WhirledView

America’s Untouchable Military: Some after thoughts on the show-down in DC

By Patricia H Kushlis

Now that the “non-essential” parts of the government have returned to work can we please move on to repair the untold financial damage –estimated as much or more than $24 billion - and personal hardships (a recent poll showed 44% of American families said they were adversely affected by the shutdown:  the rest of us on the sidelines were just appalled) caused by the 2013 reenactment of the rebel South rises again only to get squashed (again)? 

And can we please forgo another embarrassing round of two year old temper tantrums staged in front of the world media in less than four months’ time by publicity seeking hounds in the Senate and House? Obama 1 – Cruz – 0 by the way.

Meanwhile, would the scions of the Grand Old Party (GOP) please figure out how to compete in elections without caving in to an outlier hard right movement that strategically burst onto the scene prior to the 2010 elections garbed in 18^th century dress especially designed for Fox News prime time?  

Here’s one – among many - fundamental dilemmas the GOP needs to address: Corporate interests and its Republican populist rural America supporters do not make a healthy or even a sensible mix.  Corporations are established to make money for their owners and stock holders.  Populist America does not have the spare change to invest in corporations and hence to partake of the corporate bounty. 

So where’s the convergence of interests?   

I’ve seen numerous charts and correlations depicting the strengths of the Tea Party in the US.  Its core is in the Confederate South, mostly in rural areas, and it is far more attractive to aging white male marginally educated voters who dominate those and other largely rural regions of the country.  But I think that there is at least one other related yet important factor.

The Missing Stats

What I’m missing is a correlation between Tea Party supporters, military veterans and our outsized defense budget but I’ll bet that relationship exists.  Look, for example, outside the South at the Tea Party’s inordinate strength in Colorado Springs – the home of the Air Force Academy and, by the way, the Evangelical Christians who surround and infiltrate the academy at the nation’s expense.

It’s rather like looking at the statistics that demonstrate the strong correlation between high cancer rates and the preponderance of oil and gas refineries in certain areas – think northern New Jersey and Houston, Texas as for instances.

The Black Swan Effect and the Course of History

By Patricia H Kushlis

In the New York Times best seller The Black Swan:  the Impact of the Highly Improbable  (Random House 2010) its author Nassim Taleb argues that what we don’t know is likely to be far more relevant that what we do particularly with respect to significant – and unpredicted – “black swan” or rare but transformative events like the Arab Spring, 9/11 or even the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Russian and Ottoman Empires. (Two black swans on a lake at Myrtle Beach, May 2013 by PHKushlis)

A little further on in his book, Taleb cautions that the human brain too often focuses on the minutiae rather than the infrequent but life changing momentous events; therefore,  blinding us to the forest for the trees, catching us unawares, throwing us off balance and unprepared for a radically different future because we fail to realize that “Black Swans “can be caused and exacerbated by their” unexpectedness.

But why are so many unexpected?  

 If we’d only put the pieces together before the fact, perhaps we could have averted 9/11 – but we didn’t.  The signs were there. The few who had done so - or at least had reason to be suspicious - were stove-piped out of existence and their words of warning ignored by their supervisors. 

Or the US government at its highest levels may have known that the possibility that a black swan event was on the horizon – like the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – but our leaders were so focused on trying to prop up a reasonably friendly but failing regime they failed to consider the range of alternative future directions.  The record shows, however, they had been warned.

An eclectic short reading list

A few days ago, a friend asked me for a few book recommendations.  I thought briefly and suggested Taleb’s The Black Swan (which I am still reading) and Dan Balz’s Collision 2012. 

Collision 2012 is a highly rated analysis of the US 2012 national elections by Dan Balz, a veteran political reporter and elections observer from the Washington Post. 

I should also have added Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance:  A Cultural History of Russia (Henry Holt, 2002) to this eclectic short list but didn’t.  I thought I knew a fair amount about Russian culture but Figes – whose book I discovered thanks to my son who had left an unread copy on a book shelf – demonstrated how little I did know.

What If?

In Natasha’s Dance, Figes argues that the momentous events of 1917 had been set into motion by Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia because of its overwhelming effect on the Decembrists – a group of young elite Russian officers who revolted against the Czarist regime on December 14, 1825. These men had fought in the Imperial army.  They and the Russian winter successfully defended the crown and homeland against the French invaders.  The Russian war effort succeeded but the Decembrist's subsequent revolt failed, the leaders ended with long prison sentences in Siberia but their personal experiences in the war had forever altered their perceptions of Russia, Russian governance, Russia’s role in the world and the Russian people.

The Decembrists had brought winds of change to the sleeping Russian heartland – or at least to the intellectuals and members of the Russian aristocracy.  The rest of the next century was dominated by the Czarist government’s reactions to the new social ideas let in by the French invasion.

Yet, what if, Napoleon had let sleeping dogs lie and not attempted to conquer Russia?  Or what if the French Revolution of 1789 had not ended in the “Reign of Terror” which resulted in the ascendancy of Napoleon and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars?  If any one of these “black swan” events had been predicted and averted, how different would the face of Europe look today? 

Would nationalism have even come to Russia?  To Eastern Europe?  To the Ottoman Empire?  To Germany? Would World War I or II have ever happened?  Would there have been a Communist controlled Soviet Union to collapse in 1991?  Would Tchaikovsky have composed the 1812 Overture?  Or Mikael Bulgakov written the anti-Stalinist novel The Master and Margarita which was published in 1940?

Or might Mitt Romney have won the 2012 election for president if his campaign had understood and harnessed the power of the social media effectively or taken the pulse of American voters more accurately?  Romney was so sure he had won that he didn’t even write a concession speech – but why was he so blind to something the Obama campaign had harnessed so well?  Or would it have mattered?  

Were these events – and others like the great recession of 2007 – inevitable or could they – with better foresight - have been averted and the course of history changed? 

Meanwhile, history has not ended.  It is being played out every day.  Is it even possible to protect against black swan events or - given life's apparent randomness - should we even try?     

 

 

Flawed Administration at State = Ineffective US Foreign Policy

By Patricia H Kushlis

Yes, Matilda, there is a clear relationship between the administration of the State Department and America’s ability to conduct its foreign policy successfully.

I don’t know how many times it needs to be repeated before it registers on the Hill, at the NSC and on the hustings but US national security - the conduct of US foreign relations with friend and foe - does not simply equate to sending in the troops or bombing the offending opponent to smithereens.  There are far less expensive and usually more effective options that the US has underutilized, ignored or just plain forgotten.

One important reason for the latter is that in State's rush to apply the “up or out” principle to the Foreign Service which, since the law's adoption in 1980, has not only shorted the US government of considerable foreign policy expertise but is more applicable to combat troops in war zones paid to engage in hand-to-hand combat as a part of their jobs rather than in the more cerebral conduct of diplomacy on the world’s complex multi-dimensional chessboard. 

When diplomats need to go to work in combat gear, my friends, that's not diplomacy.

Yet, for diplomacy and other non-lethal forms in the US foreign policy tool kit to succeed, the lead agency – namely the State Department – also needs to function administratively like a well-oiled machine – not one that is full of grit, grime, worn out parts and riddled with corruption as is the case today.

That’s why it’s even more ironic that the one section of the department immediately furloughed in the government shutdown on October 1 was State’s inspector general’s office established to root out waste, fraud and corruption.

According to Diplopundit, 396 of its 400 member staff were likely turned out on the pavement yesterday.  The true numbers are hard to come by but DP provides an updated guestimate that 88-90% of the total OIG staff are on furlough. They will remain there until, that is, the Republicans in Congress get certain members off their soap boxes and the party functioning again.

The good news is that the Senate recently approved the administration’s appointment of Steve Linick as State’s new Inspector General.  The bad news, of course, is that he will have little staff or budget to initiate investigations until the current political impasse is resolved.  

Meanwhile, D.B. Grady has written two excellent articles on administrative problems at State.  These articles have recently appeared in Clearance Jobs: Defense News & Career Advice.  I highly recommend them – especially to those in the IG’s office suddenly without staff or alternatively, a place to hang tennis shoes or track suits during the work week.   Grady who has previously written about State’s administrative quagmire for The Atlantic should be commended for his thorough reporting, ability to connect the dots and willingness to offer practical solutions. 

Here are the links: 

Government Oversight and the Critical Role of Inspectors General, September 11, 2013

Reliable Foreign Policy Hampered by Administrative Failures, September 18, 2013

Related articles

Senate Confirms Steve Linick; State Dept Finally Gets an Inspector General After 2,066 Days

Elections moods in the German heartland and Greek megalopolis

By Lois Woestman, Guest Contributor

Dr. Lois Woestman, both a Greek and US citizen, is an External Funding Officer at the University of Marburg, Germany and an independent research/policy advice consultant for UN and international non-governmental agencies.

There was a hole in the clouds as I biked along the Lahn river Monday, the day after elections were held here in Germany. Like a wormhole, the sky-eye transported my mind back to Athens of a bit over a year ago, when feelings were running high as Greeks were deciding whether or not to remain in the Euro. The German elections, at least as they appeared from my ground’s eye perspective in its heartland, could not have been more different.

Greece stayed in the Euro. And the eyes of many Greeks – as of many southern Europeans - turned toward France and Germany, to see what the next step would be. Hopes of some growth policies being added alongside austerity ones arose as France elected socialist PM Hollande. And rumor had it that Germany might elect a new PM of similar political leanings in its September 2013 elections, increasing the chances of such an important shift in European approach to the crisis. The results of last Sunday’s elections did not fulfill these hopes.

At federal level, Angela Merkel’s right-center CDU party increased its share of the vote, almost obtaining an absolute majority. The CDU here in state Hessen - where I live near Frankfurt, the Wall Street of Germany - also increased its share of the vote. The FDP, the CDU’s libertarian coalition partner, did not obtain the 5% required to remain in the federal parliament, though it barely managed to remain in the state Hessen government. Though its second worst showing since WWII, left-center SPD also increased its share of the vote, but not enough to surpass the CDU. Both federal and local SPD leaders rejected the possibility of forming a “red-red-green” – SPD-Left-Green - coalition. Which has left the CDU the challenge of forming a coalition with either the SPD, Link or Green parties.

Why? 

Why were most of my neighbors and colleagues here in the German heartland so blasé about the elections? Why did they cast their vote for a euro policy – a Europe - so far from that southern Europeans had been hoping for?  

One reason appears to be a desire for political predictability, and realted disenchantment with the SPD. “Peer Steinbrueck is too loud, too unpredictable. He lies, and is corrupt. His promises cannot be trusted” argued Frank, a university researcher. For Frank, it appeared difficult to disentangle perceptions of Mr. Steinbrueck’s political style from SPD history. “It is more than that,” Frank went on. “We just settled down here in Germany, you know. It was the SPD that began the destruction of our health care system by introducing private health insurance, not the CDU. The SPD cannot be trusted to be what they once were, so I cannot vote for them. And, as someone born and raised in East Germany, you could not honestly expect me to vote for the Left, now could you?”