How To Spot a Hypocrite

How do we distinguish trustworthy politicians from hypocrites? On the budget war, there is a simple test.

Liberty: Defend It or Lose It

Liberty is a fragile achievement requiring constant care. Some think it should be treated as a gated community, in which “I” should hide, excluding “you.” Others view liberty as a common good best shared. Both groups, however, surely agree that to take liberty for granted is to weaken it. Consider, in this context, the significance of some events currently taking place in the Mideast and the U.S.

Identifying the Black Shoots of Fascism

If any lesson has been learned in recent years, it should be that achieving democracy does not constitute "the end of history." Leaving aside the degree to which any society ever has "achieved" democracy, to do so would be more like a mountain climber gaining the peak - the view is splendid, but living there takes effort. Nothing is easier than sliding back down the peak of democracy.

Diagnosing World Politics 

 

The weeds of authoritarianism or outright fascism sprout easily in fertile democratic soil. Authoritarian figures like nothing better than to exploit the  civil liberties of democracy in order to kill it. It is not clear that even a perfect democracy would be stable, but certainly no known democratic society--especially one with a population as ignorant and amenable to manipulation by politicians with private agendas as that of the U.S.--can be considered stable. A democratic society is a mountain climber perched on a very slippery slope.

Vice and Virtue

Talk about "vice" and "virtue" is just trouble-making. When you are part of a team, your duty is to "be a team player."

Spain in this generation is a fine democracy led by a moderate regime, a place open-minded Americans (Americans not yet addicted to empire) may look up to as something of a model, but today Spain's most famous judge--Baltasar Garzon--is being taken to trial with the threat of being jailed essentially for the rest of his life because he is challenging the Spanish conspiracy to pretend that fascism never existed in that land [Vicky Short, "Judge Baltasar Garzon suspended for investigating Franco's crimes," World Socialist Website 5/27/10].

The case is causing consternation both in Spain and abroad, mainly because it was brought by three ultra right-wing organizations. Among these were the Falange Española, the Fascist party once presided over by Franco himself -- whose military coup of 1936 sparked the bloody, three-year Spanish Civil War, and culminated in a long dictatorship that ended only with his death in 1975. Historians estimate that Franco's postwar reprisals cost the lives of 100,000 people.

Garzón's many supporters have responded to the case with dismay, moved by its outrageous symmetry: a highly respected judge brought to trial, for attempting to try crimes, on an accusation by the disciples of the regime that perpetrated those crimes in the first place. [Julius Purcell, "Baltasar Garzon, "General Franco's latest victim," The Atlantic.com  5/29/10]

In the U.S. today not one former official is on trial for having lied about the reasons for launching a war of aggression, not one person is being forced in court to justify advocating "preventive" war, not one official is being called to account for supporting death squads, not one official is being tried for undermining constitutional guarantees of civil liberties, not one is facing a hearing for attacking a city or providing arms to a state practicing collective punishment against an ethnic minority or a class of poor farmers sitting on land needed by rich cattle barons., not one has even been fired for advocating nuclear war against a non-nuclear country. Hardly a single judicial action exists today against those who cut corners and gambled with the existence of the Gulf of Mexico as a biosphere; hardly a single judicial action is investigating the possible criminal behavior of individuals whose financial gambles put millions out of work and certainly none are hauling to court officials who passed laws designed to facilitate those gambles or officials whose job it was to regulate the gamblers.

There is nothing new about this dilemma.

From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs, and vice is punished.


We have been fortunate enough to live to a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice.


However, no one dares say a word about vice...."Why open old wounds?"....


What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body?...


What are we to do? Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, and then with devoted concern we tended the murderers in their prosperous old age....


But let us be generous. We will not shoot them....But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes....


It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up."


We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to oppress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. [Aleksandr SolzhenitsNY: Harper Perennial, 2007, 175-178)]

Meanwhile back in the West, heroic nuclear whistleblower Moredechai Vannunu is going back to jail; his 18-year sentence was not enough. In the U.S., Wall Street fraud-investigating whistleblowers ["Silencing the whistleblowers," Democracy Now 5/20/10] were fired. Protect the guilty; punish the trouble-makers. And we wonder why our country seems so confused.

Climbing the Ladder of History

Human history is the story of man's climb up the ladder of justice. The West now stands on the step of welcoming the Muslim world. The "long war" so glibly threatened by extremists of all stripes will be the penalty for failure to take this step.

Human history is, or at least one must so hope, the story of man’s climb up the ladder of social justice. Skipping a few steps, let us zero in on the history of the U.S. and summarize it in a sentence: if the first step was declaration of self-evident truths (and a bit of a mix-up with the day’s superpower), the second step was the inclusion of black men in the dream, and the third step was the inclusion of all women.

Each step brought the next into focus. Articulation of natural rights of humans led logically to abolition. Welcoming male ex-slaves as citizens and voters led logically to welcoming women. With each step, the emerging society improved. If the Declaration of Independence gave the vision inspiring the first step, then Lincoln’s warning that a house divided cannot survive articulated the vision of the second.

That double vision of self-evident rights exercised within a united house should today inspire us to raise our sights to the necessary fourth step. It is now time for the West to articulate a vision of a global political system that will welcome Muslims.

So difficult was it for American society to conceive of a social structure including black men that a near-suicidal fratricidal war had to be fought to accomplish it. Society matured a bit as the result of that lesson and outright war between men and women proved unnecessary to accomplish the next restructuring. Difficult though it was to carry through the resolution to share power, each invitation, each compromise with those formerly marginalized strengthened and enriched society. Now it is not national society but global society that must be restructured.

The immediate challenge is one that in particular faces the party leading the resistance, Americans, and the challenge is to articulate both the goal of inclusiveness and a practical process of achieving it. This cannot be simple. That slavery made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence today seems obvious beyond any need for comment, but it took American society a full generation of agonizing argument and another century of refinements even to approach racial equality. Again, the logic of a white man granting to his wife the same rights that he had granted to male ex-slaves today also seems obvious, but that step took three more generations.

Can reform of the complex global political system prove any easier? Provision will have to be made for tribes that choose not to modernize and states demanding a reform of what today are highly discriminatory nuclear rules. But start we must if we are to avoid the Long War nightmare evoked by extremists on both sides.

Education: Another Option for Helping Afghanistan

Here's another option Obama overlooked on Afghanistan: funding a national educational system.

The thesis of "Hammering Islamic Radicals" was that Obama’s troop surge into Afghanistan solidifies U.S. relapse into the neo-con foreign policy based on force, effectively institutionalizing an aberrant, extremist position that ignores a broad range of policy options. While a few of these options were noted, the article’s thesis stands on weak ground unless it can be demonstrated that, in fact, the policy options Obama is ignoring truly do constitute a “broad range” of serious options.

Making that case will require significant thought and research. Any reader with suggestions is cordially invited to offer them. Here, I simply wish to add one option that was suggested by a reporter interviewed on Dalgit Daliwan’s TV news program on December 4:

Fund a national educational system for all the Afghan students currently studying in madrassas so as to expose them to a modern education rather than an education that will arguably prepare them to be Taliban recruits.

I do not know how radical the curriculum of Afghan madrassas may be. One could also question the degree to which, given the deplorable condition of the Afghan government at all levels, how radical education should be in order to prepare young Afghans to build the kind of government they need. But "funding an Afghan educational system" should not be taken to mean imposing regime-controlled curriculum; indeed, the experience of an innovative new compromise madrassa in, of all places, violent Helmand Province, suggests that education might actually be a topic on which radicals and the regime can hold a useful dialogue.

But when the total cost of such an educational system for a year would only be equivalent to the cost of some 20 U.S. soldiers, according to the interviewee (i.e., $20 million)—cookie crumbs off the $30B table of military expenses for Obama’s new military surge, this is obviously an option worth considering. In fact, even under the violence-addicted Bush-Cheney Administration, the U.S. invested money in the Afghan educational system, one small Republican idea that would have been worth focusing on.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Other options include –

1. Campaign to eradicate heroin labs

2. Stress desire for Muslim rather than Western “boots on the ground”;

3. Offer the police a living wage.

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Does anyone have more information about the current Afghan educational system?

Can anyone offer additional options that Obama might have considered to complement or substitute for his overwhelming focus on military force?

Cultural Taboos Threaten American Progress

American culture is evolving in ways that pose increasingly dangerous and unnecessary constraints on the ability of American society to imagine effective solutions to the highly interconnected set of foreign policy, economic policy, environmental policy, and health policy problems it currently faces.

Politics in the U.S.—at the level of policy-making—has a degree of rigidity, narrow-mindedness, and short-sightedness that causes enormous harm to the security and quality of life of Americans. The artificial constraints that American voters and policy-makers impose on themselves, the unstated and unreasoned taboos that are accepted without a second thought, have the effect of preventing Americans from taking full advantage of their vast natural and intellectual resources. The result is a set of interlocked policies that needlessly undermine American security and worsen the general quality of life in American society.

Taboos obstructing honest evaluation of fundamental policy choices prevent American society from moving effectively in new and desperately needed directions. The American system is based on open debate to find answers to complex problems. That is the best system yet discovered for resolving national problems, but it only works when society faces its options honestly. New directions do exist for addressing this set of challenges, but the roads will only be found if we are willing to look for them.

Ironically, these fundamental decisions—precisely the ones meriting the most meticulous public debate—are typically the public policy decisions made with the least care, the least debate, the least thought. The results include a foreign policy based on military force even when force intensifies hostility; health care as a business rather than a right; environmental policy favoring consumption now rather than preservation for future generations; and an economic policy that has more or less steadily been enriching the super-rich and impoverishing the rest since the Reagan era.

The careful reader may notice an underlying similarity among the four policy arenas: a foreign policy based on force benefits the military-industrial complex, an environmental policy favoring consumption benefits corporations looking for short-term profits, the economic policy benefits the Wall Street, banking, and real estate businesses; the current health care system benefits the insurance and medical businesses. And all four harm the average American.

That American society now faces a crisis in each of these four major policy arenas--foreign policy, economic policy, environmental policy, and health care policy--is now fortunately becoming widely recognized, though at an enormous cost (a decade of war against radical Islam, a still-deepening recession made in Washington, declining environment [see the New York Times' expose this past week of corporate poisoning of the nation's drinking water], and one of the least effective health care systems in the modern world).

The economic decline of American society, just to take one example, over the last half century is easy to see if one only recalls that in the 1950s, a man could support a middle class family on his salary alone, that by the 1990s a middle class lifestyle required that both husband and wife work, and that today a rising percentage of families face the perilous situation of the wife being a temp without benefits while the husband is unemployed. The overall economic trend is not “a natural result of the rest of the post-WWII world catching up.” That excuse contains just enough truth to be marketable, but the real reason is socialism for the rich. “Socialism for the rich” is not just a cute slogan, though few people ever stopped to think about what it really means until last fall’s billionaire bailout brought the idea to everyone’s attention.

Given the current recession, perhaps the most obvious example of “socialism for the rich” is taxing wages but not the profits from derivatives. This policy, if one thinks about it, sends the clear message that the U.S. government discourages people from holding honest jobs and prefers that the rich gamble on the market and, in particular, gambles by inventing financial tricks that enable the rich to evade legal requirements for collateral, instead building financial houses of cards. A more traditional but equally scandalous type of “socialism for the rich” is allowing huge lumber companies to clear-cut national forests (perhaps the most precious natural resource in the possession of the American people) virtually without paying any compensation at all to the thus cheated American taxpayer and, needless to say, without being required to restore the forests. Anyone who is shocked at this revelation need only drive on a side road somewhere in Oregon, notice the fine line of trees, and then walk 50 feet off the pavement: behind the screen, all you will find in a shocking number of places is a national desert.

Similar analyses could easily be made for foreign policy, environmental policy, and health care policy. The broader point is to figure out why Americans have such trouble reforming public policy. It is far more subtle than just “crooked politicians.” American voters consistently support politicians who favor socialism for the rich, environmental destruction, military force as the core of foreign policy, and health care as a business to enrich insurance companies rather than a natural right of all Americans. Intellectually serious reform candidates ran in the recent presidential election under Republic, Democratic, and several third party labels.

At the heart of this self-defeating American attitude toward public policy lies American culture, and unfortunately American culture is evolving in exactly the wrong direction. In only the last couple decades the trends toward irresponsibility (“it’s society’s fault”), winner-take-all, and bullying (whether it’s bullying your neighbor on the highway or Muslims worldwide) have become all too visible. Combine these negative trends in general culture with some highly pernicious cultural taboos that prohibit the honest public analysis of our public policy options, and the result is a social system condemned to self-defeating governance.

Maybe violence and overwhelming military superiority are the only way to achieve security. Maybe we want a country with sick poor people and great health care reserved for the “important” people. Maybe we can destroy the environment to our heart’s content and just keep inventing new ways of surviving (yes, I actually read a book making exactly this argument). Maybe the historic capitalist boom-bust cycle is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe…but that conclusion is not obvious. It deserves debate.

Alternatively, maybe allowing Muslims (e.g., Palestinians) to have their own countries and to play by the same rules as everyone else (e.g., nuclear policy toward Israel and Iran) would lead to a more stable and secure world. Maybe the provision of free, public, basic health care with the emphasis on nutrition and disease prevention for all would create a richer and happier and more productive society. Maybe saving our forests for our children would create a stronger America. Maybe America would be a better country if tax policy were designed to encourage honest labor and discourage irresponsible forms of Wall Street or real estate financial manipulations.

These are all fair questions. They deserve debate.

• Should the U.S. continue to give a blank check to right-wing Israeli militarists trying to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their own land? Or should the U.S. support Israel reformers?
• Should Iran be denied the opportunity to emerge as a regional power or be forced to accept limitations on its nuclear capabilities that are not imposed on Israel or even Pakistan or India?
• Should we learn to build more environmentally acceptable homes (i.e., not out of wood) in order to save our remaining national forests?
• Should we keep the current health care business that has produced the richest medical and insurance companies on earth or pay to create a one-class society where the poor and the unemployed have basic health care?

Unfortunately, such core questions about public policy are considered “off-limits.” Or, at least, those profiting from the current system are trying very hard to sell that viewpoint.

Sure, everyone talks about health care and foreign policy and economics and the environment, but look at content of the debates: it focuses on details. Should we, perhaps, modify the degree of Wall Street regulation a bit (while still leaving the main offenders in business)? Should we, perhaps, talk to international adversaries (in order to get them to do what we previously used the threat of violence to achieve)? Should we, perhaps, add a few soldiers in uniform to your Muslim country of choice or should we use mercenary forces out of uniform (but without altering the goal of our war)? Should we, perhaps, pass a new environmental protection law (but without holding corporate executives criminally responsible for their cheating on the laws already passed)? Should we, perhaps, add a sliver of the disadvantaged to the rolls of those favored with health insurance (but surely without endangering the massive profits of the health care industry)?

The basic questions that address fundamental direction are seldom voiced. They are taboo.

• A foreign policy of true compromise with reformist Islam is a taboo subject.
• A health care policy that rejects socialism for the health care industry and institutes socialism for the disadvantaged is a taboo subject.
• An environmental policy that punishes corporate polluters and preserves the environment (allowing economic functions only within those constraints) is a taboo subject (the recent New York Times expose of corporations polluting the nation’s drinking water notwithstanding).
• A financial system that controls exploitation and stimulates responsible productivity is a taboo subject.

Americans do have certain cultural/political advantages. Perhaps the greatest is the consensus that those who break taboos are not killed, so, yes, I can voice these complaints in safety, something I would not be able to do in, say, China, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. While I am grateful for this, it does not invalidate my argument. Taboos work more subtly in the U.S.: those who violate them may speak; they are simply ignored. In terms of having influence, if you challenge taboos, you will be cut out of the debate, will no longer be heard, will effectively no longer exist except as an official nonperson, an “…ist,” as in “racist, socialist, leftist.” In (we imagine) highly stable but tenuous Neolithic times, banishment of those who broke village taboos by speaking out may have enhanced group survival; in the contemporary rapidly evolving world, it invites disaster.

The U.S. has an historic power advantage over its adversaries (even after a decade of behaving like a rogue elephant), the best academic establishment on earth, and enormous resources. These advantages give American society an incredibly fruitful array of options. That is, Americans have the collective power to do an unimagined range of different things...if they can open their minds sufficiently to imagine taking new directions toward a fundamentally more just and effective society. Whatever the route to a perfect society, we will never find it (or even succeed in treading water in today's world) if we censor ourselves from discussing the basic options about the fundamental direction of public policy.

War, Recession, Health Care: What Can We Do?

What can we do about the war with Islam, the recession, the health care debacle, and other national emergencies in the U.S.? Quite a bit, actually, but it all starts with attitude.

“Oh, dear. What can we do?”

That, in essence, is the national debate…whether the subject is the recession that we needlessly provoked, the endless “chickens coming home to roost” war with Islam, the national shame of our health care industry, the steady degradation of the environment, or the wave of corruption among the commercial-financial-government elite.

The idea of reacting to these fundamental national problems with a sigh of “what can we do?” is of course to imply that these evils came from “somewhere else” and are by definition something beyond our control and, most importantly, NOT OUR FAULT!

• It is thus “not our fault” that some Muslims finally got fed up after years of Western mistreatment and decided on a global campaign of terrorism to send us a message. We didn’t get the message. Hence, our old behavior continues, and we remain utterly unable to understand why military force is not working in Afghanistan…or Gaza or Somalia or Iran.
• It is of course also “not our fault” that the two factions of the national party-for-the-conservation-of-elite-privilege cooperated back under Clinton (!) to destroy the New Deal safeguards against financial terrorism by big banks and thus paved the way for the recession. Hence, the members of that elite in Washington rewarded the members of that elite on Wall Street, the guys on Wall Street are happily gambling on life insurance derivatives (the old real estate-based derivatives having been, ah, “discredited”), and more guys on Main Street are unemployed every month.

OK. You get the idea.

So, what if we took responsibility and looked for solutions? One word on health care and another on the recession.

Health Care. The problem with the health care industry in the U.S. is that Americans, and particularly elite Americans (who profit), accept that phrase—health care industry—as legitimate. Health care cannot, in a decent society, be viewed as an “industry,” i.e., a business. Businesses are supposed to make profits. And that is exactly the purpose of the business of providing health care to Americans. To repeat, health care in America is highly successful; it does exactly what it is designed to do: it generates fat profits for the practitioners (insurance companies, drug companies, friendly politicians who get campaign funds). These profits are generated by methods with which every American is very familiar: by preventing the sick from getting insurance, by pushing the sick out of hospitals as fast as possible, by utterly ignoring elderly patients with cognitive problems and throwing them on the mercy of their untrained and probably working relatives (thus wrecking family after family). At least the wave of unemployment in the recession will give many more family members the time to care for these aged parents! Fixing the health care system requires throwing away the idiotic and immoral idea of a health care business and replacing it with the concept of universal health care as a basic human right.

The Recession. At a certain level, the problem is too little money in the hands of consumers because of too few jobs. We happen in the U.S. to have a crumbling infrastructure, inhumane central cities, and collapsing main streets in small towns. Hiring the 15 million unemployed to rebuild the country would resolve all the above problems, but that takes money. Where can we get it from? The answer is pretty simple: tax the most lucrative business in the U.S. (no, I don’t mean illegal narcotics): Wall Street gambling. Tax profits on derivatives (my thanks to Ralph Nader for advocating this idea). The law Congress should pass is provided below in its entirety:

All financial transactions of the general form known as “derivatives trading” or related transactions shall be taxed at a rate at least 50% greater than the income tax rate of the mean American worker, as calculated annually by the Congressional Budget Office.

In a very basic sense, the U.S. really is a democracy: we Americans have the system we designed. It does what we designed it to do. If we do not want a system that rewards political corruption; creates enemies; wrecks our environment; and generates obscene profits from the premature sickening, aging, and death of American citizens, then we have the option of designing a different system. Truly, we do. We have the skills; Americans frankly are rather badly educated, but we have the best academic establishment in the world and could choose to educate ourselves better. We have the money: although the average American is having an increasingly tough time, the total amount of money in the society is enormous (needing only to be spread more equitably and used for serious things like productivity rather than gambling on Wall Street, conspicuous consumption, and bombing everyone we don’t like). We have the resources. We have voted for corruption, recession, imperial conquest, bad capitalist (for profit) rather than good socialist (for society) health care, and dirty drinking water. We could, if we so chose, vote for the opposite and pay for its achievement.

Iranian-Israeli Nuclear Accord: Focus on Mutual Benefit

This post follows yesterday's introduction of the concept of simultaneously strengthening the national security of both Iran and Israel. The fundamental question, broached yesterday, concerns the possibility of this being conceivable.

Here I wish to point out an advantage to proceeding with small steps, several of which were suggested in yesterday's post, that are nevertheless sufficiently large so that each side considers them to be beneficial. Each side would say, "Sure; if my adversary were to accept international controls over Weapons System X or Technology Y, that would make me more secure."

One advantage of such an incremental approach is that it avoids the highly contentious Israeli issue of telling the truth about its nuclear capabilities and avoids the unanswerable Iranian issue of what their ultimate intentions are. Whether or not Israel has its reputed 200+ nuclear bombs, if its AWACS are grounded under international observation, it will have more difficulty committing aggression, so Iran should be willing to pay something to achieve that. Whether or not Iranian leaders' ultimate intentions are aggressive, if its research into nuclear warheads is constrained and under international inspections, a future Iranian regime will have more difficulty committing aggression, so Israel should be willing to pay something to achieve that as well.

Radicalizing the Poor

Steven Zunes is to be commended for writing and Common Dreams for publishing an article on the “old” issue of NATO’s Kosovo campaign because the parallels between that escapade a decade ago and U.S. policy toward the rest of the Muslim world are sobering. Yes, a few eyes are opening a bit in Washington with the arrival of Obama’s spring, enough perhaps to give cynics a moment’s pause, but Washington and the broader American public have still not learned the lessons of America’s adventures with third world rebellions. At best, Americans start in the middle because they can’t be bothered to study history.

The Palestinian predicament is perhaps the most obvious: that desperate group of the dispossessed gets absolutely no attention except when it turns to violence. Americans remains utterly tuned out, unfortunately, although the recent excesses of both Israel and its U.S. lobby may slowly be awakening the tone-deaf.

This is also the story of Lebanon, whether the reference is to Palestinian refugees or Hezbollah’s representation of South Lebanon’s poor Shi’a. I doubt we have heard the last from the former, of whom several hundred thousand remain, despite Sharon’s vicious little 20-year-war. Further spillover from Bush-Cheney’s mishandling of al Qua’ida and post-invasion Iraq is to be expected.

Until the 1960s, Lebanon's Shiites were a neglected, invisible community, oppressed by feudal landlords and disdained by their fellow Lebanese. Today, they are a rising political force, thanks in large part to the militant political movement Hezbollah. It is now a virtual state-within-a-state, with an army of several thousand men, an extensive social service network, a popular satellite television station called al-Manar ("the Beacon of Light"), and an annual budget in excess of $100 million, much of which comes from Iran, Hezbollah's major patron.--source

As for Hezbollah, after Sharon’s 1982 invasion provoked Hezbollah’s formation and Israel’s 2006 invasion consolidated its image, Hezbollah’s political position continues to improve. But these, like Kosovo, are issues Americans are content to ignore.

South Asia is another matter. Surely everyone must by now be aware that the Afghan Taliban took control in the 1990s after the U.S. walked away, leaving post-Soviet Afghanistan in chaos. And surely everyone must by now be aware we are losing the resultant war. Not only are we losing in Afghanistan, now we are beginning to pay the price for ignoring the plight of marginalized Pushtuns in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

According to former adviser to Petraeus in Afghanistan Australian David Kilcullen:

Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems.

The problem of insurgencies being provoked by the failure of “the system” to permit participation by the marginalized applies to non-Muslim regions, as well, of course. The inability of Colombia’s impoverished peasants to get any respect or fair treatment from rich cattle barons until the FARC arose to lead them in rebellion is the classic example.

An underlying theme in all of these disputes is that the oppressed are ignored as long as they “know their place,” which enrages and radicalizes. Then Americans interfere, to be polite, “in ignorance,” claiming they offer peace but siding with the oppressors and innocently asking “why they hate us.”

The disastrous Pakistani military “victory” in Bajaur last August, which resulted in half a million refugees who are still being treated more like prisoners than victims, is a case in point. The Pakistani army effectively employed Israeli tactics of effectively making war on civilians, and reports suggest that Bajaur today looks very much like Gaza. According to well-connected Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad, this campaign came as the result of “immense U.S. pressure.”

The American approach to these rebellions in search of justice is to screw the lid of the pressure cooker tighter, in the name of “stability” but without turning down the “heat.” Denied civil services, economic development, and the option of effective peaceful political participation, enforcing short-term stability through military suppression of protest only gives the pressure of frustration more time to build. This in turn empowers extremism (Taliban reformers become Taliban oppressors and U.S. client regimes start bombing villages; FARC revolutionaries become FARC drug-dealers and cattle barons do the same). A cynic would accuse Washington politicians of adopting such a policy intentionally to exploit chaos. (Neil Clark’s essay on “corporate takeover of the ruins of Baghdad and Pristina” is must reading.) Others may attribute Washington’s behavior to ignorance. Either way, it is an increasingly dangerous and ineffective strategy: not only are the original socio-political issues not resolved but local politics become radicalized and Americans become the target.

Swat Valley Watch

Proposal

Project to compare key spots where opposing forces in the Western confrontation with Islam are being forced to compromise, for the purpose of determining what solutions are being tried, what solutions are being ignored, and what impact the various strategies are having.

If Gaza is one experiment in how to manage the Western-Muslim confrontation, Pakistan's Swat Valley has become another. Both experiments are being conducted with extraordinary barbarity, though so far Swat has the distinct advantage of being a place one is allowed to leave, unlike Gaza, which Israel has walled in. An estimated 800,000 of Swat's 1.8 million residents have voted with their feet to become refugees rather than submit to the Taliban.

In any society, the educational system is key to long-term results, and the developing story of education in Swat merits close tracking.

So far, the Taliban appear to be concentrating on destroying the current system of education in Swat:

En un peu moins d'un an, plus d'une centaine d'établissements scolaires ont été détruits par les insurgés taliban dans cette région. Des écoles de filles surtout, mais aussi des écoles de garçons. Et si quelques-unes restent encore debout, elles n'accueillent plus grand-monde car les parents ont désormais bien trop peur d'y envoyer leurs enfants.

The Taliban justification:

"Nous détruisons les écoles parce que l'enseignement ne correspond pas à la façon dont les enfants doivent être éduqués", déclarait d'ailleurs à FRANCE 24 Muslim Khan, le porte-parole des Taliban de Swat

As for what is likely to replace the destroyed state educational system,

The Deobandi Wafaqul Madaris Al-Arabiya (Pakistan’s largest union of madrassas) plans to build 1,500 mosques and 300 madrassas in AJK and NWFP.

What the actual impact of this change may be is less obvious than many Westerners may think and bears close watching.

The curriculum of Sunni madrassas generally:

consists of about twenty subjects broadly divided
into two categories: al-ulum an-naqliya (the transmitted sciences), and
al-ulum al-aqliya (the rational sciences). The subject areas include gram-
mar, rhetoric, prosody, logic, philosophy, Arabic literature, dialectical
theology, life of the Prophet, medicine, mathematics, polemics,
Islamic law, jurisprudence, Hadith, and Tafsir (exegesis of the Quran).
It is important to note that out of the twenty subjects, only eight can
be considered as solely religious. The remaining subjects are otherwise
secular and were included in Nizami curriculum both to equip the stu-
dents for civil service jobs and as an aid to understanding religious
texts.

…most of the books taught in this curriculum are
very old. Books used in philosophy and logic, for example, were writ-
ten in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Medicine is taught
through an eleventh-century text that is still considered an authentic
study of human anatomy and pathology. In what we have described
as purely religious subjects, the books used date back to the seven-
teenth century at the latest and the eleventh century at the earliest.
Books prescribed for astronomy, mathematics, and grammar are more
than five- to seven-hundred-year-old texts.

These limitations do not automatically mean that the education is worthless. The logic and philosophy courses might well give madrassa students valuable cognitive skills that American students fail to get even in the best public high schools, for example. Whether or not this will turn out to be true for new madrassas being established by the Pakistani Taliban is an issue worth exploring, as is the way in which modern global affairs are presented.

Madrassas play a positive social role:

Madrassa education has been and remains
one of the surest paths of social mobility for the lower level occupa-
tional castes and artisans of the rural areas of Pakistan. Whatever
occupational backgrounds the students have, upon the completion of
their madrassa education, they are certain to take a step forward in the hierarchy of social stratification, in terms of both income and social status.

Madrassas also cannot automatically be considered “terrorist training centers”:

First, if the madrassa education is the only or the main cause of
Islamic militancy, radicalism, and anti-Americanism, why did these
tendencies not manifest themselves before the 1990s? The curriculum
of the madrassas has remained the same for about 150 years. Second,
those who suggest an inherent relationship between the madrassa cur-
riculum and Islamic militancy and describe madrassas as “jihad facto-
ries” are probably unaware of the fact that this curriculum is the most
pacifist in its orientation. Its approach to Islam is ultra-conservative,
literalist, legalist, and sectarian, but definitely not revolutionary, radi-
cal, or militant. It is interesting to note that in the standard syllabus on
the study of Hadith, chapters on jihad in all the six standard collec-
tions of the Prophetic tradition are not discussed at all. During the
study of fiqh (jurisprudence) texts also, the entire time is spent on
“problems of menstruation,” laws relating to marriage and divorce,
and other legal hairsplitting rather than on political or jihadic issues.
There is absolutely nothing in the madrassa curriculum that can be
deemed as promoting or encouraging militancy, not to mention ter-
rorism. Radicalism that we see in some madrassas in Pakistan today is
an extraneous phenomenon brought into madrassas by some interna-
tional and domestic political actors who wanted to use the religious
capital and manpower of these madrassas for their own objectives.

It is thus hard to predict the impact of Taliban education on Swat. Broader political conditions will be key, and room for compromise clearly exists in theory.

Thinking Systematically about the G20 Statement

Follow-up to the classroom exercise in systems thinking to sharpen your analytical skills that was introduced yesterday. Including lots of discussion, this exercise would make an appropriate undergraduate lesson for two one-hour classes.

The G20 that just met to resolve the global financial crisis made a significant decision that fell short of the recommendations made by the Stiglitz report to the U.N. that was submitted in March. Although the U.N. commission headed by Stiglitz recommended restructuring the highly restricting rules used by international lending institutions so as to grant poor recipient countries the flexibility to implement desperately needed social welfare measures, the G20 instead focused simply on adding funding to the international lending institutions, thereby increasing the political power of the lending institutions rather than the recipient state governments.

How should we begin to think about the implications of this decision? Is it good news or bad news for everyone who is concerned about the state of the world’s economy? Following the method outlined in yesterday’s post, the apparent “reference mode” (mental model; initial point of view) of the G20 underlying their decision is presented.

(Note: for the purposes of this post, I assume goodwill and sincerity on the part of the G20; i.e., I assume here that the G20 truly desired to resolve the economic crisis to the benefit of all mankind. Of course, if you make a different assumption, e.g., that the G20 was out to exploit the world for the benefit of the rich countries, then the reference mode I have drawn would not represent the G20’s point of view. Normally, in using this methodology, you draw the reference mode honestly to represent what you personally believe before you start analyzing the problem of interest to you. Here, instead, I am guessing—based on the logic of the G20’s statement—what the real intent of that body was.)

The G20 Reference Mode says that:

1. The key variable impacting the well-being of the world’s poor is the amount of aid;
2. The amount of aid and the well-being of the poor covary.

QUESTION: is the G20’s presumed perspective correct?

Consider the following initial causal loop diagram as an approach to analyzing the accuracy of the G20 perspective. I am suggesting that this causal loop diagram captures the key issue: does a rise in World Bank & IMF funding under current rules help or harm the well-being of the world’s poor? The argument can be made that increased aid under current rules results in the impoverishment of local populations even as, e.g., extractive industries designed to export resources cheaply to the West flourish. The purpose of this post is not to answer that question but simply to structure an analytical approach that could profitably be used, say, in a classroom, systematically to illuminate this problem.

Feel free to create a completely different explanation of the core behavior of socio-economics in poor states receiving World Bank/IMF aid if you wish. Alternatively, if you wish to accept this causal loop diagram, first, think about its implications and then consider how it might be improved.

Implications of the causal loop diagram as it stands:

• The black arrows represent the initial effect – the G20 evidently believes the effect is positive; do you agree? Will the rate of positive impact on social welfare be as rapid as positive impact on resource extraction? Will it remain positive? Will it be linear?
• The green arrows represent a second stage effect. The G20 evidently believes this will, in both cases, also be positive. Do you agree? Specifically, does a successful extraction industry (consider oil from Iraq or Nigeria or Colombia; gas from Central Asia) equate to a general rise in social welfare?
• The blue arrows represent feedbacks to international aid institution policies. What might the nature of such feedback be, assuming it exists?
• The red arrow indicates a direct impact of the state of resource extraction industry on social welfare. The literature is vast; you may wish to start with Abdelrahman Munif’s novel about the arrival of Western oilmen to Saudi Arabia. What sign would you put on the red arrow (or do you think there is no impact at all)?

How it might be improved:

• Add new variables?
• Add intervening steps (e.g., along the red arrow)?
• Add a feedback arrow from “popular living standards in poor countries” to “World Bank/IMF aid levels?

Please do not tell anyone, but here’s a secret: this post was not that difficult to write. It is about thinking systematically, which turns out to be easy once you get in the habit because, by definition, you do it one step at a time. This thinking process was so easy that, for example, a serious New York Times reporter reviewing the G20 statement would have had time to do it. In fact, this thinking process was so easy that even a G20 decisionmaker would have had time to do it. I wonder if any of them did.

Systems Thinking Experiment: For Classroom...or Decisionmakers

Thinking logically about complex topics is the critical first step missed by everyone from beginners to senior national decisionmakers. Ironically, the first steps really aren't that hard. So here's an experiment brief and useful enough to fit into any classroom schedule or crisis national decisionmaking process. Professors who would like some Internet-based pro bono support to run this experiment in their foreign policy or economic policy class are invited to get in touch. (National decisionmakers will be expected to pay.)


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A Simple Experiment

Step 1. Select an analytically substantive question.

I recommend a question of real depth, phrased generically, e.g., "What are the implications of the policy of 'security through strength'?"


Step 2. Draw a reference mode.

A reference mode is a graph with time on the x-axis showing what you think happens. This experiment is an exploration, and when you want to explore, it is good to know where you are starting. Think of the "reference mode" like knowing the coordinates of your car before you start a hike. The y-axis represents whatever variable you feel is key. Of course, you can do multiple graphs to show different processes.


Step 3. Draw a causal loop diagram.

A causal loop diagram is a diagram showing how the forces at play affect behavior. It is a "loop" because dynamics cycle back (e.g., the more you complement me, the more I like you). In contrast to the very simple picture of the reference mode graph, the causal loop diagram identifies each force and its impact. Start with A affects B and B affects A. Then add details.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<



That is the essence of a simple experiment in logical thinking that can be incrementally pushed pretty much as far as you have the intellectual stamina to take it. Here are examples analyzing military control of the political process and how war can erupt even when everyone wants peace. If you happen to have the luxury of real data, you can transform your causal loop diagram into a mathematical model using simple software such as Stella, but even five minutes on a napkin over lunch will clarify your understanding of a tough problem. Figuring out the key force in a complicated problem such as the impact on a neighboring country of a policy of security through strength and then figuring out the impact of that force turn out not to be as straightforward as many overconfident experts think. Making a formal effort to do this, even for five minutes, is push-ups for the mind.

The point of this post is to suggest that such an experiment, valuable as it is, is easy enough for anyone to try, easy enough for me to support via the Internet. Of course, it can get complicated if you want to identify all the variables, and there are numerous posts on this blog illustrating that point. But it's the first step that counts.

Mideast Friends

The U.S. needs friends in the Mideast. There, have I succeeded in making a statement that all Americans, regardless of political perspective, can accept?

Now that we are all on the same page, what kind of friends does the U.S. need in the Mideast?

• Does the U.S. need dictators with efficient secret police organizations to keep down the rabble and do our torturing for us?
• Does the U.S. need a land aircraft carrier to attack all who dare to oppose our will?

At worst, the U.S. is an ignorant savage on steroids who keeps tripping over his own shoelaces. (That’s what happens when you give shoes to a savage.) At best, the U.S. just can’t understand why everyone doesn’t just “eat cake” (two kids, nice lawn, SUV in the garage). Ah, in Palestine (for example), the roads are for Israelis; Palestinians are restricted to back alleys, and as for the garage, the Israeli Army just demolished it (along with the century-old olive grove) to build a new high-rise for illegal settlers (BYO AK-47).

What the U.S. needs is: friends who will help it mix at a party where it is the stranger. Turkey has started to play this role; indeed, Hillary is just now begging it to do more. That’s a start, and I am absolutely grateful for any help Turkey can provide, but after all, Turkey’s not necessarily so easy for Americans to understand either, and there’s a lot of issues between the U.S. and the Mideast for just one friend to resolve. It sure would be nice if the U.S. had an additional friend over there.

Imagine how American national security would be enhanced if there were, say, a small democratic country in the Mideast highly respected for its good neighbor policy and willing to explain to us out-of-touch Western Hemisphere types how things work back there in the old world. Imagine how many expensive missteps we could avoid if we had such a friend who could wink at shocked Mideasterners when we goofed up and pull us to the side when we were about to step in dirt.

But I’m dreaming. In the real world, the U.S. does not have such friends nor would it have the ability to distinguish such a friend from smooth-talking lackeys and exploitative manipulators. Too bad.

Personal Responsibility in America

In a surprise reaffirmation of the fundamental power of the American economy, the Dow Jones average remained above 7,000 at the end of the week.

True, naysayers will point to various bits of contradictory evidence:

• Washington's continuing efforts to pass billions to the rich;
• the endless outpouring of new evidence of the breadth of the criminal behavior throughout society that created the financial crisis in the first place;
• the continuing failure of the government to punish those responsible for this criminal behavior;
• the careful avoidance by the elite of such embarrassing issues as the morality of starting wars of aggression on false pretenses, attacking cities, violating constitutional guarantees of human rights, or advocating "preventive" wars;
  
• Obama's recent reaffirmation that he will not give up the war policy.

But what does such negativism mean in comparison with the market's ability to stay above the critical psychological threshold of 7,000? Once again, the rich have demonstrated their faith in the system. And why not? Isn't that system rewarding them with golden parachutes, bailouts,* new opportunities for war profiteering, and appointments as Official Foxes to guard the nation's financial hen house? One thing you have to admit: no matter how tough the times, this country takes care of its rich.
____________________________
*The AIG story, of which Chapter II is just beginning, is a prime example. Too big to fail? AIG, like Brezhnev's Russia and Bush-Cheney's Administration, has already failed. Each of these organizations failed to do the job it existed to do. Each proved to be irresponsible to the point of provoking snide "ashheap of history" remarks. If AIG has employees processing paper in a way that is invaluable, so be it: keep the institution functioning (if we may apply that term to AIG in its present condition) under the following terms:

1) nationalize it;
2) remove all levels of management immediately;
3) starting at the top, conduct criminal investigations;
4) assess blame with extreme severity and maximum publicity;
4) BUT...to move things along, announce that in lieu of possible jail, the government will accept a public apology, complete honesty in providing evidence, and the loss of all personal profits made during the AIG manager's time in the company in return for freedom and, perhaps, a job at a maximum annual income equal to the average income of an American worker.

In other words, taking responsibility and cleaning up are key, not punishment. No one starves, and only the minimum necessary amount of jail time is assessed (i.e., only for the recalcitrant). Settle things as fast as possible, with the following caveat: the issue of moral hazard must be addressed. No American must be left with any suspicions that CEO financial crime is rewarded.

Once AIG has been dealt with, then "We, the People" can turn to the far larger issue of moral hazard among politicians who profit personally from starting wars. The point is really very simple, right down there at the Sunday School level: either we have a system that expects its participants to take responsibility for their behavior or we do not.

Gaza: What Lesson Will Israel Learn?

Multiple global actors are exploiting helpless Gaza to test hypotheses related to their broader political concerns, giving great importance to the outcome of the dispute over the future of the people of Gaza. One hypothesis is the Israeli elite’s Battered Wife Hypothesis:

H1 = If collective punishment is sufficiently harsh, it will force the population to give its support to the oppressor.

If the outcome of Israel’s treatment of Gaza between Hamas’ January 2006 electoral victory and the end of its December 2008 attack teaches the Israeli elite the lesson that barbaric force pays off, the implications for Mideast peace—for Palestinian justice, for Lebanese security, for Syrian hopes to gain back the Golan Heights and settle their dispute with Israel and the U.S., and for preventing an Israeli/American attack on Iran will be put in jeopardy.

In contrast, if the Israeli ruling elite learns the lesson that brutality is both further radicalizing Hamas and simultaneously granting it monopoly ownership of Palestinian nationalism and thereby only undermining Israeli security, then the war may push Israel toward a historic compromise with the Palestinian people. Such a compromise would not be the end of Mideast history. Some thoughtful Israelis fear their country is so subject to its own extremists that it will be unable to walk this path unless pushed very hard by its friends. Moreover, Palestinian infighting will continue and Israel will have intense interest in its outcome. But achieving this compromise will focus the attention of Palestinian radicals on the tough job of governing and open the door of all in the Mideast to engage in the profitable business of working with rather than against Israel. It will also take the wind out of the sails of outsiders such as Ahmadinejad’s neo-conservative war generation of aggressive nationalists and the Salafi jihadists who gather under bin Laden’s flag.

Therefore, the lessons that the Israeli elite take away from their savage little Gaza war merit the closest tracking. It is not just that Gaza is connected to all the rest of the conflict between the West and Muslim societies but that Gaza is the canary in the mine because its predicament is contained, artificially created, relatively easily resolvable and because Gaza is so helpless to fight back that Israel, like other outsiders, feel they can get away with using Gaza as a political laboratory.

It is hard to imagine how failure to suppress tiny Gaza could teach the lesson that force works; if it fails in Gaza, how could anyone expect it to succeed in Iran or Pakistan or Afghanistan? But should Gaza be effectively suppressed and Israel or American leaders make the leap from Gaza to Iran or Afghanistan or Pakistan, then we are fated to repeat on an even more disastrous scale the horrors of the last seven years.

Evidence of lessons being learned:

1) Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on February 1:

We will never sign an agreement with Hamas.

In other words, Israel will never sign an agreement with the Palestinian political party that won Palestine's only democratic election. This is not only the statement of a man who continues to believe in the efficacy of force but a man who would rather cut off his own nose to spite his face and destroy his own country than admit he was wrong.

2) A commentator wrote in the Jerusalem Post on January 27 that:

Israel has not been ignoring the need to find what pundits call a "political solution." Without getting into the blame game, the fact is that negotiations have been conducted, unsuccessfully, for the past 15 years.

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved in the short term, it has to be managed. But how? The rationale of the disengagement strategy was that, since the conflict seems unsolvable and since the status quo is untenable, Israel might as well get the Palestinians off its back. If only. We left Gaza, but Gaza did not leave us.

The truth, of course, is dramatically at variance with this version of the historical record. First, Hamas was cheated by Israel and the U.S. out of its January 2006 electoral victory. Second, Israel did not leave Gaza: Israeli civilians were pulled out, but Israel remained very much the harsh warden of the Gaza prison. Gazans were in absolutely no sense given liberty. Such blatant distortion of the historical record invites one to learn the lesson that violence against Muslim political activists is the only option.

More evidence as I happen to notice it…

Gaza: Lesson for Afghanistan

Today it is hard to know how a patriotic person is to act, what a patriot is to do to make the situation better. Consider, for example, the following comments on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute written by two Israelis and published in the Israeli media:

If Hamas thought that lobbing missiles into Israeli civilian neighborhoods was a decent or proportionate response to the grim realities of the occupation, they were wrong. On the other hand, if Israel thinks it can bludgeon the Palestinians into political surrender, or get Hamas - or the Palestinian community at large, for that matter - to acquiesce to military occupation then it, too, is wrong.

There is no military solution to this conflict. Until both sides fully grasp this, the world can expect only continuing violence and vendetta, with civilians on both sides paying the price for leaders who - because of pressure, ambition or hubris - feel that they must do the most damage, fire the last shot or make the most credible threat. Indeed, it is sad, and repellent, to hear military correspondents speak of "teaching a lesson," "increasing pressure," "making a statement," achieving "deterrence," when those they are reporting on are really trying to control the news cycle, or win arguable (and in any case temporary) psychological advantage, by killing, or accepting the deaths of, people at random on the other side.

No tears for dead kids here. These writers are two patriots searching for a practical solution that will leave their country in an improved situation: professional realism that exposes the self-described "realist" decision-makers as over-emotional, bomb-laden amateurs unable to control themselves.

Gaza is a laboratory for running experiments about the Western confrontation with Islam. Now read the above quote again, only this time forget Gaza and Israel. This time, think "Afghanistan and the United States."

Knowing Human Intent

Almost nothing in human affairs is more difficult than knowing another person's intentions. Indeed, the reason why the social sciences are so much more difficult than the so-called "hard" sciences is precisely that: you can gather all the data you want, but you can never account for a person's ability to conceal (even from himself) or change his mind. Yet after acknowledging that "there is so much that we do not know about Iran," Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence stated in an interview:

We know (WM: my emphasis) they are committed to developing a nuclear weapon. We do know (WM: my emphasis) they are intent on developing the capability to deliver a nuclear weapon.... The third thing we know (WM: my emphasis) is that they pose a threat to the stability in the Middle East...

The Representative evidently "knows" what all the leaders in Iran's extraordinarily factionalized government intend to do, "knows" how the endless factional strife will turn out, "knows" that nothing the rest of the world can do will alter their stance, and "knows" that it is Iran (rather than countries like the U.S. and Israel that have actually started several wars in the region) that poses a threat to the stability of the Mideast.

I stand in awe before the brilliance of the Representative. He has evidently solved the most challenging problem facing us poor, ignorant social scientists: knowing what goes on in the minds of men.

Gaza: The Implications of Distorting History

A brief analysis of how Western media distort the truth…


The Distortion (Reuters):
A governance crisis erupted after Hamas won a January 2006 election and widened when the group drove Fatah forces from Gaza 18 months later, leaving Abbas's Palestinian Authority in partial control only of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The above historical summary rewritten to reflect what actually happened:
A governance crisis erupted after Tel Aviv and Washington intervened to subvert the Hamas regime set up following its January 2006 election victory. At first Tel Aviv and Washington employed economic pressure in an attempt to destroy the ability of Hamas to govern. This governing crisis widened when military assistance was provided to Fatah by Washington and Tel Aviv along with encouragement to launch a civil war to prevent Hamas from governing. This occurred and resulted in Hamas being kicked out of power in the West Bank but using force to retain control over Gaza, thereby creating two competing Palestinian administrations.

The harm in such distortions of history is clear: we cannot make informed decisions or design effective policy without knowing the context that explains current events.

The implication of the Reuters distortion is that Hamas illegally seized control; from this, it would follow that Hamas is wedded to violence and only understands the language of force and that Israel is the victim. One would logically conclude from this distortion that therefore, negotiations are pointless; the only logical policy is a fight to the death.

The implication of the corrected summary is exactly the opposite – that it was Hamas that was following democratic rules and that Tel Aviv and Washington drove Hamas back to violence; from this it would follow that Tel Aviv and Washington were not trying to persuade Hamas to renounce violence but were determined to marginalize Hamas and prevent the emergence of Palestinian democracy, to ensure that Palestine remain dependent on Israel, and that Israel is not the victim but the aggressor. One would logically conclude from this corrected version that therefore, negotiations with Hamas are a reasonable option that can be expected to succeed if pursued with sincerity; that the cycle of violence in Israeli-Palestinian relations is the fault of Israeli intransigence.

Time to Get Over The Idiotic "Capitalism vs. Socialism" Debate

Americans need to get beyond their hang-up over “socialism vs. capitalism.” We need to learn to discriminate: we need more socialism in health care and wealth distribution, more capitalism when it concerns bailing out the rich. Today we are getting the bad aspects of both socialism and capitalism without the good aspects of either. [See also Governing Ourselves, Dec 12.]

It’s not about socialism vs. capitalism. Both the childish American terror at the mention of the word “socialism” and its childish worship of the word “capitalism” only show the ignorance of Americans. The idea that a government policy is good because it is capitalistic and bad because it is socialistic is just as idiotic as the opposite argument, which for 70 years was made so vociferously by America’s mirror-image, the Soviets.

Capitalism is the pursuit of profit, which at its best generates marvelously efficient markets but at its worst generates child labor; wars of imperialism; and waves of unrestrained, depression-producing greed. Socialism is the pursuit of fairness, which at its best generates security, justice, and equality but at its worst protects industries that deserve to fail and condemns people to living in communal flats with shared bathrooms, dependent on government handouts for economic survival purchased at the price of loss of freedom. The great academic theories underlying each are equally vulnerable to abuse by greedy captains of industry and elitist politicians. The pollution of Soviet industry and the pollution of Western oil companies are equally poisonous. Soviet imperialism against East Europe in the name of Marxism and Western imperialism against oil producers in the name of democracy are equally dishonorable.

This fall’s bailout of Wall Street was not bad because it was socialistic; it was bad because it bailed out rich people who were knowingly gambling and should have been allowed to fail just as the unproductive industrial dinosaurs of Soviet industry should have been allowed to fail. Protecting the incompetent just because they are powerful is one of the evils of socialism. When the government of a capitalistic system does that, it is practicing socialism for sure, but that is not why the practice is bad. It is bad because, regardless of the system, incompetence should not be rewarded.

The issue in the U.S. today is not capitalism vs. socialism. The current economic crisis illustrates what happens when too much wealth is held by too few; the wealth needs to be spread around. The post-Reagan years of intentional government irresponsibility show that capitalism, by itself, is a lousy, dangerous, immoral system that we cannot afford. But the opposite extreme of letting the government control everything—economic choices, living style, politics, choice of reading material—was shown by the Soviet experience to be equally bad.

We need to become a little bit more mature. We need to learn to discriminate. When the issue concerns health care, economic security, or the behavior of entities with enormous power over people, a dash of socialism is essential to producing a well-flavored social stew:

• Health care must be for everyone.
• Minimal economic security must be granted to everyone (even mental patients, who otherwise become a public danger helplessly roaming the streets).
• Entities with power (be they financial firms, automobile manufacturers, or ministries of internal security) must be regulated, inspected, checked, balanced, and made to behave transparently.

When the issue concerns civil rights, consumer choice, freedom to set up your own business, a dash of capitalism is essential to producing a well-flavored social stew:

• the government needs to keep its distance from controlling what people say, read, write, or advocate;
• the government needs to keep its distance from telling people what they can buy or sell;
• the government needs to keep its distance from controlling all sources of production.
  
  

The problem in the U.S. today is not one of capitalism vs. socialism. Washington has for generations designed all manner of property protection, wealth preservation, foreign policy, trade policy, tax policy laws and actions with the express intent of giving rewards to the rich. Sure, that is socialism – but it is the bad side of socialism; socialism for the rich plus capitalism for the poor. Even the incredibly wealth oil companies get all manner of under-the-table socialist rewards from the Government. Of course, the government has also done much for the poor (otherwise, we would have long since had our own communist revolution). But the 40% of Americans without health care need more socialism, while Wall Street millionaires and oil companies deserve less.

The problem today in the U.S. is that Washington is practicing the bad aspects of socialism and capitalism while evading the good aspects of each. We are increasingly getting the worst of both worlds.