Disasters

[kirisutogomen]

I'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.

Comments

Re: Disasters

[harrock.livejournal.com]

I'll address the last question first...

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

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Gorbachev was a clumsy incompetent. He had no such goal. He was hoping to emulate Deng Xiaoping, pulling the economy out of the crapper without losing power.

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

1. Foreign policy was very low on the agenda until after 9/11
   
2. Paul Wolfowitz was obsessed with Iraq and believed Saddam to be behind every bad thing in the world.
   
3. 9/11 put foreign policy at the top of the agenda.
   
4. This gave Wolfowitz the chance to promote the invasion of Iraq.
   

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

[harrock.livejournal.com]

I'll cut bait on Gorbachev, and intend to take a shot at the books you've mentioned. Happen to have copies I can borrow?

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

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Sorry, no copies. I get books out of my friendly local public library these days. I don't even have time to read them, so I foist them off on my parents.

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

[treptoplax.livejournal.com]

Speaking of creativity and imagination from a government:


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

[treptoplax.livejournal.com]

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.

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.