Taxation with Representation Equals . . . Tyranny?

25 February 09
“You know, you think like the average Joe, the little guy makin’ three hundred grand a year.” – Duke Phillips

Writing at Salon yesterday, Gary Kamiya very ably mocked and dismantled the internet sensation that is Rick Santelli’s 15 minutes of YouTube fame and those who sympathize with him.  Santelli represents the people who spent the last decade jumping from one short term gain to another (Kamiya likens them to “acid heads who had somehow made it to the finals of the World Monopoly Championship”) and now feel justified in pointing self righteous fingers at lesser mortals (“losers“) who can no longer afford their mortgages.  Kamiya quite correctly paints Santelli, Rush Limbaugh (whom he quotes), and their ilk as massive hypocrites, but his focus on those standout media luminaries obscures the larger herd in which they spawned.

Santelli, Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and pretty much every other prominent “conservative” are populist poseurs.  They live in very big cities, wear very expensive clothes and make a lot of money and while there’s nothing wrong with any of that it places them pretty high up on the totem pole and makes it that much sillier when they try and claim common man credibility.  The entertaining absurdity of all this can be seen at the “Chicago Tea Party” website that was inspired by Santelli.  It is a testament to people who feel that democracy itself is under threat from the results of the last two elections; while there they can plan meetings, read talking points and get slogan ideas.

The page with the slogans is a comedy gold mine and well worth the click.  They range from being woefully ignorant of 180 year old history (Andrew Jackson was Right: No to Bank Nationalization) to being woefully ignorant three year old history (Sleep? I’ll Sleep When Conservatives Run Congress).  From banal right winger stuff (The Very Small List: Things Government Does Well) to panicky right winger stuff (220 Years to Build the Republic, 1 Month to Destroy It) to the downright bizarre (No Spending Without Deliberative Representation).  That last one is a true head scratcher until one considers it within the context in which it was created.  These are the denizens of the uppermost tiers of American society and they are very upset that the government is no longer doing their bidding exclusively.

The idea that a great silent majority of Americans are rending their garments over the coming Obama led socialist revolution is nothing more than myopic fantasy, particularly in light of last night’s speech from the Socialist-in-Chief.  Obama himself went on national television, in front of a joint session of Congress, and gutted the idea that ordinary working Americans are about to see their wages garnished to fund la revolucion.  Taxes are indeed going up, but only on households that bring in more than a quarter of a million per year; almost everybody else, “95% of working families” according to Comrade Obama, are getting theirs cut.

You can respond to that kind of a plan with charges of “class warfare” but it isn’t like the hard working 45% of the country is being robbed to support the lazy lifestyles of the other 55%.  2% of Americans are getting their tax rates restored to their pre-Bush levels, everybody else gets a break.  However much they might imagine themselves as speaking for the great masses, guys like Santelli and Limbaugh are part of that 2%.  They have an understandable reason to be upset, their taxes are being raised by a guy they voted against, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing to most people.

To illustrate just how absurd this faux populist crusade is, here’s some very simple and very conservative math.  Imagine a family earns exactly $250,000 per year.  They take no deductions, do not hire someone to do their returns, and pay as much as possible in federal income taxes.  This is the worst case scenario for being negatively affected by Obama’s plan.  Today these very wealthy (and very stupid) people would have $167,500 as their after tax income; under Obama’s plan that number plummets all the way down to . . . wait for it . . . $160,000.  Populist revolts are not built upon outrages as minor as someone earning a quarter of a million dollars having to give up an extra 7,500 bucks.  Do the organizers of these laughable “tea parties” honestly believe that there are large numbers of people out there willing to scuff up the leather of their luxury vehicles with torches and pitchforks?

Just because everyone personally known to Rick Santelli (which is to say everyone he interacts with who isn’t some kind of servant) agrees that Obama is implementing the socialist revolution doesn’t make it true; it doesn’t even make it the popular opinion.  Let’s not forget that even massively unpopular things in this country still have millions of supporters and people tend to hang out with other people like them.  These particular people are out of touch with the economic and political realities of the country to such a degree that it would (almost) be funnier if they weren’t so serious.  Humorously, they appear to be quite sincere.

That is what’s missing from Kamiya’s otherwise excellent piece.  He concludes that the GOP is going to get thrown overboard, and he’s probably correct, but in the meantime people like Limbaugh and Santelli are fighting a losing battle to avoid being exposed for what they are: a populist head on an elitist body.

[Edit: 5 March 09 - I realized yesterday that my tax example is ridiculously stupid and ignorant.  What can I say?  Mistakes happen.  I think the rest of the piece stands.]

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, I Love America, Obama Administration, Rick Santelli, Rush Limbaugh | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Something Militaries Should Not Be Doing

22 February 09
“Bogey’s airspeed not sufficient for intercept.  Suggest we get out and walk.” – Air Force Pilot

On Tuesday of this week the White House announced that President Obama is ordering an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan immediately.  These troops are not meant to signal the beginning of an overall reinforcement strategy, but are rather a stop gap measure.  (A review of the overall strategy is underway already and will likely be completed in the next few months; it is doubtful that the President is going to be enthusiastic about any of his options.)  On Wednesday, Juan Cole put the troop increase in perspective:

McClatchy reports that the new troops will mainly be sent to Helmand Province, a major poppy-producing areas, and will have poppy eradication as a major mission. If this report is true, it is very troubling. There is reason to think that forcible poppy eradication has produced the growing insurgency. Poppies are used to make heroin, and exports of the drug account for over a third of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. But many Afghan farmers are destitute after 30 years of war, and this crop is their one hope of escaping poverty. They grow irate when someone comes in with helicopters and torches to destroy the crop.

(Writing at Slate, Fred Kaplan has an excellent summary of where things stand.)

Irate may be an understatement, but the important thing to keep in mind is that all the US government’s power cannot even remotely successfully prosecute a drug war here in America, and now we’re thinking about trying it in Afghanistan.

Of course, Afghanistan isn’t the only place where professional military forces are being used to wage the catastrophic and increasingly militarized “war on drugs”.  Mexico has recently pushed its military directly into the fray by imposing martial law on some areas of the US-Mexico border.  Amanda Marcotte puts that into perspective:

Alas, it’s not that easy to separate the villains and the heroes in this story, because while martial law, official or not, is one of those human rights violations that we strive as an evolved species to avoid, the Mexican government has a mother of all problems on their hands, and it’s hard to fault them for trying to fix it.  In this case, the ongoing war between drug cartels in Mexico has grown especially hot in our troubled days, and the year 2008 saw at least 6,000 murders related directly to the drug trade.

You heard me right—6,000 murders.

(The New York Times had a story about this back in December.)

Obviously these two situations have a lot of differences, for starters one is a domestic deployment of military force and the other is foreign.  But the Pentagon now sees the Mexican government as potentially becoming unstable on account of drugs:

A report released this month by the U.S. Joint Forces Command is warning of the potential for “rapid and sudden collapse” of the Mexican government due to the corrupting influence of criminal gangs and drug cartels. The Joint Operating Environment 2008 document (pdf) also lists Pakistan as the other of two large and important states that “bear consideration,”

The Mexicans took some justified offense to this, but however much it might be gringo paranoia talking, the US military is now openly considering the possibility that the trade in illegal drugs could destabilize Mexico’s entire government.  They’re even drawing explicit parallels between Mexico and Afghanistan’s turbulent neighbor.  And this isn’t just a rough patch that can be gotten through with some grit and toughness, the world appetite for illegal narcotics is not about to start shrinking.

Obviously these two situations are by no means equivalent, and illegal narcotics are only a part of each story, but they do share one undisputable commonality: militaries (beholden to democratically elected governments) are being used to enforce civilian agricultural and criminal policies.  Moreover, many of the civilians that actually live in these places are extremely upset by this.

Bad ideas are bad ideas, in any context.

Leave a Comment » | Afghanistan, Illegal Drugs, Institutionalized Stupidity, Mexico, Pakistan, Places Other than America, Sophomoric Imperialism, War on Drugs, equus altus morium | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Tears for Fears

18 February 09
“You don’t even know what you’re worried about anymore.” – Marge Simpson

Alexandra Pelosi, who became slightly famous for her 2000 Bush campaign documentary, premiered another one on HBO Monday night, Right America: Feeling Wronged.  With a camera on her shoulder she interviewed people at McCain/Palin rallies through the final three months of the campaign and the people she found are about what anyone who followed the campaign would expect.  They are ordinary Americans who were terrified down to their bones of Barack Obama and what (they thought) he represented.  The very first person on camera, a tearful young woman at McCain HQ on election night, says it all, “I am scared to death”.

The fear that gripped these people is abundant in almost every interview to the point that several of them are reduced to tears even thinking about an Obama presidency.  These aren’t all shrinking violets either, we’re talking mustachioed NASCAR dudes who look like they know how to handle themselves in a bar fight.  Nevertheless, they felt their country slipping away and a future with Obama scared them enough to weep.

They’re afraid of terrorism, they’re afraid that Obama isn’t one of them, they’re even scared of socialism and nevermind that very few (if any) of them have a clue what it means.  One earnest but dimwitted teen, who’d written “Say No to Socilism” on his t-shirt, actually went to look up the definition on his phone before Pelosi pressed him and he called it “like the views of Hitler”.  Or there were the kids of a small business owner who were genuinely scared that if Obama wins “we’re gonna be poor”.  It goes on like that for pretty much the whole 45-minute run time, from the outright racists to the people who think Obama is the anti-Christ.

Perhaps the most fascinating example is a woman named Elaine Tornero who was the Franklin County (Ohio) Captain for the Value Voter Coalition.  Pelosi tagged along with her as she went door to door and to a local soup kitchen were she talked about pro-Life positions and even tried to convince a bunch of black guys in line that McCain was pro-black(!).  Clearly this woman does not lack for social bravery.  But right before we see her go to the soup kitchen she notices an Obama sign in front of a neighbor’s house.  She nervously discloses that it’s a lesbian couple’s home before saying, “I’m too afraid to get into a fight with a neighbor”.  Granting that neighbor fights are often nasty affairs worth avoiding, it’s still a telling distinction.  She’s willing to go downtown and talk to actual live black people in a friendly but semi-confrontational manner, which would probably scare the bejeezus out of most suburban white ladies; but she won’t talk to her lesbian neighbors and is skittish about even saying out loud that they’re gay.  Behold the myriad complexities of American politics.

Of course, people like Tornero are the minority, even within their own states.  Pelosi stuck with the McCain campaign pretty tight so except for a brief detour to Mississippi (where she managed to get a truck driver to say the word “nigger”) all of the people in the movie are in states that went Blue on election night: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin.  It’s no wonder they feel beleaguered, they’re outnumbered even in places that were comfortably Red just four years ago.

Fascinating as this movie is, there probably isn’t much to be made of it at this close vantage point.  After all, Obama’s only been in office for a month and since his approval rating far outstrips his vote tally maybe even some of the people displayed here have changed their mind.  He isn’t, it turns out, the anti-Christ, Hitler or even a socialist.  But Right America: Feeling Wronged is going to be a great historical piece in years to come because a more succinct and open portrait of Bush the Younger’s America may never exist.  It was a land of fear and that sad fact is as plain as day on the faces of these sometimes heart-breakingly terrified people.

Short End Note: Pelosi seems to favor a very informal interview style with just her, the camera, and her subject.  But she might want to consider getting someone a little taller to actually hold the camera next time.  Many of her interviewees come across a tad more intimidating than they might otherwise be on account of the fact that they are all clearly shot from below.  It’s a small quibble, but it’s very noticeable after awhile.  Just my two cents.

Leave a Comment » | 2008 Election, Alexandra Pelosi, America's Elite, Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, John McCain, Movies, Right America: Feeling Wronged, Sarah Palin, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

One Down, Two to Go

15 February 09
“Hoke, slow down, you’re going too fast.” – Eleanor Sherman
“I got better things to do than drivin’ a crotchety old woman like you around.  From now on, my name isn’t Hoke, it’s Malcolm H.  And when the revolution comes, you will not be spared.” – Malcolm H

The popular economic stimulus bill, backed by a majority in both houses of Congress and supported by an even more popular president passed.  Viva la revolucion!  (It is a testament to the institutional inertia of our political commentary machine that this is being treated as a surprise.)  So, what’s next on the agenda?  Well, there are two contenders: the medical bill and the carbon bill.  Both of them are desperately needed and both of them stand to have almost incalculable consequences.

(One of them is going to come first, though which one is anybody’s guess.  The carbon bill has the advantage of having its most relevant cabinet secretary, a minor media darling, already in office.  The health care bill, on the other hand, had its nominee washed out by tax problems.)

Each stands to radically reshape the economy, have a profound effect on the future of the country, and, assuming they work, bring substantial and long lasting political rewards to the Democratic Party.  Let’s take a look.

If it can extend coverage to people who don’t currently have insurance without degrading the care given to those who currently do have insurance then the medical bill is going to fundamentally alter this country.  It should save tens of billions of dollars per year in administrative waste right off the bat and that’s before accounting for the incalculable benefits of a generally healthier populace.  Healthier kids become healthier (and better educated) adults who can create and work better and more productive jobs which in turn makes us all richer and more comfortable.  At least, that’s the theory.

The carbon bill’s immediate impact (be it a cap-and-trade system, a straight up tax or some combination) is to produce a potentially large source of new federal revenue which can be turned right around and plowed into sustainable energy.  That can then create untold economic benefits by making America energy independent and giving us something new to export.  Along the way we pick up a healthier environment, climate stability and better lives for us all.  That’s that theory, anyway.

Those are optimistic outcomes, but they are not unreasonable ones.  The catastrophic problems with our medical and energy systems have been deliberately ignored for far longer than the last eight years; there’s no telling what advances serious federal attention may produce.  There is even reason to think that the benefits may start accruing sooner than is generally assumed.  From the time the federal government really focused on it, the atomic bomb was constructed in less than six years; men were put on the moon less than ten years after that goal became a federal priority.  Both of those gargantuan projects were undertaken in an America that was economically puny and downright backwards compared to the one we have today.  Years of festering neglect have bred an understandable sense of doom and gloom in the public and the media, but a sober eyed look at the precedents says there is real cause to be optimistic.

As for the future success of the Democratic Party, well the possibilities there are even more fantastic, but they also cannot be dismissed outright.  The last time the Democrats, a party that is very likely a natural majority in the country at this time, had as much executive and legislative leverage as they do right now they gave old people and poor people health insurance as well as enfranchising and recognizing millions of Americans.  Both of those accomplishments have proved enormously beneficial and have enjoyed lasting popularity.

The benefit at the ballot box that should’ve followed never got a chance on account of Vietnam.  But if Eisenhower hadn’t sent in the advisors, or if Kennedy hadn’t kept them there, or if Johnson had gotten out before the Gulf of Tonkin, there was no end in sight to what was possible.  Remember, in 1968 a candidate as lackluster as Hubert Humphrey came within 500,000 votes of political mastermind Richard Nixon, who was using every trick in the book and inventing some new ones along the way.

Does all this sound like pie in the sky?  Well yeah, it does, and so maybe it is.  But don’t forget that just a few months ago the words “generational election” were on the tips of everyone’s tongue.  Well, this is what a “generational election” looks like in practice: a fundamental reordering of some of the basic ways this country does business.  The Republican Party’s demographic position is shrinking by the day, their ideas and policies are widely unpopular, and their dream president turned into a nightmare.  If you scripted a similar streak of disastrous decisions it would be derided as unrealistic that any party could run itself into the ground so quickly; but they did it.

What’s more, it’s happening still.  The economic stimulus bill was passed over the vehement objections of almost every Republican in Washington and we can expect similar results for the next two big reforms.  But they are standing in front of an almost invincible political force and they will probably fail on both counts.  While doing so they are going to fight dirty and whine about it on a television set near you, but histrionics don’t equal votes.

There’s nothing wrong with some kicking and screaming because in time it will be recognized for what it is: a tantrum from an out of power party.  They couldn’t stop Barack Obama’s first big project and there are two left on his domestic agenda; it seems silly to bet against him or act surprised when he succeeds.

Leave a Comment » | Barack Obama, Carbon Bill, Congressional Republicans, Medical Bill, Stimulus Bill, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

War for Sale, Slightly Used

11 February 09
“This war is in danger of going all quagmire on me.” – Richard Nixon’s Head

Lost amid the hubbub over bailouts and stimulus have been a couple of potentially significant developments in Afghanistan.  Why only “potentially” significant?  Because that country, our policy in it, and the larger world’s commitment to it are giant unknowns at the moment.  Iraq, for all its internal complexities and instabilities, had a great deal of certainty brought to it by our recent election: President Obama is committed to leaving, thus we are leaving and the Iraqis are getting their country back.  Afghanistan, on the other hand, is far less certain because the new Administration is still only beginning to understand just what the real situation is, thus “potentially” significant.  Maybe the stuff that’s happened in the last couple of days will have a profound effect on their thinking and our policies, maybe it won’t.

Let us first recall that the original rationale behind world involvement (and it really was almost all the major powers of the world) in Afghanistan was the 11 September attacks.  The theory was that states which lacked effective government were threats to the entire international order because non-state organizations like al-Qaeda could use them as bases.  Prior to that, the international reaction to Afghanistan had been one of studied indifference.  The old rule of non-interference applied: as long as you kept your wars, atrocities, human rights violations, and other general unpleasantness within your own borders you could expect other countries (and certainly major powers) to basically leave you alone.

The 11 September attacks were supposed to have changed that and the result was the UN/NATO mission in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban and bring effective and normal government to a country which hadn’t known it for more than twenty years.  We all know what happened next, much quicker than almost anyone expected the Taliban were routed thanks to a combination of American air power and local Afghani forces.  Almost immediately the American focus shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, first rhetorically then diplomatically and finally militarily.  Afghanistan became an afterthought of a war, real only to the military, and ignored by everyone else (the press, the public and the Administration) for it’s more politically contentious and casualty heavy successor.

Now that American involvement in Iraq is on a path to resolution (though far from resolved), focus is once again turning to Afghanistan and the reality isn’t pretty.  Other NATO countries aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to recommit to it, the chain of supply was recently dealt a double blow, and now it appears that Obama may be reconsidering (via Juan Cole) his campaign promise to seriously reinforce our troops there.  The situation is, to say the least, unsettled and we haven’t even mentioned the new government in Pakistan.

Here’s the good news, Obama isn’t stupid and he isn’t hell bent on this war.  If the hour has grown too late in Afghanistan for even renewed American leadership to rally the world to the cause, he isn’t going to pursue it like his dead ender ideologue of a predecessor.  Obama is quite possibly the most powerful man in the world, but he cannot force the major European powers to commit seriously to combat in Afghanistan, nor can he force Pakistan to go all out around the border, nor can he simply replace the Hamid Karzai government, no matter how corrupt it is or how much he might want to.  He recognizes that his office is not an imperial throne.

Is an Afghani outcome roughly similar to what was envisioned seven and a half years ago still possible?  Maybe.  But if the rest of the world isn’t as committed to the place as Obama, there isn’t much that can be done; America going it alone is a surefire recipe for disaster, just as it was in Iraq.  Fortunately, Obama and the people around him don’t seem like the types who will delude themselves into believing that token support is a grand coalition.  Obama made campaign promises about Afghanistan, and if there’s a possibility of a genuinely good outcome (whatever that may be) he almost has to press forward; but he is very unlikely to imitate his predecessor and plunge in head first all by his lonesome.

Leave a Comment » | Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Pakistan, Places Other than America, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Will Future Nazis Burn iPhones or Kindles?

8 February 09
“Stupid books.” – Bart Simpson

There was a fascinating article up at Ars Technica this week about the history of what, for lack of imagination, everyone refers to as the “e-book”.  The story begins in the late nineties when you couldn’t open a magazine without reading an article about how the internet was going to change things.  There were lots of theories about how, but one thing a lot of people agreed upon was that books were in real trouble.  After all, the information contained in a printed and bound book could also be contained in just a few kilobytes of computer memory and wouldn’t it be great to have hundreds or thousands of books whenever you wanted to read something?

The big publishing houses were, not surprisingly, less than enthusiastic about selling their books on-line.  Their business model was relatively stable and profitable, albeit a bit bizarre, and they didn’t want to jeopardize it by making unlimited invisible copies.  The author, John Siracusa, worked for a company called Peanut Press that sold software and books for other people’s hardware, chiefly Palm Pilots.  It’s a fascinating story.

His conclusion, more or less, is that Amazon and Apple are poised to slug this out.  Apple has the hardware (iPhone) and a proven distribution network (iTunes), but it doesn’t yet have good access to the actual books.  Amazon has its Kindle and a virtual monopoly on the on-line selling of books.  But what he misses, completely, is the other 800 pound gorilla in the room: Google.

Google has spent the last several years digitizing millions of books, some recent some old, and making them available via Google Book Search.  This caused great consternation from the copyright holders and they sued; a few months ago a tentative agreement was reached.  It is fantastically complicated and may yet be subject to significant revision, but for now it looks like it may be the first step towards generating significant revenue from on-line books.  Writing in The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton breaks it down:

The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders. Google will sell access to a gigantic data bank composed primarily of copyrighted, out-of-print books digitized from the research libraries. Colleges, universities, and other organizations will be able to subscribe by paying for an “institutional license” providing access to the data bank. A “public access license” will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal. And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a “consumer license” from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders. Google will retain 37 percent, and the registry will distribute 63 percent among the rightsholders.

Meanwhile, Google will continue to make books in the public domain available for users to read, download, and print, free of charge. Of the seven million books that Google reportedly had digitized by November 2008, one million are works in the public domain; one million are in copyright and in print; and five million are in copyright but out of print. It is this last category that will furnish the bulk of the books to be made available through the institutional license.

Should that come into widespread use and acceptance there’s almost no limit to the impact it could have.  No more students, of any level, needing to purchase copies of Tom Sawyer or Shakespeare.  A world of hard to find, out of print books opened up to literature teachers and ordinary book lovers.  (Darnton rightly worries about putting that much power, essentially a majority of human knowledge, exclusively into the hands of a private enterprise.)  It’s a development that could truly, as they say, change things.

Both articles are well worth reading in full, and when considered together they raise one of the biggest technical and cultural questions to face us here at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  We will soon be living in a world where the end product of people’s creativity, what we so derisively refer to as “content”, can be taken in anywhere and from any platform.  What do we want that world to look like?  What rules should govern it?

The questions of Kindle vs iPhone or Google vs Publishers are mere preliminaries.  Five years from now the iPhone and its various competitors will be laughably primitive and ten years from now the networks they depend on may no longer exist (having been replaced by new and better ones).  The proliferation of smart phones, netbooks, and other portable devices with big, bright screens means that anything can be a jukebox or a television or even an e-book.  The real questions are of distribution, copyright and remuneration.  Today the distribution is ad hoc, the copyright laws are laughably antiquated and the remuneration is anybody’s guess.  None of those three is remotely stable, nor are their futures set in stone.

It ought to be fun.

1 Comment | Amazon, Apple, Google, Kindle, Print is Dead, The Information Superhighway, The New York Review of Books, iPhone | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Sarcastic Clapping

4 February 09
“Are we gonna die son?” – Homer Simpson
“Yeah.  But at least we’ll take a lot of innocent people with us.” – Bart Simpson

Congratulations to the government of Israel!  In exchange for three weeks of bombing and a half assed invasion of Gaza you stopped ineffectual rocket fire for two whole weeks.  That is a victory worthy of commemoration in the annals of Israeli military history; David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin would certainly be proud.

Of course, in exchange for your fortnight you had to piss off pretty much the entire planet, but hey, it was a great two weeks, wasn’t it?  Hamas, by the way, is still in power in Gaza (and by all accounts getting things right back to where they were).  The man you’d rather be dealing with, Mahmoud Abbas, has again been humiliated in front of his own people for his utter ineffectualness.  And the Prime Minister of Turkey, which was once your best friend in the region, stormed off the stage in Davos rather than put up with your side of the story.  If this is what victory in Gaza looks like, another one may ruin you.

Of course, it gets worse from here because long before Gaza runs out of rockets or civilians you’re going to run out of friends overseas (even here in the States).  In the last six weeks you’ve managed to do something that all of your enemies failed to do in the last six decades: prove to the world that the Israeli military cannot protect its people.  The rockets will fly no matter how many tunnels you bomb or people you kill, and all the while the rest of the world is becoming less and less interested in who really started it.

Where can you go from here?  Truthfully, nobody knows.  Obviously much depends on the results of your election next week, but whoever is calling the shots isn’t going to have any attractive options.  You can continue to starve and bomb the Palestinians in Gaza, that certainly has its appeal, but it isn’t going to stop the rockets even if you continue to inflict casualties at a 100-1 ratio.  You could lift the blockade on Gaza, but that’s going make Hamas the cock of the walk and even then the rockets might still fly (on orders from Hamas or from other groups).  You could go back to war or even reoccupy Gaza, and while that might have the most immediate impact on the rate of rocket fire it probably won’t eliminate it and it would cost you dearly in terms of soldiers killed and wounded as well as international respect (what little you have left).  In other words: you’re fucked.  All three of your options (abandoning force as a tool in dealing with Hamas, continuing along as before, increasing your use of force) are unpalatable and none of them is certain to cease the rocket attacks which, until you made them a casus belli, weren’t all that harmful in the grand scheme of things.

Land for peace is still the only path to remaining a Jewish state in an Arab sea, but you’ve been running away from it headlong for almost a decade in pursuit of shorter term gains.  You are strong enough (diplomatically, militarily, economically and politically) to keep it up for years to come, but it won’t end well for you, even if it takes decades.  And let’s not forget, two years ago Jimmy Carter was more or less pilloried for using the word “apartheid” in reference to Israel; now that word pops up more and more often.

Of the three people most likely to become Israel’s next Prime Minister, two of them, Ehud Barack (Defense Minister) and Tzipi Livni (Foreign Minister) are currently in government and are responsible for the utterly predictable fiasco in Gaza.  (That they were willing to undertake a course of action with an outcome as unpredictable as war just weeks before the election doesn’t speak well of their judgment either.)  The third, Benjamin Netanyahu, thinks it wasn’t enough of fiasco already and would like to continue it.  Good luck with them.

No one knows whether or not it’s already too late to save Israel; changing course right now may or may not result in a happy outcome, but the long term prospects look worse than they have for a long time and none of the three prospective Prime Ministers should fill anyone with confidence.  Hey, at least it was a fun little war.  Oh, wait, scratch that:

What is far less clear is that Israel’s tactical successes achieved significant strategic and grand strategic benefits. In practice, any such benefits may actually have been more than offset by the mid and long-term strategic costs of the operation in terms of Arab and other regional reactions. Such conclusions are necessarily uncertain, but Israel does not seem to have been properly prepared for the political dimensions of war, or to have had any clear plan and cohesive leadership in achieving conflict termination. Moreover, it may have approach Hamas and the Arab world with attitudes that will increase instability in the region and ultimately weaken Israel’s security.

Leave a Comment » | Gaza Strip, Israel, Palestine, Places Other than America, Sophomoric Imperialism, Systems Analyst | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Sign of the Times

1 February 09
“Look, if you . . . if you do find internet, let us know, will ya?” – Stephen Stotch
“How?  You won’t have internet.” – Randy Marsh

Yesterday morning I was engaging in the ancient tradition of wasting time on the internet.  My Google results were coming in all screwed up and Firefox was blocking a lot of regular sites for being dangerous, the Google Preview windows reported everything as malware.  It was slightly irritating; the internet being a veritable cornucopia though I went on to other things and put it out of my mind.  Sure enough a couple of hours later all was right again.

Then in the afternoon I opened nytimes.com and saw, “Google Error Sends Warning Worldwide“.  (Interestingly, the copy in my paper this morning on page A20 was instead headlined “Search Service on Google Briefly Fails”.)  The specifics of the brief and relatively innocuous outage are unimportant.  What’s notable is that in just ten years Google has gone from being a search engine that nerds told each other about to a utility the outages of which are worthy of newspaper stories.  That is a significant development and as illuminating a sign of the times as you’re ever likely to find.

It hints at something deeper as well.  Widely available internet access has become almost as vital as regular utilities like water and power.  People who are way into technology have known that for a long time, of course, but it’s now essentially universal.  More importantly, the internet is still far from fully formed.  As much as people, myself included, like to marvel at what can be accomplished on-line (and curse it when it fucks up), we’re still in the early stages of development.  Ten years from now it will be even more available and more capable than it is now and, put simply, ten years isn’t a very long time.

Right about mid-summer it’s going to start occurring to a lot of people that we’re about to close out a decade and begin a new one.  (Despite the fact that we still don’t have an agreed upon name for it: “naughts”?  “aughts”?  “zeros”?)  As people’s minds turn retrospective a brief Google glitch at the tail end of the decade isn’t going to seem very significant.  But it captures the tremendous shift in the way ordinary people run their lives better than traffic statistics, hardware sales data or anything else.  A private service almost no one had heard of in 1999 failed for less than an hour in 2009 and it was considered news.  That is this decade in a nutshell.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos