The best reason to resist is that I will end up writing about politics. Much better to write about cherry tree as metaphor for life.
Ooh, instant haiku!
bowed under his fruitsBut politics encompass the process that makes our world. My work-life is all about processes and making things. And I care about the world, so I can't help but care about politics.
pondering his earthly home
burdened yet grateful
Actually, I don't care about politics much at all. What I care about are the things people will have to do once the politicians become powerful enough to decide what that will be. Only that feeds back into caring to notice the politicians.
So I guess I'll just say this. There's a lot of talk these days on the following theme:
End the War. Bring the Troops Home.Folks, look closer. Those two statements are mutually exclusive. You get one, or the other, or neither. You simply cannot get both.
Broadly speaking, the Republicans are trying for one and the Democrats are trying for the other. One is very difficult, might be impossible. The other is fairly easy, if enough people agree to it, but some believe the consequences long-run will be horrific.
It's all about consequences. Causes and effect. I'm all about cause and effect. Something to do with years of stuffy classrooms, calculus problems, vector diagrams, systems control theory ... and twenty years later discovering the principle of unintended consequences holds true even in such prosaic fields as electronics manufacturing (example summary: they are outlawing the use of lead-based solder so as to stop polluting the world with the lead from electronics manufacturing, only now that may result in worse pollution from, among other things, increases in zinc mining).
Point? We all want health and freedom for everyone. If for no other reason, because that maximizes the same for us. Lots of people have opinions on how to achieve it. They are impassioned by the urgency to avoid the other side's unintended consequences. I would only ask that we not get caught up in political slogans. "End the War, Bring the Troops Home" is not logically true if the terms are conjoined with an AND function. If they are disjoined (OR) or conjoined and inverted (NAND), then ... maybe.
Dig that, choose carefully -- and if the blackbirds leave us any cherries, come on by for a bowlful. Got fresh eggs too.
Oh, and if you still want politics, write yer congresscritter to:
Save chocolate!
Save internet radio!
15 comments:
Yeah, everything seems bad. We can't go back and "undo" Iraq, and we can't know for sure the outcome of a particular choice, though of course some believe that they do know. And if you were right once with a guess, then everyone should listen to you, hey. Well, why not? Seems to me that the peeps who correctly predicted this mess are worth a listen now, even if their prediction was merely coinkydink. Obviously the other side doesn't have a clue. Throw more troops in! Uh, why? To WIN!!! But they can't even define what that means. Having a guy in there who supports Iran? That's winning? Bah.
Well, it's a comfort to you rightards that you can use logic on a bumper sticker. Pity it failed you when thinking about beginning the war in the first place.
But of course *a* war will end if you bring the troops home. The war of America vs the Iraqi people will be over. The one that the Iraqis are having among themselves will continue.
And dude, give it up, will you? It is not possible for the US to end that latter war. It's not a failure of will, just a matter of its not being amenable to being stopped.
It's the bumper sticker logic I'm against. It doesn't hold up, and even you acknowledge the violence won't end, though you do seem to like the bumper sticker logic that maintains the war is between America and the Iraqi people.
not being amenable to being stopped
An excuse to give up can be comforting in its way. But the trust that Sunni and Shia need to build up between them can be built, if we do not excuse ourselves too swiftly. Unfortunately, while America has her historical cycles, we are not in one that will allow for patience or resolve. Sucks but true. I'm afraid things are going to have to get a lot worse before the corner is ready to be turned.
"congresscritter" :-)
For every "expert" that says pulling out will increase the violence, there is another "expert" that says it's our presence that continues the violence. It's hard to know what's right, since no one can see the future, so many people will see nothing negative about us no longer adding to the mess. It might be easier to know what to do if the motivation for being there were finally made clear after all the lies. I know the reason isn't WMDs, and it isn't Sadaam's "partnership" with Al Queda (which never existed). We've long been in bed with dictatorships, so I don't buy that "spreading democracy to help the oppressed" bullshit. Now I hear that the war is being fought for women's rights, which would be funny if people weren't dying. How can we end this mess CORRECTLY when no one can tell us honestly what the goal is, or why we're even in it?
The motivation's always been clear to me: Prevent a situation in which unaccountable dictatorships have control of the global oil-based economy (and while we're at it, see about establishing some sort of democracy rather than just another dictator). The lies and half-truths were to make it possible politically. The implementation's been fucked up, so here we are.
I've heard none of the reasons you cite as actual causae belli. They are points people like to raise. Desperately, sometimes. Of course, I pay little attention to the informational entertainment media (fka network news) so I don't know the justification du jour.
But the goal is still very clear: Establish security, and trust, and a government that is strong enough to be responsive to the Iraqi people and that they don't have to be cynical about. We've failed because we haven't really tried. The so-called surge was a nice idea, but too little to late, and a majority of congress is now more interested in being on the least-losing side of domestic political history, than on doing the right thing for our longer-range security.
So now people are saying, well, that didn't work, let's try something else, and that something else is pull out. Kind of like saying, well, the stress of marriage has turned my wife into an abusive drunk, so I'm divorcing her. No, we went in, and we failed to prevent the sectarian strife that had been simmering all the time from busting out, and so we absolutely owe them a serious effort to crack down on the opportunists and help Sunni and Shia work together again for the sake of their country. I simply cannot respect a position that says Arab lives don't matter and that our troops should just be pulled out of harm's way.
(The rider to this, of course, is that for our own sake we should get off the oil as soon as possible. Our high-flying economy depends on cheap, convertible, transportable energy, so we're stuck on oil. But if by some means or other we could change that -- obviously without dragging our economy down meanwhile -- there'd be rather less at stake in the oil-bearing regions.)
"and a majority of congress is now more interested in being on the least-losing side of domestic political history, than on doing the right thing for our longer-range security."
Iraq never had anything to do with our security. If it does now that only demonstrates the incompetence of this administration.If anyone in government had been concerned with our security, they'd have started checking freight and tightened up the borders. We've also seen that "unaccountable dictatorships" can't do nearly as much damage as an "unaccountable president" can.
As for your parenthetical thought, I find it ironic that we're listening to the White House call Carter "irrelevant" when we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now if we'd listened to him in the 70s when he said we have to get off the foreign oil dependency. Instead, we elected a Republican who used a barrel of crude on his hair every day. Now, we'd still rather kill people while pretending to help them than tighten our belts on oil consumption.
Obviously you (and many others) disagree, but my view of Iraq wrt our security was not about Iraq per se, but about the political trends in the region and how much of a key Iraq was to directing them. Properly redirected, Iraq could be a key towards peace and prosperity. Left alone, its a piece in the jumble that leads to major war (resource-driven and global, possibly not involving Iraq itself).
But apparently the U.S. is not in one of the historical cycles in which it can be effective overseas, so I guess we'll get WW3 on schedule after all.
I don't get blaming Bush for not tightening the borders, since we have no way to know any other president would or could have done better.
wouldn't be in the mess we're in now if we'd listened to him in the 70s
I don't know anything about current arguments between Carter and the White House but so far as legacy, it was Carter's fresh new approach that encouraged the USSR to invade Afghanistan, and it was he who midwifed the Iranian revolution, so I think it's a bit premature to assume he won't be regarded as worse than GW.
I'm all for tightening our belts, but I know of no way to do it except through the effects of much higher prices. The oil producers are always going to set prices such as to maximize profits yet not drive away the customer. Therefore, short of some sort of fascist decree that forbids buying foreign oil, we will not tighten our belts enough, and GWB is not at all to blame for that, nor is any other president. What would Gore have done? Yeah, the guy that criticized Bush for not opening up the strategic oil reserve.
"I don't get blaming Bush for not tightening the borders, since we have no way to know any other president would or could have done better."
I don't get what other presidents have to do with it. The Bush administration is in power NOW, and over the last 6 years when we've needed tighter security. It's the admin that says "Trust us on security" and then does nothing to deserve that trust. It's also the same admin hat says that if we elect Democrats, we'll be attacked again, a statement designed to make people think that something is actually being done that the Democrats won't do. So I'd say putting the onus on this administration is fair.
As far as the belt-tightening, I wasn't putting that on the president at all. When I said "we" I meant the American people.
So are you saying that trumping up fake excuses for a war of choice was a strategy to PREVENT WWIII?
I know it sounds crazy and probably is but if you think about what leaving well enough alone could lead to, with the U.S. going into eclipse regionally and Iran etc. ascendant, and all the pre-invasion warnings about Neville Chamberlain-style peace in our time, and the growing economies of China and India needing more oil while Japan and the U.S. and Europe need to prevent economic shrinkage ... Throw in a change of political outlook here or there, driven by growing unemployment or what have you, and that left to their own devices regimes such as Saddam's tend to pursue advanced weapons technologies (the sanctions lull having a limited practical lifespan), and the fact that the big wars, however justified, are always about access to resources, then the alternatives to us mucking around look potentially much worse, at least to me.
I don't know. WW2, for ex, could so easily have been lost, or even the Cold War, I just can't go for complacency, even though to some points of view I probably look like a crackpot, whatever. No skin off my nose if Bush etc. take a fall for it meanwhile.
I agree that it is very simplistic to simply say, "Bring the troops home." It was also very simplistic to expect our invasion of Iraq to spawn a secular democracy there, which is what many neocons and folks who listen to them thought would happen.
I don't say "We should have left well enough alone" in Iraq. I say, "We should have left bad enough alone." America does not understand Middle Easterners, and we should be very careful about expecting our intervention, particularly with the military, to help. Now that we have meddled, it would be nice if we could guide the different sects and factions toward a peaceful solution, but I really don't think we can help. I'm not sure the factions want a peaceful solution -- they don't trust each other enough. And it's not just Sunni vs. Shiite. There are so many factions, it seems to me to be far more complicated than, for instance, guiding Israel and Egypt toward a peaceful solution. Anyway, would any of the factions trust us now to help?
So if we stay, what will we do? I don't know what. I also know it will be terrible when we leave. But eventually, we will leave . . . now or later. Does anyone see any good coming of our staying?
That's a point that isn't brought up often enough..... the fact that we don't understand them or their society. That makes our hubris even worse, that we feel that it is our right to meddle in other societies with the idea that we'll re-make them in our image because everyone wants to be just like us, and will react just like us in any given situation.
You're forgetting what really happened. We didn't go in to make them be like us. We went in because the dysfunction and the violence was now getting exported to our shores, and the risk of someone adding nuclear weapons to the mix was (sold as being) too great to accept; and it appeared that our security, in the coming age of commodity WMDs, depended on those societies somehow becoming more constructive and less prone to inflicting their pathologies on the rest of us. Thus the democracy angle, which needn't be anything like ours, so long as it works for them.
Whether or not it does any good for us to stay there -- whether or not it was justifiable to go there in the first place -- we mustn't forget that leaving bad enough alone only risks more 9/11s, and as technology advances, those 9/11s get rather worse. What to do? I don't know. But let's not pretend that doing something about it is nothing more than hubris on our part.
Yes, I understand that we are actually threatened to some degree by enemies in the Middle East. But in the wake of our invasion of Iraq, that country has become one of the biggest incubators of terrorism the world has known. (Maybe not the very biggest.) Just in the past few days, the Saudi minister of the Interior said that the lax security in Iraq has created a fertile ground for terrorists and a great danger to the region.
And I think that anyone who understood that region before we invaded is not surprised by what has happened. Journalist George Packer published an article in the NYTimes BEFORE our invasion called "Dreaming of Democracy" in which several experts on democracy said that the ingredients for democracy do not exist in Iraq, that politics would take the form of vigilantism if we did not establish strong security right away. Also, in his archives from BEFORE the invasion, Juan Cole at www.juancole.com predicted much of what is happening now. Cole also never minced words about the depravity of Saddam too -- he definitely understands how awful that regime was.
And according to George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate," in the meeting with Bush and Cheney where Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya said that we would be greeted as liberators, there were two other Iraqi exiles (Mukhlis and Rahim) who issued warnings: if we did not garner respect within two months of invading, we would have another Mogadishu on our hands. That if we disbanded the army, we would be viewed as occupiers, not liberators. That tribal loyalties were very important to Iraqis. That none of the exiles that the Bush administration was listening to had been in Iraq for decades, so none of them really knew their people that well any more.
But Cheney chose to listen only to Makiya, and it was his words that Cheney repeated to Tim Russert later and became the famous "greeted as liberators" statement.
From what I see, the warnings were clear to anyone who would listen. Also, the intelligence about WMD's was insubstantial, though also, it could not be substantiated that there were not WMD's.
Given the uncertainty of the threat of Iraq, and the warnings about what would happen if we were to invade, I am very surprised that anyone, conservative minds especially, thought the risk was worthwhile -- or that the risk without substantial planning for post-war reconstruction and many more troops was worthwhile.
So no, I'm not convinced that our invasion was a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. Honestly, it does seem to be the pursuit of a neocon dream which had been written about long before 9/11, in The Weekly Standard and at the Project for a New American Century, to name just two places. Go back and read old William Kristol/Robert Kagan articles for a good laugh about how Shiites would establish a democracy on their own if we liberated them.
And to those who believe that war in general is an effective tool, I say, remember that it was by supporting Saddam Hussein that we kept Iran weak in the '80's during the Iran/Iraq war. Who would not expect the removal of Saddam to bring the most benefit to Iran?
So now we've got a new incubator of terrorism that a Saudi official openly acknowledges as a threat to the region; we've got Iran rattling its saber; we have done nothing in the Iraq war to make ourselves safer.
And again, I say, none of this should be a surprise to anyone who understood the region. We took a huge chance. I say that the results are commensurate with our government's understanding of Iraq, and its planning for the war.
"You're forgetting what really happened. "
No, I'm not.
"We didn't go in to make them be like us."
I didn't say we did. I said the misconception that they would behave just like us in the same situation is what we based our tactics on, and is the main reason we're in the mess we are in. Now we have war supporters trying to deny that the war was about WMDs or that Sadaam/Osama connection that was laughably wrong, they want to say that it was about spreading democracy, as if we have a right to decide what system of government everyone else in the world should have, and as if America took a consistent stand AGAINST dictatorships, which we certainly do not. They say that we were doing them a favor. These people do not understand those people at all, which is why this little project of ours is failing miserably, and is the hubris of which I spoke.
" We went in because the dysfunction and the violence was now getting exported to our shores, and the risk of someone adding nuclear weapons to the mix was (sold as being) too great to accept"
I never for one minute believed that they had them. Most people did because they felt good believing what they wanted to believe. They wanted to think that this could be solved by taking over another country, instead of going after Al-Queda in the first place, because that is EASIER. And the people who screwed this up from the very beginning are the same ones you're counting on to fix it, which they won't because they've already said that they're leaving that job for the next administration.
It reminds me of the drive-through liquor stores here in NM. We have a bad DWI problem here, and there was a push to outlaw the drive through purchases. Of course, it was absolutely inneffective, just as Illinois outlawing happy hours for the same reason was. But hey, people who didn't know what to do sure felt better for having done SOMETHING instead of NOTHING.
Now you're saying the same thing, but what tactics have changed? We're not doing anything different than we were doing before, and that is supposed to be better because it's not nothing? It can be reasonably argued that doing nothing is better than continuing to do something that doesn't work.
It's been said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing as always and expecting different results. By that standard, our government is demonstrably insane. We need to do something different, but instead we just keep letting that stupid evil son of a bitch in the White House do whatever he wants to do, so we'll have another year at least of soldiers coming home dead or crippled (and getting stiffed on healthcare to boot, support our troops indeed), of creating more jihadists, of having our treasury plundered, and we won't get a single damn thing out of it except more war.
Another thought -
When discussing the bill for financing the war, Republicans unanimously refer to "withdraw dates" as "SURRENDER dates" as if that is what leaving Iraq by a certain date means. In any business, or even government function, setting a date is usually called a deadline for success, not a planned date for failure.
That, along with the President's statement that the withdraw would be for the next president to decide upon, say quite loudly that the Republican party, and this administration in particular, have no intention of WINNING anything over there, but merely prolonging it. That, along with the lack of armor, healthcare, or any support outside of mere lip service, makes this a very bad time to be an American soldier.
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