Ezra and Brian are complaining that it's hard to get anything done these days:
I think it's almost certainly wrong that we're not overwhelmed by the volume of tragedy in the world -- there'd have to be something genuinely wrong with you to be able to absorb the current moment in some coherent way. So what many of us do is pick and choose. But once an issue is selected, there's no real step two. Marching doesn't work. Exhortations to write a letter or shoot an e-mail seem increasingly hoary, particularly as the process is taken over by organized pressure groups able to flood legislators with millions of e-mails. Volunteers are generally misused, and even when a campaign tries to construct a movement out of them, it can backfire, discrediting the whole enterprise (see Dean, Howard, and those $%*^*# orange beanies). The utter inadequacy of contemporary methods of protest and social action has been well established -- it's even been recast as narcisstic. As Martin writes:. . .
At the end of the day, there's really one good option: Donating money. Possibly even raising it. And so political activism becomes indistinguishable from consumerism, and relies on funding other people's ability to make a difference. Some groups, like Moveon, have done brilliant work at involving their small-time funders in the process, closing some of that gap. But the average campaign or cause is not nearly so innovative. And so most who want to be involved, who want to make a difference, are left writing a check, and never, themselves, feeling impactful.
First of all, the notion that this is some sort of uniquely horrible moment in world history is absurd. I grew up with the very real fear that one day, without much warning, I would simply vanish in a radioactive cloud. The fear of nuclear annihilation was the ever-present undercurrent to the lives of children living in major urban areas, or near military installations, in a way that you simply cannot comprehend unless you've lived it. Compared to the threat of global thermonuclear war, any of the world's current problems, including climate change, are trivial.
With the exception of climate change--and even then, remember, it was already happening twenty years ago; we just didn't see it--pretty much everything one can think of is better than ever. Wars are fewer, and kill fewer people. Everyone's richer. Racism and xenophobia are bad, but not as bad as they used to be. Women have more freedom and opportunity than at any other moment in world history. Health care is better. Our teeth are cleaner, straighter, and less cavity-filled. We know more, do more, and enjoy more than human beings ever have before. I mean, things may look pretty grim compared to the three years at the end of the last millenium, but that's life: you have good years, then you have less good years, then you have better years again.
But of course, people now in their early twenties don't really remember anything before the late Clinton administration; no wonder everything seems like it's going to hell in a handbasket. Their baseline is an unsustainable economic bubble in an unprecedented peacetime lull following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Not only did things used to be worse; very few people managed to do anything about it. Think of the communists languishing for decades, their only substantial achievement stealing nuclear secrets for Stalin. Or the student movement of the 1960's which contributed to the end of the war, but lost on everything else they wanted, and moreover only fought against the war because half of them thought Ho Chi Minh was the good guy. Or the decades it took for the NAACP et. al. to get America to the point where we could even have a civil rights movement. The narrative where you pour out of the classroom, tell everyone how wrong they are, and sit back and wait for magic social change is a fantasy cooked up by the Baby Boomers. Who, by the way, destroyed the effectiveness of protest by creating a protest culture which emphasized alienation from, rather than solidarity with, the larger culture.
Update Brian says his argument is not that the world is worse, but that the avenues of action are fewer. Fair enough, but I don't think that's really true. I'll re-emphasize two points above. First, most grassroots action never achieves anything, because most grassroots action is at odds with what the majority wants. You can wave your polls about the environment until you're blue in the face, but I maintain that the public gets a lot angrier about rising gas prices than about climate change, which tells me where their actual priorities lie. People look at the civil rights movement and think "Yeah! That's the way to do it!" but it was preceeded by decades of slow, painful work preparing for it. Likewise, it took decades to get women the vote. Most major political change occurs at a glacial pace.
In passing, I wonder if the left isn't having a hard time getting it together precisely because sixties nostalgia is making it hard to, as conservatives did in the sixties, develop a thirty-year plan.
The other thing I would emphasize is that protesting minorities generally succeed when their letters, marches, etc. emphasize their role as part of a larger culture. This is why the breast cancer lobby is overwhelmingly more successful than, say, the antiwar movement.
But on a lot of issues, the grassroots culture really emphasizes alienation rather than connection. Antiwar protests might not have stopped the war no matter what, but it's a safe bet they'd have garnered more sympathy and respect for their views had more of the protesters shown up dressed for the Elks Lodge Annual Dinner Dance rather than Sunday afternoon in the Village. Undoubtedly, in an ideal world conformity to restrictive social norms would not be a prerequisite for activist success, but you're stuck with the primate tribe you got born into, where it largely is. The boomers got away with it because they were the largest generation in American history, and had recently been given the vote. No one else will get to repeat that feat.
"very real fear ... of nuclear annihilation"
eh, not so much. more like the very hyped fear of nuclear annihilation.
"The fear of nuclear annihilation was the ever-present undercurrent to the lives of children living in major urban areas, or near military installations, in a way that you simply cannot comprehend unless you've lived it."
ooooooh, scary monsters!!!!
And didn't you just write a post entitled "The personal isn't political (always)"? Please try to cut down on the 180 degree shifts; you're giving your readers whiplash.
cmon Megan, Russia still has a vast collection of ICBMs. Why not so scared now?
Francis, you have no clue. When I was 6 I knew that, with almost no warning, I could be dead. It wasn't some made up boogieman made to scare me, it was the reality everyone knew about. You live in NYC, you're the first ones to go. I remember watching "The Day After" when I was 10 and thinking how glad I was that, if it happened, I would be dead.
Interestingly my husband, who is 7 years older and grew up in the middle-of-nowhere felt the opposite in that he was horrified at the thought that he wouldn't die.
What I find really odd about Meg's post is that my spouse and I had this conversation yesterday. CNN had something about the wildfires in California being attributable to climate change and I made a comment about how depressing it was and he said something about how, compared to what we grew up with, it was really not all that scary. And he was right.
Yes, there are lots of ICBMs in the world, and yes, probably some of them are floating around, but it is unlikely that all of them will be launched at the same time destroying everything. It's much more likely that it will be isolated and most of us will be able to survive (admittedly with some very negative effects). I don't worry about the world ending due to global thermonuclear war anymore.
Francis... "hyped" though it may be, that doesn't make it false. The USSR assumed the US was making a first strike during training exercises and the world almost got blown to smithereens accordingly.
"cmon Megan, Russia still has a vast collection of ICBMs. Why not so scared now?"
Maybe because Russia is not a) the primary ideological opponent of the US b) posturing itself for nuclear war on the same level as the USSR? For all Putin's aspirations and irritated diplomatic exchanges, preparing to go to war with the other is no longer either the US or Russia's primary security concern.
This reminds me of when my dad used to talk about the "good old days." He grew up during the Great Depression (born in 1920). He said "Son, when people say they wish they lived in the good old days, they don't know what they're talking about. I lived back then and life was HARD. We had to work before the sun came up till after it set. We didn't have TV or telephones or refrigerators. We didn't even have indoor plumbing. These days we're living in now are the real "good old days.""
No, no, no, Megan. The party line is that Bushitler is the most uniquely evil and awful that the country has ever had. "Worst president ever." There's some question (check out Jim Henley's blog) if he'll leave office peacefully when his term is over.
Given these premises, Ezra et al. do face a disturbing conundrum: why aren't their youthful peers doing more about the most horrible government America has ever had? The answer must be some historically unique set of circumstances promoting quiescence. It can't be anything else.
"moreover only fought against the war because half of them thought Ho Chi Minh was the good guy. "
As one who was draft eligible in 1969-70, allow me to say that the main reason 98% of the males of my generation even cared about Vietnam was the draft. Now there were certainly those who truly believed that Ho was the George Washington of Vietnam. But without the draft and the massive call-up, the rallies would have been mighty lonely.
If you want to instill a sense of activism in today's 19-23 yr olds, institute a draft. They'll be in the streets in droves.
And another thing--Woodstock sucked if you were actually there. The movie is cool; the actual event--not so much.
Ezra's point was a substantive one: he feels that the avenues available to him to advocate for social change are either ineffective or unsatisfying by virtue of being equivalent to consumerism.
Ezra's point is completely asinine, of course. If he feels strongly about something, there remain open to him the same avenues that have historically been effective for advocates of social change: depending on how strongly one feels, tactics range from polite political agitation to violent insurrection. It's just that Ezra really doesn't care enough about anything in particular to consider getting arrested in order to effect change. He feels as though he ought to be willing to do something effective, but since he isn't willing to live with the consequences that that action would entail he whines that there's nothing he can do. Asinine.
Ezra's whining, however silly, is still significantly less obnoxious than the Pollyanna response you came up with. Sure, absolutely, it is getting better all the time. It's not even worth arguing: is it "better" now than during the Roman empire? By what standard? Within what timeframe? For who? For what purposes? It's comforting that things in general are better now for someone than they were at some unspecified point in the past, but it's also obviously and disturbingly true that things are much much worse than things were for someone else at some other unspecified point in time. Vapid.
Besides, whether things are better of worse isn't even tangential to the issue Ezra was whining about. His whining takes as stipulated that things are bad, not that they're worse than at some other time. He's complaining about what to do, not whether to do something.
I was born in '63 in NYC and didn't leave until '89 when I moved to California, and I always thought the fear of nuclear war was overdone. Maybe having a parent who lived through WWII in France cut down on the scary stories.
So yes Kate, I have a clue. Several, in fact. (I was THERE, man!) Spare me all of your childhood terrors. Every kid has them.
And I still think that this post of Megan, with its oh-so-pretentious title and its oh-so-exclusive understanding of the fear of nuclear war was pretty damn awful, especially when juxtaposed against her earlier post about the personal not being the political.
"The fear of nuclear annihilation was the ever-present undercurrent to the lives of children living in major urban areas, or near military installations, in a way that you simply cannot comprehend unless you've lived it."
Fear of instantaneous annihiliation, the end of the world etc, is nothing new, and it is certainly not unique to the baby boomer generation. People have been believing for millenia that the end of the world is upon them, that the world as we know it could cease to exist tommorrow, or in two minutes. It is irrelevant whether the object of fear is the nuclear boogyman or god or the devil or whatever. The most interesting thing, imo, is how many people actually seem to desire the end of the world and want to be here when it happens. They can't wait, it'll all be over soon.
But, according to Mike Huckabee and David Horowitz et al, Islamofacism is the greatest danger America has ever confronted (their words, I'm not making this up). By posting this nessage on Islamofacism awareness week no less, you're clearly showing you're for the terrorists.
Megan, why do you hate America?
Thank you Megan! For everywhere in the world except parts of the Middle East and much of sub-Saharan Africa, this is a friggin' Golden Age. Which isn't saying a whole hell of a lot, but no less true for it. Can you imagine what it felt like in 1939? 1914? Jeez, how about December 1950 (the worst week in Korea was far worse than the worst week in Iraq, for US casualties) or April 1968?
The world isn't going to hell, and neither is the US. Yes, despite eight years of incomparably stupid governance on our end of things. As to what to do, how about we elect a candidate who's extremely smart, knows how to get things done in the political system we have rather than some idealized one that won't ever exist, and has general principles that (translated into policy) will address the most pressing needs at home and win back admiration for our country abroad. I'll give you a hint: a lot of people have a reflexive, irrational hatred of her. That's two hints.
The fear of nuclear annihilation was the ever-present undercurrent to the lives of children living in major urban areas, or near military installations, in a way that you simply cannot comprehend unless you've lived it.
This Army brat seconds that. I remember being in the first grade when I figured this one out. Freaked me out for a while.
Fear of instantaneous annihiliation, the end of the world etc, is nothing new, and it is certainly not unique to the baby boomer generation.
Yes, but during the cold war, such fear was legitimate. That's the unique thing, imho.
I think this comment by Ezra says it all about the left -- whether in the 1960s or the present:
There were legitimate claims of injustice; there still are, though many fewer and less significant. But for the left, it's not really about those injustices, but about how they feel. (Notice that he doesn't complain that writing a check is ineffective -- just that it doesn't "feel" like he's doing enough.)Ezra's comment is just sheer narcissism on all sides. He thinks things are horrible now because he's experiencing them. And he's upset because he personally doesn't feel effective.
But at the same time, it's clear that it's narcissism combined with laziness; it's clear that what he really wants is to do more than just write a check -- but without having to put in much effort. A protest is easy. You show up one morning with your sign and march around for a while. Letter writing is trivial. What he wants is to be able to do these things and for them to work. That way, he can "feel" like he's making an impact without having to do much.
Stephen Colbert pointed out that when the student got tasered at the Kerry speech in Florida, all the other students sat there and did nothing. Other than going home and posting the incident on YouTube. Nobody interfered, or even verbally challenged the cops. They just sat there passively.
This is hilarious and sad, from ezra's post:
"I think it's almost certainly wrong that we're not overwhelmed by the volume of tragedy in the world -- there'd have to be something genuinely wrong with you to be able to absorb the current moment in some coherent way."
I find left leaning activist to be egotistical and self-centered. To be authentic, one has to be drowned in angst and sorrow. its sad. and its not healthy.
bottom line: one can be deeply engaged with world events and still be happy and hopeful.
In fact, I would bet that the activists who are changing the world the most aren't "overwhelmed" by the problems in the world.
Back in the 19th century, when civil service reform was a major issue, there were people who considered their life work a success if they managed to protect a third assistant postmaster from political re-appointment (paraphrased from Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex).
The real root of Ezra's discontent is that he wants to change the whole world, or nothing. If he just concentrated on changing his local public school, he might be just as frustrated, but he could at least be certain of being heard.
David Hacket Fischer describes the world of Paul Revere as one of the "voluntary association." There's a mechanism for making a difference without the taint of commerce. Of course Paul Revere was just trying to change King George's policy in Boston, a city of 16,000 people. And he was willing to work through the network of tradesmen of whom he was a part. Ezra Revere would be trying to change King George's policy in India, with predictable results.
Now is a value free state of affairs.
Whether you judge things to be better or worse depends not on the state of affairs we call "now" but rather on what you consider "better."
Whether I agree with your assessment of now as Better or Worse depends on the extent to which I agree with the standards you use to arrive at that judgment. And whether I find the judgment useful for my purposes, as opposed to yours.
There aren't any standards of value which I am compelled to view as absolute. I can always disagree, and in disagreeing I will always be right.
Cope.
henry,
Ezra says "But once an issue is selected, there's no real step two." And then he goes on to talk about why that's a problem.
"What I find really odd about Meg's post is that my spouse and I had this conversation yesterday. CNN had something about the wildfires in California being attributable to climate change and I made a comment about how depressing it was and he said something about how, compared to what we grew up with, it was really not all that scary. And he was right."
Oh, yes. The reality of 2000+ homes destroyed so far in the worst fire in known history in California, with 500,000 people evacuated from their homes, is not at all scary next to something we grew up with that never even happened. And next to the werewolf that scared the bejeezus out of me on "Dark Shadows", hurricane Katrina was really not all that bad. Because, you know, stuff that happened to me, even when it didn't really happen, is way worse than stuff that is really happening to someone else right now.
Don‘t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.
How many of you remember watching The Day After on TV, and how scared and depressed it made you feel? I remember my sister starting crying when we watched it.
We were right to be scared. We'd be smart to stay a little scared today, since accidents can happen (and almost did).
What's changed with the Muslim nutters today is that the odds of total annihilation (i.e., every major city in America nuked at the same time) have gone down, but the odds of one nuke going off in America have gone up. I find it odd that those who remain nonchalant about this possibility tend to be the ones who whine the most about the Patriot Act. What sort of legislation do you imagine would get passed into law in the days following a terrorist nuclear attack in this country? I'm right-winger, and I even worry when I think about that. Our open society would be history.
Although the reason to be fearful was real during the Cold War, that doesn't mean that the fear wasn't used as a means of manipulation to some extent. Michael Crichton makes a great point about this in his book State of Fear, where a character points out that it wasn't coincidental that fears of Global Warming became promulgated right after the end of the Cold War. We went from fears of Nuclear Winter to fears of Global Warming in no time flat.
Yes, global thermonuclear war did almost happen, most notably on two occasions, in 1962 and 1983. In fact, if the Soviet early warning satellite malfunction which occurred in September 1983 had occurred a few weeks later, during the Able Archer NATO war games, and Robert McFarlane had not scaled back the scope of the war games at the last moment, civilization may have disappeared over purely trivial misunderstandings. The chance of such an outcome is so much more remote today that it cannot even be credibly compared.
The historical ignorance that ostensibly well educated people regularly display is often surprising, and anyone who believes that this is a particularly terrible or especially challenging moment in the history of civilization, even modern civilization, doesn't really know anything at all.
Sarah, a couple thousand insured homes burning up in the richest society in all of human existence is not very scary at all, and yes, it's happened to me. Yawn.
I have about 10 years on Megan and while as a kid the idea of mutual assured destruction was known to me and my generation, I don't recall thinking about it much. The generation before mine, what with duck-and-cover movies likely was a little more anxious about it.
In college everyone had lots and lots of time to consider the state of the world generally, obsess, pontificate or become overly earnest about such things. Nena and her 99 red balloons might have caused some additional chatter but really it struck me as what I'd now call proto-Euro agi-prop, though she was hot and the song, danceable.
I guess as we approached the fall of the USSR the generation just after mine felt the threat more acutely, or perhaps we should just blame Nena.
All that said, I think Megan is right-on -- people can naturally lose perspective and may be subject to hyperbole. The more strongly held a belief or hatred, the more prone to this they are. So when I hear people hyperventilate about how bad things are, I never doubt their sincerity, but I do doubt their ability to put things in perspective. I hope I do this equally well with both liberals and conservatives, but I'm sure I fail depending on the specific topic.
Man, maybe it's just because my parents were hippies, but I remember the constant belief that we could be nuked any given year. The Nuclear Doomsday Clock wasn't crankery, nor were the two or three close calls we had.
Francis, you might be right that the threat of nuclear annihilation was overblown at the time, but that logic probably applies equally to today's threats. Most threats turn out to be overblown, except for the one that gets you.
That said, the idea of Mutually Assured Distruction as a stable long-term strategy for survival still strikes me as crazy, and I am constantly amazed when I hear today's 20-something liberals announce that no matter how many countries get nukes, it will be ok because the leaders of all those countries know that we would nuke them in retaliation. That is a lot of faith in a doctrine that the liberals of my youth (justly, IMHO) rejected, and the conservatives grudgingly accepted as the best of a bad set of choices.
Megan's in her late forties, early fifties?
cs, I'm pretty sympathetic to Ezra's discontent. My issues are not his, but it is frustrating to be separated from making a difference by a green ceiling.
But there's still something comical about a pundit complaining how hard it is to End War and Remake Global Capitalism. It's a Fabian conceit: I have the solution to the world's troubles but nobody will listen to me.
I bring up local schools and the Boston colonial population of 16,000 to provide an alternate context for Ezra's lamentation. When localities have power (i.e. as described in Christopher Alexander's communitarian A Pattern Language, or alternatively in Robert Nozick's libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia), then individuals and the voluntary association can make a difference.
The irony of the modern advocacy movements whose ineffectiveness Ezra bemoans is that they seek big solutions -- if not local, then federal; if not federal, then transnational.
By aggrandizing the exercise of top down power (the problem is not the power, but the fact they don't have it), the marchers buttress the institutional view that marginalizes themselves as individuals.
Or the student movement of the 1960's which contributed to the end of the war, but lost on everything else they wanted, and moreover only fought against the war because half of them thought Ho Chi Minh was the good guy.
You just can't resist throwing in hyperbole about those dirty hippies, can you? With the implication, of course, that today's anti-war movement (such as it is) is just a bunch of dirty, Ahmadinejad- and Saddam-loving hippies, too.
If you're wondering why so many liberals hate you, Megan, it's not your substantive positions, it's your rhetoric.
Henry's posing a false choice: try to improve your local schools or try to end the war. Most liberals I know do both. And what if the local school is failing because of a lack of resources, and the lack of resources is connected to the billions we're squandering on the war? The fact that we spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined just might, it seems to me, be connected to the fact that we receive fewer social services, from education to health care, than the citizens of every other developed country.
And when I read the pieces that Megan linked to, I don't see a general lament that "things are bad today", I see a specific lament that the people of this country want this war ended, and yet the war doesn't end. Congress continues, by wide margins, to vote money for the war, and the top three Democratic contenders for President have said that they cannot commit to a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops, even by 2013.
We've all been raised on the belief that we live in a democracy, so the realization that we don't would tend to be a downer.
I'm sorry that you don't like to remember that the antiwar movement's motivations weren't always particularly laudatory, but that's not ad hominem; it's a fact. The student movement of the 1960s had a lot of wacked out ideas that I'm very glad they *couldn't* get passed. If this makes you hate me, so be it.
I don't know what specific tragedy prompts Ezra Klein's sense of powerlessness. Tops on my personal list: I find it disgusting to the point of intolerability that soldiers from my country are killing innocent people every day for no good reason whatsoever. The intolerableness is compounded by the fact that the killing they're doing, and the mission of occupying an Arab country in general, is constantly, day by day, increasing the odds that an American city will suffer a catastrophic terrorist attack within the next decade. The attack could be nuclear, and most likely, the city will be New York again, which is where my parents live. It's a stupid policy, created by stupid men, which is likely to get a lot of innocent Americans killed, just as it's already gotten a lot of innocent Iraqis killed. Most of the country wants it to stop, and has for years. And yet there doesn't seem to be anything one can do about it. So if the mood in the country sometimes seems to be approaching the fever pitch of 1968, that's the main reason why.
MAD has a decent chance to be a workable doctrine over a long period of time when the number of actors reamins fairly low. It almost inevitably suffers catastrophic failure once the number of actors grows large enough. How large is large enough? Hard to be precise, but I fear we might eventually find out some day.
SteveB, I'm not trying to present a choice. I'm pointing out that the idea of being heard and having a direct personal impact on an issue -- the theme of Ezra's essay -- will necessarily correlate to the level at which your activism is directed. If you direct your activism at a global problem, your individual impact will be different than if you direct your activism at a local problem.
What I hear you say is that the sense of personal impact derives from success. This is probably true, but Ezra is trying to say something a little more profound. He is not just alienated by failure (well, probably, he is), he is alienated by a system of advocacy that mainly devolves to writing checks.
Yeah, brooksfoe, the desire of fanatical people to inflict a catastrophic terrorist attack upon New York City was markedly smaller before the Baathists were removed from power in Iraq by American military forces. If it weren't for those stupid people you decry, New York City would be much, much, safer. Yeah, that's it.
This is why the breast cancer lobby is overwhelmingly more successful than, say, the antiwar movement.
Surely it helps just a bit to be against something no one's in favor of?
Even if a statement is true, that doesn't mean it's not an ad hominem fallacy, as you should remember from Logic 101.
But I didn't claim you were committing the ad hominem fallacy. I claim that you're engaged in pointless insults that have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of your post.
And anyway, it's not true that half of the anti-war movement in the 60s was motivated by pro-Ho Chi Minh sentiments. That's hyperbole. And hyperbole is a particularly inflammatory form of rhetoric.
It was more than a small percentage of the anti-war movement that thought Ho Chi Minh was some kind of hero. And even amongst those who were, that was mostly a self-deluding effect of their anti-war sentiments, rather than a motivating cause.
I agree with a lot of what you write, Megan, such as the substance of this post. (Yes, things really are better than they were forty years ago, by just about any measure.) I just don't understand why you punctuate your posts with gratuitous anti-liberal insults.
Well I’ll jump in here. I watched “The Day After” while sitting nuclear alert with my B-52. (Have you hugged your SRAM today?) I figured that after the day I would trying to get my aircraft and crew back to the states from where –ever we landed (assuming we lived). All of us would have taken off and delivered all the weapons that we could. So I actually lived with the reality and new where the bombs would fall.
Of course we followed that movie with the traditional “Dr. Strangelove” and laughed our butts off!
Also the scariest part of he cold war that I was around for was watching the fighting around the Kremlin.(1991?) There was a possibility of a Russian Civil war with nukes. Not a pretty site.
Also, I have a relative who celebrated when the AF base in her city closed. (Austin). She said that it made her and her friends feel much safer since they were no longer a target. When I managed to stop my laughter long enough to get back in my chair, I explained to her that Austin, as the capital of one of the largest states in the union, would be getting multiple ICBMs because of it target value as a political leadership site. She was horrified, I still laugh to this day over that. But she also thought that military people believed Dr. Strangelove was a serious movie!
SteveB – the Senate voted 92-3 in favor of the war and appropriate more funds. Sounds like widespread bi-partisan support. All the major candidates say they will not be cutting and running. Sounds like wide-spread bi-partisan support. Get a grip, the world is more prosperous and free than in anytime in human history.
Lastly,
“In fact, I would bet that the activists who are changing the world the most aren't "overwhelmed" by the problems in the world. “
And they would be the US Marine Corp and US Army. Bringing freedom to the world since 1776. While the left supports totalitarianism and the stability of the gulags – see support for Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussain. And you wonder why we think the loony left as lost their way?
I'll add to the chorus of people who grew up terrified of imminent nuclear war. I grew up with nightmares about nuclear tipped ICBMs destroying my city. Having read about the close calls (that we know about), I don't think the fear was overblown.
As far as the effectiveness of activism goes, I think that others have made a good point that trying to save the whole world all at once is going to be very difficult, but saving a few people in your local community is probably a lot easier. There are plenty of organizations one can join or volunteer for. Writing checks to other organizations and writing letters to politicians helps, too. Most city governments have meetings where citizens can go and speak their mind. Representives to state and local government are accessible in various ways.
All of this requires some work and time commitment, though.
I think the Internet has made it seem like it's really easy to do lots of things from one's computer. While that is true to some extent, changing the world will still require getting up, walking away from the computer, and actually doing something.
In other words, these discussions are interesting and fun but probably not going to change anything...
EI
I ducked and covered as a child, and I doubt things were more frightening for me than they are for my son with terrorist attacks and school shootings. This has little to do with the reality of the threat, and a lot to do with the over-saturation of scary news that permeates our culture. I don't think childhood fears are a really meaningful thing to measure or talk about though. We might as well be talking about the monster under the bed.
I do want to challenge what you're saying about women's rights, at least in this culture. At best it's a mixed bag. Reproductive freedom is a marker of women's rights, and that has diminished since the seventies and eighties. Moreover, the Phyllis Schlafley "women's place is in the home" schtick was pretty much a joke when I was a young, and now it is a line accepted by many mainstream conservatives. There are pushes to make divorce laws harder. There are also many more girls growing up in conservative christian homes who are being told that their future involves only subjugation to man and childrearing. As MLK once said: when one of us is chained, none of us are free.
I'm old enough to have some perspective on this. Sure, it sometimes seems that the 'great ideas' aren't moving forward fast enough, but those of us over 40 have seen quite alot of movement as Megan points out. That is no reason to counsel patience however which, to me, translates as a shrug of the shoulders and a mumbled "oh, we'll get there eventually." All great ideas had great leaders behind them. Great leaders don't resign themselves to waiting it out.
Instead of writing a check, I'd suggest volunteering for a campaign, or spending your long weekend doing volunteer trail work in a national forest or park. Don't want to 'do' anything? Fine, but then just STFU. Believing you can change the world with your checkbook is a sort of cynicism the country can do without.
I think Ezra's spending too much time hanging out in the coffee bar and too little time thinking about how he might actually change the world.
How many of you remember watching The Day After on TV, and how scared and depressed it made you feel? I remember my sister starting crying when we watched it.
Oh puh-leez! The Day After was sheer overhyped, poorly acted, cliche-ridden crap. It was as bad as Plan 9 from Outer Space. Or Gigli. Or as bad as Showgirls would've been without all the nekkid chix. I actually wasted a couple hours watching the The Day After on television, having been drawn in by all the advance publicity, and realized afterwards that I would have been much more intrigued by watching paint dry.
Megan's in her late forties, early fifties?
No, much younger than that, early to middle 30's at most.
"And you wonder why we think the loony left as lost their way?
Posted by buffpilot | October 24, 2007 10:20 AM "
Excellent post!
I think it's probably likely that there was greater fear of nuclear war in the 50's and 80's than the sandwich decades in between. In the 50's, the Cold War was new; in the 60's, the focus was on Vietnam, and it might have seemed that rather than thermonuclear war, tensions between the superpowers might be dealt with through conventional proxy wars. The Republican presidential candidate who the left had slandered as the one most likely to start a nuclear war (Goldwater) lost. In the 70's, you had detente.
In the 80's, you had Reagan, the president the left had also claimed was likely to start another nuclear war. You also had the growing movement of scientists opposing nukes, the nuclear freeze movement, Carl Sagan writing about the horrors of nuclear winter in Parade Magazine, etc.
The Senate voted 92-3 in favor of the war and appropriate more funds.
And the American people are, by a similar margin, in favor of spending billions more of their money to continue the war?
No? Then I'd say there's a problem here. Our government, it seems, is not representing the people.
I could point to other issues as well, but the Iraq war is the most dramatic example of the yawning chasm between the desires of the American people and the policies of our elites in Washington (Democrat and Republican alike).
And that, I think, is what leads to depression and confusion in people like Ezra. We've all been told that, as citizens of a democracy, there are certain tools we can use to influence our government (elections, writing our representatives, protest, etc.) and yet none of these things actually seem to work. So what do we do? It's a good question, one all of us should consider.
From what I could tell many of them were cheering and applauding the police for removing the would-be hijacker who was there only to disrupt Senator Kerry’s presentation. As well they should.
SteveB,
This might help you understand: "End of a Movement". An excerpt:
[...]
Fred - right on the money:
"The peaceniks need only blame themselves for their failures. They are asking Americans to believe not that the war was a blunder, so much that the war was a sin; that the decapitators and car bombers of innocents are a resistance; that the army seeking to prevent ethnic cleansing today is in fact responsible for it."
If we played all the beheadings of US troops, aid workers and journalist on TV as much as we had Abu Gharib the peace movement would be laughed at. How about the buried story were AQ slaughtered an entire village? How about who is responsible for driving car-bombs into groups of their own children??? Lets show how the terrorist handle prisoners - all by the Geneva conventions - Not. They torture to death any they capture. And the US military is to blame?
Yet Code Pink supports these guys? Why? Look who they stand with and support.
And you wonder why we think the looney left as lost its way?
Yes, Will Allen, it was. There are a thousand times as many people with a visceral hatred and a desire for vengeance against America today as there were in September of 2001. And the greatest contrast is that for many of those who desire vengeance against America today, who are moved to rage by images of, say, toddlers killed by American bombs in Iraq, the desire for vengeance is as well grounded as a desire for vengeance can be.
Look, we can't refight our argument about whether the war was/is a good idea in this thread. I mean we can, but it's pointless. The substantive point is simply that polls have very consistently shown that a majority of Americans want to pull out of Iraq and think the war was "not worth it", ever since some time in 2005. The Republicans lost both houses of congress in 2006 entirely over this issue. And yet there is no movement towards pulling out of Iraq, because for various complicated reasons the political system is locked down. That's what creates a sense of powerlessness.
It was the sense of powerlessness to stop the war, despite widespread public opposition, that destroyed the Democratic Party in 1967-72. It drove the anti-war left to a level of disgust with its own country which was ultimately politically poisonous. In fact, the country merited that disgust. Unfortunately, it's not politically wise to say so, because people don't like being told that they have slaughtered innocents for no good reason but their own vanity, particularly when it's true.
brooksfoe, there also seems to be a thousand times more hatred for bin Laden today than there was in September of 2001.
I don't think that it was the plan, but putting innocent Muslims in the crossfire has created some blowback for the Islamists as well.
SG: and this redounds to the credit of America how? People HATE us. I'm out here in Vietnam, where people turned pro-American as part of the reconciliation in the late '90s. They're still in love with Bill Clinton. They despise Bush. And Vietnam is still one of the more pro-American countries in the region; try talking to people from Indonesia or Malaysia, or China. I don't even want to think about Pakistan.
In counterinsurgency, the problem is to fight an enemy that swims among the people like a fish in water. The key is to separate the fish from the water by turning the people against the enemy. We've turned the "people" -- all the Muslims in the world -- against us. Now try finding the enemy. Any wonder Osama is still out there?
brooksfoe,
There are a thousand times as many people with a visceral hatred and a desire for vengeance against America today as there were in September of 2001.
This is what's called "The product of brooksfoe's fevered imagination presented as fact."
I think there's enough evidence to support the view that America's prestige and popularity in the world have declined significantly over the past seven years. There isn't remotely enough evidence to supported your absurdly hyperbolic claim. Get a grip.
brooksfoe, according to soldiers now serving in Iraq, many Muslims are quite happy with our soldiers and like having them around. Iraqi and coalition soldiers live and fight together and have developed a mutual respect. Many in Iraq are turning against Al Qaeda and other terrorists and actively helping our soldiers find the terrorists.
While I would prefer that citizens of foreign countries see the US as a beacon of freedom and salvation to whom they should give thanks daily, I do not want our foreign policy to be shaped by polls of foreigners. The attitudes of foreigners towards the US should be a concern, but not the motivating factor behind our foreign policy.
EI
Brooksfoe's comparison of public feeling now about the Iraq War to public feeling in the late 1960s/early 1970s about the Vietnam War is also ludicrous. There was hardly an American family that wasn't affected in some way by Vietnam. That war killed 58,000 Americans at a time when the U.S. population was only two-thirds its present size. It was a significant burden on the national economy. It killed millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians. In contrast, the Iraq War barely has any impact on the lives of most ordinary Americans. Its effect on the economy is insignificant, there's no draft, and although the deaths of American servicemen are obviously tragic, they are only a small fraction of the losses caused in Vietnam. Yes, public opinion is now against the war. But it isn't remotely like the magnitude and intensity of the opposition to Vietnam.
Brooksfoe,
Read this, it will cheer you up: "Failing Upward: Relax, America will survive George W. Bush". It's long, and I don't agree with the more gratuitous attacks on Bush (which I'm sure you'll enjoy), but Mead makes some good historical points. Among them:
[...]
[...]
And, in support of SG's point about Al Qaeda's own blowback in the Muslim World:
EI, you and I read accounts by different soldiers. Polls consistently show that a significant majority of Iraqis support violence against American troops. I'm not surprised that some Iraqis get along with our soldiers, and I should be more specific in what I mean: there is not a Muslim country in the world anymore where a majority of the population has a positive view of the United States. In September 2001, Indonesians, Turks, and Malaysians all viewed the United States favorably. Now, by huge margins, none do. Even in Pakistan, in September 2001 the US had reasonable favorability ratings. Those days are long gone. Obviously US troops can work with their counterparts, and in some neighborhoods people may view them favorably (though I am very skeptical as to whether this is a repeat of the Vietnam-era phenomenon, in which Marines in CAP platoons rooming with Vietnamese families with whom they became close would find out after the war that their "aunties" had backed the VC all along). But in most of Iraq and in the Muslim world at large, the US is despised now. And when the next big attack comes, nobody will be asking, "why do they hate us"? We gave them a reason.
"And when the next big attack comes, nobody will be asking, "why do they hate us"? We gave them a reason."
Wasn't one of the "reasons" bandied about our support for brutal Arab dictators who oppress their people? Now you say we will be hated more for deposing one of these brutal dictators and giving his people a chance to chose their own leaders and their build a better future? Seems like a contradiction.
I'm out here in Vietnam, where people turned pro-American as part of the reconciliation in the late '90s. They're still in love with Bill Clinton. They despise Bush.
I am very skeptical as to whether this is a repeat of the Vietnam-era phenomenon, in which Marines in CAP platoons rooming with Vietnamese families with whom they became close would find out after the war that their "aunties" had backed the VC all along
So if it turns out that your "aunties" are actually Bush supporters...
By the way, I wonder how many people who voted Democratic in 1974 thought they were voting for bringing our boys home.
Fred:
"The peaceniks need only blame themselves for their failures. They are asking Americans to believe not that the war was a blunder, so much that the war was a sin; that the decapitators and car bombers of innocents are a resistance; that the army seeking to prevent ethnic cleansing today is in fact responsible for it."
I'm not asking anyone to believe anything, I'm just noting what most Americans do believe: that the war was a mistake, it's not making us safer, and that we should be implementing a timetable for withdrawing troops. Yes, there are still some disagreements among the general populace about what that timetable should be, but the "debate" we see in Congress is not whether we should leave in six months or 18 months, it's whether we should leave at all. And what percentage of Americans share the view of the three leading Democratic Presidential candidates that it would be "irresponsible" to withdraw all troops by 2013?
These are all signs of a failed, or failing democracy. You can argue all you want that the war is just and should be continued; but most Americans no longer agree with you. Who should our government listen to: you, the "enlightened minoirty" who are certain we're making progress, or the increasing (and increasingly angry) majority who want us to get out?
brooksfoe, If the only issue that matters is who they hate, then the fact that they hate bin Laden more is a good thing, no? If their hatred is the salient point, then we're doing something right.
And by your own assessment, we got 9/11 (and the first WTC bombing and the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers the African Embassy bombings) when we were popular. What good did that alleged popularity do us?
I'd rather be loved than hated, but unless you're calling for a mass conversion to Islam, I don't think that either is ours to choose. Right now we're forcing the average Mohammed to live with the fruits of jihad and it turns out he doesn't like it. Since our end goal has to be the discrediting of jihad, that has to be to our benefit.
Golly, Brooksfoe, where do you buy one of those finely calibrated visceral hatred-o-meters? Amazon?
Good gravy, the very fact that you think it is important that non-Americans have hatred for an American President who is only going to be in office for 14 more months, compared to a previous President, demonstrates that your perspective is entirely out of whack. Presidents come and Presidents go. So what?
Here is the long term reality. Until the population of the Persian Gulf governs itself, includiung it's oil reserves, and then decides to trade peacefully and profitably with the rest of the world, the U.S. is going to be embroiled in the conflicts within the Arab and wider Muslim world, and there will thus be more than enough highly motivated, well funded, people with a desire to inflict mass casualties in New York to eventually make it happen. Everything else is window dressing. Thus, nearly anything which makes the day come closer when that population, or substantial part of that population, achieves self government is likely to be preferred. True, if that population achieves self government, they may choose hostilities with the U.S.. It is better to know this sooner rather than later. In any case, there's is also a good chance that a self governing people will decide that it is a lot more pleasant to trade with the U.S. than it is to engage in hostilities with the U.S.
I grew up with the very real fear that one day, without much warning, I would simply vanish in a radioactive cloud.
I dunno. I don't think Ms. McArdle is older than I (44) and I sure don't recall this being my daily reality as a kid in the 70s and 80s. Sure, every now and then there'd be some furrowed-brow grown-up solemnly declaiming about the danger of Noooclear War!!!, usually on the nightly news, with stock footage of B-52s taking off in the background, or Pershings being elevated into launch position.
But as a kid my time horizons were pretty small. From June to Christmas was just about forever, for example. On that time scale nothing ever seemed to change on the noooclear war front. It was always maybe gonna happen any moment now who knows eek eek eek. So I concluded, rationally enough, that while the fear of nuclear war was apparently omnipresent (for adults), the actual fact of it was pretty remote. It hadn't happened in forever (on a kid's timescale), nothing ever changed to make it seem more or less likely, so it probably wouldn't happen any time soon. Psychological problem solved, time to go out and play catch, ride the bike, go swimming, whatever.
Maybe Megan was one of them pasty-faced nerdy types who sat indoors all the time and read Time cover to cover on how Ronnie Raygun was going to lead us into Armageddon? Most of us kids had more fun things to do than fret about nukes.
Yes, yes, Boomer Babies, we know the Vietnam War sucked. But it already happened, and your generation should have learned your lesson from it and kept the equally unnecessary and far more geopolitically self-destructive Iraq War from starting.
Ezra's point is valid. The mainstream majority of America, in poll after poll, is against this war and recognizes it as a mistake. Please, spare us the derisive broadbrushing of war protesters as "Village people" who scare the muggles. MILLIONS of Americans have marched against this war. We had a historic political realignment last year almost wholly about this issue, but nothing has actually changed. For the legions of politically active Americans who have done everything imaginable to stop this, yes, it's monumentally frustrating, and fair for people to start to wonder if in fact there is anything citizen activism and involvement can ever really do.
SteveB,
These are all signs of a failed, or failing democracy. You can argue all you want that the war is just and should be continued; but most Americans no longer agree with you. Who should our government listen to: you, the "enlightened minoirty" who are certain we're making progress, or the increasing (and increasingly angry) majority who want us to get out?
Majority public opinion only started to favor withdrawal around mid-2005. Prior to that, a majority of Americans opposed withdrawal. Were you saying to proponents of withdrawal prior to 2005 that the government should listen to the majority instead? Or do you make your "the government should do what the majority wants" argument only at times and for policies on which you happen to share that majority opinion?
"I'm pretty sympathetic to Ezra's discontent."
Please. Anyone with the nominal intelligence necessary to turn a Microsoft Word document into an animated .gif can change the world.
Michael Yon is making a difference. Does he do it by chanting slogans and waving a sign around? Of course not. He's better than that and so is his audience. He went to Iraq, filed reports that were compelling and credible, and brought us news we can trust. That his efforts are an overall boon to the pro-war side isn't at issue here; that he seems to have no problem making a difference is.
Ezra is the victim of nothing more than rising standards, he just lacks the intellectual integrity to see it so he rationalizes instead. To put it into the "consumerist" frame he so despises, he's 1980's GM complaining about Toyota instead of improving and adapting to modernity.
What the Internet Age has done is RAISE THE BAR. Nobody cares if you wave a sign and protest because that's not good enough anymore. I think on some level Ezra knows he doesn't measure up and is hiding his feelings of inferiority by pining for the "Good Ol' Days".
Read "An Army of Davids" and tell me people can't make a difference.
Sheesh, navigating foreign relations is not like running for Class President; being well liked is not paramount. What is important is that entities with the ability to influence events see that it is in their enlightened self interest to pursue goals which also are in your enlightened self interest. With regard to the Persian Gulf, this cannot happen as long as 1)the rest of the economically developed and developing world, with the U.S. the largest entity, has an absolute demand for the oil beneath the Persian Gulf 2)The population of the Persian Gulf does not govern those oil reserves, and thus cannot decide of it's own free will to trade with the rest of the world, for it's own benefit. Anything short of that means that the U.S. will be in conflict with the population of the Persian Gulf and wider muslim world.
Now you say we will be hated more for deposing one of these brutal dictators and giving his people a chance to chose their own leaders and their build a better future? Seems like a contradiction.
Juan, your quarrel is with the Iraqis and the Muslims. If you think their reasoning is illogical, make the argument to them, not me. Good luck with that, yeah?
I was 11 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis and lived within the thermo-nuclear blast range of Oak Ridge, TN, one of the, reportedly, top 3 targets. We were doing survival drills at schools. People were selling fallout shelters in grocery parking lots. Every major building you entered, governmental and non-governmental, had Civil Defense survival supplies and designated fall-out shelter areas.
Yes, the fear was very real. I had occasional nightmares for 15-20 years. Even now, I find myself evaluating culverts, manholes and other places to hide in the event of that big flash in the sky.
At least one person, Francis, needs to read a little more history.
Gte a grip TTT. A handful of Congressional and Senate seats changed sides. Whoop-dee-damn-doo, and the leading Democratic candidate for President doesn't even see it in her best interests to promise immediate withdrawal. This ain't exactly the draft riots in New York of the Civil War period.
brooksfoe:
Please try not to assume that your arguments are universal; the fact that they are as disputed as they are, here in this forum, should be ample evidence that they are not.
A few minutes ago you said:
EI, you and I read accounts by different soldiers.
Thank you -- a clear acknowledgement that multiple valid points of view exist here. But then:
Polls consistently show that a significant majority of Iraqis support violence against American troops.
All polls? Certainly not. Most polls? I'd doubt even that. You're overgeneralizing, and (quite possibly) engaging in the very sort of hyperbole that Megan was being criticized for earlier.
I don't know what America's "favorability ratings" were in the Muslim world in general in September 2001, as you put it. I'd argue, however, that late September 2001 was an aberration, in parts of the Muslim world just as much as in parts of Western Europe. America had sympathy has a recently-struck victim. (The victim often has far less sympathy when he goes out and does something to prevent being a victim again.)
I'd also like to remind you that there were a great many Muslims who celebrated the 9/11 attacks. Not a majority, certainly. But enough to give me serious doubts about the goodwill we supposedly have squandered.
And when the next big attack comes, nobody will be asking, "why do they hate us"? We gave them a reason.
Nobody has ever lacked reasons to hate the United States, if they wanted them. (As I just pointed out, they hated us on Sept. 12 2001 too.) Heck, people generally don't need much reason to hate anything.
My conclusion to this is that trying to be loved in the world-at large will not make us safer. Contrariwise, having people hate us does not necessarily make us less safe; there's more to this, lots more, than whether or not we are hated.
We must do what we need to do, for our own sake. Other countries will do the same for themselves; they always have. And we will forge alliances where we can, as often as we can, so long as doing so does not jeopardize our ability to protect ourselves.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
And by your own assessment, we got 9/11 (and the first WTC bombing and the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers the African Embassy bombings) when we were popular. What good did that alleged popularity do us?
We're about to hit 4,000 dead in Iraq. So terror attacks against Americans abroad are up astronomically since we started this war; they're all taking place in Iraq (and a couple in Indonesia), for pretty obvious reasons. Terror attacks in the US -- we had exactly two, both at the WTC. They came eight years apart. There'll be more. The figures on that...it doesn't lend itself to a trend analysis. Two attacks, one kills five, one kills almost 3,000. What's the trend? I mean, come on.
I don't know if I can convince you of this, but it simply defies reason that when in 2000 you feel comfortable around Indonesians, and in 2007 you feel uncomfortable, that this doesn't mean you are in greater danger. I've lived abroad for 8 years. I keep feeling greater and greater anxiety at traveling on an American passport. There keep being more places where it's not a good idea. I was in West Africa on 9/11. Back then, Muslims in West Africa were not anti-American at all. A little bit in Nigeria, due to the Muslim-Christian conflict there, but elsewhere - not a bit. Now you've got Tuaregs joining Al-Qaeda. Tuaregs! They were the guys you bought leather boxes from, incredibly hospitable. They didn't have a global politics in 2001. Muslims in Burkina Faso in 2001 were complaining to me that the New York Times had been too harsh on Bill Clinton for the Lewinsky thing. It's a sea change, and it feels terrible. And I find this facile "It's not a popularity contest" response really irritating, because of course it's a popularity contest. What else is it? You're trying to get people not to kill your countrymen. You think you do this by bombing their villages? It defies reason and common sense.
Daniel:
All polls? Certainly not. Most polls? I'd doubt even that.
All polls. Read 'em and weep.
Mixner:
Majority public opinion only started to favor withdrawal around mid-2005.
Well, thanks for acknowleging that, for the last two years, a majority of the public has supported withdrawal from Iraq. What, in your opinion, should the goverment do with that information? Especially given the fact that public support for the war is trending in only one direction: downward. In other words, there will never come a time again when a majority of Americans support us staying in Iraq, and yet we will stay in Iraq, nevertheless.
And how is any of this fair to soldiers now serving in Iraq? Before we ask our troops to give up their lives in a war, shouldn't the minimal requirement for demanding that sacrifice be that said war enjoys at least minimal majority support from the public?
As for your question about what I was doing from from 2003 to 2005, I was demanding, as was my right, withdrawal from Iraq. I didn't get what I wanted, obviously, and the elected officials who refused to give me what I wanted had a ready defense: what I was asking for wasn't supported by most Americans. What's their defense today?
Please try not to assume that your arguments are universal; the fact that they are as disputed as they are, here in this forum, should be ample evidence that they are not.
Megan McArdle's comment thread: the one place left on Planet Earth where the unpopularity of the U.S. within the Muslim world is still open for debate.
So many repeat constantly that "the American people are against the war", or something along those lines.
This is true. Today!
What about tomorrow? Tomorrow might be a totally different story. If the surge continues to improve the conditions in Iraq, for both American troops and Iraqis, the American people will probably agree with the war.
The American people, just like Kerry, were for the war before they were against the war. And it's very likely that they will be again for the war at some point in the future, if things keep improving.
The Left keeps saying that only a minority supports the war, but they definitely forget that in 2004 more than half of American voters voted for Bush, even though the war wasn't going well.
I will never understand this fixation with the idea that "Americans are against the war", when it's crystal clear that Americans change their minds easily on this issue.
What will the Left say if Americans again support the war en masse? Will they say "now ignore the American people"? Do they hope that those times never return? Either way, I don't see a meaningful strategy on their side. (But then, I bet MoveOn.org were and still are utterly convinced that the BetrayUs ad was a meaningful move. Some people just keep trying to shoot themselves in the foot).
Things are getting so much better in Iraq, now even the Turks want to invade! And the Syrians are going to start sending 1.5 million refugees back into the country over the next 3 months, which should make that ethnic mix nice and peaceful.
Notice to those who can still get suckered every three months for five years straight: We are going through another moment of media lull. Wait a month or two, the horror will be back.
brooksfoe, I've been surrounded by thugs and beaten overseas, for the offense of being American, and this was before George W. Bush became President. How could this be? Do you think the Vietnamese forgot about the bombs, and naplam, and agent orange when they started getting bootlegged American movies, and said to themselves, "Hey, those Americans aren't so bad!"? The Vietnamese attitudes regarding Americans changed when it became clear that it was in their best interest to have different attitudes.
Believe it or not, your feelings aren't a good way by which to guide foreign policy.
The comment about climate change is a bit misleading. Climate change is continually, and has always been happening on Earth. I suspect you were referring to CO2 induced warming, as predicted by Al Gore and the High Priests of the IPCC. That theory is not looking so good now, with the atmospheric CO2 concentration up 35% while temperature is about the same as in 1979. Man-made climate change is around of course, primarily due to land use changes.
SteveB:
"You can argue all you want that the war is just and should be continued; but most Americans no longer agree with you. Who should our government listen to: you, the "enlightened minoirty" who are certain we're making progress, or the increasing (and increasingly angry) majority who want us to get out?"
There is no "increasingly angry" majority: the percentage of Americans who support continuing the effort to stabilize Iraq varies roughly inversely with the casualty levels, and, to a lesser extent, directly with perceptions of progress. Since casualty counts have been going down recently, and indications of progress have been going up, recent polls will reflect a change. I don't have to time to look up the poll results, but if you don't believe me, pull up a few polls on Iraq from, say, May, and compare them to a few polls from this month.
Our representative democracy works a lot better than you think it does. If there really were an "increasingly angry" majority committed to retreat in Iraq, Congress would act accordingly; there isn't, which is why it hasn't. Many on the left conflate two different sorts of opinions on Iraq: that of average Americans frustrated with previous incompetence in the Iraq War, and that of the hardcore Left. Average Americans and hardcore leftists have both been soured on Iraq for entirely different reasons: Average Americans don't like to see America lose wars, and hardcore leftists don't like to see America win. To the extent that perceptions are changing and Iraq is seen as more winnable (in the sense that we will be able to eventually leave a stable, decent, relatively pluralist, self-governed country behind), average Americans' support for the war effort will increase, while hardcore leftists' opposition will remain the same.
Well, that's interesting, Will Allen. Now, where exactly were you surrounded and beaten for being American, and why might that have been?
brooksfoe, those terror attack in Indonesia that you refer to...Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't they occur after 9/11 and before Iraq? Again, what was the benefit of the (alleged) good will?
I'm not disputing that a good deal more Muslims may dislike us now than before 9/11. I dispute that that fact inherently means we're less safe. I figure the zenith of Japanese hatred of Americans came after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but paradoxically that's when we became safe.
More generally, I'm of the opinion that the current global situation looks a lot like Europe circa the Thirty Years War. It's only after people generally decide that going to war because someone worships differently then you brings more misery than its worth will we be able to move on. That means we're going to see more misery and more bloodshed before it gets better. The fact that people are turning against jihad makes me hope that we're moving in the right direction, though.
Also, Will: yes, I would agree that bombing the s**t out of Vietnam and spraying it with Agent Orange cost the US considerable influence there from 1975 well into the '90s. If the effect of American behavior in Iraq is similar after US forces leave and the strongest factions take power, we will have done ourselves no favors there, either.
Many on the Left, mostly the hardcore Left, love to ride the polls. To the despair of fellow moderate Leftists, those who ride the polls don't realize that those polls might one day melt away from under their feet (or buttocks).
Public opinion on the war can literally change within weeks, either way. That's a fact. This makes those polls a very sharp double edged sword, and many Democrats just don't feel like playing with that.
The short term consequences of riding the war-polls might be very rewarding, but when we talk long term the entire scenario changes.
The problem is that the ideologues are not quite famous for strategic thinking and their attempts to drag the moderates towards them might backfire.
Well, to be more candid, brooksfoe, I was beaten by soldiers for being American while being across a border that I didn't recognize. It was roughly in your current neck of the woods. The point was that there has always been plenty of anti-American feeling since the end of WWII, which fluctuates with various events. The best guarantor of peaceful behavior directed towards the United States is to have people see it in their interest to avoid hostility. That can't happen in the Persian Gulf as long as nearly everyone demands energy at the cheapest possible price, and the people who live in the Persian Gulf don't govern the oil reserves they stand on.
Yet, yet, brooksfoe, the Vietnamese don't hate us. How can that be? Did they decide it was fun being napalmed, or merely that it wasn't so bad after all?
SG, the attack in Bali was before Iraq but was targeted at Australians. The attack in Jakarta aimed at Americans was after Iraq, but didn't kill anyone.
The main point is that jihadists these days are going after American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for the moment. It's vastly easier for them to operate there. But if we're responsible for that at all, it's because we've made immigration to the US a lot harder. We could have done that without invading Iraq, and we'd never have radicalized half the people who are killing our soldiers, aid workers and reporters now. Meanwhile, among those 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, a kid is growing up who someday is going to avenge the loss of his home and the deaths of his siblings by staging a really spectacular attack on the US. That's what happens when you put your soldiers in the middle of things and create a mess, instead of leaving things alone and allowing the mess to work itself out.
No, brooksfoe, if the population of the Middle East becomes self governing, that kid in Syria will be too busy trying to make life better for his family to worry about avenging anything. If the people of the Middle east don't accomplish self government, his additional anger will be too trivial to worry about.
I think the fact that Vietnamese were willing to forgive America, to some extent, has to do with two things. First, North Vietnam won. Makes it easier to forgive. Second, in Vietnamese culture, people don't talk about grudges once an agreement has been reached to settle them. There are rituals for getting rid of one's remaining bad feelings. It's extremely practical and Buddhist.
I'm not a racist, but I do think culture makes a difference, and, broadly, Arabs aren't like that. Neither are Jews -- my tribe of semites. And, of course, no one is going to win the war in Iraq the way Hanoi won the Vietnam War. There are going to be oceans of humiliation, fury and ressentiment out there for years and decades to come.
Did invading Afghanistan antagonize Muslims? Wasn't our sanctions regime against Saddam given as justification for 9/11? And also our support of Saudi Arabia? As I see it, we've been damned for supporting Muslim governments, for resisting them with efforts short of war, and for overthrowing Muslim governments. Care to suggest a policy that hasn't been shown to provide justification for jihad, because I haven't seen one yet.
I don't doubt that Iraq has given some Muslims another cause to hate Americans, but I see no support for the proposition that the Iraq is singularly bad. There was plenty of justifications proffered for jihad prior to Iraq; Iraq just added another item to an already lengthy list.
This doesn't mean invading Iraq was a good idea, but the fact that jihadists have a 23rd bee in their bonnet doesn't make them appreciably more dangerous than they already were from the other 22 bees.
And you keep neglecting my point that some jihad is starting to fall out of favor with some muslims. Is this not a good thing? Can you suggest alternative ways to accomplish the same ends?
Again Brooksfoe, do you really think the Vietnamese who were bombed by us now like us because they are such wonderfully forgiving folk? Did they have a really good therapist to have them work through their anger issues? Or is it more likely that they, being intelligent folks, decided that trading with Americans was a lot better than being in a mutually hostile relationship with Americans, so they, unlike your hypothetical Iraqi kid, decided to forget about past hostilities? Might this lend insight as to what is likely to defuse hostilities between Americans and people living in the Persian Gulf and wider muslim world? How do you suppose that is to happen as long as the primary activity between Americans and the people of the Persian Gulf is first and foremost the extraction of oil without the full consent of the people who live there?
"And anyway, it's not true that half of the anti-war movement in the 60s was motivated by pro-Ho Chi Minh sentiments. That's hyperbole. And hyperbole is a particularly inflammatory form of rhetoric...It was more than a small percentage of the anti-war movement that thought Ho Chi Minh was some kind of hero."
For some of us who had studied some of the history of the US and European powers vs. Southeast Asia, while in this proxy war we did not think of Ho Chi Minh as a hero, we were well aware that he had begged the U.S, Great Britain, Italy and France for help in 1918-1919, was soundly rebuffed and turned elsewhere, much as Fidel Castro did when he was treated the same way.
And, yes, I was a hippie many moons ago, but those times have passed and I wear my pearls now and actual suits, especialy when I go out to protest something.
My gosh how can one say that avenues of action aren't available? I'll point to just one -- Jessica's Law. Now enacted in some 31 States. Through the action of 1 pervert a family and volunteers decided they did not want to see another incident like that again.
Megan you are so right about the Cold War. I remember the 'duck and cover' exercises. Living in Florida at the time; I remember the empty shelves in the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I and my parents could have been TAC nuked off the face of the earth in less than 30min.
Brooksfoe, you beg the question of how the Vietnamese and Americans came to decide to bury the grudge. Funny, there is a strong strain of Buddhism in Chinese culture, and yet there seemed to have been rather less impetus for many decades among the Chinese to forget about Japanese transgressions. Interests trumps everything eventually, if only people have enough freedom to pursue their interests.
I just saw the following article.
Apparently, bin Laden has released a new audiotape calling for a change in Al Qaeda strategy in Iraq because "for the Iraqis the enemy has become al-Qaeda and not the occupying forces".
Hmm....
SteveB,
Well, thanks for acknowleging that, for the last two years, a majority of the public has supported withdrawal from Iraq. What, in your opinion, should the goverment do with that information?
I'm not sure. I don't think the government should necessarily adopt a particular policy simply because a majority of Americans favor it.
As for your question about what I was doing from from 2003 to 2005, I was demanding, as was my right, withdrawal from Iraq.
Despite the fact that you were in the minority. So we need pay no mind to your argument that the government should now withdraw our troops on the grounds that that is what most Americans now want.
There are three reasons why the Vietnamese government likes America today:
1) Regarding the war, they respect the restraint we showed in avoiding civilian targets in North Vietnam. The NVA showed far less restraint in massacring their own people in the south.
2) Vietnam wants to do business with the United States, since has embraced capitalism now (albeit an authoritarian version similar to China's).
3) Vietnam wants to cultivate a relationship with us as a counterweight to China.
Of these, #3 is obviously the most important reason. You'll find the same sentiment among most countries that have either fought wars with China or Russia or been occupied by them.
"I grew up with the very real fear that one day, without much warning, I would simply vanish in a radioactive cloud."
That was real. That fear returned in 2001. It is not a delusion.
"It was the sense of powerlessness to stop the war, despite widespread public opposition, that destroyed the Democratic Party in 1967-72. It drove the anti-war left to a level of disgust with its own country which was ultimately politically poisonous."
No comment.
Brooksfoe--
And why should I respect mistaken opinions, no matter how popular?
"We had a historic political realignment last year almost wholly about this issue, but nothing has actually changed."
This is a popular but laughable point of view based on the facts. There is at best a bare Democratic majority in the Senate (depending on how you count certain senators) and one Democratic Senator has been laid up and missed most (or all?) of the entire term. It's hard to imagine a "historic political realignment" that leaves the Senate divided 50/50 (or 49/49 to be accurate).
As to the House, the Republicans lost 30 seats in what was a second presidential term midterm election. The average loss of Republican seats in the House for the 80 years between 1914 and 1994 for any midterm election with a Republican in the presidency is a little over 29 seats. (For Democrats the link says it was 39 seats.) Again, it's hard to see a "historic political realignment" in an election that gave predictable results entirely in line with the historical average for previous midterm elections without taking any policy considerations into account. (I'm also guessing, based on things I have read in the past but don't have right to hand, that if those midterms were broken down into first term vs. second term, the second terms would see the larger losses, thereby making 2006 even less notable.) It also pays to keep in mind that one reason that Republicans had more seats to lose in 2006 is that they did actually defy historical odds and gained seats in the previous midterm election in 2002.
So, no, I don't see 2006 as evidence of a "historic political realignment". It was a rather average second term midterm election. At least I will give you credit for saying the election was "almost wholly about this issue." I think you're dead wrong but at least you didn't make the mistake of the commenter above stating, as a fact, that it was "entirely" about this issue. No election is entirely about anything and I don't think this one was even mostly (in a near uniform sense) about Iraq. I think there were plenty of voters (putatively Republican and otherwise) who were unhappy about a lot of different issues and cast their votes on that basis. It's just that the anti-war side wanted to believe that was the only issue and that's why they are upset and puzzled that they didn't get the immediate results they wanted. If the consensus they assume exists really did exist, then they wouldn't be having nearly as much trouble. Again, a 50/50 Senate hardly represents some historic new power balance. Perhaps you need to read up on what political scientists mean when they use the term "realignment".
I thank my father and his buddies, who spent most of their professional lives cooking up nasty surprises for the Soviets if they tried anything serious. Although I doubt we'll know for sure in our lifetimes, I don't think the balance of power and ostensible strategy were ever exactly what were revealed publically. Yes, there was great danger, but the enemy was not irrational and willing to commit suicide. Today, if we take the enemy at face value, they want to go up in smoke so long as they take a bunch of us with them. They've publicly declared their goal of destroying us, just like the Nazis and the Soviets did. Remember Khrushchev's little shoe episode at the UN. I propose that we not wait around to see if these islamists mean it this time. By the way, I could care less how popular we are with the international league of despots, which constitute the bulk of the UN.
1) Regarding the war, they respect the restraint we showed in avoiding civilian targets in North Vietnam. The NVA showed far less restraint in massacring their own people in the south.
Fred, you made this up, and you have never spoken with a North Vietnamese person on this subject. You couldn't have; this view is not held by anyone in Northern Vietnam. By conservative estimates, 1300 civilians were killed in Hanoi during the Christmas bombings alone. In one raid, B-52s trying to hit the railway station missed by 250 yards in two directions, wiping out an entire residential block and a civilian hospital. One of those who died was my housekeeper's 12-year-old brother. In the early 1990s, when former US soldiers began returning to Vietnam as tourists to seek peace of mind, those who went to North Vietnam would be asked one question by average Vietnamese they met: "Are you a pilot?" As long as the answer was "no", they were given a friendly welcome.
Your accusations regarding the NVA are also invented. The NVA had no free-fire zones, and there were no soldiers in the NVA who believed that "every gook was the enemy". Violence by American soldiers was far more "indiscriminate" than that by NVA soldiers, because they couldn't tell the difference between friendlies and enemies, and eventually lost the will to try. Accusations of widespread atrocities by American soldiers in Vietnam are largely true. While most American soldiers didn't do it, most American soldiers who spent time in areas with civilians did see it happen in their unit. The VC and NVA used terrorism against officers and supporters of the Saigon regime and their families. This was vicious, but not "indiscriminate"; it was comprehensible, and many in South Vietnam chose the side whose violence made sense over the side whose violence was incomprehensible.
Despite the fact that you were in the minority. So we need pay no mind to your argument that the government should now withdraw our troops on the grounds that that is what most Americans now want.
Sorry, I guess I missed the fine print in the first amendment that said we were only allowed to express opinions that reflect the majority view. Obviously, I had a right to express my desire, even a demand, that troops be withdrawn, and legislators had a right to ignore me, on the basis that my view was a minority one.
But my views didn't stay in the minority, did they? Millions of people like me expressed our opposition to the war, and we eventually won the American people to our point of view. For the past four and a half years, we have been engaged in a protracted national debate about the war, and your side lost.
It's of no consequence to me whether you pay any mind to my arguments. I was merely making the obvious (to most rational people) point that in a democracy, there should be some rough correspondence between the views of the public and the actions of the government. It's not a great shock to me to see that this is not the case in the U.S., I've known for years that, on matters of imperial power and issues of interest to corporate America, the views of the American people matter little. I was simply speculating that Ezra Klein (remember him?) might be feeling confused or depressed because he continues to harbor illusions that we live in a democracy. Eventually, he'll figure it out, I'm sure.
SteveB,
I'm not questioning your First Amendment rights, I'm pointing out the inconsistency of your position. You think the government should do what the majority wants it to do, but only when you agree with the majority.
I was merely making the obvious (to most rational people) point that in a democracy, there should be some rough correspondence between the views of the public and the actions of the government.
There is. That doesn't mean the government will (or should) always do what the majority wants it to do on any given issue at any given time. If public opposition to the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq lasts long enough and becomes intense enough, then U.S. troops will eventually be withdrawn.
After all the above, I think we have paid entirely too much attention to some (guy?) named 'Ezra'. Which may have been his intention.
Gerry
Will, why exactly is it not in China's interests to trade with Japan, while it is in Vietnam's interests to trade with the US? Ultimately it's in everybody's interests to get along with everybody, and yet we seem to end up fighting. That's because one's understanding of one's own interests is determined by a number of factors, including culture and one's assessment of the character of other players.
With regard to cultural differences, it is hard to put a clear label on the way Vietnamese culture differs from Chinese culture, but you'll find wide agreement among area experts that there's a characteristic pragmatic tolerance for ambiguity and consensus-driven decisionmaking in Vietnam, and that China, while very similar in many ways, tends to be more rigid in the application of national programs and to carry things to extremes. Hence compulsory land reform in Vietnam was broken off as a disaster after 2 years, in '56, while China had wave after wave of rigid ideological disasters. This may help explain why the Chinese are still using anti-Japanese feeling as a catalyst for nationalist fervor 70 years after the rape of Nanking. Overall, I think it's highly creative to argue that ongoing Chinese hatred of Japan shows that massacring people doesn't have long-term foreign-policy consequences.
The fact is that when cast in a certain light, the US's war in Vietnam created a reason for CLOSER relations in the '90s, much as Germany's history with Israel does. But the grounds for that closer relation was an understanding that America regretted its war. The figures in Congress who pushed through the normalization of relations and the BTA from 1994-2000 were people like Pete Peterson, John Kerry, Max Cleland, Chuck Hagel and John McCain, who all created a narrative of reconciliation with an honorable foe. The reason the US became Vietnam's number 1 trading partner was because the American desire to make amends and heal the wounds of the war pushed the BTA through Congress far faster than a similar agreement with, say, Thailand or Bangladesh would have gone. The trade relationship cements reasonably good relations, but the reason for the trade relationship is the American desire to atone for the war. Fortunately, most of the Americans who come through Vietnam still see the war that way; but when Bush suggests that maybe the US should have fought on till victory, it leads the Vietnamese to feel that in general the US is not as reliable or rational a partner as it might be, and to reject other elements of the American worldview more easily.
SG, suicide bombings were always, obviously, going to start to alienate people in the long run. This is exactly why it was totally unnecessary to stage some kind of massive intervention in the heart of the Arab world to jump-start a Muslim Enlightenment, or whatever; the ideology of suicidal jihad is simply of limited appeal. But the thing that continues to throw fuel on that fire is US occupation of Muslim countries. Look, if you don't agree that the use of excessive violence against inappropriate targets is fatal to the pacification of an insurgency because it radicalizes the population, it's not me you're disagreeing with. It's General David Petraeus, author of the US's Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
Brooksfoe,
Both points are accurate. I never said I spoke with a North Vietnamese; the point about their distinction between American restraint versus the French was made by a Vietnamese official to a member of an American delegation and was reported about the time we re-established diplomatic relations. I don't remember the name of the American official who recounted it, but feel free to look it up.
Regarding NVA/VC atrocities, you can do some homework on that as well. For starters:
If brooksfoe is going to defend the NVA, we know he his a foe of freedom.
"I keep feeling greater and greater anxiety at traveling on an American passport."
An easily addressed problem.
Brooksfoe-
I have to admire the way you can compartmentalize your views so well- enabling you to dwell on American shortcomings, perceived or actual, here amongst friends and other Americans, while defusing anger and hatred in the countries you visit by teaching them about all of the good the US has done and continues to do in the world (see especially the tsunami response). At least, I am assuming you wouldn't actually by engendering and nurturing hatred against the US, as "patriotic" as that might be.
Off topic, the changing attitudes you note might be somehow tangentially associated with the desire of some to restore a Muslim caliphate. I, and a couple of others, think this may be a bad idea, and think that it is necessary to resist, refute, and dissuade them from pursuing such a caliphate. Of course, the radicalization of Islam was occurring well before President Bush (pbuh) was elected, so should be ignored or discounted.
BTW, can you name the only presidential candidate to fight on the winning side in Vietnam?
brooksfoe, if jihad has no appeal then why was bin Laden gaining in popularity prior to Iraq?
I disagree that jihad has no appeal - when it's directed at the west. Occupation has caused it to be directed at their own. That's when it became unapealling.
And please, by definition no one is arguing for excessive violence against inappropriate targets. That's tautology. The disagreement is over what's excessive and appropriate.
And just to be clear, measured against the stated goals of the Bush Administration*, at this point Iraq is unquestionably a failure. My position is that on its own terms Iraq may turn out to be a success. I believe it's quite possible we may see less jihad as a result.
*To create a territorially complete, democratically governed Iraq that is an ally in The War on Terror (I hate this phrase) and is at peace with itself and its neighbors.
Brooksfoe, it is in China's interests to trade with Japan, and anti-Japanese fervor has decreased somewhat, and Japanese investment in China has increased greatly, as China has liberalized it's economy over the past 25 years. Prior to that, a heavy handed despotism prevented people from pursuing what was clearly in their interests, and also much more frequently used anti-Japanese fervor as a safety valve for internal dissatisfaction. Much like anti-Western fervor is used throughout the Middle East for the same purposes.
You still haven't addressed the central reality regarding the relationship between the people of the Persian Gulf, and the people of the United States, choosing instead to address sideshows like how a President who is going to be out of a job in 14 months is hated. As long as the primary activity between those peoples is the extraction of oil for the benefit of the American people, without the full consent of the people of the Persian Gulf, and that extraction does not also primarily serve the people who live on top of the oil, bitter conflict will persist between the American people and the people of the Persian Gulf, bitter conflict which will provide huge motivation for sufficent numbers of intelligent radical muslims with adequate resources to attempt to inflict mass casulties on the American population. Until you adress this central reality in a meaningful way, everything else is trivia.
No these bitter, highly motivated radicals do not pose an existential threat to the American people. They do, however, in a world where massively destructive technology becomes more ubiquitous with each passing year, pose an existential threat to the other people in the Persian Gulf, in what sort of response they could eventually elicit from the people of the United States.
SG, I'd say one of the faults of the Bush Administration is that it either did not grasp, or did not clearly communicate, how long-term such a goal was. Ending Baathist rule was still a prerequisite for that to occur, and it is not unreasonable to argue that ending it quickly changed the goal from one that was extremely long term to one that was substantially less so. I did not think we had five or six decades to slowly defuse this resource-driven conflict, which is why I favored the military effort to end Baathist rule quickly, despite the all the inevitable chaos which would surely follow.
Actually, m, I think that's a natural human reaction. When you're in a room full of anti-American people talking stupid nonsense, your argument skews pro-American. In a room full of pro-American people talking stupid nonsense, your argument skews anti-American. And, obviously, because Communist propaganda is so doltish, one spends a lot of time explaining that South Vietnamese weren't simply "puppets" of the US but actors with their own interests, that the US wasn't actually deliberately trying to kill every Vietnamese civilian they could, and that the war in general was a mixed bag of rotten nuts that happened for a lot of reasons. But in selling the ideas of freedom of expression and multiparty democracy these days, you don't want to start out saying, "Well, in America, we do it this way, and it's great!", because increasingly when people hear "American" they think "bullshit". I see US ambassadors constantly bragging about how much money the US is giving other countries, which usually isn't much compared to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank etc., and I see the locals just tuning it out: more pompous American propaganda.
The tsunami relief thing is another example where Americans still think they came in and saved the world, when in fact not much of what was done had any long-term effect, and Indonesians, who became noticeably less anti-American just after the tsunami, returned to skepticism as they saw how shallow and short-term the relief was. Humanitarian relief is great, but it doesn't really build long-term close relationships unless you stick around and show a sense of interest and engagement in long-term development.
To note that the VC and NVA were intelligent and rational employers of terror who tended to use it effectively, rather than indiscriminately as American forces often did, is hardly an endorsement of Communism. As for the numbers, the US-ARVN Phoenix program assassinated over 26,000 members of the Viet Cong shadow government between 1968 and 1972, but this was a small fraction of the total civilians killed by the US and South Vietnamese armies, and was probably among the more rational elements of US violence. On the irrational side, in a single operation in the Mekong Delta over several months in 1969, the US Army's 9th Division recorded a body count of over 9,000 and a weapons count of about 750. Assuming charitably that only one in four VC had weapons, that leaves us with 6000 corpses to account for. As usual, we encounter these numbers where we have good data; there's no reason to believe they are exceptional. This doesn't include random interdiction shelling, bombing of VC-controlled hamlets which were deemed legitimate military targets by definition if in a free-fire zone, and all the bombing north of the 17th parallel -- more bombs than were dropped by all the participants in WWII combined. All I'm saying is, the idea that we were less violent towards civilians than they were is simply wrong. We killed a lot of innocent people and they killed a lot of innocent people, but they were killing innocent people for reasons that made some instrumental sense, and that's part of why they won the war.
m: what, did Robert Garwood run for president at some point?
I'm not much for contrafactual history, but occasionally I wonder what that conflict would have been like if the Phoenix program had been instituted in 1963 instead of 1968. The ulitmate outcome, reunification, may not have changed, but perhaps it would have been rather less stupidly violent. I obviously cannot fortell the future in Iraq, but I sometimes wonder if another one of Bush's faults has been being entirely too slow to relieve commanders who didn't grasp the nature of the conflict well. Abrams for Westmoreland several years sooner may have made the world a better place, and perhaps Petraeus for Sanchez would have done the same. No, this is not an iron clad argument for waging either war, but if war is to be waged, it should be done with the most competent leadership.
Will Allen, I'm somewhat in agreement with you. I think the Bush Administration did not grasp the length of commitment necessary to reach the desired end state.*
But I disagree that the conflict is resource driven. Sure, it's a flash point, but what resources were we extracting from Afghanistan that caused the Taliban? What resources are Thai's extracting that is fueling their Islamic insurgency? Or the Phillipines, or Nigeria or Indonesia or seemingly any other country where Muslims live in large numbers?
Persian Gulf oil fuels and lubricates jihad, true enough. But I don't think it causes it.
(*) I've wondered why the Bush Administration was so far off in setting its timeline and goals. My best guess is that the foreign policy folks at the time (Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell) were Cold Warriors at heart, and so they inappropriately applied the experience of the fall of the USSR, neglecting the fact that Islamic Culture and Eastern European culture are decidedly not interchangeable.
SG, the Taliban is largely an offshoot of Saudi radicalism. If the oil in the Persian Gulf were instead loacted beneath Australia, the people of the United States and the people of the Persian Gulf and wider Muslim world would pay about as much attention to one another as the people of the United States and the people of Zaire.
Will Allen: While Americans happily ignore Zaire, the people of Zaire have no choice but to be aware of America.
We cast a large shadow. Our popular culture and consumer goods are omnipresent. I disagree that Muslims would be unfazed by our presence were it not for Persian Gulf oil. If they lacked oil revenue, jihadist's ability to project violence would be greatly, but not entirely, diminished. And as technology makes weaponry more and more accessible, the magnitude of the threat was bound to increase, oil or no oil.
No oil would make it easier to ignore for longer, though.
An interesting consequence of the war in Iraq: Al Qaeda is now angry at Al Jazeera for airing parts of at tape where Bin Laden "criticizes mistakes by insurgents in Iraq": " Al-Qaida anger at Jazeera on Laden tape"
SG, absent the oil, if the jihadists wished to, they could try to subjugate their countrymen, and keep us out as effectively as the thugs in North Korea do, and we wouldn't much care.
Brooksfoe,
The North Vietnamese won the war because we refused to supply air support or aid to the South when the North invaded at the end of '74. The North's terrorism and guerrilla tactics in the South had defeated, for all intents and purposes: they conquered South Vietnam with Soviet-supplied tanks, not with pajama-clad guerrillas.
Brooksfoe: It is good you to hear that you are arguing from the highly principled point of view of contrarianism. I highly recommend Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" as an excellent refresher course.
BTW, abandoning our South Vietnamese allies to the "peaceful" "agrarian reformers" was perhaps one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
I will confess that John Kerry's performance ("reminiscent of Ghengis Khan..." must rank high in the shameful category as well. He was, however, the only Presidential candidate to fight on the winning side of the Vietnam war. So he has that going for him...
Ah, yes, Fred. The Vietnamese Communists fought for 30 years, the US fought them for 14, had hundreds of thousands of troops engaged for 6, bombed them relentlessly for 8, poured billions of dollars into creating and training an army as well-equipped as theirs was or better, killed several million of their people. But ultimately, they won the war because a supplemental appropriations bill was defeated in Congress in February 1975.
Occam's Razor, honeybunch.
Brooksfoe,
You're the one ignoring Occam's Razor here (as well as my point about air support). Consider that the North Vietnamese tried the same type of mechanized invasion in 1972 and it was defeated by a combination of South Vietnamese ground troops and U.S. air support. This was shortly after the U.S. Air Force first developed laser-guided bombs, and NVA tanks were sitting ducks for them. Had we provided the same support to South Vietnam in '74-'75, it would probably still be an independent country today, and would probably be as free and prosperous as South Korea.
Or, if the last thing standing between the PAVN and Saigon were American B-52s, the North would have started figuring out how to shoot down B-52s over Kontum, not just over Hanoi. The US had the first laser-guided bombs; the Russians had anti-aicraft missiles that could hit B-52s at altitude. (The B-52 engine nacelle in the middle of the lake behind the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum testifies to the latter.) At least three F-5 pilots in the South Vietnamese Air Force turned out to be Northern agents; how many B-52s could they have downed on a crucial day, if needed, before the USAF figured out what was going on? That was the pattern, for 15 years: we introduce the new tactic/technology that's guaranteed to win the war. They figure out how to counter it; it stops working. On and on and on.
The Paris accords left the PAVN with entire divisions still inside the South's territory. The US and ARVN repelled the Easter Offensive of 1972 -- just. But the ARVN was incapable of even cleansing its own territory of Northern forces. In late 1974 when the North essayed its exploratory offensive, it found local forces collapsed easily under pressure. When the big offensive came in '75, much of the ARVN fought valiantly, but the rest collapsed. The North didn't need Soviet air support to win; the South needed American air support to hold. That reflects the basic political imbalance that structured the entire war. The US was unwilling to continue pulverizing Vietnam with B-52s forever, and that was what it would have taken. We tried everything we knew how to try for 15 years, and it didn't work, because Hanoi was a real Vietnamese government whose people would fight for it, and Saigon was a weak foreign-sponsored junta split by rivalry and corruption, most of whose people wouldn't fight for it.
Will Allen, I must be misunderstanding your analogy. Are you claiming we don't care what North Korea does? I seem to recall a lot of talk about their weapons program, no? It seems to me that we do care greatly about what spills beyond their borders.
I don't see any indication that jihadists would be content to remain closed behind their nation's borders persecuting their own people. Oil wealth funds jihad, but oil doesn't appear to cause it.
SG, I rather doubt that, absent oil revenues, the Persian Gulf states would be doing anything that would get our attention any more than Chad or Sudan does. The Pakistani weapons program was largely in response to the Indian weapons program, but I think Iran would be very much a different place without oil reserves (it would be much better for everyone), so I think it likely that the virus could have been contained. North Korea is a somewhat unique outpost of Stalinism that I doubt would have been replicated elsewhere. Absent oil revenues, the Persian Gulf, with the exception of a likely prosperous Iran, would just be brew of tribal warfare, squalor, and despair, little different from Africa.
Contrafactuals are ultimately limited in value, of course, because one cannot, for instance, truly know what Iran would have been like after WWII absent the oil reserves, but certainly there isn't a lot to distinguish the region in general from other economically deprived areas of the world, other than oil reserves. If Muslims who thought the West was evil had gained the upper hand, they could have easily shut out a good deal of the western influences, and if they had made sounds of developing a taste for hostilities against the west, they would have been easily kept in check, not posing the unique problems of the Korean peninsula. It is far more likely that everybody would mostly ignore each other.
Steve B - Re: "And what if the local school is failing because of a lack of resources, and the lack of resources is connected to the billions we're squandering on the war?"
Nonsense. Most education funding is state or local, those budgets aren't drawn away by the war. Meanwhile federal spending on education has exploded upwards under Bush. (I imagine it also increased on Clinton, but I'm not sure)
More generally in terms of resources, real dollars per pupil keeps going up, without clear indications that we are getting value for the additional dollars. Each generation real spending per pupil has doubled or more.
---
" This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002."
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26346
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=23172228
brooksfoe - The people we are fighting in Iraq are doing most of the killing of innocents. And leaving and letting such people take control, and have a perceived victory over the US, would do far more to move us towards increasing the small chance that a US city gets nuked, than anything we are doing in Iraq now.
brooksfoe - In Iraq its more the Islamicists turning the people against them. We're protecting the people, they are oppressing and killing them. The sea for Al Qaeda and its ilk has recently been drying up in Iraq.
brooksfoe - Re: Vietnam. Sure the communists in Vietnam could have shot down planes. They did shoot down planes (not something that happens much in Iraq, but its was common enough in Vietnam). But they could never shoot down enough to deny us air-superiority, or to make safe the concentrations of troops they needed for their conventional invasion of South Vietnam.
Brooksfoe,
It wasn't B-52s dropping laser-guided bombs on the invading NVA tanks in '72, it was the far more maneuverable fighter-bombers. And the NVA tanks were destroyed like fish in a barrel by laser-guided bombs in '72. They would have been similarly destroyed in '74-'75 had we provided air support. In fact, had we provided air support, it's unlikely North Vietnam would have expanded its initial, limited incursion of December '74 into a full scale invasion, know that the result would be similar to what happened in '72. So North Vietnam's threat of conventional invasion would have been checked.
It would still have guerrillas infiltrated in the south, as you point out, but by 1970 or so, these were no longer an existential threat to South Vietnam -- that's why the North had to resort to a conventional invasion in '72. South Vietnam could have lived with a low-level insurgency, just as India and The Philippines have for decades.
One can argue legitimately about whether we should have been involved in Vietnam in the first place, but it seems pretty clear that we made an awful decision to abandon South Vietnam in '74. Aside from the millions who died in the wake of our abandonment, this act of fecklessness and weakness on our part provided encouragement for the Russians to invade Afghanistan (which ultimately led to us backing the Mujihadeen and the rise of Al Qaeda), for the Iranian radicals to take over our embassy, and for communists to challenge our interests across Central America.
I am of the "contrafactuals are of limited value" school. The hammer and sickle flies over Saigon. The North won. It makes far more sense to explain what strengths the North possessed that allowed it to win the war than to hypothesize, rather absurdly, that had the US just dropped another thousand tons of bombs in 1975, the North would have lost. We spent 15 years and killed, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of people just trying to clear the Communists out of South Vietnamese territory, and yet entire PAVN divisions were still inside of South Vietnam and unclearable by our forces when we left. If you can't clear your own territory in 15 years -- and I'm not talking a few guerrillas, I'm talking entire divisions and large swathes of territory under enemy control -- you can't survive.
Brooksfoe, if you don't care about conterfactuals, than why did you bother with your own (where the communists shoot down all our B-52s)?
Yes the North won. Not exactly a surprise considering we not only pulled out of the country but stopped air support and resupply of the South, while China and the USSR didn't stop resupply of the North.