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A Toast to the Common Good: Reflections on Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the US

By PLS

Watching, on TV, the looting in Mogadishu after Ethiopian tanks had sent the Islamic Courts bunch scampering southward out of the city, then hearing that warlords had already set up money-raising (to put it nicely) checkpoints segregating sector from sector within the city, I felt despair. Here we go again! Another cycle of anarchy and despotism. That downer led to thoughts of Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries apparently ricocheting between too much or too little governance, which in turn let to the eternal question WHY?

Well, maybe that’s too grandiose. But I did find myself wondering how on earth such countries could get themselves out of such a self-destructive pattern. And, as a veteran public diplomat, I couldn't help wondering whether the US experience might have anything constructive to offer. I think it does.

Let's start with something incoming Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (who actually wasn't thinking of Somalia or any other foreign country) said recently. She remarked that she would be a more inclusive leader of the House. Unlike her Republican predecessors since 2001, she did not intend to preside as if the minority party members did not exist. Not that the Democrats in majority are about to act like the election-annulling, self-abnegating idiots a once imperial President Bush is calling for when he bleats about bipartisanship these days. But it’s also not likely that Pelosi’s Dems will scuttle controversial but worthwhile legislation in need of a little Republican support for passage. That’s intelligent bipartisanship, and it tends to cluster around centrism, a modern word for the old fashioned common good and the bane of the now discredited Rovian Republicans (and, to be fair about it, some on the Democratic left, as well).

SO: centrism and intelligent compromise; not extremism and ricochet. Here is one key to political stability, and it gives rise to another notion: inclusivity. Politics in the US has got angry, bitter and ugly to a large extent because the Republicans have governed from the extreme right, marginalizing and attempting to delegitimate all other opinions and orientations. Winning at any cost and excluding the losers from both goodies and respect became the rigid rule of the Republican power game. No wonder corruption ensued, and fear of exposure leads corruption-tolerating office-holders to cling to power. Hence the need for a “permanent majority,” however secured, which is what any despotism seeks. Arrogant, entrenched, narrowly-based power isn't good. Anywhere.

Let’s get back to Somalia. Whatever form a stable future government takes, it must surely recognize the partly conflicting, partly overlapping claims of tribalism, rival sects of Islam, geographic divergences rooted in history and custom, evolving gender roles, the tension between rural givens and urban miscibility. There’s a similar need in Afghanistan. Iraq, too, is torn among cross-cutting loyalties, one reason why that shattered humpty-dumpty is proving so hard to put back together again. Any system that cannot accommodate its characteristic congeries of non-criminal aspirations will not be long lasting.

Endings

by CKR

We’ve been getting lots of hits from searches for Rupert Pole (posts here and here). I suspect that they are prompted by the obituary in the New York Times’s year-end magazine. None of the photos I linked to, however, are anywhere near as charming as the one the Times acquired.

Lots of deaths this yearend in particular. James Brown, Gerald Ford, Saddam Hussein most newsworthily, and of course the continuing deaths of not-so-famous Iraqis and Americans in Iraq.

A few loom large in my universe. Gerald Ford’s decency replaced the guile of Richard Nixon. By that time, the men close to me no longer had to fear the draft, and even Nixon was starting to understand that the war had to be ended. Betty Friedan awakened us to “the problem with no name,” and Coretta Scott King and Jeane Kirkpatrick showed me that my efforts need not be in vain. Glenn Ford and June Allyson were already old hat: ideals that our parents had looked up to, no longer our stars. Marshal Igor Sergeyev moved the nuclear missiles and their warheads safely back to Russia from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine when the Soviet Union dissolved.

They’re gone now. Ford’s pardon of Nixon will continue to be discussed, but both of them have said all they will say about it. We’ll hear no more from Betty Friedan on how feminism is changing. Marshal Sergeyev will not be able to tell us the details of his operations.

I will recall my best friend’s mother braiding my hair when my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my brother and sister, but I won’t be able to hug her any more.

We’ll have to continue with others and on our own strength. Our memories of them will fade. History argues, and the public people become historical figures. Conversations are locked in their dead minds, nuances of intonation flattened on transcript pages. Reinterpretations and revisionism follow.

Rupert Pole seems unambiguous, a devoted lover and almost-husband. There were things about him that Anaïs Nin didn’t write down. We can think him into an ideal lover and hope there are more. And what woman would turn down one of those?

It's Still Snowing...

by CKR

I thought you might like to see how much snow we've gotten since yesterday, so I've taken photos from the same locations as yesterday's, and one more because it was so fascinating.

I last shoveled my front steps yesterday mid-afternoon. Here they are this morning. Note how the snow that has piled up on the railing is curving around. We haven't had much wind, although there probably will be some when it clears up...When it clears up? Am I kidding?

Update (10:30 am): In the depths of the snow as I shovel, the luminous blue of glaciers. Still snowing.

On Doing It Oneself

by CKR

I think that this storm has left even more snow than last week’s. It’s slowing down and getting lighter. I just get warm all over thinking about all the seeds I’ve left around the yard and all the plants that are already there. I went to the native plant nursery toward the end of the season and bought a bunch of specials, tucked them in here and there. Last year I found out which could take the drought. This year I’ll find out which don’t mind being buried for too long.

Update (2 pm): Ugh. It's still snowing. I just cleared the steps one more time. I'll deal with it tomorrow.

I worked with a guy once who said that he wanted to hire only do-it-yourselfers for managers. I think about that as I struggle with the snowblower or scrape the steps for the second time because I started before the snow ended.

There are things you learn through doing things yourself that you don’t learn any other way, he said.

Fighting Global Counterinsurgency is not a War on Terror

By PHK

George Packer’s “Knowing the Enemy,” published in the December 18 New Yorker is one of the most thought provoking articles on the nature of the militant Islamic threat behind W’s so-called “global war on terror” that I have read in months, if not years. This article is well worth taking the 20 or so minutes to read – go back, read and reread it again. Then forward it to your Congressional representatives, presidential hopefuls and their staffs.

Much of “Knowing the Enemy” is just plain common sense – but it is a common sense that this country has lost under the inept leadership of the current occupant of the White House, his flailing over-militarized,* unilateralist approach to US foreign policy, and far too much MSM complicity in accepting and propagating the neoconservative-generated grossly simplified, wrongheaded view of a single Islamic global anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-western insurgency that demands a military “solution” and that has provided the mantra for W’s administration since 9/11.

Insurgency runs in families

“Knowing the Enemy” is revolutionary, refreshing and pragmatic. Its focus is on people, their relationships and interactions. Packer asks and answers the questions why and how disaffected young Muslim men become violent Islamic jihadists. The basic reason, he and his well informed sources argue is that they “get pulled in by their social networks” – family, friends, associates. Militant Islamic ideas play, in essence, a secondary role.

In a sense, this observation about human nature is as old as the hills. Not only was it highlighted by French scholar Olivier Roy in Globalized Islam an excellent book which Packer references briefly, but the importance of social networks in perpetuating insurgencies was also substantiated by eminent American social scientists as well as through the anthropological field research of two of Packer’s chief sources – Australian David Kilcullen, now an advisor on counterterrorism at the State Department on loan from the Australian military, on Indonesia and Montgomery McFate, an American Pentagon consultant, on Northern Ireland.

For whatever reason, however, this simple concept about human interaction has been ignored by a “Rumsfeld Pentagon” refusing to cut expensive weapons systems to permit, as Packer argues, the creation of “new combat units” and free “other resources necessary for a proper counterinsurgency strategy.”

"Disaggregating insurgencies"

Packer also tells us that there is no single Islamic jihadist insurgency as both W and Osama bin Laden would like us to believe – but more likely 60 or so local insurgencies in various corners of the Muslim world – with different goals, needs and approaches. Each needs to be dealt with individually as Kilcullen explains “finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad.”

Just as a single Communist monolith did not, in reality, exist during the Cold War despite what the Kremlin leadership wanted us to believe, an integrated militant Islamic movement is far more a figment of today’s imagination tied together by clever propagandists through expanded global information networks.

Information: the new element of power

Nukes to India?

by CKR

Not yet. There are several more steps to this dance.

The legislation that President Bush signed last week is not an agreement to trade nuclear technology. It waived existing US trade requirements for the very special case of India. In other words, the laws prohibiting trade with nations that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty will not apply in the case of India. It also lays out a number of requirements that must be met before trade can take place.

Waivers are a weak way to make foreign policy, but it’s what the President asked for, and, in any case, he doesn’t see it as foreign policy, since that is something only the unitary executive can make. (Here’s the Google for HR 5682. The Thomas version is easier to use for a short time, but the links die quickly. Here’s a pdf copy.)

What the president didn’t say during the signing ceremony was that he appended a signing statement. That signing statement pretty much guts the bill. Michael Roston in Raw Story details what the signing statement undermines in the law.

Roadrunner Update

by CKR

The roadrunner hasn't returned. Perhaps its visit on the 23rd was to show that it is a politically correct, split-the-difference-between-Christmas-and-solstice roadrunner, rather than the Christmas roadrunner I called it.

4:20 pm: She's back, fluffed out in the sun. Trouble is, the camera is on the dining room table, where it would have been handy if she had been active while I was eating breakfast. But now it's too close to her, and if I try to get it, I'm afraid I'll scare her away. Sunset will be at 5 pm.

4:45 pm: She took a little walk and I retrieved the camera. But my motion and noise are unnerving her, so I'll just remove myself to another part of the house. Better that she accustom herself to roosting here than I get one quick photo.

Before St. Francis

by CKR

Thomas Cahill tells us what he thinks is a Christmas story for our times. Perhaps St. Francis did indeed go along on the Fifth Crusade and make friends with Muslims. But there’s more to the background than Cahill tells us.

Cahill has written a new book he’d like you to buy. He spoke here in Santa Fe a few months ago, but parking was so bad that I decided not to bother with the crowd. I was intrigued by the promise of his finding the origins of feminism in what is sometimes called the High Middle Ages.

I looked at his book in the bookstore, haven’t read it; apparently he credits the orders of nuns, new at that time, with encouraging women into something that he considers the beginnings of feminism. It’s hard for me to trace direct lines of thought back that far, but perhaps he does. It wasn’t what I found in my study of the middle ages, and, as far as I could tell from flipping through his book, he didn’t find what I did.

That’s the trouble with history, of course, particularly as far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for which the sources are limited: it’s easy to cobble together a story that goes along with one’s prejudices. That may be what I’m doing, too. My interpretation of this bit of history has little support from the official historians; I’ve found one book that comes close. But I’ve got the events all here and in chronological order.

What Cahill ignores are the late twelfth-century courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie of Champagne, her daughter by King Louis VII of France. He ignores the literature that came out of those courts, and the follow-ons by Gottfried of Strassburg and Wolfram of Eschenbach*, in Germany. Women and men told stories in the French courts, and some wrote them down. Those stories were about knights and women, how they dealt with warfare and the return home, and their personal, emotional conflicts. Those stories were lightly grouped around the court of a King Arthur of Britain, lightly, not the forced unity we see today.