7/28/10

Let's see. Lend Lease was in full swing when I was born. Not quite two years later Pearl Harbor was attacked, so that was the first day of "actual" war for the United States that happened during my lifetime. Since the 2nd World War we have had Korea—which has never been resolved and threatens to boil over again—Vietnam, Panama, Granada, Dominican Republic, Serbia, Somalia, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, and soon Yemen. All told, without getting too precise about it, about 85% of my lifetime has been seriously impacted by America's wars, including my own combat zone duty in the mid-1960s in Tonkin Gulf and around the Indochinese peninsula.

I wasn't sufficiently against going into Afghanistan after bin Ladin, like most Americans, and when Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama said that there was a strategic goal they believed could be met with some diligence and patience on our part, I did not protest loudly.

I still have the eerie feeling that without our forces in Afghanistan the terrorists of al Qaeda would be roasting marshmallows and all beef hotdogs at tailgate parties throughout that loosely defined country after each successful terrorist raid on western civilization. I lose my breath when in an older movie the twin towers of the World Trade Center appear. I am, just like almost everyone, sick to my stomach about what war and empire have done to our country: the distortions of our industrial sector, the numbness we all have about mass death visited by suicide bombers and stealth bombers. It is truly sickening.

So, when Wikileaks and then major newspapers leaked and published the classified background information that we all suspected but refused steadfastly to hold in the center of our imaginations, that "news" that we are being "handled" by a bunch of opium farmers and fourth world tin pot raskals, I scarcely blinked. I was once in the midst of all that "classified" stuff and knew full well that most of it—probably 70% was CYA information rather than real facts about our plans or "them."

Maureen Dowd in the NYT has her take on the "revelations" and President Obama has his. His statement, which I thought was a marvel of truthfulness and still adroit, was that there was almost nothing in the illegally exposed information that was not already part of the public debate. Really! Really?

If Wikileaks did us any service by making these background materials public it was that the U.S. (and to some extent NATO) governments are in a gigantic denial syndrome. What the documents reveal Doonsbury has been drawing for months, namely a cynical interface between cultures that have virtually nothing to say to one another, there being so few points of fundamental understanding and common culture and ethics. The military, including the sacked McChrystal, have been asked to do something that cannot be done without removing the shackles of western ethics from their arms. No, I am not sneaking up on the idea that we should nuke Afghanistan into oblivion. (I am not even sure we should do that to North Korea, say.) I am saying that attempting to wrench the various peoples who make up Islamic Afghanistan into a 21st century version of their religion and a modern view of civil polity is fundamentally an impossible task ... and everything in the pilfered documents shows the lengths to which civilians and military alike skirt that fundamental issue and pretend that under some (wildly improbable) circumstances the struggle can be won.

No. It cannot be won with states like Pakistan, failing to to keep pace intellectually, industrially, economically with India its bete noir necessary adversary, cynically playing our over extended forces for the fools they believe them to be. No, it cannot be won in any terms familiar to western ears, eyes, or hearts. No, it cannot be won except by descending to the level at which the public consciousness exists (in so far as it ever exists in Afghanistan) and playing the game on those terms ... which is against our hopes and dreams of wrenching these peoples from their medieval ways and into our none-too-savory methods of governing villages and towns and cities.

The President may be right that these matters were "on the table" in plain view before. Now, though, we have a more "candid" and less manipulated view, and we really need to take it to heart. July 2011 is not soon enough to begin making some moves on that chess board that will rock Pakistan's world. The Afghans will cave to the Taliban, of course, and we will have to violate their territorial integrity from time to time to chase down terrorists, but they should be given to understand that we no longer hold out ANY hope for bringing them into the modern world. They will have to do that for themselves. Meanwhile, since we are no longer trying to find an economy there, we will bomb the opium fields into kingdom come, knowing of course that they will grow it again. Meanwhile we will let Mr. Karzai know that his life is not worth another American dollar, so he might as well kiss up to the Taliban sooner than later ... so we have a bald excuse for dealing him out of the game.

Enough of war. Our "reluctant empire" no longer serves our people ... only our corporations ... so we must begin anew. In November we will.

JB

3/16/10

There is a debate (perhaps it is a discussion) going right now with Dr. Paul Krugman at one pole of the opinion about China and her government's monetary policies, the objectives of which are often said to be "obvious," but are not really necessarily clear.

The "discussion" includes the following recent publications by Dr. Krugman in the New York Times:

• "Taking on China"
• "Curveball
  
• and "Capital Export, Elasticity Pessimism, and the Renminbi (Wonkish)"

The 1904 Mackinder Thesis is not entirely irrelevant here. Although China historically within itself has practiced a version of a "heartland" strategy of east Asian imperial hegemony—the Middle Kingdom and the Five Peoples—the point goes deeper than the movement of national borders. It goes to the almost imponderable significance of population numbers and poverty. In a nutshell, the history of the Han in China has been (except for one maritime foray to the east coast of Africa) the history of an inward focused people, content (if not perforce compelled) to focus on what is certainly the world's largest population with all that implies and connotes.

Which brings us to the considerations that Krugman and most of his commenters leave out—the motivations of the Chinese Communist government, leaving aside for the moment the question of whether "communist/ism" is at all germane to the discussion. Why does China pursue a monetary policy that it does (see Krugman's description of it)? The answer is that China earnestly wishes to modernize and to bring its people up out of what Marx termed "the idiocy of rural life." The Chinese people want this, of course, in terms they can stomach, namely, with due respect to useful traditions and cultural values. The methodology is essentially transparent to the average Chinese citizen, but competitive pressures and advanced quality controls have an impact, as do Google and other forces that work against population control.

The lessons of the Maoist period are not lost on Chinese. The "great leap forward" was not successful. The "cultural revolution" created a backlash. The last twenty years of flirting with capitalism, on the other hand, have produced unparalleled wealth and brought wealth down to the level where a legitimate middle class now exists, not "compradores" and their retinues, but educated professionals and people with a stake in continued socio-economic progress. So, in general and overwhelmingly China can be seen as seeking a better life for its people.

Krugman sees beyond this and into Hari Seldon's book that China in doing what it wants for its own people becomes a force to be reckoned with internationally. There is no gainsaying this perception, except that China really has no significant experience beyond its own cultural bailiwick. Yes, there is Chinese nationalism which can be whipped up almost instantly by a cynical government, but all always it tends to focus inwardly.

Krugman and others are savvy. They know the cultural history and they know the typical responses of North Americans and Europeans to a rival. The essays and blogs Krugman has written recently may be seen, therefore, as a heads-up to the West that an economic rival is playing its necessary game to the detriment of western recovery from the Great Recession. I am not convinced China's motives are hostile, but I am convinced that the Chinese government knows it is pinching our nose and hard!

Krugman knows that incidents like this do not produce comity. We do not easily forget, in this case, that China did not help the rest of the world recover, despite the fact that the rest of the world has been the consumer that China absolutely required to get this bootstrapping operation moving. The ethical or moral imbalance is obvious when it is our nose being pinched. Not so much when it is theirs, perhaps. Krugman is to be commended and applauded for bringing this up.

JB

2/7/10

You will search high and low for news of Greece and her economic problems, her political problems, the precipice over which the Greeks stare in horror at this very moment. The press in the United States is oblivious. No, not oblivious, "managed."

Here is what is happening in a nutshell. Greece has piled up a national debt equal to that of Germany, but without the productive capacity to resolve that debt within the frame of financial obligations. The result is that Greece was poised on the brink of defaulting to its European neighbors, who, when they got wind of the immediacy of the situation began to act like market managers always do—irrationally. Immediately, Portugal, Spain, and Italy began to survey their own situations and their financial connections to Greece. All at once, the horrid truth emerges that these countries, too, are very fragile and closer to the brink than generally reported, even in Europe.

Here is a reasonably good set of articles from the Guardian in the UK about Greece and her problems.

My colleague in Montreal, whose access to information and whose keen eye sees the situation for what it is, reported these matters to me yesterday and I was appalled ... primarily at the domestic U.S. press's obliviousness and collusion with Wall Street to keep this "greatest financial crisis in Europe since the meltdown two years ago" out of the imaginations and thoughts of snowbound Americans. Thank you, "Justina!"

Yes, the Euro is in danger, and yes, the problem affects the almighty dollar as well. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to get involved, but the folks in Brussels, Belgium, the seat of the EU leadership has asked IMF to play a smaller role than IMF wants. So, the international repercussions will extend outward like low waves in deep water, but treatening tsunami when reaching the shallower waters of individual nations.

As "Justina" says, keep an eye on the Greece situation. There may be portents for the future here that threaten contemporary politics far more than Sarah Palin and her teapot revolution talk down in the bowels of Tennessee.

JB

2/1/10

China is an ancient place, both more and less than a country or nation, in the sense of being more than a "birthplace." It is a "civilization" like Russia, human, eclectic, yet fundamentally unique. The Chinese themselves are not all the same, of course, the most important ethnicity is the Han, whose territorial history goes back to the dim recesses of written history. There are four other major groups: the Manchu, the Mongolians, the Tibetans, and a mixed assortment of Muslim peoples called the Hui, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and several others. Ethologists believe there are about sixty distinct ethnicities within the borders of China currently. In this sense, China is ... and has been for millennia ... an empire.

If you have Chinese associates or friends, you will know what I mean when I say that there is a distinct element of the Chinese personality that is shared, if not completely universally, then very widely among the Han. It is tough to put your finger on it, but if I had to put a one-word "western" label on it, it would the word "pragmatic." Quickly I would add the idea of "coldly pragmatic," leaving myself room to move towards "warmth." I have experienced both the cold and the warm, but would say that just from my own experience that, like Texans, the Han Chinese have a lore about themselves, a mythos, a marrow feel that transcends humility, dwells in an impoverished sort of hubris, and manifests itself, often crudely, as a long-suffering-but-recently-relieved humiliation for which some kind of redress is "obviously" appropriate and forthcoming. This is all fumbling around with delicate concepts, of course, but my experience derives from both males and females, older and younger, super-ordinate, collegial, neighbor, lover, and teacher. These Chinese were important in my life.

Each of these people were evoked as I read in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post about the noticable shift in the public attitudes expressed by the leaders of the People's Republic of China. The article is at a minimum a very interesting public notice given by the Post in what appears to be a deteriorating discourse between China and the rest of the world, particularly the Atlantic world. Further along that line of thought, the feeling is definitely of a foreboding. Having written recently about the Google assertion of principles and having received an earful from one Chinese-American and from a presumably Euro Sinophile, I am a little chastened to bring this up, but I will.

China recently reiterated the Ripley homily of Chinese marching four abreast forever past any point you might care to mention. They are seemingly endless, and their display at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies made that point with some beauty and some pomp and quite a bit of lugubrious overkill ... that sort of "okay, now we're on our feet get the f**k off our lawn" type of attitude. The endlessness of China's population is an illusion, of course, but it is within the Chinese civilization a dominant illusion, very likely to frame and mold the Chinese government's policies on many things internally and in foreign affairs.

Internally, the neo-capitalists in the Chinese government are beginning to understand the huge power of people numbers when attached to money. Politically, they have always understood that the population can ... and if necessary should/could/would ... sustain grievous losses that would devastate smaller nations ... as the loss of a generation of young men did to post-WWI France. So, you can add "stoic" to the "pragmatic."

Externally, China believes that the rest of the world understands China's immensity and is or should be cowed by it. This is a big, very big mistake on their part, over which they must get, the sooner the better.

I do not mean to suggest that China is not important in terrestrial affairs. Clearly any nation that large, with the obvious pride and industry and enterprise, is going to be consequent. And just as obviously the historical chip on their shoulder from the 19th c. depredations, the Opium Wars, the utter humiliations is something to take into consideration. But ... China is responsible for itself. A civilization twice or three times older than Europe has to recognize that China's woes are mostly of their own making. The Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty fell apart, sold out, and at no point was worthy of the task before it ... organizing and nurturing the better spirits of Chinese peoples.

And so, yes, we will get off your lawn, China, but we are not going to kiss your ring or pay you reparations or even apologize for events begun 200 years ago and long since forgotten by 95% of the remaining world's people. In other words: get over yourselves and join the community of nations as the proud, and resilient people you are. Get rid of the chip!

JB

1/25/10

The internet has been around since the 1970's, but certainly for most of us only since about 1990 when the WorldWideWeb quickly supplanted Gopher. I have been online since the last moments of Gopher and the first of the Web, and it has truly been a fantastic journey, a breathtaking revelation, and (even) an excellent lesson in human nature. If there is one point that the internet has made, it is that human beings are human. They have biological and personal urges and these express themselves quickly ... even on the internet.

Society through its various means of exerting controls over our appetites has been virtually (no pun intended) helpless as pornography and politics rapidly spread out across the cyberscape of the internet. Parents have been justifiably cautious (or horrified) about letting their children have unfettered access to the web because of the pornography ... and rightly so, for graphic displays of bestiality and subjugation of human beings for sexual purposes are all too available. But politics is a different matter. Politics is by definition public and argumentative and emotional, with emphasis on public and free.

I am incredibly proud of Google for standing up to the leaders of the People's Republic of China on this count. They have given a cold clear shot of courage and honor to our internet culture. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unapologetic criticism of China is equally important, for it takes a baton and runs with it in areas that Sergei Brin and Larry Page cannot go. She rose in my estimation by hundreds of points, for coddling China has become an industry around the globe.

China is a giant, commercially, militarily, and politically. Its weight is felt wherever the Chinese government wants it felt. They are not altogether subtle about it either. The Chinese response to Clinton was predictable and clearly a very sore point within the ruling clique there. But, they are on the wrong side of history on this one. Confusing politics with pornography may seem like an apt analogy to people who cannot abide criticism, but as dirty as politics gets sometimes, it is not pornography and, instead, it is exactly the sort of thing that human beings need to understand.

China is not a communist country in any Marxian definition of the term. Their "flirtation" with capitalism to jump over the historic impediments to progress has long since become a way of life. China is a command economy with much of the means of production (or elements thereof) in government hands ... but not in the public trust or a commons! China is simply a dictatorship, a frightening and frightened dictatorship at the same time. It is no wonder that the leadership is afraid of criticism and variant political ideas. No dictatorship can long stand when freedom of speech and conscience are wide-spread.

Google and Clinton have made and then turned an important corner in the maturation of our global civilization. Both are to be commended, and as always is the case, every man and woman on the planet must see that they have an obligation to let China's people know that they are welcome into the community of humanity ... and that China's leaders are not.

JB

1/18/10

By now everyone with an eye for cybernews has read something about the Chinese attack on Google and Google's response. Several have noticed that Washington has made no comment, since the Chinese foray into American internet company core intellectual property comes at a time when we have delicate negotiations going with the Chinese government on a wide range of things, including Global Warming and monetary policy. But the issue goes far deeper than any quick list like that. China tries to pretend that there is a difference between hackers in China and the Chinese government all the while, however, maintaining control over everything that breathes in that country. You can have it one way or the other, but not both.

Meanwhile another evolutionary process is underway. While China slowly sheds the primitive agrarian communism of Mao, finding it convenient to steal what they can to catch up (and their window for catching up in this technological environment is closing inexorably), back in the U.S.A. Microsoft, The Giant, the gargantuan, showing significant signs of being related to the dinosaurs, is strapped to its own unhappy past and perhaps fatally. The fact is that Internet Explorer, still used by 65% of all internetizens for browsing the web, is a classic case of "ontology recapitulating philogeny," namely, that to ease the transitions between stages of evolution of their Windows operating system and their browser, Microsoft has chosen the path that incorporates into each stage mortal flaws from father to son. It seemed like a good and reasonable choice at the time, given that the physical environment of computing was also changing so rapidly, but the flaws accumulate like genetic drift, and today we have a rival exploiting those flaws to hopefully leapfrog into the present.

Joe Wilcox, a veteran reporter on these issues, says that you should at last dump MSIE at once. Read his article. It is not dense with jargon. The simple fact is that MSIE is like those "loose lips that sunk ships" during WWII. It is a constant menace to the rest of us. Yes, of course, we know you are not a target, but you who continue with MSIE are now providing aid and comfort by having a computer they can use to batter at the door. Put another way, are you absolutely positive that you have done everything reasonable to prevent your computer from being taken over by hostiles and being used to mount denial of service attacks on friendlies? Of course you are not. If the German government recommends to an entire nation that they get off MSIE, listen!

If you doubt that Google's experience was significant, do not doubt that Google's response will be. Denying China access to our hard-won expertise is part of a global struggle for supremacy. Right now, in the throes of the Great Recession, the U.S. position in the world financial and monetary sectors is as perilous as it ever has been among the current player nations. The stakes could not be higher. China has its masses, as it proudly and somewhat ominously displayed at the beginning of the Olympics; it believes in itself and in the social and industrial momentum it can create using capitalist tools for non-democratic ends.

In other words, this is a serious and important situation in which, for a change, you can make a difference. Download Google Chrome (I am currently using it) or Firefox 3.5 (with 3.6 coming soon) or Opera (the European favorite because it has a small footprint that fits aging home machines nicely). The hardest part of the transition from one browser to another is bookmarks and the newer, better, faster, browsers make even this easy. Do it!

JB

11/20/09

Lorelei Kelly wrote in Huffington Post Thursday about a strategy of "commitment" to Afghanistan. You should read this, because it is either the most laughable recent arrangement of words on screen or a very subtle and psychologically astute plea for immediate withdrawal from that festering sore of west Asia.

Lorelei states her opening premise that having a strategy that incorporates other than military options is good. Then she counts the ways that not having a military strategy are bad ...

The consequences of a complete withdrawal would leave a violent, chaotic hole in the middle of a tense neighborhood. The US would deal a potential death blow to the world's premier military alliance (NATO) and crackpot messiahs across the globe will claim credit. Troops need to be in the mix. Most Afghans want us there. They overwhelmingly dislike the Taliban. Girls attending school has risen to 44% since we've been present. Far more Afghans have access to basic health care. We need to start seeing these benchmarks as part of a broader set of objectives -- all thus far achieved with the help of American troops.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. Obama is not Bush. We are not the Soviets. And this is not Vietnam. Historical analogies must be very carefully considered.

I don't know why Lorelei thinks NATO would be dealt a death blow by a coordinated but rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan. Perhaps she thinks that European governments have themselves over a public relations barrel on that subject. First, there is no evidence that any NATO force, including ours, is so committed to military ops in Afghanistan that not being committed would ring the death knell of a willingness to remain in NATO for some future necessity ... which is what Afghanistan is not. Second, "crackpot messiahs" are everywhere, Alaska, Virginia Beach, west Asia, the Arabian peninsula, the horn of Africa, everywhere. What they say is their business. Certainly we cannot predicate U.S. national policy on the angst of crackpots taking pot shots at us!

Lorelei says that troops must be in the "mix," by which she means a multi-pronged presence, that is, a continuation of military ops while we undertake to build a modern nation out of miscellaneous 14th century TinkerToy ® pieces. The assumption that Afghanistan is culturally or intellectually or spiritually ready to join the 21st century is at best problematic and on average utopian and without foundation in discernible evidence.

Afghans want us there? Who says they do? The only female member of the Afghan legislature is here in the U.S. right now telling us quite the opposite. Polls taken by Europeans and U.S. agencies report the opposite as well. The U.S. presence provides only temporary security to Afghans paid for at the cost of mayhem when we move along to the next village and the warlords and Taliban seep in behind us. And, you did notice that a female says this, a person with the most to lose if the Taliban take over the country again. No, Afghans generally do not want us or the Russians or any other do-gooder forces there stirring up the cultural demons that have kept Afghanistan retarded all these centuries.

Yes, historical analogies should be considered carefully, but doing the same thing again and again hoping that eventually you will have success instead of repeated failure is insanity.

George Will, of all people, put it quite directly. If President Obama decides to augment the troops and continue military operations in Afghanistan, he will have opted for a second term of office with the price being hundreds of billions of dollars and innumerable American, allied, and Afghan lives. It is not worth it.

JB

11/18/09

Tuesday evening on MSNBC it was reported that New Zealand has the least corrupt government in the world and Somalia the most. With folks like Wm. Jefferson, now starting his thirteen years in prison and the former governor of Illinois headed that way by all accounts, the U.S. comes in 19th in the world. Afghanistan ranks (word choice deliberate) next to the worst. Afghanistan, remember, is the place where the Taliban represents order and discipline. If you also like Sharia law, 9th century politics, misogyny gone over the top, and the rule of blood, Afghanistan is the place for you.

The overwhelming question is whether Afghanistan is the place for us. The President will soon be making a decision on whether to believe his generals that the mere infusion of 40,000 troops will bring order and stability to this trouble land. NATO announced Tuesday that it will be supplying more troops to stand alongside the Americans, not tens of thousands of troops, mind you. Just drops in the bucket, different languages (often) to make coordination difficult, different ethos to make discipline difficult, different war aims ... because we really do not have any.

The problem with Afghanistan is that it really is not a country in the modern sense. It is more like a confederation of places and peoples whose broad understanding is that they can coexist and occasionally make a profit from opium or perform a "good work" in the eyes of Allah and basically live out their lives as a pre-modern society without too much interference because their country is bereft of natural resources, impossibly mountainous in places, hot, dry, formidable.

How President Obama is going to make a decision on this has been speculated to death. Clearly two items loom foremost in the imaginations of policy makers these days. Afghanistan under the Taliban will become a safe haven and even a spawning ground for international terrorist, like Osama bin Ladin, who very well may still be in Afghanistan in some cave near Tora Bora. The second item is neighboring Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal, with its weak central government, with traitors in every closet, with adventurers around every corner, with its own Taliban. Pakistan is enough to scare the hell out of anyone, not excluding President Obama.

But, even with the two clear problems posed in the region, Afghanistan itself is unlikely be tractible to outside influence, especially clumsy, civilian-killing military like ours and NATO's. Perhaps the most dismal situation is the corruption and the mind-set among Afghans that this is more or less normal. Read Chatterjee's essay and then ask yourself if you would choose to spend a couple thousand U.S. lives every five years for the next twenty to thirty years trying to create a modern Afghanistan. I think you will agree with me that we just do not have the military, civilian, or any other kind of resolve to do it. We should just get out.

JB