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Monthly Archives: September 2009

Iran has the Bomb! Meh.

“Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.” – Parallel Prof. Farnsworth

Let’s begin by acknowledging that the Bomb is the greatest threat to human beings, in groups or as a species, period.  Even the most nightmarish of global warming models are Edenic next to what would happen to us in the event of a serious exchange of nuclear weapons.  That said, we’ve lived with them for sixty years now, their total number is way way down from where it was just twenty years ago and the risk of a big time nuclear war is about as low as it’s ever been.  This is despite the fact that in the history of the Bomb, from 1945 to the present, only one country has ever gotten the thing and then given it up, that would be post-Apartheid South Africa, and no, the non-Russian former Soviet republics don’t count.

Meanwhile the number of nuclear powers has increased almost every single decade, with the US and Russia getting there in the forties, the British tested their first bomb in the early 50s, the French, Chinese and Israelis (wink wink, nudge nuge) all tested bombs in the 60s, the Indians tested one in the 70s, the Pakistanis joined them in the 90s and the North Koreans (probably) in the 00s.  That is a pretty steady increase in the number of human beings with the power to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of their fellows (and in the number of potential command and control problems to have the same result).  And yet we’re all still here.

The reason no one has died from a nuclear war shot (as opposed to a test) since 1945 is that since the end of World War II the use of such weapons has only been considered seriously once, during a few terrifying days in October of 1962.  Why is that?  Because every country with the resources and technical wherewithal to build the fucking things is established enough not to want to see itself and its people destroyed.  It’s the great paradox of the Bomb: you finally have the power to kill all those people you hate, but to do so you also have to sign the death warrant of pretty much everyone you know and everything you love.

This bizarre but very reliable (so far, at least) concept is always the first thing to get ignored every time some new nation decides to split the atom.  In 1998 India and Pakistan engaged in a nuclear game of “mine’s bigger than yours” so childish it would’ve seemed uncouth on a grade school playground.  Newspapers and magazines were filled with doom laden articles about how India and Pakistan share a long, heavily militarized border, and how they’d fought three wars since 1947, and if ever there was a place where nuclear weapons could be used it was here.  All of this ignored or severely downplayed the fact that in an age of missiles Islamabad and New Delhi really aren’t all that far from each other and that neither side, however irrational each may be over the subject of Kashmir, has a death wish.

The current subject of international nuclear hysteria is Iran.  Set aside the twin elephants in the room: 1) as far as we actually know Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program years ago and 2) the last time the US Government thought a Middle Eastern country was on the verge of building a bomb it turned out to be 100% bullshit (though that didn’t stop it from being uncritically swallowed by almost all major media outlets).  Most stories are going to ignore the first and once again parrot whatever the government leaks them on the second.  As valid as they are no one is going to pay attention to them anyway so let’s just skip them as well, shall we?

Right on cue, as soon as “Iran” and “nuclear” became topics-du-jour, the usual half-assed arguments began being trotted out, all based on one unquestioned assumption: Iran must not build a bomb.  Well, what happens if they do?  There’ll be international outrage in the form of strongly worded editorials, hyperventilating pundits and condemnatory diplomatic protests.  There would even probably be some additional economic sanctions placed on the Islamic Republic.  But the Sun wouldn’t stop rising, nor would the oil beneath Iran’s sands lose its value.

The instant Iran possessed a viable nuclear threat, and again there is no evidence that they are trying and no reason to believe that even if they were trying it’s anything but years away, the Islamic Republic would be constrained by the same paradox that binds all other nuclear powers.  If they gain the ability to incinerate Tel Aviv, Haifa and even Jerusalem, so what?  They could only do so at the cost of Tehran, Esfahan, Qom and probably the rest of their major cities.  The leadership of Iran is many things, ruthless, undemocratic, corrupt, but it has never given any indication that it is suicidal.

And so the usual back and forth about sanctions, inspections and the rest of the nuclear kabuki will play out across media of all forms.  And it would be better if the Americans, Russians and Europeans can get Iran’s nuclear program as out in the open as possible.  But if all that doesn’t work, the world will not have changed much.  It will be a slightly more dangerous place, no doubts there, but it would hardly be a development to shake the foundations of the world.

Beginning to Look Back

“You know, ever since that barbeque nothing’s gone right.  It’s like there’s been a curse on me.” – Ned Flanders

As we enter the home stretch of the decade it will be interesting to see if the year-in-review pieces begin popping up earlier than usual.  Commemorating a decade that still doesn’t even have an agreed upon name is a bigger task than commemorating just one year.  Not to push this too far or anything, but the fact that we cannot even agree on a name for the decade seems appropriate.  The two sides of American politics spent the last ten years talking past each other, what better way to epitomize that than in an inability to come to a consensus over the simple naming of the decade?  I’m a fan of “naughts”, by the way.  “Aughts” is good too, but you need that “n”, these were nothing if not negative years.  (“Nils”, maybe?)

At any rate, whether they’re eventually known as the “naughts” or something else, the decade of Bush the Younger was a disaster.  It started with 3,000 dead Americans who were but the first pebbles in a landslide of violent deaths that hasn’t stopped yet.  The economy never really recovered from the first recession and that was before it came to a screeching halt last year.  The naughts saw a war based 100% on lies, torture, civil liberties infractions that would make J .Edgar Hoover blush, and – oh yeah – the planet that much closer to a climate disaster so enormous it threatens to touch every person alive.  If this list is familiar it’s because these problems have been obvious for years.  People who spent the decade reading Paul Krugman, people who made Howard Dean’s presidential campaign a national sensation eighteen months before the 2004 election, have been pointing them out since the 2000 election.  Remember Ralph Nader?

It’s cool to hate on Nader now, especially in light of the fact that his campaign was a major part of the 173 improbable coincidences that landed Bush the Younger in the White House, but pretty much everything he was warning about in 2000 came to pass.  In fact, as Bush the Younger’s ascendancy to the throne was the genesis of much of the woe of our sorry decade it will be interesting to see how it’s commemorated over the coming months.  Indeed, it might be a good time to remember just how it happened.

George Walker Bush spent the first four decades of his life drinking and failing upward, blowing other people’s money and shirking his responsibilities only to be rescued by his wealthy and powerful father time and again.  This man’s resume would make you scared to hire him as a assistant manager at Shenanigans and yet, in 1994, riding that big Republican wave that he did nothing to create, he became governor of Texas.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were in the midst of a comedy of errors.  Bill Clinton managed to keep the World’s Most Famous Blowjob a secret until after the 1996 election.  Ignoring the oldest rule in politics he tried to cover it up and got impeached for his trouble.  Despite Clinton’s high approval ratings throughout the impeachment saga, and Democratic gains in the 1998 election, Al Gore was still so scared of the fallout from Lewinsky that he wouldn’t let Clinton campaign for him and selected Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate.

The press fell asleep on the job, something they would be doing a lot of, and allowed Bush to start getting away with provable falsehoods, particularly about the budget.  On election night Florida and the presidency were erroneously called by all the networks for Bush (starting, naturally enough, at FOX News), and Gore very nearly conceded.  He never shook the sore loser taint.  A later analysis will conclude that Gore almost certainly won the state.  Bush stole it with a massive and illegitimate purge of minority voters, butterfly ballots, an intentional riot, and the connivance of his brother the governor (and transparent party hacks like Kathleen Harris).  The Supreme Court, two of whom were appointed by his father and fully seven of whom were nominated by Republican presidents, issued a 5-4 decision so embarrassingly thin that they banned later courts from ever citing it as precedent.

The above reads like a conspiracy theory, which is why some people think it was a conspiracy.  If you went back in time to 1996 and told someone what was going to happen in the next election they wouldn’t have believed you.  It’d just be too far fetched.

That is how the decade started, and it was all downhill from there: thousands of dead American civilians in New York and New Orleans, thousands of dead American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq; dead foreigners in numbers too large to be accurately counted.  The federal budget was destroyed, America’s reputation left in tatters, and, as a grim finale, a near total economic collapse.  It was a terrible decade and plenty of its horrors have been omitted here for the simple reason that recounting them over and over again is both pointless and exhausting.  But they’re almost over; and while there is – ahem – hope that things might now be getting better, how we got ourselves into this mess must never be forgotten.

The naughts were a lost decade – in so many ways – and it will be good to be rid of them.  Ring in the 2010s.  And look, the new decade already has a name, “the twenty-tens”.  It works much better than “nineteen tens” (too much “te”) and “twenty teens” (too much number confusion).  The 2010s, here’s to them.

The Sad, Unchanging Afghan Political Calculus

“I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try.” – Bart Simpson

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books contains an article titled “The Afghanistan Impasse” by Ahmed Rashid.  It is predictably thorough, detailed and depressing and is the most comprehensive look at the wars currently tearing up both Afghanistan and Pakistan.  This of course includes the direct US engagement in the former and the active US encouragement of the latter.  The ostensible goal of these wars is the defeat of the “Taliban” on both sides of the border and the establishment of a vaguely democratic government in Afghanistan.  The real goal is the continued political marginalization of the Republican Party here in the United States.

As paranoid, goofy and disrespectful as that sounds, it’s true.  Barack Obama, and therefore the United States along with him, is committed to the continued existence of the government in Kabul.  He campaigned on it and in doing so gave himself political cover with the American public (and the doltish American media) that he could be trusted to – ahem – keep us safe.  That means that Karzai, or someone like him, has to remain the titular leader of Afghanistan.  His government must not cease to exist, for if it disappears it will mean that Obama “lost” Afghanistan to our “enemies”.

That’s a crude and wildly ill informed concept, but it’s the way politics works here in a United States of America that is still recovering from one of the most disastrous periods in its history.  The world rejoiced when he won because it made it seem like the insanity coming from Washington was over.  But he’s up for re-election in three short years and barring an economic collapse in 2012 the only thing that really threatens him is “national security” and “terrorism”.  If Obama is seen as having let al-Qaeda or the “Taliban” recover their strength, or if there’s another major terrorist attack against America, he becomes instantly vulnerable to charges that he simply isn’t tough enough, and those types of attacks are always dangerous for Democrats (see: Kerry, John; Dukakis, Michael; Mondale, Walter; and Carter, Jimmy).

Obviously we don’t know who the challenger will be in 2012, or what the main issues will be.  But we do know the date, and we do know that the challenger will come from a party that has traditionally been able to exploit Democratic foreign policy failures.  If the “Taliban” or something like them has kicked us out of Afghanistan Obama will have a major vulnerability that the Reds will be only too happy to attack.  Maybe it’ll be enough to sink him, maybe it won’t; but it’s hard to imagine a worse weakness.

It isn’t fair.  People in Helmand and the North-West Frontier Province shouldn’t have to die so that people in Iowa and Ohio can feel safe.  But the greater threat to the world isn’t a bunch of guys in caves, it’s the reestablishment of neoconservative control over American foreign policy.*  You’d be hard pressed to find any serious observer of world affairs, outside of right wing American think tanks that is, who believe that the 2001 attacks were worse than Bush the Younger’s reaction to them.  The Iraq War alone has caused the violent deaths of more than thirty times as many people as perished eight years ago in America.

As the recent health care protests have shown, it would be unwise to discount the ability of the right wingers to scare the living shit out of ordinary Americans on a given issue.  Then there’s the lead story in this morning’s New York Times, anonymously sourced from the White House and Pentagon, saying that Obama is unhappy with Afghanistan and may be considering . . . well, something.  It isn’t entirely clear what his other options are, but the political implications are obvious just in the tone of the article: he’s thinking about backing down.  The article was co-written by Elisabeth Bumiller, who isn’t much of a reporter but is a very good bellwether for the conventional stupidity inside the Beltway’s green rooms and salons.  The threat there is greater than the one along the Afghani-Pakistani border.

Whatever the progress, or lack thereof, in Afghanistan itself, Obama and his minions have already made the political calculation that they cannot end both wars at once.  Iraq is the bigger, stupider and costlier war, it ends first.  They campaigned on fighting the good fight, and now they’ve got to at least try it or they’ll look like the fickle Democrats of old.  That means that Afghanistan, and the American troops sent there, will have to endure a few years longer; and tragically sad stories like the one in Bob Herbert’s column yesterday will continue.

It sucks, it isn’t fair, and it will doubtless be small comfort to those who will be killed, injured or lose someone in the interim (American, Afghani and otherwise).  But that’s the reality of the world Bush the Younger left to us.

End Note: It was big news these last couple weeks when polls began showing that Americans are souring on the Afghan War.  And much as the hyperbole outraced the numbers there is an unmistakable trend there.  But Obama cannot be challenged on Afghanistan from the Left and the only challenge that will come from the Right is to fight more and harder.  The peace movement, sadly, has nowhere to go.

* And if you think any 2012 Republican wouldn’t have such a foreign policy, well then, I’ve got some land in Florida to sell you.  As late as last year the bulk of their foreign policy establishment still thought Iraq was a really keen war and worth continuing.

By Our Ads They Shall Know Us

“Didn’t you have ads in the twentieth century?” – Leela
“Well, sure, but not in our dreams, only on teevee and radio, and in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and bananas and written on the sky, but not in dreams!” – Fry

I won’t live to see it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, thousands of years from now, anthropologists and historians describe our culture as one driven primarily by advertising.  Be it movies, television programs, or commercials (the length of which is measured in seconds) video with sound (a “talkie” in ye olde speak) is about the most profound medium we’ve yet devised.  These days anyone can put shit on YouTube, but of the stuff we as a society deem important enough to be worthy of professional production values (and the resources that requires) the overwhelming majority has to be television advertisements.

For every vilely laughtracked sitcom, ponderous drama, and dimwittedly earnest reality show there are dozens of commercials.  They are dense missiles of communication, scientifically designed to nuzzle an idea (or a need) into the most primal part of your mind.  They are insidiously violent weapons.  Mercifully, their only immediate goal is to get you to reach for one brightly colored package over another.

I’m writing about this out of trauma.  Like most technically savvy Americans I’ve managed to almost completely insulate myself from television advertisements.  It’s rare that I watch commercially supported television with the commercials.  Between digital video discs and the ongoing miracle that is the internet almost everything I view that isn’t live has no advertising interruptions.  But the coming of autumn has brought televised football and that means that I’m forced to watch commercials.

Having seen hardly any for months, the beginning of football season slams so many of them into my eyes that I feel molested.  Other human beings are doing things to me which I most certainly don’t like and have only barely consented to.  I recognize these things as the price of televised football, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them, or, more importantly, buy the shitty products they’re designed to hawk.  Still, one must admire the artistry.

Ultimately it doesn’t much matter.  It seems unlikely that any great number of people will reach for a different colored box of beer on account of the dim memory of a cute blond girl in a thirty second television spot.  But the effort and skill that goes into the ads, and the keen cultural understanding that underpins them, cannot be denied.  Art museums and other high brow expressions are all well and good, but in the time it takes to walk through a gallery of painstaking creations thousands more advertisements will be beamed out across the land.   In an age when everything is recorded it is the banal and the catchy that will be most well remembered.  It is not a form we often honor, nor is it one of which we are particularly fond, but it is undeniably the way we most often express ourselves.  It’s stupid, but it’s worth remembering; and, thousands of years from now, it might be what they remember best.

Knowing When to Strike

“Oh yeah, and it won’t be long before they drive all of us poor underachieving people out of town with inflated real estate costs.” – Mr. Garrison
“Damn I hate them stupid richers!” – Skeeter

This past week was the first anniversary of the financial panic/meltdown/catastrophe that sent the already weak US economy into a free fall.  Consequently, there were lots of “one year later” type stories and articles trying to answer unanswerable questions like “what did it all mean?” and “what else could’ve been done?”.  These sorts of things are silly in the extreme for the simple reason that the crisis that peaked, but certainly did not begin, one year ago is still very far from over.  There may no longer be daily photos of distraught looking traders on the floors of the world’s exchanges, but to loosely paraphrase Bob Herbert: the economy is still Fucked with a capital F and anyone who tells you otherwise is myopic, rich or both.

The consensus seems to be that the GDP will turn itself to positive very soon but that employment will continue to suck hind tit for a long time to come.  That means that the economic pain that was a major factor in ushering Barack Obama to his current residence will continue.  There’s a lot of misery ahead for pretty much anyone not at the tippy top of the socio-economic ladder (which is to say most American voters).  Much of that misery has been, and will continue to be, blamed on financial institutions, bankers, Wall Street, etcetera.

One thing that’s been noticeably absent from Obama’s legislative agenda thus far has been an overhaul of the way high finance is regulated.  The fact that it hasn’t been seen as a priority (so far) has led to despair that there ever will be reform and to sentiments like the one expressed in yesterday’s Times, “For Obama, a Chance to Reform the Street Is Fading”.  Granting that there is ample reason for pessimism when it comes to the idea of our bought out parliament of whores standing up to their paymasters, this seems to ignore several obvious facts.

The first is that economic stability was not only an immediate necessity upon Obama’s taking office, it was also a necessary precursor to having the credibility to seriously challenge the biggest of Big Money.  An Obama presiding over an economy that is at least nominally growing is in a strong position to say something like, “Okay, now it’s time to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”  That’s a powerful sentiment and one that Obama and his people are capable of exploiting for political advantage.

The second important fact is that this is the most popular of populist issues.  Last year’s financial mess took money (real, tangible, I-could-spend-it-if-I-had-it money) from virtually every American.  This includes the wealthy and the poor, the employed and the unemployed.  It is as close to a universal issue as one is likely to find, and issues like that are very rare.

Third, that kind of popular pressure and outrage is most easily exploited in the shadow of a looming election.  In this political environment the last thing anyone in Congress wants to be seen as (in an election year!) is a friend to the financial wizards.  Those well dressed assholes cost voters money and the sting is still very fresh.  The political power of popular anger is magnified by the coming of an election.

Which is not to say that meaningful reform, defined as the kind that will prevent another corporate financial fiasco in the LTCM/Enron/AIG vein, is a sure thing.  The power of serious and entrenched money on Capitol Hill is not to be underestimated.  But the time to strike is not now, it’s later this year and into next year, when the Congressional calendar begins to get short.

Flavor of the month journalism might lead you to think that the window on reform is closing, but it’s foolish to declare that when it hasn’t opened fully yet.  Somewhere in the White House (possibly just rattling around in the back of Rahm Emmanuel’s skull) is a loose schedule of what they want to try before Congress closes shop next year.  Something with as much political potential as sticking it to the rich pricks who brought America to its knees is no doubt highlighted in seven colors with stars around it.  An anniversary is a decent time to run commemorative pieces, but the passage of a tumultuous year, one that also had a lot of other crises to deal with, doesn’t mean reform is dead or even yet in jeopardy.

Small, Welcome Beginnings

“Mr. Scorpio says productivity is up 2%, and it’s all because of my motivational techniques, like donuts, and the possibility of more donuts to come.” – Homer Simpson

It was during the sitzkrieg of the interminable presidential nominating contests, a mere two years ago, that Hillary Clinton mocked Barack Obama for being naive in wanting to talk with the world’s less popular nations.  Think about that, you had the lead candidate insinuating that one of her rivals was unfit for leadership for even deigning to speak with governments that didn’t test well with US focus groups.  And this was in the left party!  Bush the Younger’s America was a very strange place and we are going to have a hard time explaining it to our children.  But it’s over now and this weekend came word that President Obama is moving forward in talking with both of the remaining members of the Axis of Evil.*

North Korea is a dystopian nightmare so twisted and bizarre it can be difficult to suspend disbelief that it actually exists.  It seems to fit more naturally as the fever dream of some Hollywood scribe conjuring next summer’s blockbuster.  But it’s real and pretending otherwise won’t make it go away.  Whether or not North Korea has actually managed to test a small nuclear device (and count me as a skeptic) is almost irrelevant.  They’re still capable of enormous disruption and destruction, managing to kill six South Koreans this week alone.  On Friday the new and improved US government recognized that reality and said it’s willing to sit down and talk.

Iran is a more conventional country if only because it’s impossible to be weirder than North Korea.  Though it’s premature to completely write off the reformist’s protests after the cooked election, it appears that the conservative government is going to remain firmly in power and is moving forward.  Which means, distasteful as it is, the United States and the world at large must continue dealing with them.  In that vein, Friday also saw our government announce that it was willing to sit down and directly negotiate with the Islamic Republic about, among other things, its nuclear program.

It seems very likely that little will come of either of these negotiations, at least at first.  The only motivation of the North Korean government seems to be its continued survival and it’s unclear what, if anything, the outside world can promise it.  Iran is wedged between both of America’s wars but would very much like to normalize itself if for no other reason than economics.  American sanctions have been, shall we say, less than effective in toppling the regime or in slowing its nuclear enrichment program, but that doesn’t mean they are without cost for Tehran.  A genuine change in the relationship between America and Iran is a real, if far off, possibility.

Obviously nothing is assured just because some diplomats sit at a table and repeat banalities to each other for hours on end, but doing so means that there is at least a chance of some materially good outcomes.  Refusing to talk, on the other hand, merely guarantees bad ones.  So while diplomatic wheels grind slowly, these first steps are potentially very significant.  That these things can go forward with relatively little teevee attention is a testament to how far we’ve come.  Things are getting better.

*Say what you will about Bush the Younger, and I have, but his marketing people were linguistic masters.

Triple Threat Guy

“Okay, Lois’ list says clean the windows, clear the gutters, and wash the siding.  To most folks that’s three chores, to Peter Griffin and his big hose it’s one.” – Peter Griffin

There are three things coming to a boil soon, and though they may appear to be only superficially connected in reality each is in some way dependent on the other:

1.  Netanyahu Government Deathwatch: Day 162 – Our old friend Benjamin Netanyahu went ahead and authorized the construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank.  This is Netanyahu more or less openly biting his thumb at Barack Obama while the latter man has more pressing issues on his agenda.  But, like most of Netanyahu’s plans, it seems frightfully short sighted.  Obama is in a much more politically secure position than Netanyahu, he won’t always be busy with things like health care, and he can make Netanyahu’s political life quite difficult by simply ignoring him (Clinton did the same thing a decade ago).  On top of that Netanyahu’s cabinet is conflicted about the wisdom of further settlements beyond those just authorized.  When things like this go into the country’s main newspaper . . .

The foreign minister [Avigdor Lieberman] vowed that disagreements over a settlement freeze will not threaten the governing coalition, saying “the right will not topple the right,” adding that his right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party would stay in the coalition even if a freeze is enacted.

. . . you know it spells trouble.  The first stage is always denial.

Netanyahu is stuck between the same rock and hard place he was when he came to power in the spring.  The blank check the Bush Administration gave Israel is long gone, but the hard liners he depends upon for his majority are still around and they aren’t going to relax on settlements (or anything else) any time soon.  Keeping his coalition together will piss off the Obama Administration, which will eventually sour relations with America and cause his government to collapse.  Appeasing the Obama Administration will piss off the right wingers in his coalition and cause his government to collapse.  His hold on power is likely too tenuous to survive the trials and tribulations ahead, one way or the other.

2.  The Health Care Thing – It’s getting down to nut cutting time on health care, with tonight’s speech being the beginning of the end.  No one has any idea how it’s going to turn out at this point, the possibilities range from a bill that will please House Progressives to no bill at all or something so shamefully terrible that it’ll act like a millstone around the Democrats’ collective neck.  Who knows?

What we do know is that this is going to set the stage for pretty much all of the remaining legislation Obama wants to enact before Congress starts clamming up in anticipation of next year’s midterms.  If he gets his way on this one, and at this point the more “liberal” the bill the more it’s going to look like a victory for the White House (no matter what they say), it’s going to make things a lot easier.  The passage of genuine health care reform, after the Republicans threw everything but the kitchen sink at it, would be an undeniable signal of the Democrats’ newfound power.  It won’t stop everything and the kitchen sink being thrown at the energy bill, finance regulation, or anything else, but it will make all of those attacks seem considerably less threatening.

3.  The Afghan Election – Hamid Karzai appears to have cheated his brains out in order to avoid a runoff in his reelection campaign.  Now the UN, which has an important say in the matter, is ordering recounts of numerous highly suspicious ballots.  Much like on health care at this point no one knows how it will turn out, whether or not there will be a recount.  But Karzai’s legitimacy has already been badly tarnished; only a successful runoff can come close to restoring it in the eyes of the poobahs (press, government and otherwise) in Europe, the US and elsewhere.

Obama is committed in Afghanistan for at least the duration of his current term.  He campaigned on it and he’s already increased the number of American troops there.  Moreover, he’s walled himself in politically.  Afghanistan is how he answers his national security critics, and if you think the conservative opposition to health care was vitriolic, you ain’t seen nothing compared to what they’d do if they saw him moving out of Afghanistan.  Even if that action consisted of little more than the approach he’s taking in Iraq (a loose deadline and a gradual withdrawal) the opposition would make lies like the death panels (ludicrous and totally fictional but nevertheless persistent and pernicious) seem like nothing.  Obama needs Karzai (or possibly Abdullah if Karzai screws this up) to have at least a veneer of democratic legitimacy, otherwise he’s spending American lives to support an undemocratic regime in a rubble strewn badland on the far side of the globe.  That would be an extremely tough position to justify to his domestic supporters and to other world leaders.

As long as he gets America all the way out of Iraq before he’s up for re-election the American left will forgive him Afghanistan, regardless of Karzai’s legitimacy.  (It would of course help matters if he had a convincing plan to end the war in his second term.)  But that’s three years away and in the meantime every soldier and euro he can squeeze out of the other members of NATO makes his job easier.  And those soldiers and euros are going to become increasingly scarce if the Afghani election is perceived as a sham.

Add these three things together (Netanyahu’s intransigence, health care reform on the edge of a knife, and Afghanistan threatening to take a serious turn for the worse) and what do you get?  You get a very interesting autumn for Barack Obama, the United States and the world at large.  These problems, and people’s expectations about what can be done about them, were frozen in time for the last two lame duck years of Bush the Younger.  Nothing could be accomplished so long as the American government was paralyzed with incompetence.

But now they’re all in motion again, and they’re all connected.  Heath care reform will go a long way towards deciding Obama’s domestic popularity and Netanyahu has much more reason to fear a popular Obama than he does an unpopular Obama.  Afghanistan is an open wound and is going to remain so for years, but it can be mitigated (and the death toll along with it).  An Obama who can wring genuine concessions out of Israel (health care reform or not), who can materially and politically improve the condition of the Palestinians, is one who could also rally the world behind him on Afghanistan and give hostile Afghans a reason to bargain.  Similarly, a significant foreign policy triumph can return that new penny shine to Obama at home.  It all matters, and as this tragic decade winds down over the next few months we might begin to see the shape of things in the next one.

Um, . . . What He Said (Part 2)

“Yes, it reminds me of a joke I heard about upper middle class people.” – Judge Whitey

I’m aware that I did this a couple of weeks ago, but fuck it.  Once again someone else has expressed my thoughts far better than I can.  In this case it was an article in the most recent London Review of Books written by Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  Discussing a book titled “Who Cares about the White Working Class?” it is a clear eyed picture of where American politics seems to be heading:

More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics.

This is what “post racial”, if we ever get there, will actually mean.  The inexorable demographic trends that are giving America a darker complexion will eventually render the racism inherent in Southern Strategy style politics irrelevant.  But the war between those who Have and those who do not will continue.  It’s been with us since the Roman Republic and before and it isn’t ever going to end.

Inequality to some degree is never going to go away, of course, and nor should it.  But structural inequality can and should be minimized and the fight to do so is just beginning.  This is apparent in literally every political debate we have.  On something like health care it’s right out front because it’s people of lesser incomes, of all colors and genders, who will benefit the most from aggressive health care reform.  On something like global warming it’s less obvious but it’s still a fundamental aspect of the issue because rich people will inevitably be the least effected by rising temperatures, rising seas and all the rest.

The entire piece is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how politics is going to work once the culture wars (and much of the racism and sexism that underlie them) finish winding down.  So read the whole thing.  And the next time you wonder why something like the Lilly Ledbetter bill can sail through Congress when the equally sensible act of stimulating the economy causes a political war to break out, think of this:

Race, on the other hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and that I respect her culture.

Bingo.

Elaborate, High Class Idiocy

“You’re ignorant!  That’s the Wright Brothers’ plane, at Kitty Hawk in 1903, Charles Lindbergh flew it 15 miles on a thimble full of corn oil, single handedly won us the Civil War, it did.” – Abe “Grandpa” Simpson

Like its parent publication (The Washington Post), Slate has a pretty poor ratio of useful/good articles to worthless/bad articles.  On top of that, its editorial stance seems to be dedicated almost solely to expanding the furthest frontiers of snide.  It is usually best ignored, but I happened across this little nugget of arrogant stupidity:

The Days Are Getting Shorter. Time for Another World War II Memorial?
Why European leaders can’t resist celebrating the Sept. 1 anniversary—again.

Set aside the fact that this article was written by well documented idiot (via) Anne Applebaum and that ultimately it’s just a silly little article in a silly little on-line magazine.  It’s still indicative of two larger and more important ignorances that genuinely affect the way America interacts with the planet at large.  The first is our simple tendency to think the world revolves around us.  The most famous expression of this can be found in the “they hate us for our freedoms” canard, as though people on the other side of the world plot against us for motives as nebulous as those of a cartoon super-villain.  In this particular instance, there is this:

The British and the French will be there for the same reason—Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions and generally have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Top-level U.S. politicians will presumably be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously.

Last time I looked the US was treaty bound to defend much of central Europe, so we do indeed have reasons to take them “seriously”.  But it’s more ego stroking to ignore that fact and deride them as not worth our time.  And so, in keeping with the general policy of “snide”, that’s what goes into the article.

The second ignorance is the general historical ignorance that to some degree affects us all, but seems particularly prevalent here in the United States for the simple reason that we were spared most of the 20th century’s horrors.  The combined body count of December 7th, 1941 and September 11th, 2001 amounts to little more than a rounding error when compared with the wholesale slaughter on the Nazi-Soviet front, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Indian Partition, the Khmer Rouge regime, the Rwandan Genocide or a dozen other tragedies.  (And all those things happened after World War II started, the list could get a lot longer if you wanted to include things like the Japanese invasion of China, the Great Depression (which the United States weathered comparatively well) and, of course, World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic.)  There’s a reason Europeans commemorate World War II a lot; it, more than any other event, shaped modern Europe and anyone with half an education ought to know that.

The article in question dimly acknowledges this, but the tone of it, in everything from the headline to the conclusion, is one of almost exasperated pedantry.  “Okay, you silly Europeans”, it seems to say, “We’ll let you keep commemorating this but you really should let it go.”  That rather shallow and myopic point of view stems directly from an extremely thin and very American-centric reading of the 20th century.  Even asking the question, “What’s with all the World War II memorials?” (to say nothing of wasting 800 odd words actually answering it), betrays a deep historical ignorance.

American centric worldview?  Check.  Extremely narrow historical understanding?  Check.  Snide tone?  Check mate.  None of these are good things, however.

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