I have a brother. My brother is a conservative. Contrary to the dominant paradigm, however, my brother is a conservative that actually believes in conservative principles. My brother, in other words, is a great believer in liberty.
Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who are still the two greatest personal influences on the nature of the federal government, did not believe in liberty so much as they did “justice”, which is in quotes for a reason.
“Justice” doesn’t exist. It is, rather, something humans are predisposed to strive for, even if it proves perpetually unattainable. Liberty, on the other hand, is easy for the government to provide; it simply does nothing. When the government does nothing, every citizen enjoys perfect liberty, and all of the opportunities and perils inherent in the same.
Even the most libertarian of us, however, understand that we need some measure of government, up to and including the federal level. My brother, the nearly bulletproof conservative intellectual, could write sonnets about the inherent danger of federal authority.
My brother’s favorite example of the issue at hand is the federal Deparment of Education, instituted during the Carter administration. He points out that the country got along just fine without a DOE for two centuries, and that the quality and efficiency of education has suffered since centralization.
And my brother, of course, is right. The logic of any federal agency is, first and foremost, to perpetuate its own existence. Its second priority is to grow. It is the same for any individual human being; First food, then sex. Survival, then pro-creation. All else is secondary.
We should not be shocked that faceless bureaucracies act the same as cornered humans. Would a bureaucrat ever tell his boss that his job was done, or unnecessary?
With this insight on the nature of bureaucracy in mind, here is the leap that my brother and those aligned with him need to make: the Pentagon falls into the very same fold. The Pentagon is the Department of Education on crack.
The United States did not have a standing peacetime army until 1947. It got along for nearly two centuries without one. When the United States first adopted a standing peacetime army, it accounted for fully fifty percent of the world’s wealth, implying that the lack of a security state has thus far been friendly to America’s fortunes.
As soon as this insidious bureaucracy, this Pentagon, which must be explicitly distinguished from the military, came into existence, it had a vested interest in perpetuating the its own existence as an end in and of itself. And therein lies the flaw; you cannot deputize a war machine during peacetime, because that war machine will, by definition, seek to justify its existence via…guess what? Guerra.
In August of 1945 the United States was more powerful than any other country had ever been or realistically dreamed of being. The military, however, did not de-mobalize. This is the turning point.
The newly standing military, born of the 1947 National Security Act which created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA, had to justify its existence. The logic became the Soviet Union.
No nation, in the far-too-extensive history of war, had ever bled in the quantities that the USSR did at the hands of Hitler. This was an incinerated, brutalized, and paranoid society. This was a society, which, hardened as it was, was in no condition to wage war.
The Pentagon, however, needed an enemy. This enemy was not invented, it was not unfairly criticized, but it was inflated to an absurd extent. This inflation was inevitable, given the logic of centralized bureaucracy and its single-minded focus on the budgets and power that only perpetual paranoia could secure.
This is the understanding we must come to: we are not surrounded by enemies. We are surrounded by 200 countries, every single one of which is poorer and weaker than us. We hold 20,000 metropolis-melting nuclear weapons. Why are we afraid? Why do we feel constantly under siege? Why were we afraid of Iraq in 2003, the country that met our cripping bombardment with precisely zero airplanes of their own? Is this constant fear based on reality? Or is it based on bureaucratic inertia?
Monday, June 25, 2007
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Does it Even Matter Anymore?
Sapere Aude -- Have the Courage to Use Your Own Reason
We all know that George W. Bush did all he could to avoid war, right? War was obviously his last resort. It wasn't like he wanted to invade Iraq, right? It wasn't as if he would stop at nothing to do so. It wasn't as if he was supressing a grin and probably an erection when he announce that the war had started. So, keeping in mind that our fearless leader wanted nothing so much as peace, lets review the finding that he sent to Congress before the invasion.
(I) Whereas, U.S. reliance on further diplomatic and peaceful means alone would not
(a) adequately protect U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, nor
(b) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant U.N. resolutions regarding Iraq, and
(II) Whereas, acting pursuant to the Authorization to Use Military Force was consistent with continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations including those nations, organizations, and persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Is any part of this, any part of this, true? No. The default (apologist) position then becomes that the president acted in good faith and was simply mistaken or misled, presumably by a renegade CIA that was itching to invade Iraq.
What we must come to grips with is this: this was no honest mistake. The president himself has denied that he ever explicitly linked Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, due to a total lack of evidence. Really? Did you read your fucking execution order? The one that to date has resulted in scores of thousands of deaths? Does it not explicitly say that attacking Iraq is consistent with attacking the 9/11 planners, aiders, etc.?
Maybe he was focusing on the "persons who committed the attacks"; maybe they had been reincarnated and moved to Baghdad. The world is very complicated. Iraq is very complicated. But some things are simple. Simply put, the President willfully lied to the world and to his countrymen. Period.
Mixed metaphor time: If the head of the snake is that rotten, is it realistic to hope to find salvation or victory somewhere towards the tail? This is not the case of a few, or a bunch of, bad apples; this is the case of a rotten and leak-ridden barrell.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Who Won?
Who won World War II? The short-term answer, obviously, is the United States. Even among the victorious allies, America benefitted immeasurably more than the others. The Soviet Union had lost 22 million citizens and seen the western quarter of its country incinerated. Great Britain had barely held out and, newly bankrupt, was about to lose its entire global empire. France had given in to collaboration and was now to give in to the inevitable loss of its own empire in North Africa and Indochina.
Among the victors, only America had not paid a crippling price. The American mainland was untouched. American civilians had slept safely in their beds throughout the carnage. And the American economy accounted for fully half of the entire planet's wealth. Never before had any country, in either a quantitative or a qualitative sense, been so powerful.
Our enemies, on the other hand, were decimated as no societies had ever been. More than half of the largest cities in Germany and Japan were utterly destroyed by American bombs. Millions of civilians were killed, most of them in the last year of the war. These societies were brutalized in a way that it is useless to write about; if it's impossible to imagine, it's impossible for me to write about.
By demanding uncondional surrender, the United States lengthened the war. Many elements of the German and Japanese establishment would have negotiated a peace with the United States if this demand had not been made. After this demand was made, the German and Japanese moderates were made irrelevant. After the United States made it perfectly clear that it would use massive and indiscriminate terrorism to compel this surrender, that it would destroy entire metropolises, that it would incinerate 100,000 civilians, intentionally, in a single night, the moderates looked downright suicidal.
For what nation in its right mind would surrender to an army that was willing to destroy on the scale that America was? Many Germans and Japanese felt that surrendering to an enemy willing to employ that level of violence meant surrendering the very country; there was no guarantee of post-war American magnanimity and, quite frankly, there was no reason for the Germans or the Japanese to expect it.
However, once unconditional surrender was achieved, the Americans conducted themselves in a way that we should be proud of. The devastated nations were rebuilt, governed in a more democratic way than ever before, and brought back into the community of nations.
And the most staggering thing, which really borders on the unbelievable, is that despite the fact that there was hardly a single person in Japan and Germany that had not lost a loved one to American bombs, there was no insurgency. Not only was there no organized insurrection, there was not even an isolated incidenct of a widowed husband taking a shot at an American. None. Not 10, not 2. None. Zero Americans were killed in the occupations of Japan and Germany.
Sixty years later, Japan and Germany are the second and third richest countries on Earth. Their physical security is guaranteed in perpetuity by the only country that is richer than them, the United States. Germany and Japan were made to give up their empires, which they never could have maintained anyway. They were subjected to a level of violence that had never been employed before armies before, never mind civilians. But in the end, they are the second and third richest countries on Earth and they pay absolutely nothing for their own defense. So, who won?
Among the victors, only America had not paid a crippling price. The American mainland was untouched. American civilians had slept safely in their beds throughout the carnage. And the American economy accounted for fully half of the entire planet's wealth. Never before had any country, in either a quantitative or a qualitative sense, been so powerful.
Our enemies, on the other hand, were decimated as no societies had ever been. More than half of the largest cities in Germany and Japan were utterly destroyed by American bombs. Millions of civilians were killed, most of them in the last year of the war. These societies were brutalized in a way that it is useless to write about; if it's impossible to imagine, it's impossible for me to write about.
By demanding uncondional surrender, the United States lengthened the war. Many elements of the German and Japanese establishment would have negotiated a peace with the United States if this demand had not been made. After this demand was made, the German and Japanese moderates were made irrelevant. After the United States made it perfectly clear that it would use massive and indiscriminate terrorism to compel this surrender, that it would destroy entire metropolises, that it would incinerate 100,000 civilians, intentionally, in a single night, the moderates looked downright suicidal.
For what nation in its right mind would surrender to an army that was willing to destroy on the scale that America was? Many Germans and Japanese felt that surrendering to an enemy willing to employ that level of violence meant surrendering the very country; there was no guarantee of post-war American magnanimity and, quite frankly, there was no reason for the Germans or the Japanese to expect it.
However, once unconditional surrender was achieved, the Americans conducted themselves in a way that we should be proud of. The devastated nations were rebuilt, governed in a more democratic way than ever before, and brought back into the community of nations.
And the most staggering thing, which really borders on the unbelievable, is that despite the fact that there was hardly a single person in Japan and Germany that had not lost a loved one to American bombs, there was no insurgency. Not only was there no organized insurrection, there was not even an isolated incidenct of a widowed husband taking a shot at an American. None. Not 10, not 2. None. Zero Americans were killed in the occupations of Japan and Germany.
Sixty years later, Japan and Germany are the second and third richest countries on Earth. Their physical security is guaranteed in perpetuity by the only country that is richer than them, the United States. Germany and Japan were made to give up their empires, which they never could have maintained anyway. They were subjected to a level of violence that had never been employed before armies before, never mind civilians. But in the end, they are the second and third richest countries on Earth and they pay absolutely nothing for their own defense. So, who won?
Friday, June 15, 2007
Wake Up
Only a few guessed that the retreat of darkness
presaged the emergence of an entirely new
and less tangible terror
It's over. It's been over for years. We lost. Friend and enemy alike warned us not to do it. But we did it. The disgustingly proto-fascist attitude that held sway before the war is something that brings a still-visceral disgust to me. Too many Americans were pro-war pre-war, weren't they? Too many Americans were unforgivably negligent in their duty to be informed citizens.
When the bombing of Baghdad began, I was genuinely ashamed of my country for the first time in my adult life. Disgusted. Fucking disgusted. Prime time television we made it, this storm of metal rained upon a nation of children and paupers. Did anyone shoot back? Did any Iraqi planes challenge ours? No. This was not war; this was murder. We will not have victory in Iraq because we don't deserve it.
We were cowards then, bombing at will while our "enemy" could only hope that their children would not be decapitated by flying glass and metal while they slept. What part of this do we fail to acknowledge? We chose to do this. The president of the United States chose to start a war. Chose to invade a country that had not attacked or threatened to attack ours. We have sinned, and our rewards thus far have been predictable.
Enough about "liberation". Enough about "misleading" intelligence. Enough about "9/11 changed everything". George W. Bush is a war criminal. He knowingly and willfully commited an act of aggression against a nation that could never have directly attacked his. George W. Bush is not a visionary. He did not make a gamble. He did not act on the best available intelligence. He did not go to war as a last resort. He is simply a murderer with a bigger microphone than most.
The way to get out of situations like this is to acknowledge that we have a problem. The problem is that we were wrong. More that wrong, this was a criminal enterprise. George W. Bush is a murderer. Period. He ordered the mightiest military in history to launch a full-scale attack on a country that posed no threat to us. Murder. Ask yourself this: if the leader of any other country had done this, what would we call him? Did Hitler not do this to Poland? Did Hussein not do this to Kuwait?
George W. Bush deserves the deference and respect accorded to the office of the presidency. He has disgraced that office to the point where any such deference has long been expended. If law meant anything, George W. Bush would be on trial for his life as the head of a criminal conspiracy that has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of innocents.
From Adam to the Atom
The explosive force of suns,
once safely locked in nature
now lies in the hand that long ago
dropped from a tree limb
into the upland grass...
Both the light we seek
and the shadows we fear
are projected from within
Science, for all its wonders, is a human undertaking. This is why science has not prevented war, but rather perfected it. Why are we dependent on the Middle East? Because we are dependent on oil. And why are we dependent on oil? Because we refuse to use nuclear energy. And why do we refuse to use nuclear energy? Because it is dangerous. True enough. But is it more dangerous than building 50,000 nuclear weapons and rattling them in vain in a doomed effort to shape the world to our will? How is it acceptable to weaponize this beast yet too dangerous to tame it in the interest of clean and independent energy?
Our identity is a dream.
We are process, not reality,
for reality is an illusion of the light--
the light of our particular day
We risk becoming the tools of our tools, which may include ideas, before we have managed to make those tools work productively rather than destructively. The manipulation of the atom is the purest example of this danger.
There is strong archaeological evidence to show that
with the birth of human consciousness there was born,
like a twin,
the impulse to transcend it
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
On Bullshit, Briefly
Who had more face to face meetings with Saddam Hussein: Osama bin Laden or Donald Rumsfeld?
Thursday, June 7, 2007
The Greatest Generation
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy again.
When destruction comes to define the national purpose,
annihilation becoming the end product of the best-organized communal effort
in history--there is the threshold to remember. By the year 1945
what American believed in--judging not from what they said
but from what they did--was nothing.
I'm sure we are all familiar with the dominant paradigm of America's role in World War II. It goes something like this: we were attacked by an inherently agressive Japan, after which a psychotic Germany declared war on us. We did not start this fight, but we sure did finish it. We were the good guys and, all modesty aside, we saved the world. We crushed regimes that were evil and expansionist. Rarely has there been such a clear dividing line between right and wrong, between good and evil.
I have sympathy with this argument, but it is riddled with holes, and millions of incinerated women and children filled those holes. While it is impossible for any American or Japanese to be totally objective about Pearl Harbor, a couple thoughts: first of all, Pearl Harbor was a purely military target and Hawaii was not a state at the time. Secondly, it can be seen as a classic pre-emptive strike if emotions take a back seat.
The United States did not single-handedly win World War II. It was one of two indispensible powers; the other was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union sacrificed 22 million lives to defeat Germany; the United States sacrificed 200,000 lives in that theatre, all military. For every pint of American blood, the Reds gave a hundred.
The real issue, however, is the means that we employed towards the end of defeating Germany and Japan. When waging war, we must decide: do we aim to break the enemy's capability or to break the enemy's will? In World War II, we decided to break the enemy's will. The means were indiscriminate terrorism, pure and simple.
The United States did things from the air that no modern nation would ever dare do on the ground; it purposefully destroyed entire cities full of civilians. In Japan, for example, there were very few soldiers; the huge majority of them were deployed in China and throughout the Pacific. The United States executed the most destructive acts ever carried out by man against Japan. Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. These were the three largest scale killings every committed.
The United States, as a matter of policy, destroyed these cities, killing 300,000 civilians in 3 days. Women, children, and elderly mostly. Those who attempted to escape the fire bombs by jumping into rivers were boiled alive. Japan's rivers ran thick with melted human fat. With babies. Incinerated by the thousands, melted into their mothers' arms.
All we can say about this is that Japan and Germany, which was subjected to similar indiscriminate slaughter, got the message; they both surrendered without condition and accepted occupation without reverting to guerilla warfare.
In Iraq, we temporarily crushed the enemy's ability to fight, but clearly did not undermine his will. Should we nuke Anbar? No. Analogies between World War II and Iraq are mostly counterproductive, but we must come to grips with this fact: there are no good guys in war. And out greatest generation, in order to win its war over "evil", which surely existed, committed the largest scale single acts of murder in the history of the Earth. The next time you wonder how foreigners could possibly fear the United States and see us as a threat, keep that in mind.
Bush Was Right (About One Thing)
If there is one word that must come to define American foreign policy in the future, it is multilateralism. What we need, however, is not a regression to prior forms of multilateralism as embodied by the United Nations or even NATO, but one which more closely reflects the fact that the intertwined nature of foreign affairs is becoming exponentially more so with globalization, as well as, and this is the most fundamental point, the unique legitimacy of democracies in the shaping of geopolitics.
Any broad assessment of American foreign policy must, of course, acknowledge the specific challenges that our country presently faces, rather than simply offer broad generalizations of an ideal future stance. When we look at our current predicaments, however, the rationale behind these broader orientations will manifest itself. At present, of course, the primary foreign policy issue for the United States is the war in Iraq.
The way in which the war in Iraq was commenced should, by now, serve as a study of how the United States must not go to war. Despite the nominal contributions of the “coalition of the willing”, this was, and is, an essentially unilateral effort by the United States. Compare this with the 1991 Gulf War, in which Saudi Arabia and Japan footed most of the bill.[1] This time, the horrible toll in blood and treasure is being paid almost entirely by the United States, despite the fact that nearly every nation on Earth stands to benefit from a stable Iraq. Because of its arrogance before the invasion, the United States is now stuck with unilateral responsibility for a multilateral problem.
The Curse of Sovereignty
Keeping this critique in mind, one thing must be made clear: the type of multilateralism which would have been obtained with UN support for the invasion of Iraq is no more viable a model for our future conduct than American unilateralism. While the war in Iraq may have been cheaper in American dollars and lives had there been UN approval, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the UN’s endorsement would have made the war any more legitimate.
Among the many nations who refused to endorse the American invasion of Iraq, including some of those who were on the Security Council at the time, were governments that the United States, and other democracies, can no longer afford to treat as legitimate and equal members of the international community. In other words, if a state such as Syria or Zimbabwe were to bless an American initiative, would that somehow make the proposed action more “legitimate”? My vision for the future emphatically says, “No”.
While I reject and regret the way in which America went to war in Iraq, the underlying premise of its right to do so is something I endorse, albeit somewhat qualitatively. That premise is this: Saddam Hussein, and many like him, are not legitimate and equal members of the international community; they are sadistic thugs with no right to be accorded the respect of a sovereign government. To those of you who would qualify this statement as overly judgmental and holier-than-thou, let me remind you that tolerating the intolerant is no virtue.
We see a similar dynamic in regards to the genocide in Darfur. Most efforts aimed at staunching the bloodshed seek to persuade or coerce the government of Sudan. This is the very government that is allowing, indeed supporting, indeed orchestrating the slaughter. This is not a legitimately elected sovereign government protecting the interests of its people. This is not a “government” at all; it is a group of murderers, nothing more, cynically employing the cloak of “sovereignty” to enable its horrific crimes.[2]
Men like these have no right to govern states, any states, and the new American foreign policy must move past the antiquated UN framework in which any thug with enough guns is accorded the same respect as the chancellor of Germany or the prime minister of Japan.
Many who were dismayed and worse by the United States’ conduct in the lead up to the Iraq War made the argument that closer cooperation with the UN was required. I respectfully assert that this is precisely the wrong lesson to take from this diplomatic debacle. The entire episode, rather, proved that the UN is inherently incapable of condemning and confronting sadistic governments because far too many of the UN’s members are dictatorial sadists themselves.
Again, George W. Bush’s instinct was correct; Saddam Hussein had no right to “govern” Iraq. However, the answer to the UN’s ineptitude is not, and never can be, American unilateralism.
The Nature of the UN
The United Nations is the product of a different time, a time to which it is impossible to return. The primary function of the UN has been to prevent conventional wars between states, especially powerful states.[3] In this regard, the UN has proven remarkably successful, despite what its legions of critics may say. Surely the specter of nuclear weapons played an inestimable role as well, but the six decades of the UN’s existence have been, in a historical context, inconceivably peaceful, if peace is measure as the absence of open warfare between powerful states.
The world, of course, has seen no lack of war since 1945, but for the most part these wars have taken place within nations rather than between them. The type of civil war presently raging in Iraq has been far more common since World War II than the conventional mechanized invasion of the country by American armies has been. In fact, the United States is the only country in the world which has invaded foreign states in the 21st century with conventional armies.
What accounts for this shift in the nature of war? Partly wars within states are the inevitable consequence of European decolonization throughout the third world and the subsequent local battles to define the nature of the newly-independent states. There has also been, however, a sort of default green light for this bloodshed from the UN. Again, the UN is a product of a very different world, and we must assess if and how its mandate even applies in the 21st century.
One of the positively (both qualitatively and quantitatively) revolutionary elements of the UN’s founding was its explicit codification of certain international laws. The UN explicitly outlawed aggressive war, delegitimizing it as an acceptable expression of any state’s national interest. The moral and strategic import of this should not be underestimated.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, there was nothing technically illegal about it; Germany had simply decided that its national interest compelled it to invade Poland. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, however, there was no room for debate; it was illegal. Regardless of Iraq’s perceived national interests and somewhat legitimate grievances against Kuwait, the action was recognized by most as illegal and unacceptable. It pains me to say that when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the legal footing for doing so was essentially as weak as Saddam’s had been in 1990; it employed the familiar logic of might makes right.
While the UN stigmatized and banned aggressive international war as a morally or legally viable instrument of any state’s foreign policy, it made another stand at the same time that totally undermines America’s position in the 21st century. This second component, perfectly understandable at the time, is the concept of sovereignty within states. In other words, whatever a state did within its own borders was outside the purview of the UN; all domestic conduct was seen to be the state’s own business, and it would not become the international community’s business unless and until international borders were crossed.
The strength of this granting of internal sovereignty is that it deprived powerful states of the excuse for invading weaker neighbors under the guise of supposedly benevolent attempts to quell internal unrest in those weak states. However, there are two major flaws with the granting of such blind sovereignty.
Firstly, it allows illegitimate governments to massacre its own people, like Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign of the late 1980’s.[4] There was little legal room for UN intervention, since the crimes were carried out inside of Iraq, where the butcher of Baghdad was accorded the status of an internationally recognized “sovereign”. This is a huge moral dilemma whose ramifications should be clear to all of us who would hope to prevent blatant human rights violations.
Secondly, in addition to moral blind spots, internal sovereignty poses serious tactical, and even strategic, threats to the United States. This is the most far-reaching lesson of September 11th; what happens within the borders of other countries is our business, even if that country is, like Afghanistan, thousands of miles away and located in one of the poorest, most remote corners of Earth.
The New Multilateralism
I hope to make the case, if I have not already done so, that the old UN precepts of total equality of all states in terms of their sovereignty and their roles in fostering multilateralism are as poor an option for America as is American unilateralism. We must seek a third way, one which embraces the value of international cooperation, while not falling victim to an insipid relativism that grants criminals the status of statesmen. The new multilateralism must come to recognize democratic or democratizing governments as the sole legitimate actors on the international stage.
This does not mean, let it be clear, that governments deemed non-democratic by the United States are to be ignored and consigned to pariah status; rather, it means that tyrannical governments will be given a great impetus to reform and to integrate themselves fully into the family of nations.
As a model for this approach, we can look at the European Union. The EU shows us that, when democratic reforms are explicitly linked to tangible economic and political benefits, even the most repressive governments can be swayed to reform.[5] Does anyone really believe that the communist bloc states would have democratized so quickly in the absence of the benefits that EU membership promised them?
We must take great care, when formulating this vision, that we do not equate “democratization” with “Americanization”. States absolutely must be granted the respect that their distinct cultures and values demand; we must, however, be confident enough to draw distinctions between cultural relativism and tyranny. For example, we can look at the fact that many democratic or democratizing states in Latin America and Asia have different definitions of certain freedoms than Western states do.
This is a delicate balance, of course. Many Muslim states, for example, do not believe that freedom of speech extends to the “freedom” to blaspheme their prophet; they are not against freedom of speech, but they absolutely do not recognize a freedom to blaspheme. Many Latin American states, populated by conservative Catholics, do not believe that women’s rights extend to the “right” to an abortion. We must take care not to engage in cultural imperialism; we must not condemn as un-democratic any state that does not totally mirror the American concepts of freedom.
At the same time, of course, we must be self-assured enough to know where to draw the line. We must, for example, be willing to accept Turkey’s right to censor blasphemy. We must not, however, recognize any state’s “right” to police its population via murder and terror. Murder is not a cultural quirk. Murder is murder. There is no objective standard for this threshold, of course; it must be the product of negotiation among the universally recognized democratic states.
Democracy’s Definition
We must also make sure not to equate democracy with elections. While elections are obviously the most public manifestation of what we in the West know as democracy, they are the last step in the march towards democracy. Without a foundation of rule of law, equality under the law, free enterprise, minority rights, and an independent judiciary, elections would simply serve the majority. Elections without the foundations listed above simply empower radicals and sectarian groups. We have seen this trend over and over, from Bosnia to Iraq.
It is often said that if elections were held in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, Osama bin Laden would win as a write-in candidate. This is, unfortunately, probably not totally hyperbolic. Part of the United States’ role in endorsing and incentivizing democratization must be the patient acknowledgment that premature elections can often serve to undermine democracy rather than foster it. States must not be allowed to endlessly drag their feet it democratizing, but the West must maintain a sober respect for the time it takes to foster a genuine, sustainable democracy.
Sustainable is the key word; we do not want one man, one vote, one time.
With this broad framework of the ideal medium and long-term goals of the United States established, we must also acknowledge that America faces many immediate problems, especially in the Middle East, that will come to a head long before that region is even remotely democratic. The two immediate trouble spots are Iraq and Iran.
Iraq
Books have been written with great haste and devastating detail documenting the American failures of foresight and conduct in Iraq. Those errors do not need to be rehashed here, but all Americans owe it to themselves to make a sober assessment of the best option moving forward, untainted by their personal feelings towards the president. This is not George W. Bush’s war; it is America’s war. When Mr. Bush is out of office, the war will go on. Quitting Iraq out of a desire to humiliate and discredit the president is, and I hesitate to use this word, un-American.
When considering the national interests of the United States, however, I am of the firm conviction that the war in Iraq, in its current manifestation, must be ended. We must not delude ourselves as to what this means. Firstly, it does not mean peace. There was no peace in Iraq before the American invasion, there is no peace there now, and there will be no peace if Americans are withdrawn. Iraq has been at war with Iran, Kuwait, the United States, and itself since 1979. We cannot expect this to change anytime soon. We must not, in other words, profess to “end” the war in hopes of securing “peace”.
What we must do, rather, is end the American component of the Iraq war. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it pains me to say, the war’s aims, as originally defined, are not attainable. The war, if its aim was to secure a stable and pro-American government with real authority throughout Iraq and along its borders, is lost. It is against the American nature and paradigm to admit this, but it must be done. If I had to pick a point where the war was lost, it would be the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, but that is almost beside the point at this late stage.
Yesterday was always the best day for America in Iraq. This is not pessimism; it is logic. If, for fifty months, each month is more bloody and less shapeable by American power, this is not a coincidence; it is an undeniable truth. The act of repeating the same act endlessly in expectation of a different result is the definition of insanity. Expecting that the American military can secure Baghdad is insane.
The United States has little influence over the course of events in Iraq. It has the ability to bleed and to spend, but not to win. Americans are dying every day in Iraq to ensure that the Iraqi civil war remains bad as opposed to terrible. This is not the role of the American military.
We should not be so cavalier as to throw Iraq to the wolves, but if Iraq is throwing itself to the wolves, we should not be so vain as to think that we can convince them not to do so. American soldiers in Iraq, especially those in Baghdad, are hostages to Sunni extremists, Shia militias, and, eventually, Iranian intervention.
A withdrawal of most American forces from Iraq would achieve several objectives. It would staunch the hemorrhaging of American blood and treasure. It would greatly increase our military’s readiness for other theatres and, therefore, its credible deterrent power. It would deprive al-Qaeda of its cause célèbre and incentivize local Sunnis to turn on these nihilists. It would deprive Iran of tens of thousands of targets in the event of a confrontation over its nuclear program.
The United States will never, and must never, totally withdraw from Iraq. As noted above, 9/11 proved that a state’s internal behavior is directly related to American interests and security. Iraq has become a magnet of jihadists, who have received far more effective training and experience than they did in Afghanistan. The United States must keep an eye on Iraq, especially the areas such as al-Anbar province which are infested by radical Islamists. We must, however, move away from the idea that Iraq’s civil war is the most pressing national security issue for the United States at the present.
Iran
The two greatest beneficiaries of the American invasion of Iraq have been al-Qaeda and Iran. American policy towards Iran must be firm but much more realistic. Iran is going to be the regional power of the Middle East. If American policy is to treat this inevitability as a threat, then war is inevitable. The next president of the United States must open full diplomatic relations with Iran.
We must be honest; war with Iran in the next few years is a distinct possibility. Open war with Iran would make Iraq look like a cakewalk. Preventing war with Iran is the most important task for this nation in the next few years. As such, we must do everything we can to avoid war, which could just as easily begin with a miscommunication or a technical malfunction as with an open attack.
For all of our incessant talk about war being “the last option”, how can we dare to say such a thing when we refuse even to talk to our adversary? How can we look the mother of a fallen soldier in the eye and tell her we did everything we could to prevent the loss of her son when we refused even to communicate before the war? Communication is to be cut off during war, not before. If establishing open dialogue with Tehran decreases the chance of a miscommunication spiraling out of control, we must do it. If talking means making war one percent less likely, we must talk.
Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a much different threat now that it was before 9/11. It is more of an ideology now than an organization. The one place where it still operates openly as a physical organization, of course, is Iraq. As noted above, I believe than an American withdrawal from Iraq would deprive local Sunnis of their sole motivation in harboring these nihilists. Al-Qaeda was allowed refuge in Afghanistan only because it paid the destitute Taliban government. Iraq, on the other hand, does not need al-Qaeda’s money; Iraq has money under its sands. The danger is not that al-Qaeda will be given a safe haven in Iraq. The danger, rather, is the inevitable dispersion of these hardened, disciplined, and well trained soldiers throughout the world.
This dispersion must be braced for and combated by American intelligence and whatever foreign allies we can recruit to help us. Intelligence gathering always has been and always will be the most important aspect of the war on terror; all the bombs in the world are useless if you don’t know where to aim them,
The first rule is battling al-Qaeda must be to do no harm. Invading Iraq did harm, to say the least. The current administration asserts that the unprecedented flood of suicide bombings serves as proof that we are luring the terrorists to a place where we can kill them. I see the situation as evidence that the invasion of Iraq did harm to the war on terror by creating thousands upon thousands of new terrorists. Al-Qaeda type terrorism is not a finite problem that can be solved by killing a certain number of people. It is a fluid problem to which the most important step is to not create more terrorists than there were in the first place.
Conclusion
Al-Qaeda is simply one result of globalization. As noted above, old ideas about the sanctity and sovereignty of states need drastic revision. Capitalism has seen to it, for better or for worse, that international borders mean less than they ever have, having been lowered and riddled with holes to allow for the constant deluge of goods, services, people, and information that defines life in the 21st century.
Since corporations, airlines, diseases, radio and television signals, and, increasingly, people have little or no regard for international boundaries, we can no longer afford to define our foreign policy from a paradigm in which borders were inviolable and states were the preeminent, indeed the only, international actors of note.
Globalization entails great sacrifices, and one of these sacrifices is the traditional notion of sovereignty and independence. How many nations on earth today are truly independent, in terms of being self-sustainable? What nation would not be utterly devastated if oil were to disappear tomorrow? What nation could implode upon itself without dragging its neighbors down with it? This degree of interdependence is unprecedented, and it must be met head on with a new paradigm.
Americans are traditionally very wary of ceding any degree of sovereignty to international institutions, and for very good reasons. What we must understand, however, is that the global economy has already seen to it that America’s sovereignty is compromised. We are economically dependent on foreign nations, and our diplomacy must reflect a willingness to work in concert with other nations. Once we embrace this necessity, we can choose what nations we will associate with.
We will start with the established democracies, perhaps forty or fifty of them, and then expand the group as nations gradually come to meet the established standards. Nations failing to meet the standards would not be isolated or abandoned; they would be aggressively recruited. One of the possible benefits of globalization is that it may afford us the opportunity to spread democracy across the earth by way of example rather than by force.
[1] http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/facts/gulfwar
[2] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/07/20/darfur9095.htm
[3] http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter
[4] http://www.answer.com/topic/al-anfal-campaign
[5] http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/enlargement_process/accession_process/criteria/index_en.htm
Any broad assessment of American foreign policy must, of course, acknowledge the specific challenges that our country presently faces, rather than simply offer broad generalizations of an ideal future stance. When we look at our current predicaments, however, the rationale behind these broader orientations will manifest itself. At present, of course, the primary foreign policy issue for the United States is the war in Iraq.
The way in which the war in Iraq was commenced should, by now, serve as a study of how the United States must not go to war. Despite the nominal contributions of the “coalition of the willing”, this was, and is, an essentially unilateral effort by the United States. Compare this with the 1991 Gulf War, in which Saudi Arabia and Japan footed most of the bill.[1] This time, the horrible toll in blood and treasure is being paid almost entirely by the United States, despite the fact that nearly every nation on Earth stands to benefit from a stable Iraq. Because of its arrogance before the invasion, the United States is now stuck with unilateral responsibility for a multilateral problem.
The Curse of Sovereignty
Keeping this critique in mind, one thing must be made clear: the type of multilateralism which would have been obtained with UN support for the invasion of Iraq is no more viable a model for our future conduct than American unilateralism. While the war in Iraq may have been cheaper in American dollars and lives had there been UN approval, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the UN’s endorsement would have made the war any more legitimate.
Among the many nations who refused to endorse the American invasion of Iraq, including some of those who were on the Security Council at the time, were governments that the United States, and other democracies, can no longer afford to treat as legitimate and equal members of the international community. In other words, if a state such as Syria or Zimbabwe were to bless an American initiative, would that somehow make the proposed action more “legitimate”? My vision for the future emphatically says, “No”.
While I reject and regret the way in which America went to war in Iraq, the underlying premise of its right to do so is something I endorse, albeit somewhat qualitatively. That premise is this: Saddam Hussein, and many like him, are not legitimate and equal members of the international community; they are sadistic thugs with no right to be accorded the respect of a sovereign government. To those of you who would qualify this statement as overly judgmental and holier-than-thou, let me remind you that tolerating the intolerant is no virtue.
We see a similar dynamic in regards to the genocide in Darfur. Most efforts aimed at staunching the bloodshed seek to persuade or coerce the government of Sudan. This is the very government that is allowing, indeed supporting, indeed orchestrating the slaughter. This is not a legitimately elected sovereign government protecting the interests of its people. This is not a “government” at all; it is a group of murderers, nothing more, cynically employing the cloak of “sovereignty” to enable its horrific crimes.[2]
Men like these have no right to govern states, any states, and the new American foreign policy must move past the antiquated UN framework in which any thug with enough guns is accorded the same respect as the chancellor of Germany or the prime minister of Japan.
Many who were dismayed and worse by the United States’ conduct in the lead up to the Iraq War made the argument that closer cooperation with the UN was required. I respectfully assert that this is precisely the wrong lesson to take from this diplomatic debacle. The entire episode, rather, proved that the UN is inherently incapable of condemning and confronting sadistic governments because far too many of the UN’s members are dictatorial sadists themselves.
Again, George W. Bush’s instinct was correct; Saddam Hussein had no right to “govern” Iraq. However, the answer to the UN’s ineptitude is not, and never can be, American unilateralism.
The Nature of the UN
The United Nations is the product of a different time, a time to which it is impossible to return. The primary function of the UN has been to prevent conventional wars between states, especially powerful states.[3] In this regard, the UN has proven remarkably successful, despite what its legions of critics may say. Surely the specter of nuclear weapons played an inestimable role as well, but the six decades of the UN’s existence have been, in a historical context, inconceivably peaceful, if peace is measure as the absence of open warfare between powerful states.
The world, of course, has seen no lack of war since 1945, but for the most part these wars have taken place within nations rather than between them. The type of civil war presently raging in Iraq has been far more common since World War II than the conventional mechanized invasion of the country by American armies has been. In fact, the United States is the only country in the world which has invaded foreign states in the 21st century with conventional armies.
What accounts for this shift in the nature of war? Partly wars within states are the inevitable consequence of European decolonization throughout the third world and the subsequent local battles to define the nature of the newly-independent states. There has also been, however, a sort of default green light for this bloodshed from the UN. Again, the UN is a product of a very different world, and we must assess if and how its mandate even applies in the 21st century.
One of the positively (both qualitatively and quantitatively) revolutionary elements of the UN’s founding was its explicit codification of certain international laws. The UN explicitly outlawed aggressive war, delegitimizing it as an acceptable expression of any state’s national interest. The moral and strategic import of this should not be underestimated.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, there was nothing technically illegal about it; Germany had simply decided that its national interest compelled it to invade Poland. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, however, there was no room for debate; it was illegal. Regardless of Iraq’s perceived national interests and somewhat legitimate grievances against Kuwait, the action was recognized by most as illegal and unacceptable. It pains me to say that when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the legal footing for doing so was essentially as weak as Saddam’s had been in 1990; it employed the familiar logic of might makes right.
While the UN stigmatized and banned aggressive international war as a morally or legally viable instrument of any state’s foreign policy, it made another stand at the same time that totally undermines America’s position in the 21st century. This second component, perfectly understandable at the time, is the concept of sovereignty within states. In other words, whatever a state did within its own borders was outside the purview of the UN; all domestic conduct was seen to be the state’s own business, and it would not become the international community’s business unless and until international borders were crossed.
The strength of this granting of internal sovereignty is that it deprived powerful states of the excuse for invading weaker neighbors under the guise of supposedly benevolent attempts to quell internal unrest in those weak states. However, there are two major flaws with the granting of such blind sovereignty.
Firstly, it allows illegitimate governments to massacre its own people, like Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign of the late 1980’s.[4] There was little legal room for UN intervention, since the crimes were carried out inside of Iraq, where the butcher of Baghdad was accorded the status of an internationally recognized “sovereign”. This is a huge moral dilemma whose ramifications should be clear to all of us who would hope to prevent blatant human rights violations.
Secondly, in addition to moral blind spots, internal sovereignty poses serious tactical, and even strategic, threats to the United States. This is the most far-reaching lesson of September 11th; what happens within the borders of other countries is our business, even if that country is, like Afghanistan, thousands of miles away and located in one of the poorest, most remote corners of Earth.
The New Multilateralism
I hope to make the case, if I have not already done so, that the old UN precepts of total equality of all states in terms of their sovereignty and their roles in fostering multilateralism are as poor an option for America as is American unilateralism. We must seek a third way, one which embraces the value of international cooperation, while not falling victim to an insipid relativism that grants criminals the status of statesmen. The new multilateralism must come to recognize democratic or democratizing governments as the sole legitimate actors on the international stage.
This does not mean, let it be clear, that governments deemed non-democratic by the United States are to be ignored and consigned to pariah status; rather, it means that tyrannical governments will be given a great impetus to reform and to integrate themselves fully into the family of nations.
As a model for this approach, we can look at the European Union. The EU shows us that, when democratic reforms are explicitly linked to tangible economic and political benefits, even the most repressive governments can be swayed to reform.[5] Does anyone really believe that the communist bloc states would have democratized so quickly in the absence of the benefits that EU membership promised them?
We must take great care, when formulating this vision, that we do not equate “democratization” with “Americanization”. States absolutely must be granted the respect that their distinct cultures and values demand; we must, however, be confident enough to draw distinctions between cultural relativism and tyranny. For example, we can look at the fact that many democratic or democratizing states in Latin America and Asia have different definitions of certain freedoms than Western states do.
This is a delicate balance, of course. Many Muslim states, for example, do not believe that freedom of speech extends to the “freedom” to blaspheme their prophet; they are not against freedom of speech, but they absolutely do not recognize a freedom to blaspheme. Many Latin American states, populated by conservative Catholics, do not believe that women’s rights extend to the “right” to an abortion. We must take care not to engage in cultural imperialism; we must not condemn as un-democratic any state that does not totally mirror the American concepts of freedom.
At the same time, of course, we must be self-assured enough to know where to draw the line. We must, for example, be willing to accept Turkey’s right to censor blasphemy. We must not, however, recognize any state’s “right” to police its population via murder and terror. Murder is not a cultural quirk. Murder is murder. There is no objective standard for this threshold, of course; it must be the product of negotiation among the universally recognized democratic states.
Democracy’s Definition
We must also make sure not to equate democracy with elections. While elections are obviously the most public manifestation of what we in the West know as democracy, they are the last step in the march towards democracy. Without a foundation of rule of law, equality under the law, free enterprise, minority rights, and an independent judiciary, elections would simply serve the majority. Elections without the foundations listed above simply empower radicals and sectarian groups. We have seen this trend over and over, from Bosnia to Iraq.
It is often said that if elections were held in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, Osama bin Laden would win as a write-in candidate. This is, unfortunately, probably not totally hyperbolic. Part of the United States’ role in endorsing and incentivizing democratization must be the patient acknowledgment that premature elections can often serve to undermine democracy rather than foster it. States must not be allowed to endlessly drag their feet it democratizing, but the West must maintain a sober respect for the time it takes to foster a genuine, sustainable democracy.
Sustainable is the key word; we do not want one man, one vote, one time.
With this broad framework of the ideal medium and long-term goals of the United States established, we must also acknowledge that America faces many immediate problems, especially in the Middle East, that will come to a head long before that region is even remotely democratic. The two immediate trouble spots are Iraq and Iran.
Iraq
Books have been written with great haste and devastating detail documenting the American failures of foresight and conduct in Iraq. Those errors do not need to be rehashed here, but all Americans owe it to themselves to make a sober assessment of the best option moving forward, untainted by their personal feelings towards the president. This is not George W. Bush’s war; it is America’s war. When Mr. Bush is out of office, the war will go on. Quitting Iraq out of a desire to humiliate and discredit the president is, and I hesitate to use this word, un-American.
When considering the national interests of the United States, however, I am of the firm conviction that the war in Iraq, in its current manifestation, must be ended. We must not delude ourselves as to what this means. Firstly, it does not mean peace. There was no peace in Iraq before the American invasion, there is no peace there now, and there will be no peace if Americans are withdrawn. Iraq has been at war with Iran, Kuwait, the United States, and itself since 1979. We cannot expect this to change anytime soon. We must not, in other words, profess to “end” the war in hopes of securing “peace”.
What we must do, rather, is end the American component of the Iraq war. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it pains me to say, the war’s aims, as originally defined, are not attainable. The war, if its aim was to secure a stable and pro-American government with real authority throughout Iraq and along its borders, is lost. It is against the American nature and paradigm to admit this, but it must be done. If I had to pick a point where the war was lost, it would be the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, but that is almost beside the point at this late stage.
Yesterday was always the best day for America in Iraq. This is not pessimism; it is logic. If, for fifty months, each month is more bloody and less shapeable by American power, this is not a coincidence; it is an undeniable truth. The act of repeating the same act endlessly in expectation of a different result is the definition of insanity. Expecting that the American military can secure Baghdad is insane.
The United States has little influence over the course of events in Iraq. It has the ability to bleed and to spend, but not to win. Americans are dying every day in Iraq to ensure that the Iraqi civil war remains bad as opposed to terrible. This is not the role of the American military.
We should not be so cavalier as to throw Iraq to the wolves, but if Iraq is throwing itself to the wolves, we should not be so vain as to think that we can convince them not to do so. American soldiers in Iraq, especially those in Baghdad, are hostages to Sunni extremists, Shia militias, and, eventually, Iranian intervention.
A withdrawal of most American forces from Iraq would achieve several objectives. It would staunch the hemorrhaging of American blood and treasure. It would greatly increase our military’s readiness for other theatres and, therefore, its credible deterrent power. It would deprive al-Qaeda of its cause célèbre and incentivize local Sunnis to turn on these nihilists. It would deprive Iran of tens of thousands of targets in the event of a confrontation over its nuclear program.
The United States will never, and must never, totally withdraw from Iraq. As noted above, 9/11 proved that a state’s internal behavior is directly related to American interests and security. Iraq has become a magnet of jihadists, who have received far more effective training and experience than they did in Afghanistan. The United States must keep an eye on Iraq, especially the areas such as al-Anbar province which are infested by radical Islamists. We must, however, move away from the idea that Iraq’s civil war is the most pressing national security issue for the United States at the present.
Iran
The two greatest beneficiaries of the American invasion of Iraq have been al-Qaeda and Iran. American policy towards Iran must be firm but much more realistic. Iran is going to be the regional power of the Middle East. If American policy is to treat this inevitability as a threat, then war is inevitable. The next president of the United States must open full diplomatic relations with Iran.
We must be honest; war with Iran in the next few years is a distinct possibility. Open war with Iran would make Iraq look like a cakewalk. Preventing war with Iran is the most important task for this nation in the next few years. As such, we must do everything we can to avoid war, which could just as easily begin with a miscommunication or a technical malfunction as with an open attack.
For all of our incessant talk about war being “the last option”, how can we dare to say such a thing when we refuse even to talk to our adversary? How can we look the mother of a fallen soldier in the eye and tell her we did everything we could to prevent the loss of her son when we refused even to communicate before the war? Communication is to be cut off during war, not before. If establishing open dialogue with Tehran decreases the chance of a miscommunication spiraling out of control, we must do it. If talking means making war one percent less likely, we must talk.
Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a much different threat now that it was before 9/11. It is more of an ideology now than an organization. The one place where it still operates openly as a physical organization, of course, is Iraq. As noted above, I believe than an American withdrawal from Iraq would deprive local Sunnis of their sole motivation in harboring these nihilists. Al-Qaeda was allowed refuge in Afghanistan only because it paid the destitute Taliban government. Iraq, on the other hand, does not need al-Qaeda’s money; Iraq has money under its sands. The danger is not that al-Qaeda will be given a safe haven in Iraq. The danger, rather, is the inevitable dispersion of these hardened, disciplined, and well trained soldiers throughout the world.
This dispersion must be braced for and combated by American intelligence and whatever foreign allies we can recruit to help us. Intelligence gathering always has been and always will be the most important aspect of the war on terror; all the bombs in the world are useless if you don’t know where to aim them,
The first rule is battling al-Qaeda must be to do no harm. Invading Iraq did harm, to say the least. The current administration asserts that the unprecedented flood of suicide bombings serves as proof that we are luring the terrorists to a place where we can kill them. I see the situation as evidence that the invasion of Iraq did harm to the war on terror by creating thousands upon thousands of new terrorists. Al-Qaeda type terrorism is not a finite problem that can be solved by killing a certain number of people. It is a fluid problem to which the most important step is to not create more terrorists than there were in the first place.
Conclusion
Al-Qaeda is simply one result of globalization. As noted above, old ideas about the sanctity and sovereignty of states need drastic revision. Capitalism has seen to it, for better or for worse, that international borders mean less than they ever have, having been lowered and riddled with holes to allow for the constant deluge of goods, services, people, and information that defines life in the 21st century.
Since corporations, airlines, diseases, radio and television signals, and, increasingly, people have little or no regard for international boundaries, we can no longer afford to define our foreign policy from a paradigm in which borders were inviolable and states were the preeminent, indeed the only, international actors of note.
Globalization entails great sacrifices, and one of these sacrifices is the traditional notion of sovereignty and independence. How many nations on earth today are truly independent, in terms of being self-sustainable? What nation would not be utterly devastated if oil were to disappear tomorrow? What nation could implode upon itself without dragging its neighbors down with it? This degree of interdependence is unprecedented, and it must be met head on with a new paradigm.
Americans are traditionally very wary of ceding any degree of sovereignty to international institutions, and for very good reasons. What we must understand, however, is that the global economy has already seen to it that America’s sovereignty is compromised. We are economically dependent on foreign nations, and our diplomacy must reflect a willingness to work in concert with other nations. Once we embrace this necessity, we can choose what nations we will associate with.
We will start with the established democracies, perhaps forty or fifty of them, and then expand the group as nations gradually come to meet the established standards. Nations failing to meet the standards would not be isolated or abandoned; they would be aggressively recruited. One of the possible benefits of globalization is that it may afford us the opportunity to spread democracy across the earth by way of example rather than by force.
[1] http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/facts/gulfwar
[2] http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/07/20/darfur9095.htm
[3] http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter
[4] http://www.answer.com/topic/al-anfal-campaign
[5] http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/enlargement_process/accession_process/criteria/index_en.htm
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Pyramid Schemes
Science, in spite of its awe-inspiring magnitude, contains
one flaw that partakes of the nature of the universe itself.
It can solve problems, but it also creates them in a genuinely confusing ratio.
They escape unseen out of the laboratory into the body politic,
whther they be germs inured to antibiotics,
the waiting death in rocket silos,
or the unloosed multiplying power of life.
We are finite creatures seeking to establish our own reality against infinity.
Man has twice been forced to revise his concept of time. Revise is perhpas too tame a word for this pair of universe-bending revelations. The first realization was that the Earth was countless millions of years old, rather that the conceivably tangible few millenia previously thought. The second was that, although the Earth was infinitely older than previously thought, the span of a single human life could wrap itself around time.
How different is the world today than it was when my grandfather, now 89, was born? That difference is greater than the difference between the birth of Christ and the birth of Columbus. There was a time when time was seen as relatively short (circa 4000 years) and when a human life merely marked the constant and unchanging passage of the same, as the material world did not change at all during the course of one's life. No more. And we, we destroyers of time, are left to live our lives amidst this unparalleled disorientation as if it were the most natural thing imgainable.
This smashing of time has led to unprecedented wealth and leisure, myopically defined as success. But it is this very success that has led to ignorance, myopically defined as specialization. And it is this very specialization that leaves us more vulnerable than ever before.
We have created a world in which a disease can circle the globe in a single day, yet hundreds of millions of people have no idea how to make a fire, how to hunt, how to navigate. A world in which buildings reach into the sky, but would be rendered totally unusable if an electrical generator were to fail. This act of painting every "modern" society into a corner is what time now dramatizes for us.
The human brain has become superorganic. It functions in ways that are totally unnecessary for organic survival. What is the biological logic of imagination? There is none. In the most elemental sense, it is a waste of calories. It paid off, however, this investment in the unnecessary, so that now we are superorganic creatures, no longer totally bound by physical dimension. If we become carried away with this gift, however, we will expose ourselves to organic dangers that were conquered long ago by our "less evolved" descendants.
By superorganic, I mean this: the brain is not limited in its capacity by the human body. The physical host and the brain need each other to live, of course, but the function of the brain is not bound by the function of the body. For example, if my lungs begin to fail, I can't borrow the energy from a healthy person's lungs to restore my own. If, however, I want to know something about Persia, I can take information about it from the brains of countless others.
Lungs don't leave breath for future people to use. Brains leave whatever they want for countless followers to use as they can. This indefinable and ephermeral, and infinite, swarm of information, words, thoughts, music, ideas, and all the rest can never be extinguished. That is the miracle of the human brain. That is superorganic. Cemeteries of thought have much more life left in them than cemeteries of men. Let us pray we do not allow them to become the same.
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