My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
David Brooks' essay in the New York Times, today, is the best I've seen about the Bush Administration, the war, and politics, generally, in a long time.
"The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.
The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.
The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.
But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.
Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact."
Best line I've read in a long time. And the heart of what is most true about liberal and American democracy today or ever.
More true than even Lord Acton or George Orwell.
And probably the most important lesson we can take for this whole godforesaken political period. And maybe from any period.
Glad someone else said it and not me. Thanks David.
Given the dissing of Reagan's greatest legacy - his diplomacy with the Soviet Union and his persuading Mikhail Gorbachev of the failures of Communism - I thought this was an appropriate time for this.
This isn't about Barack Obama, a man I've less likely to vote for, today, than I first encountered him. This is about smart policy.
If you need any more evidence of the depth of ignorance and denial that government officials often have about their efforts, this article is quite the exhibit.
It's passages like this one that make me wonder if government officials are capable of rational thought, at all, sometimes:
"Western nations have told Iran that they could cut off any new help to Iran's anti-drug units unless the Islamic regime halts uranium enrichment, which Washington and its allies worry could be used to develop nuclear arms.
The warning was a small but potentially significant item tucked amid an array of trade and economic incentives seeking to sway Iranian leaders to strike a deal. Iran has not formally responded to the package, presented June 14 by the five permanent United Nations Security Council members plus Germany.
But Iran has repeatedly said it will not back off uranium enrichment — pushing the European Union to consider wider sanctions and placing the little-known drug trafficking fight in jeopardy.
It's the type of pressure that strikes the United Nations as counter-productive.
A 'heroin tsunami' could hit Europe if the drug interdiction by Iran is weakened, warned Antonio Maria Costa, the director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
'We should definitely assist Iran in this respect,' he said.
Roberto Arbitrio, head of the U.N. drugs and crime office in Iran, said the war on drugs should be viewed as 'a non-political area of mutual interest.'"
And it's not just that anyone familiar with drug culture, at all, knows just how fruitless and easily circumvented this drug war is. And anyone who watches the news and pays attention to the broader culture, for any substantial period of time, should be aware of that fact, at this point.
All of this is done to sanction Iran's development of nuclear weapons, an effort which has failed for 5 years straight right in front of the eyes of the entire world and which there is, in fact, very serious issues to be discussed and debated, namely how Iranians will provide for self-defense against many enemies that they have much reason to believe might attack them, namely Israel and the United States.
This is how repressive forces perpetually rationalize themselves. They identify an enemy more dangerous, often, but not always, more dangerous as a consequence of repressive policies - and the drug war is most certainly one of those situations; the violence associated with drugs is undoubtedly, to my mind, driven substantially by its illegality, as with alcohol prohibition, the other most murderous and violent period in 20th century American history (1933, the height of alcohol prohibition, and the late 1980's and early 1990's, with the advent of new drug laws and the height of the drug war, are the two highest points of homocide in American history) and they rationalize repression as a function of danger that, often, they have created or exaccerbated. The repressive regimes of the Middle East and Arab states rationalize in such ways, regimes like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; as do many regimes in Africa, like Zimbabwe, Sudan, Algeria, Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Congo; those in Southeast Asia, like North Korea, Myanmar, China, Pakistan, and Thailand; nations of Central and South America, including Cuba, Columbia, Bolivia, and Venezuela; and still too often in the liberal democracies and illiberal governments of the West, especially Russia, Serbia, and Turkey, but really all of the liberal democracies and illiberal and undemocratic governments of the world, including the United States, Israel, Great Britain, France, Germany, Mexico, and most of the liberal and illiberal governments of the world. This, despite the fact that their repression often worsens the problems that repression was rationalized for, in the first place, instead of improving them.
The greatest irony in this example being that the Taliban were, likely, the most cyncial purveyors of this lie, both claiming to have wiped out drug production under their reign through a ban on drug cultivation and brutal reign, a ban that has subsequently and dramatically failed with a vengeance, and who profited then and now from such production and the boon to profits that drug prohibition has always proved to be.
This is how it has been since the beginning of humanity and civilization, and it was this propensity that necessitated the efforts of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstencraft, Alexis DeToqueville, John Stuart Mill, and their intellectual brethren, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lord Acton, George Orwell, and the like, to criticize, reform, and/or rebel and revolt against this kind of repression, and promote freedoms and liberal democratic values and institutions that most citizens of liberal democracies take for granted, today, and which provide hope to many citizens of illiberal and undemocratic nations, even as they, too, often fear that the problems of humanity are caused by too much freedom rather than too much repression, despite the ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
Fear has always been the great deterrent and obstacle to freedom. It is what drives terrorists of all stripes. It is what motivates dictators and despots of all sorts. It is what leads democratic leaders, since the advent of liberty and democracy, to rationalize almost all of their most sordid, ugly, and illiberal legacies.
It is fear and not reason that drives this unholy drug war, just as it has been fear and not reason that had driven the entirety of our illiberal and undemocratic past.
And the idea that fear and not reason will triumph today where it has failed for the entire course of humanity to resolve our most serious concerns, problems, and conflicts is the most damned foolish notion that humanity has ever conceived.
And the idea that we would celebrate that damned foolish notion at the beginning of the 21st century, after a century that witnessed the clearest and most undeniable vindication for the causes of freedom and democracy of any century to date, is the senseless, absurd, stubborn, and dimwitted death throes of that timid, fearful, and otherwise cowardly and irrational concept.
It is not strength and never has been. It is and always has been cowardice. It is yellow-bellied. And it is no way to lead a life or anyone else, for that matter. Cowardice demands respect when it cannot earn it. It compels when it cannot persuade. It bullies and intimidates when it cannot summon real strength or virtue.
Real courage respects reason and freedom and does not turn to force except when violence warrants it.
Real courage only uses force when violence and aggression are used against the free and reasoned will of those involved, including when reason and free will leads people to poor conclusions or outcomes, unless it is literally and clearly not possible for a person to reason adequately of their own accord, and it is clear that no other route is possible or viable. And when aggression or containment are needed, because no other routes that respect liberty are possible, courage, reason, and humanity call for the least possible necessary aggression or containment to be used. And no matter how I or you qualify it, those who seek to rationalize repression and violence will always do so, as long as it confirms their own stubborn and righteous notions of controlling and harming their neighbors for their own good. They can be persuaded different. But, ultimately, as always, each individual and independent conscience will decide this question, in the end.
Real courage is not premised on fear. Real courage is premised on strength and confidence, compassion and humanity, and a thoughtful and freely chosen commitment to virtue and decency. Everything else is counterfeit. Always has been. And hence the march of freedom and progress over the course of history.
Real courage and respect is not premised on fear. Fear is the opposite of respect and courage. Honest respect does not require fear. And genuine courage operates despite fear, not because of it.
What 21st century liberal democracies and illiberal and undemocratic cultures need, what all of humanity needs at the turn of this century, is a commitment to real courage and independence of thought and judgment, which respects freedom and democratic values and the free and independent conscience and virtue that underpin them. Real courage does not manipulate or otherwise show contempt and disrespect for those values and the consciences of others. It shows genuine compassion and respect for the lives, consciences, and freedoms of others.
Manipulation is the tool of the weak. It is not the regular instrument of governance or self-governance of the strong. Strong people engage others with respect, love, concern, decency, thought, engagement, and dignity, as a rule. Those of honest strength do not need to manipulate others, except in the rarest of occassions, and even then it should be presumed against, as much as possible.
That exception will always be used by the forces of violence and repression to rationalize their foolish and ugly activities. Always.
And it will be effective only until free and democratic peoples wisen up and take freedom, democracy, and respect for the conscience that underpins them, seriously.
Real courage does not prey upon the ignorance and fear of others. Real courage enlightens and honestly faces challenges with a genuine concern for others and for an honest assessment of the life as it is, not (only) as we might wish it to be.
And is that kind of courage that I respect and have always respected in the world.
And this policy, like so much policy today, is not a function of that kind of courage. It is a function of power and the obsession with having and keeping it, and the depth of ignorance and denial that operate at its behest. It is Lord Acton wondering aloud why he said anything on the subject of politics at all. It is John Stuart Mill wondering if he should have remained with the British East India Company. It is George Orwell wondering why he did not go into investment or write pulp novels for big profit.
It is the utter failure of those in power to come to terms with the limits of their enterprise. And the foolish ventures that they will engage in to reinforce that failure of recognition.
Real courage explores and faces honestly facts of life that are counterintuitive and challenge us to reason beyond our biases of confirmation and immediate experience.
Real courage does not settle for ignorance or denial or stubborn defenses against even more stubborn facts.
Real courage faces life honestly.
And this policy squarely does not.
And that gap is the dilemma to be resolved for the cause of genuine freedom, democracy, and progress in the 21st century.
