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kirisutogomenI'm very sorry that 100,000+ people died and 5 million more have had their lives wrecked by the earthquake and tsunamis. It's good to see and hear all the charitable impulses at work.
However, the first thing that crosses my mind is to wonder why we're falling over ourselves to help victims of a natural disaster, but we do so little to help those whose lives are destroyed by their fellow humans. With a tsunami, all we can do is try to help the survivors. With human cruelty, we could even stop it before it starts, and failing that, we could help the victims just as well as we're doing now for the tsunami victims.
The Indonesian province of Aceh is one of the hardest hit areas, but hardly anyone had heard of it before, even though at least as many have been deliberately slaughtered in Aceh as have been killed by the tsunami.
Oh well.
However, the first thing that crosses my mind is to wonder why we're falling over ourselves to help victims of a natural disaster, but we do so little to help those whose lives are destroyed by their fellow humans. With a tsunami, all we can do is try to help the survivors. With human cruelty, we could even stop it before it starts, and failing that, we could help the victims just as well as we're doing now for the tsunami victims.
The Indonesian province of Aceh is one of the hardest hit areas, but hardly anyone had heard of it before, even though at least as many have been deliberately slaughtered in Aceh as have been killed by the tsunami.
Oh well.
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Aceh
Date: 2005-01-06 05:38 pm (UTC)Re: Aceh
Date: 2005-01-06 09:04 pm (UTC)I wonder if some of the same might be happening with the Tamil Tigers or those terrorists who were hanging out in that extreme southern bit of Thailand? Maybe only Aceh meets the minimum threshold of carnage before it works.
I was also wondering today about Bangladesh; they're constantly getting hit by massive destructive flooding, which has occasionally been as deadly as this earthquake was, but it's never been big front-page stuff.
Bangledesh
Date: 2005-01-06 09:24 pm (UTC)As fo the the Tamil Tigers, I think they'd already started making some motions toward peace in the past couple years (at least, there's been a cease fire since 2002). Dunno if this will help that along or not.
re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-07 06:20 am (UTC)The wildcard in that, of course, would be inspired leadership. Too bad we don't have any.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-07 05:07 pm (UTC)The problem is that his reach exceeds his grasp. He has magnificent ultimate objectives, but every time it looks like things might go well, he shoots himself in the foot (which seems to have no nerve endings).
We try to promote justice and human rights, and end up holding hundreds of prisoners without trial or access to lawyers. We invade Iraq (completely justified), and completely screw the pooch on the occupation. We torture prisoners and try to pretend it was just a couple of Bad Lieutenants. We mindlessly support Israel regardless of what they do, and are confused when it destroys our credibility in the Arab world.
We've got a surfeit of inspiration and a shortage of competence. I think you were exactly right when you pointed out the opportunity (http://www.livejournal.com/users/harrock/7623.html) this tsunami provided us, and that we're likely to fuck it up.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-07 07:28 pm (UTC)There's the inspiration of "the world would be great if we could do this thing".
And then there's the inspiration of "I'm willing to do the *hard* things necessary to do this thing right. All of them."
Hm. I think I not only described the difference between what we have and what I want for political leadership, but also the difference between college and professional football. Scary.
I think you're talking about the latter when you talk of competence. I am overusing the word "inspiration", mostly because in this context, I think that competence involves solving problems in an imaginative/creative way ("inspired"), instead of the obvious/comfortable way. See the obstacles and overcome them, don't just wish them away.
That's what we're doing with every obstacle, every flaw, every screwup--trying to wish it away. Wish that the situation was simpler, then plan accordingly.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-07 08:06 pm (UTC)I don't think invading Iraq was the easy thing to do. The easy thing would have been to keep our allies happy, and not rock the boat. Continue with the policy of the previous 12 years -- try to contain with bases in Saudi Arabia, sort-of enforce the no-fly zone, maintain the pretense of sanctions, etc.
Invading Afghanistan was not the easy way out, either. Clinton just fired some Tomahawks so that he could claim to be taking action. We could have the same, and no one would have accused a Republican of being soft on terrorism.
I believe that our mistakes are of a quite different and almost opposite nature; we've been willing to make the hard decisions, but grossly underestimated how hard our answer really is. We've overhauled the federal government more thoroughly than any other reorg since 1948; bold, but we didn't prepare sufficiently for the chaos. We sent too few soldiers on our ambitious mission to Iraq, underestimating how ambitious it really was.
I'd say that we're willing to do the hard things necessary, but that we've grievously failed in accurately gauging just how hard and just how many these tasks are. We're not trying to wish away the obstacles.
I do agree that we've been trying to wish away the flaws and screwups. In fact, we've done one step worse -- we've been pretending they didn't happen. We're still stupidly claiming that our Gitmo camps are the appropriate way to promote justice and democracy. We tried to bury Abu Ghraib, instead of display the humility that is the only sane response, and then demonstrate our understanding of its seriousness.
When have you ever known a government to be imaginative or creative?
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-10 06:11 pm (UTC)I have seen a few instances of imagination and creativity on the part of governments. Gorbachev managing a quasi-peaceful liquidation of the Communist regime was one. The institution of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was another.
Regarding hard things and easy things...
We went into Iraq in a frenzy of self-delusion about the danger posed by the ex-regime, and in a frenzy of self-delusion about how much work it would be to fix afterward. Why?
In retrospect, it's pretty obvious. A thing that Americans across the political spectrum are generally likely to agree on is that it's OK to smack people who have attacked us. The farther you got from 9/11, the harder it was to stretch this to cover Iraq. This is why, in so many major ways, we were inadequately prepared to do the job. We had to rush because the clock of public opinion was running down.
When you have dodgy intelligence in front of you, saying that Saddam Hussein carries nukes in his wallet, and has lunch with Osama bin Laden every day, and personally printed the airline tickets of the 9/11 hijackers, and you know that the fickle American public is in danger of going wobbly on you if you don't move soon, and you don't actually know much about the practicalities of war and international politics, hence do not really know that half of the plan before you is outright fantasy, then yes, sir, I do say that pushing the button on the Iraq was psychologically easier than holding out for more information and more preparation.
It is also psychologically easy to say that smacking people who have attacked us is our right, but that nation-building is not our problem. Millions for defense and not one cent for tribute, yada yada. A fine campaign speech, comfort-food for the soul of a righteous and industrious people...but absolute crap, strategically speaking.
So, sure, not every *objective* is the easiest objective available. You can construct a consistent and plausible long-term strategy in which invading Iraq was the right thing to do. But I don't think that we're following any such strategy. I think we're lurching through a period of more aggressive foreign policy, fueled by peoples' perceptions of 9/11, and the result is that the top few countries on our hit list will be invaded or leaned hard on until we get tired of it and feel less threatened.
Those countries may be on the hit list for good reasons, or bad. I'm still dumbfounded that anyone thought it was a good idea to tell Iran that it was so high on the hit list. Iraq's reasons were as good as any. In my mind, the least arguable reason was that, in 1991, a lot of people in Iraq put their faith in us and we screwed them over.
But frankly, given the job we've done, I think they could have waited a couple of years for us to get our act together.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-11 04:23 pm (UTC)The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a perfect answer, though. My mother recommends Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa by Antjie Krog.
I agree that we were in a "frenzy of self-delusion" about how much work the occupation would be. I do not agree that we were completely detached from reality regarding the threat posed by Saddam's regime.
I believe the invasion was the right thing to do, and that it would have been no less right without 9/11. But the subject here is the psychology of the Bush Administration, not what was actually the correct thing to do.
My father recommends America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, who were both Clinton policy wonks. Dad tells me that
We didn't need to invade Iraq to satisfy popular bloodlust. The first thing we did was invade Afghanistan, which was smacking the people who attacked us. The American people would have considered that sufficient vengeance. That's why I say that invading Iraq was not the easy way.
I'm not comparing it with holding out for more information and more preparation. If you do, as you do, you're right. Taking advantage of the popular desire for smackage was opportunistic at best. Our interpretation of some dodgy intelligence was unforgivably skewed.
I'm comparing it with doing the same thing we'd been doing for twelve years. That would have been the easy way. We knew that the invasion was politically risky, and we chose the road less travelled.
Our self-delusion regarding the difficulty of nation-building should be separated from our assignment of priority. The neocons wholeheartedly believe in nation-building.
I also want to draw the contrast between being willing to take the difficult decisions, and having a coherent long-term strategy. We get an A- on the former test, and are getting a C+ on the latter.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-12 11:16 pm (UTC)Neocons wholeheartedly believe in nation-building? Was I just not paying enough attention in 2001? I could swear that I heard Republicans talking about how nation-building was junk, up to and past the time when we had taken the decision to clear away the wreckage of the Afghan state and replace it with we knew not what. It's possible that I was listening to a narrow set of sound bites.
We've beaten our main point of contention fairly to death, and I'll concede that your taxonomy of hard decisions vs. strategic coherence makes sense. And strategic coherence is hard, hard, hard, so if we grade on a curve, I'll refrain from giving our leadership an F for that part. But I also think that there are parts of the test (environment, anyone?) that we're essentially leaving blank, and we are going to pay for that.
Trying to correct for the fact that I was paying less attention as we go farther back, my impression is that the only time in recent history that we've had competent leadership in foreign policy was in George the Elder's administration. Clinton's people certainly were junk when it came to confrontations of any kind.
Not really about disasters any more
Date: 2005-01-13 03:21 pm (UTC)Republicans in general were quite uninterested in foreign policy in 2000 and 2001. The neocons only started to gain influence after 9/11. The Republican mainstream was somewhat isolationist, which explains why we have indeed left the environment section blank. It's the neocon faction that believes in actively prosletyzing for capitalism and democracy. Now that we've screwed the pooch in Iraq, their star is no longer ascendant.
I think that by our demanding standards, Bush 41 wasn't too coherent either. He just happened to have the watch when Communism collapsed. I'd go back one more, and say that the first term of the Reagan administration was the last with a plan of any kind.
Reagan administration
Date: 2005-01-14 03:28 pm (UTC)Once in the Soviet Union, computers and software, working together, ran the pipeline beautifully — for a while. But that tranquility was deceptive. Buried in the stolen Canadian goods — the software operating this whole new pipeline system — was a Trojan horse. In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard-currency earnings from the West and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds.
The result was the most monumental nonnuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was a detonation of a small nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at 3 kilotons, but he was puzzled by the silence of the Vela satellites. They had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another 20 years to tell me why.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-13 05:16 pm (UTC)Encouraging the Shia to launch an uprising immediately after the first Iraq war, then doing nothing as they were slaughtered, was IMAO inexcusable.
The trouble with the neo-cons and nation-building is that they think it happens automagically; that liberal (in the classical sense of the word) republics are a natural and stable arrangement that will naturally arise once the impediments of the existing government are removed.
Re: Disasters
Date: 2005-01-07 07:33 pm (UTC)