America Fails

A Game Of Kings

2007-01-10T10:00:00.000+13:00

Decision: Reinforce US forces in the Baghdad region to destroy the Sunni insurgents and force a separation between Maliki (Washington) and the Shia militia and political leaders. Why the latter decision? Because Bush's illision about Maliki is not tenable without it.

Problem: Maliki is not George Washington. He is only disguised as George Washington. He is in fact, just another Shia political and militia leader, and not the strongest either. (...)

Because of the rich Bushian fantasy life it will be demanded in the New Plan that Maliki distance himself, and indeed fight, if necessary, to disarm and render impotent Shia Arab militias. He is INCAPABLE OF DOING THAT!! He is one of the Shia Arab leaders.

The Coming Crisis

Aramis: The King has ordered me to seek out the secret general of the Jesuits and kill him.
Porthos: You should let the secret general worry about that.
Aramis: Therein is the problem. I am he. I am the general of the order of Jesuits.

The Man In The Iron Mask

Gone for an early shower

2007-01-09T13:04:00.000+13:00

Of course, you would never know if this blog had closed down or not. But a lot of people are signing off, as Digby laments.

I suspect that many people think that it is now all over bar the shouting, as Democratic control of the Congress restores oversight and checks and balances limit the scope of the Imperial Presidency. I further suspect that many people are wrong, and that the wrecking of America in the last six years is not easily reversed. I predict a panic within the next six months as people begin to realize that the system is no longer responding to the controls.

Specifically,

SCOTUS is still nuts,

there is still a war in Iraq, and the Stalingrad-on-the-Tigris strategic weakness still applies,

the press are uniform, remotely controlled and hostile to any kind of initiative that hasn't been OKayed at the White House,

the Federal government is still run by partisan, evangelical hacks, instead of by experts, so expect another Katrina,

the deficit is out of control,

the economy is japanifying, hollowing itself out to low labor cost outsourcers,

everyone hates each other and will fight to the death rather than admit they were wrong.

A better recipe for breaking the Union it is hard to imagine.

Three planes an hour for three hours

2006-08-11T15:31:00.000+12:00

There is a temptation, and a duty, and even Occam's razor to consider that events such as this are likely to have been staged by the security forces or by politicians to accrue greater power to themselves.

But in this case I don't believe the British government would be so stupid. The patience of the British public is not infinite. The British Civil Service fetishizes stability above nearly all other virtues, and the possibility of widespread BNP violence can't be ruled out.

Haditha it coming

2006-06-05T13:44:00.000+12:00

Because puns are for bitterness.

To some extent we still live in a feudal society, however rational and capitalist we are. The pay for military service is not the cash-per-hour payment, it is respect. And afterward, respect entails preference. Hence the feudal principle of reward for service in war endures.

What does it mean for the principle of respect to have a presidential candidate's service record smeared by the Swift Boat Liars? It means that the country agrees that the service record counts for nothing and that there is no value in keeping it clean. And so we arrive at Haditha.

Getting Paid

2005-11-20T15:42:00.000+13:00

If Sir Christopher Meyer has gone to the bother of writing a book, then he should be paid for it. A Labour leader ought to recognise this principle. Of course, what Prescott means is that Meyer shouldn't have written the book in the first place, but in that case he should come out and say so.

To say that someone should write a book and not get paid for it is as stupid as saying that the Prime Minister should train an army so that the President of some other country can get it killed.

No-one sees how bad this is

2005-11-19T14:26:00.000+13:00

One of the most important themes of this blog is that America has lost its compact with its military. It has lost the relationship by which young people put their lives at risk in order to serve. Douglas MacArthur saw that this relationship was in danger from the atom bomb, and his response was to insist on using atomic weapons on the battlefield. Why, his argument goes, would soldiers risk everything for the struggle if the country was not willing to commit everything to the struggle in return?

This consideration is peculiar to America. In Europe the experience of mass casualties in World War I had already eroded the compact to the point where war is viewed as only occurring as some inevitable calamity that sweeps all up into itself, not as something in which individuals can choose to play an active part. It is solely a reactive game; where states retain armies they are perceived as having a policing role rather than a role of national survival.

After the blow to the compact delivered by the existence of atomic weapons came the blow of Vietnam. A generation was conscripted into a war that would take their lives yet was not so important that the nation would commit its full force to it. Yet surviving veterans might look to obtaining at least some measure of respect from some quarters of society. Apocryphally, they were derided ("spat at by demonstrators") on their return - an allegation for which there is no evidence - and this legend illustrates that the returning Vietnam veterans did not have the legitimacy of liberators that the GIs of, for example, Omaha Beach had. Yet they had a service record that was respected for itself, albeit not for any greater philosophical value.

After Vietnam, some effort went into reforming the compact. Wars were henceforth to be fought with the minimum of casualties - in Kosovo, apparently, with no casualties at all. The military was to be all-volunteer. Instead of relying on an old boys' network to assure as many vets as possible some kind of minor supervisory position in certain amenable enterprises, with all the scope that entails for partiality, incompleteness and hidden prejudices, military service would be seen as the provider of technical training, citizenship and similar certifiable advantages. Reserve status would supplement civilian pay. Vets would receive respect for their experience and expertise, and via that, for their integrity.

Until Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the hideous gang. The compact has been ripped open on all sides. For a soldier in a hard job the light at the end of the tunnel is extinguished. Stop-loss, and especially stop-loss for reserves means that his service is not getting him (or her, but mostly him) anywhere. Tours in Iraq mean that he is not getting the certifications he expected to have when he eventually leaves the military. And respect for his efforts is absent from the people who sent him there. He is less likely to get respect than a civilian.

You doubt that? Ask Max Cleland. Ask John Kerry. And now, ask John Murtha. Josh Marshall reports that

The House burst into yells and pandemonium. Schmidt was forced to come back to the House floor and ask that her remarks be stricken from the record.

But they still don't get it. It's not about behavior to one veteran congressman being not gentlemanly enough. It's about the troops in the field now and their expectations of their role.

Everybody remembers that one

2005-10-29T13:06:00.000+13:00

As we know, the President of Iran has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. The usual suspects have their pat response:

"I have never come across a situation in which the president of a country has said they want to wipe out another country. That is unacceptable."

The unacceptable seems to have been accepted quite a lot. There is quite a number of countries that I can think of that have been wiped off the map. Among them (I will post more when I think of them) are the following - spot the ones that have been wiped on again:

Carthage (146 B.C)
Poland in the nineteenth century.
Apartheid South Africa (non-apartheid S.A. is still there but the bantustans should be shaded in differently these days!)
The Soviet Union
North and South Rhodesia
Tanganyika and Nyasaland
Austria-Hungary
Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia, Saxony, Hanover, Bohemia, etc.
Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, etc.
Czechoslovakia
Mercia, Anglia, Northumbria and Wessex
Burgundy
The Confederated States
Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia
The Ottoman Empire
Savoy

Some of these we don't miss; others, like Poland, were an international disgrace. But they only remember the first one.

Now I don't think Israel should be wiped off the map. After all, if it were, where could the Palestinians have right of return to? But that's not what is on offer; what is more likely is the bombing of Iran.

What Blair is thinking, what Bush is thinking and what the president of Iran is thinking are all subjects for speculation in later posts. But this is the moment of prestidigitation, when the fork is being bent on the belt buckle and the threat of genocide is being conjured out of thin air to distract us from seeing it done.

Pope John Paul II has died

2005-04-03T10:05:00.000+12:00

Frankly, I couldn't care less. He had his full life expectancy, he did a job that he loved, and he had more power and influence than we ordinary people can ever hope to achieve, all made possible by the credulity of centuries.

Lots of blather is filling the airwaves about his achievements, how he liberated Poland and so on. But there is one thing his papacy may be remembered for, and that is the equation of abortion issues with death penalty issues, so that the Catholic church now supposedly opposes the death penalty. That will mark a sea-change if it lasts.

Hiatus Hernia

2005-03-17T15:13:00.000+13:00

From Body and Soul, apropos something different:

The nature of blogs -- even eccentric and personal blogs like this one -- is that if you don't have something to say right away, you don't have something worth saying.

Defining Our Times

2005-01-01T20:08:00.000+13:00

I have a bad feeling about this year. With the tsunami, of course, it couldn't have started much worse. America's failure as a world nation, let alone a world superpower, is quite incredible.

I am reading two books over the holidays - Absolute Friends, by John Le Carre and The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer. Suddenly America's failings are a stock-in-trade; the miscarriages of justice in America's courts are the place to go for a popular childrens' writer who wishes to set up an alienated futurist landscape for his teenagers. While Le Carre's solid seething rage at America's betrayal of its cold war vision makes for a polemic that few political commentators could hope to rival. And these were just the first two books I picked out.

I have the three Matrix movies to watch. (I saw the first one and hated it; the time has come to put the trilogy to bed.) But here is America's art. This, rather than smart bombs or venture capital is what will be remembered when America is broken. Which I continue to hope will not happen, but from the road it has now taken I can't see a turning back.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

2004-12-24T09:17:00.000+13:00

Which is my preferred salutation at this time of year. Such things as the 'culture wars' usually turn out to be a marketing ploy to leverage brand loyalty into more purchasing. While I like to emphasise that there are two different holiday dates - just why is that, again?

The Truth That America Has Never Faced

2004-12-23T14:02:00.000+13:00

The truth is that American soldiers have died, are dying and will die in vain. James Wolcott spells it out.

What are the Asian governments thinking?

2004-12-05T13:31:00.000+13:00

Brad DeLong asks:

(1) Given all the reasons for the dollar to decline, who in their right mind is buying the current flow of dollar-denominated securities held overseas needed to finance America's current-account deficit? (2) Given all the reasons for the dollar to decline, why haven't all the private-sector overseas holders of the enormous stock of dollar-denominated assets dumped them yet?

For the answer to (2), I would agree with the commenter Randolph Fritz, who said, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". Without a George Soros-type figure, there is no mechanism for the private sector overseas holder to take a position on the dollar based on fundamentals. In any case, trying to play the dollar would be a dangerous adventure given the huge amount of cash involved. Of course, they could just dump the dollar without trying to make gains on both the roundabouts and the swings; that would be just cutting losses, a change from the profit-seeking ethos of today's finance industry.

The big question is what is the game plan that the Asian banks are following?

I'm guessing that the Asian economies are funding America to buy their exports because America will buy the "right" exports. If they instead merely stimulated their own economies, their populations would buy the products that suit their societies in the state of economic development that they are in now, rather than the state that they aspire to.

Thus they are paying a premium to the American consumer to choose winning industries for them. One question is, how much is this service worth to them, and at what point does it become a losing bet? Another prediction that can be made is that what would kill this funding of the deficit stone dead would be import controls.

"What the bloody hell is it for?"

2004-11-29T22:56:00.000+13:00

No discussion of how theories of war have changed since 1945 would be complete without an admiring mention of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. The historian E.P.Thompson once identified five different meanings that the expression has, at different times, alluded to. I don't have them to hand, but I think they went largely as follows:

The principle, immediately post-war, that only the U.S. had nuclear weapons, and thus everyone else was deterred.
The principle of the "nuclear umbrella" over NATO countries (and also over the Warsaw Pact countries) which deterred a conventional attack.
Mutual Assured Destruction. That nuclear war would result in retaliation and destruction so total and widespread that an aggressor would be deterred.
Mutual Assured Destruction, second strike variant. The principle that an attacked country would retain enough capability, through the strategic tripod of missiles, bombers and submarines to survive a surprise attack and exterminate an aggressor.
The arms race to maintain Mutual Assured Destruction against the possibility of pre-emptive strike by highly accurate MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicle) weapons. Thompson referred to it as "mirror logic" that the deadly weapons in their silos should now be considered naked and vulnerable and requiring yet more resources to be consumed in building systems of destruction to protect them.

These were later followed by the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), that would make nuclear weapons "obsolete", and the "nuclear winter" theory by which Mutual Destruction was again Assured. But by then people were a little less impressed by the claim that nuclear weapons would be obsolete, as it generally meant they would have to pay a whole lot more taxes in order to build new nuclear weapons.

All of these contradictory theories were known as "deterrence", even though the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in the middle of it all, when the missiles that were supposed to deter war came uncomfortably close to precipitating one.

Westphalia and San Francisco

2004-11-29T01:19:00.000+13:00

Another change in our thinking since 1945 concerns the nature of national sovereignty. Many commentators consider the iconic status of the nation-state in international affairs to date from the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War in which one third of the German people had perished. Here was established the principle of fixed national borders, whose violation was illegal and a cause for war.

If you've worked in a large organisation, you will know that there is a right way to do things and an ad hoc way to do things. The right way can be to follow standard operating procedures, or it can be to set up and carry out a project that cuts across ordinary boundaries. Either way, processes are in place, money is budgeted, resources are allocated and so on.

For the purposes of this discussion, the right way to do things in terms of national sovereignty is to follow existing treaties, from that of Westphalia onwards.

In an organisation, the ad hoc way to do things is for a bunch of people to come together in a meeting. (At least one of them should have some money, to pay for peoples' time if nothing else.) The meeting decides what it is that people are doing, and the participants report back to the next meeting on progress, issues and the like. There is usually an expectation that this meeting-driven activity will produce a programme of work which can then go forward for approval and become a body of projects in the normal fashion, but that often depends on how fast outside events are moving and on the paradigm of change.

The danger to organisations is that the meeting will be seen as a more powerful and direct form of activity assignment and existing processes will be superseded.

To continue the metaphor in international terms, the resort to meetings is the equivalent of resorting to the UN Security Council to resolve the issue of when might national sovereignty be violated.

Thus there is the old paradigm, where the origins of national sovereignty may remain obscure, and the details are a matter of history, and the new paradigm where national sovereignty is sustained by the agency of the UN. From being sustained it is an easy step to imply that sovereignty is now something like human rights, something that people grant to each other at a big world meeting. This is not quite what was envisaged by the founding of the UN, and it has no standing in international law, but just the existence of the UN nevertheless means that it is a change that is occurring.

Limited War

2004-11-28T23:35:00.000+13:00

Here is Thomas Friedman in the New York times, which I will cite as the NYT goes behind a paywall after a week, and I'm slow in posting:

But most of all, I want to have the gall to sully American democracy at a time when young American soldiers are fighting in Iraq so we can enjoy a law-based society here and, maybe, extend it to others. Yes, I want to be Tom DeLay. I want to wear a little American flag on my lapel in solidarity with the troops, while I besmirch every value they are dying for.

or...

Yes, I want to be a Republican House member. At a time when 180 of the 211 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq who have been wounded in combat have insisted on returning to duty, I want to look my constituents and my kids in the eye and tell them that I voted to empty the House ethics rules because I was afraid of Tom DeLay.

This is about values and war. As well as the issue of the hippies being right, there have been a number of significant changes in the way we think since World War II. Here is the first one.

The Second World War was the last genuine struggle for survival by the industrialised countries and, as described by William Manchester in his biographies of MacArthur and Churchill, was characterised by a distinction between what might be called grand vision by the war leaders and a vision of deals and compromises carried out by the civilians.

Manchester suggests in American Caesar that military leaders will act ruthlessly and crushingly in war, and then will behave with unusual magnanimity in victory. To civilians this military behaviour may appear as monstrous egotism, but Manchester implies that it is a constructive part of strategy and psychology.

Of psychology, because the general has a need to keep faith with the soldiers who have died, to deliver a peace that they could have been proud of. Of strategy, because fighting should not be about seizing some trench or some hill, but of destroying the enemy's forces, of grand movements with geopolitical reach. Such thinking must inherently include the post-war settlement and, since it is conducted on the same scale as in wartime is magananimous in comparison to the bean-counters' version.

To civilians, before the event, an operation such as the Inchon landings may just seem like a bunch of boats on a beach, but to MacArthur and to his enemy, the implications for supply routes and the vulnerability of the forward lines are immediate and obvious. The civilian approach is to count, and to minimise, how many vessels are required and to proceed only after full deliberation and preparation. Manchester argues that these considerations turned the landings at Gallipoli into an unnecessary and far from inevitable disaster. The military leaders' approach is to get the vessels there as fast as possible, under cover of surprise, and to use as many as possible.

MacArthur wanted to go further. Having successfully put pressure on the Korean military, he wanted to make further amphibious landings along the Korean coast, and into China. And he wanted to support these landings with atomic attacks. He was only interested in total war.

This is shocking to us, and it was shocking to Truman. But to MacArthur the opposite was shocking. He believed that it was immoral to ask soldiers to die for a limited war, and that eventually soldiers would not do it. Manchester's implication of course is that MacArthur accurately predicted the cause of the failure in Vietnam in this way. Nevertheless, limited war is now what we have, and with all the immorality that MacArthur predicted for it.

MacArthur's differences with Truman foreshadowed not just Vietnam but also Powell's differences with Rumsfeld over the size of the engagement in Iraq. The issue is still the nature of limited war, only by now people ought to know better.

America Fails: reasons for pessimism

2004-11-24T08:31:00.000+13:00

The 2004 election looks to me, and to many people, as the moment when America failed as the world leader. In particular the failure has a finality to it because it is a failure of the American people. And it looks to be a defining catastrophe, rather than just some reversible bungle that we can somehow muddle through.

The incomprehension which the result gives rise to stems from the double-whammy of America denying both its own values and its own interests. I have difficulty with a people who can make such choices as these:

the ratification of torture
the abandonment of sound finances
the ending of the principle of emancipation
the smearing of a war hero

None of these are new. But this time they have been chosen, together, deliberately, and exalted as though they are God's mission on earth. There will be consequences.

These consequences are hard to fathom. If America fails, the implication is that America will break, which suggests secession. That can only happen if it is business-driven, no-one is going to secede for the benefit of women, blacks or homosexuals. The world just does not work that way.

Another suggestion is that America becomes a nazi state. History suggests this. But at the moment such an eventuality is signally lacking its fascisti or brownshirt movement. For a totalitarianism to be total, it must impinge on personal safety in everyday life. And geography is on America's side - it's a big place for a nazi government to get round to everywhere. The Soviet Union managed it, of course, but they could use Siberia as a prison.

Which brings me back to secession. I think there is a fast and a slow variety of secession, just as crime was once described as 'slow rioting'. The fast version happens if , for example, Maine decides to join Canada or California decides to go it alone. These ideas seem loopy, which means they are a whole paradigm shift away.

But slow secession is more likely. There will be greater and faster social polarisation. Read Richard Florida on the role of creativity in the economy, and the countless commentators responding to Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas (full disclosure, I haven't read it) on how the response of the "Heartland" to the loss of its brightest and most creative is to resent and retreat from the challenges of modernity. In such an atmosphere, secessionary activity, such as a campaign of refusal to pay federal taxes, can happen and therefore probably will, and probably in a "militia state", one of those that would be most hurt by the very break-up they would promote.

And one issue is dynamite. The last states to secede would be left holding the federal debt.

Yikes

2004-11-24T08:26:00.000+13:00

I've been found. That was quick; no more languorous dallying over how best to phrase the next bit.

Shades of 1972

2004-11-21T10:10:00.000+13:00

The second shade:

The second shade of 1972 is John Kerry. It is Vietnam and Iraq, and it is America's failure to recognise how the Vietnam adventure, its conduct and America's inability to recognise itself has led to an inability to conduct progressive politics, with all the dangers that such a condition implies.

In A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese mocks Kevin Kline with America's loss in Vietnam. The pungency of the scene is lost on international audiences, but the American consensus has not recognised the loss in Vietnam as inevitable nor experienced it with the relief that foreigners did. Many people have said that LBJ was wrong, or McNamara was wrong, but not that the hippies were right or that the draft-dodgers were right. The furthest anyone has gone is to concede that they had principles. The stark truth is that the counter-culture was right.

Instead of an understanding of how the counterculture came about - where did they get their information from, how did they learn to organise, how did they erect their own understanding of America's place in the world to put against the official version - conventional wisdom brought us a series of ever more ridiculous framings of the military myth, whether it is Kenny Rogers, proud to go and do (his) patriotic chore, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo justifying continuing into the 1990s America's cowardly economic vengeance against the Vietnamese or Clint Eastwood's ludicrous invasion of Grenada.

It has got to the point that Matthew Yglesias can write: "The Republican brand has been built up over a series of decades, while the Democratic brand was dragged through the mud by the events of 1968-1972." With the exception of the 1968 convention, it didn't look that way to anyone outside the country at the time. And why, pray tell, would the events at Kent State, for example, constitute the Democratic brand being dragged through the mud? Is Yglesias saying that Governor James A. Rhodes' (R- Ohio) interpretation, that the murdered protestors were "worse than brownshirts", is now the conventional orthodoxy? And that no-one challenges this?

It could be argued that the U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War amounted to a series of war crimes - the bombing of Hanoi, the bombing of Cambodia, and the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange are all good examples. If history is written by the winners, and America didn't win, then we need a reason to see why it was never established that these were crimes, even if prosecutions could not be enforced. I see softpower as being that reason and that the perhaps unintended consequence of the activities of the antiwar movement was to reestablish America's honour by articulating its internal strength as a pluralistic democracy, and therefore to confirm America's diplomatic strength.

Yglesias uncritically accepts this as mud; I don't. Because I don't, I see the cultural history of the US, post-1974, as the manufacture of a convenient series of myths. One of these myths has to do with the conflation of defeat in Vietnam with Watergate. Another concerns the elevation of wannabe-military vainglory over practical measures. And a third concerns the decadence of Hollywood, and the creation of a culture of consolation that substitutes for a culture of inclusion. What the narratives of these myths are I will have to leave for another time.

Shades of 1972

2004-11-21T08:53:00.000+13:00

The first shade:

After Nixon's re-election, Pauline Kael famously said that she knew no-one who had voted for him. Much the same seems to apply with Bush's election. In a sense, blogs are to blame for this, though this time there is certainly no shortage of blogs that support Bush. What blogs have done for me is they have put me in touch with Clever America, an America that we foreigners always knew existed but only had the most fumbling of contacts with. This sense of connection happened with 9/11, though I didn't read blogs obsessively until I found Salam Pax (who isn't American, see Ground Rule 3). So powerful is Clever America that we eventually became seduced by our own propaganda until, despite the warning signs that there was no clear opinion poll lead for Kerry, we felt the election loss as a personal catastrophe. Which it is, of course.

Clever America won all the arguments in 2004, while noone was listening. Clever America is arguably the future of American softpower, just as Hollywood has been the most obvious manifestation of softpower until now. Pauline Kael was, as we all know, a film critic, so in 1972 she was at the very heart of American softpower. If Clever America is going to be the new softpower of a no longer hegemonic United States, then it will be those commentators today who are the most crushed now by the Bush victory who reveal themselves to be the closest to the power axis of the future. (Did I mention Ground Rule 3?)

Ground Rules

2004-11-21T08:15:00.000+13:00

1. I'm writing this blog entirely for my own interest, as a kind of diary. This is not some kind of exhortation to everybody to be more like me, however much it may sound like it at times. That would just be me posting my rage.

2. The title of the blog is America Fails. That was the message that came out loud and clear from the 2004 election.

3. Irony may or may not be present, in huge doses. Irony is a much over-used term, "polymorphic" you might say. I am interested in collecting different interpretations of what constitutes the ironic and I expect I will be posting them.

4. Don't expect pictures.