation, not for that, anyway.
Are we hopeless Puritan boobs in this country? Does a man’s philandering have anything to do with his competence as an administrator, his vision as a statesman? When Georgia and Russia are at war and Pakistan is about to fly into a thousand pieces, is John Edwards really the most important news story? What gives with this?
There’s no question that there’s a strong Puritan strain in our culture; the country was settled by folks who came here because they thought Europe was hopelessly Godless and decadent. There’s no Religious Right anywhere near as strong as ours in Europe. And that’s reflected in our politics.
But there’s more to it than that. Look at what people are actually getting indicted for. Kilpatrick’s original crime was perjury. And Bill Clinton was impeached not for shtuping the help when he should have been attending to matters of state but, again, for lying about it under oath. As for Spitzer, he knew his career was over because he campaigned as a paragon of virtue and then got caught with his pants down.
In other words, Americans don’t like liars and hypocrites. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that JFK was a lousy president because he cheated on Jackie. And Barney Frank is still in Congress despite his dalliance with the head of a male prostitution ring because he admitted everything and threw himself on the mercy of his constituents. At least in Massachusetts, voters can be very forgiving. It’s getting caught and not fessing up that’s fatal.
So if you’re up to no good, whether cheating on your wife or cheating on your taxes (remember, Martha Stewart didn’t go to the Big House because of insider trading but because she lied about it to investigators), whatever you do, just don’t try and deny it. When the snoops kick in the door and catch you with your pants down, you’ll probably be OK if you schedule a press conference the next day, haul your wife in front of the cameras to stand beside you, muster up a few tears and apologize to all and sundry. Americans will forgive just about anything except trying to weasel out of the spanking you know you richly deserve.
Oops: Police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, raided the house of a small-town mayor, shot his two dogs, and kept him in handcuffs for a couple of hours before determining that they had made a mistake in identifying him as a drug dealer. The mayor has been exonerated and received an apology, but the dogs are gone for good.
The War on Drugs keeps producing mistakes like this. When you criminalize actions that are essentially non-predatory, consensual and private, you make everyone’s private life police business. This is a violation of so many American ideals it’s hard to know where to start in listing them. In a country which for the most part does pretty well by world standards at leaving its citizens alone, the drug war is a hideous exception, with Gestapo-like raids, high-handed seizures of property and harsh prison sentences for non-violent actions.
Drugs can do great harm. But drug abuse should be regarded as the user’s problem, like, say, alcohol abuse. Drugs should be regarded as a public health problem rather than a criminal problem. Legalize and regulate, and stop kicking in people’s doors.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Friday, July 4, 2008
Fireworks
It’s the Fourth of July again, and we’re celebrating something. Most people, of course, are just celebrating not having to go to work, an occasion for a party if there ever was one. But the deep-thinker types insist on asking about the meaning of the occasion, and some of them are not in a partying mood. “...the history of my country has been a series of wars of conquest and subjugation masquerading in mainstream discourse as a series of heroic frontiers...” says Clare Brandabur in an essay on the Arabic Media Internet Network. And “...when it comes to black America's history and Old Glory, there is a hypocrisy that cannot be swept away with one hundred tragic 9-11s,” says the pseudonymous Morpheus on Playhata.com.
What about it? Is the Fourth of July a mass exercise in hypocrisy, an orchestrated distraction from the ugly reality of American history? Should we be cringing instead of partying, hanging our heads in shame?
Well, let’s consider. Is there a country on earth whose history doesn’t involve conquest, subjugation and convenient tidying up of history? The Arabs swept across half the globe imposing their religion by force, before they were subjugated in turn by Western colonial powers. The Bantu tribes went marauding into the southern regions of Africa, subjugating as they went, before the the Afrikaners did it to them. And why do the Apache live in the Arizona desert? Because they were driven off the plains by the Comanche. There are few innocent nations, and the European settlement of North America was hardly unique in its expropriation of already occupied land.
Successful expropriation is not what we’re celebrating today. What we’re celebrating today is, on the contrary, the things that redeem American history, the principles and the achievements that manage to raise this project of ours above the familiar sordidness of human affairs. The reason we celebrate the Fourth of July is that on this date in 1776 a document was signed that, uniquely up to that time in human history, asserted as the founding principle of a nation a set of principles, instead of shared ancestry or fealty to a monarch. Unlike say, Germany, where they’re still debating whether third-generation residents of Turkish ancestry can be real Germans, here we say you can be an American as long as you embrace a few key principles. And while those principles were compromised from the start by the existence of slavery and the expropriation of the native peoples, a lot of Americans have expended a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the years to force us back toward those ideals. That’s the central struggle of American history, and that’s the honorable part of it, what we celebrate today.
The ugly side of American history is the human side: the swindles and the massacres and the deportations and the lynchings. Those should never be forgotten, but there’s nothing especially American about them, either. Open a world history text to any page. The particularly American side of our history is how the institutions derived—by fits and starts—from those founding principles have forced us time and again to confront those things. The economy of half the country was based on slavery, and the other half refused to accept that. A cruel system of racial separation was ended by a combination of grass-roots action and pressure from the federal government. And our courts have an irritating habit of telling the government it can’t get away with things that in other countries are done by decree.
A cynic will point out that all of these achievements have been resisted by vested interests. So they have—and they happened anyway, because we were bequeathed a strong and flexible system designed to limit state power and enable reformist zeal. And when we betray our principles, there is pressure for remedy and recompense. It’s an imperfect, clumsy system, but show me one elsewhere that’s done better. There’s a reason why our net migration flow is so overwhelmingly into the United States. Our struggles have produced an extraordinarily dynamic society, with a highly fluid concept of class and a realistic prospect of prosperity for the great majority.
And if you’re black, or Native American? What’s in it for you? Do you have any reason to celebrate the Fourth of July? Well, the African-American community with all its problems is the world’s wealthiest population of African origin, by far. You might celebrate that on the Fourth, without giving an inch on your claim to a fair shake from a society run by whites. As for the Indians, it’s hard to imagine a world in which nobody ever intruded into their stone-age Eden. Sooner or later they would have had to engage modernity. In a best-case scenario, without theft and slaughter, what would the life of the Lakota or the Cherokee look like today? I don’t know. But I suspect that the old ways of life were doomed anyway. Change could have happened without slaughter, maybe, assuming a superhuman prescience and restraint on the part of the settlers the likes of which have never existed anywhere. Ask it this way: is there another framework in which the original nations of America could exist today that would be better than the one that exists, of a modern state ceding sovereignty in local matters to the native communities? If you can’t come up with one, you might as well celebrate the Fourth along with the rest of us.
None of this is to encourage triumphalism or complacency. We’ve got a lot of problems. But we’ve also got institutions and traditions and attitudes that foster solutions to those problems. And those are what we celebrate on the Fourth of July.
Look at the essays I cited above. You’ll see that Clare Brandabur says, “I love my country.” You’ll see that Morpheus says, “...black patriotism stands up for the greatest ideals written into the American idea.” I don’t want to speak for them, but I suspect that these two critics of our historical record recognize, in spite of their reservations, the value of what we’re celebrating today—institutions and attitudes that were designed to manage the strife inherent in human affairs.
So have another beer, guilt-free, and raise a quiet toast to those ideas Jefferson held to be self-evident two hundred and thirty-two years ago. They’re what all the fuss is about today.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
What about it? Is the Fourth of July a mass exercise in hypocrisy, an orchestrated distraction from the ugly reality of American history? Should we be cringing instead of partying, hanging our heads in shame?
Well, let’s consider. Is there a country on earth whose history doesn’t involve conquest, subjugation and convenient tidying up of history? The Arabs swept across half the globe imposing their religion by force, before they were subjugated in turn by Western colonial powers. The Bantu tribes went marauding into the southern regions of Africa, subjugating as they went, before the the Afrikaners did it to them. And why do the Apache live in the Arizona desert? Because they were driven off the plains by the Comanche. There are few innocent nations, and the European settlement of North America was hardly unique in its expropriation of already occupied land.
Successful expropriation is not what we’re celebrating today. What we’re celebrating today is, on the contrary, the things that redeem American history, the principles and the achievements that manage to raise this project of ours above the familiar sordidness of human affairs. The reason we celebrate the Fourth of July is that on this date in 1776 a document was signed that, uniquely up to that time in human history, asserted as the founding principle of a nation a set of principles, instead of shared ancestry or fealty to a monarch. Unlike say, Germany, where they’re still debating whether third-generation residents of Turkish ancestry can be real Germans, here we say you can be an American as long as you embrace a few key principles. And while those principles were compromised from the start by the existence of slavery and the expropriation of the native peoples, a lot of Americans have expended a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the years to force us back toward those ideals. That’s the central struggle of American history, and that’s the honorable part of it, what we celebrate today.
The ugly side of American history is the human side: the swindles and the massacres and the deportations and the lynchings. Those should never be forgotten, but there’s nothing especially American about them, either. Open a world history text to any page. The particularly American side of our history is how the institutions derived—by fits and starts—from those founding principles have forced us time and again to confront those things. The economy of half the country was based on slavery, and the other half refused to accept that. A cruel system of racial separation was ended by a combination of grass-roots action and pressure from the federal government. And our courts have an irritating habit of telling the government it can’t get away with things that in other countries are done by decree.
A cynic will point out that all of these achievements have been resisted by vested interests. So they have—and they happened anyway, because we were bequeathed a strong and flexible system designed to limit state power and enable reformist zeal. And when we betray our principles, there is pressure for remedy and recompense. It’s an imperfect, clumsy system, but show me one elsewhere that’s done better. There’s a reason why our net migration flow is so overwhelmingly into the United States. Our struggles have produced an extraordinarily dynamic society, with a highly fluid concept of class and a realistic prospect of prosperity for the great majority.
And if you’re black, or Native American? What’s in it for you? Do you have any reason to celebrate the Fourth of July? Well, the African-American community with all its problems is the world’s wealthiest population of African origin, by far. You might celebrate that on the Fourth, without giving an inch on your claim to a fair shake from a society run by whites. As for the Indians, it’s hard to imagine a world in which nobody ever intruded into their stone-age Eden. Sooner or later they would have had to engage modernity. In a best-case scenario, without theft and slaughter, what would the life of the Lakota or the Cherokee look like today? I don’t know. But I suspect that the old ways of life were doomed anyway. Change could have happened without slaughter, maybe, assuming a superhuman prescience and restraint on the part of the settlers the likes of which have never existed anywhere. Ask it this way: is there another framework in which the original nations of America could exist today that would be better than the one that exists, of a modern state ceding sovereignty in local matters to the native communities? If you can’t come up with one, you might as well celebrate the Fourth along with the rest of us.
None of this is to encourage triumphalism or complacency. We’ve got a lot of problems. But we’ve also got institutions and traditions and attitudes that foster solutions to those problems. And those are what we celebrate on the Fourth of July.
Look at the essays I cited above. You’ll see that Clare Brandabur says, “I love my country.” You’ll see that Morpheus says, “...black patriotism stands up for the greatest ideals written into the American idea.” I don’t want to speak for them, but I suspect that these two critics of our historical record recognize, in spite of their reservations, the value of what we’re celebrating today—institutions and attitudes that were designed to manage the strife inherent in human affairs.
So have another beer, guilt-free, and raise a quiet toast to those ideas Jefferson held to be self-evident two hundred and thirty-two years ago. They’re what all the fuss is about today.
Sam Reaves
www.samreaves.com
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Platform, Part Four
Foreign Policy
George Washington advised the young United States to avoid foreign entanglements, and that’s not a bad basis for anybody’s foreign policy. The trouble is, foreign entanglements get harder and harder to avoid as a country grows and develops. Much of our prosperity is based on trade, and international trade depends on an international rule of law. So isolationism becomes less viable as globalization advances.
I’m in favor of globalization, so I have to favor things that reinforce an international rule of law. This puts me at odds with people who believe that our participation in international organizations such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization undermines our sovereignty. It also puts me at odds with people who think that any action on behalf of U.S. interests abroad is by definition imperialism and therefore to be opposed. So both the far right and the far left are going to have problems with my position on our role in the world. Tough.
Globalization is inevitable, and, I believe, a good thing. Trade makes everyone richer, and countries that have peaceful trading relations are less likely to go to war. One prominent feature of the run-up to war in the dismal nineteen-thirties was the proliferation of embargoes and tariffs that crippled international trade, spread the Depression, and provided dictators with ready-made grievances. So I think it’s in our national interest, as well as that of the world as a whole, to promote a smoothly functioning system of international trade.
Beyond trade, peace depends on the ability of people and information to circulate freely around the world. Travel contributes to human knowledge, and travelers need security and predictability in their movement. All of this means coordination between nations and some system of international law. And because there is no law without enforcement, this means some mechanism for international coordination of the application of force, i.e. police and military powers.
The UN and the WTO and other world bodies were set up to provide this kind of international coordination, and they are indispensable in some form or other. Those who complain that we surrender sovereignty by belonging to and cooperating with these bodies are, of course, to some extent correct, and they certainly have a point when they protest the corruption and hypocrisy that is so common at the UN. But to me that means only that, like all human institutions, these world bodies need constant maintenance and reformist vigilance, not that we can do without them. We can’t, not if we want to further the globalization that benefits us as much as anyone else. Globalization has to be fair and governed by rules everyone plays by if it is to find widespread support.
So I favor continued membership in and contribution to world bodies such as the UN and the WTO, while at the same time I favor increased insistence on probity and accountability in those bodies. As the major bankroller of the UN and other bodies, we’re in a good position to insist on these things. We should pay our dues and use our leverage to insist on reform.
In general, then, my foreign policy is based on the principle of strengthening the rule of law in the international arena. But what does this mean applied to real-world conflicts? Let’s get down to cases. I’ve talked about Iraq in a previous post, but let’s recapitulate: What are reasonable goals to pursue in Iraq? At this point, we’re playing damage control, having presided over a disastrous collapse in Iraqi society. Our goal in Iraq should be the restoration of basic security. This appears to be achievable; the surge has had real and positive effects. Beyond that, our goals should be modest. We can’t make Iraq a western-style democracy. Only the Iraqis can do that. We can’t prevent Iraq from cozying up to Iran. We can’t even insist that they agree to a long-term American military presence. We can only restore order, leave the basic structures of an independent state in place, and hope for the best. If our experience in Iraq has taught us anything, it should have taught us to avoid hubris.
This applies especially to Iran. Iran represents a potentially more serious danger than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever did, with its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Even if they’ve temporarily mothballed their weapons program, once they have enriched uranium, re-starting it is a snap. How scary would an Iranian bomb be? Maybe no scarier than the North Korean and Pakistani bombs. But every time another dubious regime gets the bomb, the world becomes a more dangerous place. If you are bothered about Israel or India having the bomb, you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be so bad if Iran had it. And pious exhortations aren’t going to dissuade the mullahs.
This is the toughest problem of modern statecraft. We don’t want everybody to have the bomb, but we really can’t stop anybody who is determined to get it unless we’re prepared to wage war. And how many wars can we afford?
Keeping Iran from getting the bomb is an urgent foreign policy goal. But it would be good to find a way of doing that short of total war. We should keep in mind that Iran is a much less monolithic state than Hussein’s Iraq was. To an extent, it is even a democracy, certainly more so than our gallant ally Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government is dominated by hard-liners, but there are also strong reformist currents in Iranian society and even rumbles of discontent in government circles about Ahmadinejad’s grandstanding. A war with Iran would instantly legitimize the hard-liners, unite Iranian society in hostility to the West and shove any positive political trends into the deep freeze. So war should be a last resort.
First, in accordance with our adherence to the rule of law, we should make clear that any nation willing to play by the rules is entitled to reap the benefits. We should emphasize to the Iranians that our opposition is specifically to their infractions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which they are a signatory, and their evident lying about said infractions. Then, without waiting for an improbable change of heart, we need to keep up the carrot-and-stick approach, in conjunction with the Europeans, who seem to agree with us (for a change) that Iran is a problem. The carrot is the offer of technical assistance in developing peaceful nuclear power. As for the stick, sanctions have their role. But the unspoken threat of a few quick airstrikes (either by the U.S. or, more plausibly, by Israel) might concentrate minds wonderfully in Teheran as well. It doesn’t have to be total war. We didn’t need a regime change to make Qaddafi have second thoughts about Libya’s weapons program. And even surgical airstrikes should be kept in reserve. But the U.S. should keep the mullahs guessing by refusing to take the military option off the table.
If you think that’s too harsh, you’re not living in the real world. Ultimately the only answer to existential threats in the nuclear age is deterrence. And deterrence is an ugly thing. Deterrence means we are prepared to be just as nasty as anybody else. It means if you hit me, I’ll hit you back. And that’s childish. But sometimes it’s the only way to keep the peace. Deterrence has to be convincing. People have to be sure that we are both willing and able to commit mass slaughter if provoked. And that’s not a gratifying role to play.
But we have to play it. It’s the only thing that works. In the meantime, we can do our best to get everyone to agree that a nuclear arms race is expensive and dangerous, and keep negotiating and drawing down nuclear arsenals and improving international control of nuclear materials and all of that, and we might even make some progress. But we’re always going to need at least a minimal nuclear deterrent. Pacifism is not an option, not in a world where Kim Jong-Il can run a country.
However, that doesn’t mean that all foreign policy problems are military problems. Somebody said that if all you have is a hammer all your problems tend to look like nails, and as the world’s sole superpower, we risk falling into the trap of wanting everything to have a military solution. We have to make sure we use the other tools we have.
The best tool we have is the undisputed appeal of an open society. Migration patterns are the truest indicator of quality of life, and that fence some people want to build isn’t to keep people in. Even the Muslims want to come here. To a high degree, we have a free economy, a fluid class system and a strong tradition of personal liberty and freedom of expression. All these things come under assault from time to time (from both right and left), but so far they’re hanging on. And as long as they do, most of the world will be on our side, most of the time.
We have to take care of those things here at home. We also have to make clear that they are universal values and that we support their extension. That doesn’t mean we can do it by force. That may work sometimes (see Japan and Germany), but it’s damned expensive. We can’t afford that kind of effort more than once a century or so. It’s better to set the example, nurture relations with like-minded countries and realize that living in the real world is going to mean making compromises sometimes. A dose of Realpolitik is always necessary.
I’ve written before that the War on Terror is a mistaken metaphor—as horrific as September 11 was, it wasn’t a military action. It was a brutal and spectacularly successful crime. Al-Qaeda doesn’t have any carrier groups or armored divisions. What it has is a line of cant that a certain type of shallow-thinking person in the Muslim world finds attractive. But they are a minority, even in Muslim society, and if we don’t further alienate and enrage Muslims with invasions and mass civilian deaths, eventually they themselves will defeat Al-Qaeda. It’s already happening in Iraq. Our approach to the Muslim world should be like our approach to anybody else—offer them the benefits of trade and migration and make clear that in return we expect them to act as responsible members of the world community and police their extremists. A good place to start is with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, our two allies in the War on Terror. We should emphatically support liberalizing political and social currents in those countries.
A full exposition of my foreign policy platform is beyond the scope of a single post because there are a lot of countries and crises in the world. I’ve touched on some of these in past posts, and I’ll deal with others in the future. In general, my approach is based on strengthening the rule of law, even if that means relinquishing a degree of sovereignty, while keeping in mind that ultimately the threat of force is what makes countries toe the line and keeps us safe. I favor supporting the WTO and a serious push for freer international trade. I favor our phased withdrawal from long-term military commitments abroad (like our heavy presence in Korea) and in general a more pacific approach to international conflicts. I wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. But I’m not a pacifist. Afghanistan is a war worth fighting. And there will be others.
But in the long run, the best thing for us and for the world is to promote increased trade and migration between countries, despite the short-term costs to particular interests, because globalization is what will tend to bring everybody’s interests into line. That is not a Utopian vision, but rather a principle to be followed in dealing with the terminal messiness of human affairs. Arrange things so that people have more to gain by trading with their neighbors than by invading them. But be prepared for breakdowns, flare-ups and plain old human savagery. Above all, a U.S. president has to keep a firm grasp on principle and stay on his toes.
Sam Reaves
samreaves.com
George Washington advised the young United States to avoid foreign entanglements, and that’s not a bad basis for anybody’s foreign policy. The trouble is, foreign entanglements get harder and harder to avoid as a country grows and develops. Much of our prosperity is based on trade, and international trade depends on an international rule of law. So isolationism becomes less viable as globalization advances.
I’m in favor of globalization, so I have to favor things that reinforce an international rule of law. This puts me at odds with people who believe that our participation in international organizations such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization undermines our sovereignty. It also puts me at odds with people who think that any action on behalf of U.S. interests abroad is by definition imperialism and therefore to be opposed. So both the far right and the far left are going to have problems with my position on our role in the world. Tough.
Globalization is inevitable, and, I believe, a good thing. Trade makes everyone richer, and countries that have peaceful trading relations are less likely to go to war. One prominent feature of the run-up to war in the dismal nineteen-thirties was the proliferation of embargoes and tariffs that crippled international trade, spread the Depression, and provided dictators with ready-made grievances. So I think it’s in our national interest, as well as that of the world as a whole, to promote a smoothly functioning system of international trade.
Beyond trade, peace depends on the ability of people and information to circulate freely around the world. Travel contributes to human knowledge, and travelers need security and predictability in their movement. All of this means coordination between nations and some system of international law. And because there is no law without enforcement, this means some mechanism for international coordination of the application of force, i.e. police and military powers.
The UN and the WTO and other world bodies were set up to provide this kind of international coordination, and they are indispensable in some form or other. Those who complain that we surrender sovereignty by belonging to and cooperating with these bodies are, of course, to some extent correct, and they certainly have a point when they protest the corruption and hypocrisy that is so common at the UN. But to me that means only that, like all human institutions, these world bodies need constant maintenance and reformist vigilance, not that we can do without them. We can’t, not if we want to further the globalization that benefits us as much as anyone else. Globalization has to be fair and governed by rules everyone plays by if it is to find widespread support.
So I favor continued membership in and contribution to world bodies such as the UN and the WTO, while at the same time I favor increased insistence on probity and accountability in those bodies. As the major bankroller of the UN and other bodies, we’re in a good position to insist on these things. We should pay our dues and use our leverage to insist on reform.
In general, then, my foreign policy is based on the principle of strengthening the rule of law in the international arena. But what does this mean applied to real-world conflicts? Let’s get down to cases. I’ve talked about Iraq in a previous post, but let’s recapitulate: What are reasonable goals to pursue in Iraq? At this point, we’re playing damage control, having presided over a disastrous collapse in Iraqi society. Our goal in Iraq should be the restoration of basic security. This appears to be achievable; the surge has had real and positive effects. Beyond that, our goals should be modest. We can’t make Iraq a western-style democracy. Only the Iraqis can do that. We can’t prevent Iraq from cozying up to Iran. We can’t even insist that they agree to a long-term American military presence. We can only restore order, leave the basic structures of an independent state in place, and hope for the best. If our experience in Iraq has taught us anything, it should have taught us to avoid hubris.
This applies especially to Iran. Iran represents a potentially more serious danger than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever did, with its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Even if they’ve temporarily mothballed their weapons program, once they have enriched uranium, re-starting it is a snap. How scary would an Iranian bomb be? Maybe no scarier than the North Korean and Pakistani bombs. But every time another dubious regime gets the bomb, the world becomes a more dangerous place. If you are bothered about Israel or India having the bomb, you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be so bad if Iran had it. And pious exhortations aren’t going to dissuade the mullahs.
This is the toughest problem of modern statecraft. We don’t want everybody to have the bomb, but we really can’t stop anybody who is determined to get it unless we’re prepared to wage war. And how many wars can we afford?
Keeping Iran from getting the bomb is an urgent foreign policy goal. But it would be good to find a way of doing that short of total war. We should keep in mind that Iran is a much less monolithic state than Hussein’s Iraq was. To an extent, it is even a democracy, certainly more so than our gallant ally Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government is dominated by hard-liners, but there are also strong reformist currents in Iranian society and even rumbles of discontent in government circles about Ahmadinejad’s grandstanding. A war with Iran would instantly legitimize the hard-liners, unite Iranian society in hostility to the West and shove any positive political trends into the deep freeze. So war should be a last resort.
First, in accordance with our adherence to the rule of law, we should make clear that any nation willing to play by the rules is entitled to reap the benefits. We should emphasize to the Iranians that our opposition is specifically to their infractions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which they are a signatory, and their evident lying about said infractions. Then, without waiting for an improbable change of heart, we need to keep up the carrot-and-stick approach, in conjunction with the Europeans, who seem to agree with us (for a change) that Iran is a problem. The carrot is the offer of technical assistance in developing peaceful nuclear power. As for the stick, sanctions have their role. But the unspoken threat of a few quick airstrikes (either by the U.S. or, more plausibly, by Israel) might concentrate minds wonderfully in Teheran as well. It doesn’t have to be total war. We didn’t need a regime change to make Qaddafi have second thoughts about Libya’s weapons program. And even surgical airstrikes should be kept in reserve. But the U.S. should keep the mullahs guessing by refusing to take the military option off the table.
If you think that’s too harsh, you’re not living in the real world. Ultimately the only answer to existential threats in the nuclear age is deterrence. And deterrence is an ugly thing. Deterrence means we are prepared to be just as nasty as anybody else. It means if you hit me, I’ll hit you back. And that’s childish. But sometimes it’s the only way to keep the peace. Deterrence has to be convincing. People have to be sure that we are both willing and able to commit mass slaughter if provoked. And that’s not a gratifying role to play.
But we have to play it. It’s the only thing that works. In the meantime, we can do our best to get everyone to agree that a nuclear arms race is expensive and dangerous, and keep negotiating and drawing down nuclear arsenals and improving international control of nuclear materials and all of that, and we might even make some progress. But we’re always going to need at least a minimal nuclear deterrent. Pacifism is not an option, not in a world where Kim Jong-Il can run a country.
However, that doesn’t mean that all foreign policy problems are military problems. Somebody said that if all you have is a hammer all your problems tend to look like nails, and as the world’s sole superpower, we risk falling into the trap of wanting everything to have a military solution. We have to make sure we use the other tools we have.
The best tool we have is the undisputed appeal of an open society. Migration patterns are the truest indicator of quality of life, and that fence some people want to build isn’t to keep people in. Even the Muslims want to come here. To a high degree, we have a free economy, a fluid class system and a strong tradition of personal liberty and freedom of expression. All these things come under assault from time to time (from both right and left), but so far they’re hanging on. And as long as they do, most of the world will be on our side, most of the time.
We have to take care of those things here at home. We also have to make clear that they are universal values and that we support their extension. That doesn’t mean we can do it by force. That may work sometimes (see Japan and Germany), but it’s damned expensive. We can’t afford that kind of effort more than once a century or so. It’s better to set the example, nurture relations with like-minded countries and realize that living in the real world is going to mean making compromises sometimes. A dose of Realpolitik is always necessary.
I’ve written before that the War on Terror is a mistaken metaphor—as horrific as September 11 was, it wasn’t a military action. It was a brutal and spectacularly successful crime. Al-Qaeda doesn’t have any carrier groups or armored divisions. What it has is a line of cant that a certain type of shallow-thinking person in the Muslim world finds attractive. But they are a minority, even in Muslim society, and if we don’t further alienate and enrage Muslims with invasions and mass civilian deaths, eventually they themselves will defeat Al-Qaeda. It’s already happening in Iraq. Our approach to the Muslim world should be like our approach to anybody else—offer them the benefits of trade and migration and make clear that in return we expect them to act as responsible members of the world community and police their extremists. A good place to start is with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, our two allies in the War on Terror. We should emphatically support liberalizing political and social currents in those countries.
A full exposition of my foreign policy platform is beyond the scope of a single post because there are a lot of countries and crises in the world. I’ve touched on some of these in past posts, and I’ll deal with others in the future. In general, my approach is based on strengthening the rule of law, even if that means relinquishing a degree of sovereignty, while keeping in mind that ultimately the threat of force is what makes countries toe the line and keeps us safe. I favor supporting the WTO and a serious push for freer international trade. I favor our phased withdrawal from long-term military commitments abroad (like our heavy presence in Korea) and in general a more pacific approach to international conflicts. I wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. But I’m not a pacifist. Afghanistan is a war worth fighting. And there will be others.
But in the long run, the best thing for us and for the world is to promote increased trade and migration between countries, despite the short-term costs to particular interests, because globalization is what will tend to bring everybody’s interests into line. That is not a Utopian vision, but rather a principle to be followed in dealing with the terminal messiness of human affairs. Arrange things so that people have more to gain by trading with their neighbors than by invading them. But be prepared for breakdowns, flare-ups and plain old human savagery. Above all, a U.S. president has to keep a firm grasp on principle and stay on his toes.
Sam Reaves
samreaves.com
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