Easily Distracted

The President’s major reasons for temporarily suspending programs of torture and secret detention are: 1) we already tortured these guys as much as we want to for the moment, thanks very much; 2) the Supreme Court annoyingly decided to get in the way. Oh, also, 3) the people supervising and committing the torture were “just following orders” and the President doesn’t want any chance that they might be held accountable for that.

Not anything truly brave like, “We made a mistake, and we’re going to correct it”. Lots of qualifiers, half-truths, omissions and double-standards. As usual.

I’m just curious. If it’s necessary to employ torture, secret detention, limited or no rights to counsel, and to keep the accused from seeing some or all of the evidence against them, in order to deal with people who commit terrorism, then why shouldn’t we do the same in the domestic U.S. justice system? Doesn’t the President believe that we should do anything to bring murderers to justice in our own country? Anything to stop the kind of corporate malfeasance that leads to massive companies crashing into economic failure and destroying the lives and fortunes of thousands upon thousands of Americans? Shouldn’t we act without restraint against those who sexually abuse children or rape women? Why not have secret evidence for those crimes? Why not restrict the access of those accused of such crimes to counsel? Why not allow police to use “alternative questioning” in order to find out the truth about such crimes? Is it just a matter of degree? Kill ten people as a serial killer and sure, you’ve got all your rights. Kill thousands as a terrorist and that’s it, no more rights? What’s the magic number? Thirty? Fifty? Eighty? Maybe Congress can add that to the list of specifics that the President would like legislated before the November elections when it may get more difficult for him to get things rubber-stamped.

What does the President mean when he talks about how he is defending “liberty”? I’d really like to hear a reporter just ask him that: could you define “liberty” in the United States? I wonder what he’d say if he was asked why there are specific provisions for the rights of those accused of crimes in the U.S. Constitution, what the meaning of those provisions might be, what on earth the authors of the Constitution were thinking when they put that stuff in there.

With one part of my family helping to document what’s not working right now about the Administration’s policy in Iraq, I figured it was time for me to hold up my end and go back once more with feeling over the history.

1) The Iraq War was conceptually flawed in its match of ends and means in a way that no policy, no matter how skilled, could ever have overcome. Many people who made this observation before the war started were otherwise supporters of the use of military power against al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, and in other contexts. The difference between Iraq and Afghanistan was a difference in basic missions. If fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan led to a more liberal and democratic government, you could see that as an additional benefit of going to war there. But it wasn’t the point. The point was to deny al-Qaeda the opportunity to use that territory freely for their operations and to demonstrate a basic security doctrine, that “failed states” could not be allowed to open their territory to terrorist movements. Iraq, on the other hand, was from the outset described as a war with two missions: to stop Saddam Hussein from acquiring and disseminating WMDs and to create a stable, liberal, democratic ally in the region. We all know how the first objective turned out, and more importantly, we know why it turned out that way: because the intelligence was slanted, cooked, distorted and repackaged.

The second objective was always and inevitably a dog. You can’t occupy a country under the circumstances facing the U.S. in Iraq and create liberalism “from above”. That isn’t how liberalism has come into being in world history. There are only two arguable exceptions, post-WWII Germany and Japan, and those analogies were woefully, terribly abused by supporters of the war throughout 2002 as the preparations for invasion were made. The circumstances in both of those cases were completely, utterly unlike those facing the U.S. in Iraq.

I heard Michael Ledeen on Fresh Air a short while ago, and he protested to Terry Gross that he can’t understand why people would call him a conservative when in fact he’s a democratic revolutionary. Ledeen said, “I think a lot of people are confused about what we stand for”. Not at all: I understand perfectly that Ledeen, Wolfowitz and others are and were “democratic revolutionaries”. What they don’t understand is that revolutions are not made by occupiers. The enduring democratic transformations of our time have come from the people of the societies being transformed, in Eastern Europe, in South Africa, in South Korea, with their consent and understanding.

This is not to say that a major power like the United States cannot foster democratic revolutions. The U.S. helped force the pace and character of those transformations, particularly in South Korea and Eastern Europe. How? By keeping economic, moral, political and diplomatic pressure on, by isolating totalitarian societies as much as possible. By serving as an illustration of what a free and democratic society can be. By believing in liberty and living up to its promises. This is what is so strange about the fervor of the “democratic revolutionaries”: they have so little faith in the power and attractiveness of their goals, so much of a sense that if it’s not accomplished under military occupation, it cannot be accomplished at all.

I suppose in a way that this is rather like the debate between various fractions of Marxism before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. There were those who took revolutions to be largely inevitable and those who did not. But it is a harder thing for someone who believes in liberalism and democracy to be arguing that systems which depend upon the consent of the governed, on the rights of the autonomous subject, on the constraint of the power of the state, can be secured through means which substantially contradict those achievements.

2) So this could never have worked. Could it have failed less spectacularly, less grotesquely, and had more muted or negotiable consequences? Certainly. But here too, some of the failure is not just in the execution of the mission after the invasion. Some of it is in the conditions that preceded the attack, and in the way that the Bush Administration chose to go to war. The war in Iraq was a preordained disaster not just because of conceptual flaws, but because the Administration and its chief supporters chose to dissemble at home and abroad, treated the idea of diplomacy as if it were a communicable disease, relentlessly demonized all opposition as treason, and claimed the mantle of wartime leadership without any of the gravitas or responsibility that such a claim should entail. A more methodical build-up to war, a more careful pursuit of allies, a more serious and grown-up engagement of the American public all would have made the occupation a more robust affair.

More importantly, if George Bush wanted to lead in wartime, he would have put aside the relative pettiness of cultural conservatism. Abortion, creationism, the whole suite of issues that Bush turns to every time he needs to get the evangelical shock troops out for short-term political advantage: a stronger leader who was more determined to lead in war would have left that for a later date, another time, a different moment. Leave aside everything divisive that is not necessary or urgent. Be willing to propose measures which hurt your political base, such as tax increases, if they are tasked specifically to the larger military and diplomatic mission. Then when the inevitable contradictions in a top-down “democratic revolution” appear, at least you’ve got a far more united nation (and world) prepared to learn the lessons of the misadventure.

3) I don’t need to go over the specific post-occupation failures of policy, save to recall that they were and are enormous in scope, number and consequences, at every level of policy and every possible conjuncture of decision-making. But again, in this sense, failure was predictable, because this was an Administration which made it clear from the moment of its disputed election that it had total contempt for deliberative process. These were never the people who were going to consider all the options, look at all the information, face the hard truth of numbers and data, prepare alternative plans, make prudence a rule of their decision-making. These were never people who believed in consultation and respect for complexity and nuance even within their own ranks, let alone in relationship to any competing faction or interests. So of course they bungled, and bungled again. You can talk a line of political bullshit as long as you don’t really have to actually make policy, or as long as the consequences of failure are minor or easily politicized. In a military conflict with very high stakes, you can’t use Karl-Rovian trickery to just make the enemy vanish, or whistle past both literal and figurative graveyards. You can’t wag the dog if what you’ve actually done is stuck your head up an elephant’s anus.

4) So what now? If there is anything which makes me bitter, it’s to know that we’ve gone from a situation that was painful and offered few satisfying alternatives (Saddam Hussein in power, tormenting his own people) to a situation which is pretty much a colossal fuck-up no matter what we do, where the consequences that flow from our failure regardless of what we do next are far graver than the consequences that would have followed on restraint in the matter of Iraq. Bush isn’t half-wrong when he says that there’s a danger of a renewed totalitarianism in the world, and not just as an accidental self-indictment. It’s bad no matter whether leave or we stay. That’s why many of us with prudential concerns before the war so desperately wanted it not to happen, because we could see the trap waiting for us down the road. The pro-war voices are, as Matthew Yglesias observed with deadly accuracy, trapped in a weird utopian fantasy about power that makes them sound like Green Lantern, believing that all we need is more will. Just kill with greater abandon and brutality, don’t worry about civilians, don’t be concerned about rights at home or abroad, don’t fret about the Constitution. All you have to do is show that you won’t be beat (but do show that you’re very much afraid to die, so afraid that you’ll do everything you can to avoid a terrorist attack no matter what you have to do in order to prevent it), and somehow it’ll all turn out well, the bad guys will go away. Will as a utopian fantasy of male bravado and determination can see you through a single tough confrontation or a session at the negotiating table, it can help a wounded man crawl a hundred yards to safety or give someone the courage to chop off his own arm in order to save his life, but it doesn’t win wars, change history, solve the unsolvable.

Right now, the Administration is roughly like someone who has been playing carefully, has a big stack at a Texas Hold’em poker table, got overconfident, and put a big bluff down on the flop. The other guy called the bet. That either means he knows you don’t have anything, or that he’s got something really good. Or both. At that point, it’s better by far to fold. Why? You’re not giving anybody any information about whether you’re careful or crazy, about whether you bluff from nothing or play from strength. Plus you save your stake for another day, a better chance. If you put down an even bigger bet, an even bigger bluff, your desperation often becomes clear, and you’re heading for the river without a life preserver in your hand. The thing an empire ought to fear most is exposure of its limits.

That’s what has happened to the United States, whatever we do next. I’m indifferent as to whether we go or stay: the damage is done. Now the job in front of the American people is to clean house, to exact a price for failure and fecklessness, to reawaken to our ownership of our own nation and futures. A slim majority of Americans were willing, twice over, to act as absentees, allowing our employees to make a mess of our common property and heritage, to steal and cheat and lie their way through the jobs that we and we alone permit them to undertake on our behalf. Maybe the next employees won’t do that much better a job, especially given what a disaster they will have to fix, but they can’t possibly do a worse one.

Today was a brief orientation for parents and kids before the first full day of school. I’ve always followed debates over K-12 education from a fairly austere distance. Now I can see that I’m probably going to get drawn into the nitty-gritty specifics. I managed to hold my tongue and not start a major disagreement with another parent during a small meeting with our daughter’s very nice and engaging teacher. But now I’m wondering just how much of this kind of thing I’m going to be seeing in the months and years to come.

This kind of thing is the question of religion in the schools. Parents can volunteer to read to the kids in the class later in the year, once a week, choosing their own age-appropriate reading. That’s a great way to involve parents, I think. The teacher mentioned parenthetically that around Christmas time, readings can’t be overtly religious. One of the other parents batted her eyes innocently and pressured the teacher about the restriction. The teacher clarified: parents could potentially bring a religious reading, though the principal would like to be consulted, but the teacher herself could not read overtly religious material in the classroom. Really, said the parent, simulating surprise and confusion, as if she was hearing this strange, mysterious and entirely standard public school policy for the first time. How can that be? What a bizarre idea. I just don’t know what the world is coming to.

Considering that she later on made it clear that she had several older children in the school district, count me a skeptic.

If it weren’t for that kind of disingenuous activism, that sense of religious fundamentalists poking and prodding at public institutions, looking for an opportunity to capture them for the sake of their promoting their own private and particular beliefs, my hackles wouldn’t go up at all over the modest presence of religious symbols and activities in public education. I wouldn’t object to a class singing “Silent Night”, or to public prayers before football games. All of that would just be a kind of civic politeness, a recognition of the nature and outlook of communities and individuals that feed into schools. But dealing with someone who feigns innocence and acts as if there is some hideous moral conspiracy afoot because an elementary school teacher is not allowed to get up and read from the New Testament every day, I’m disinclined to concede even the smallest possible foothold. This is why this issue has to go back to a really foundational assurance of rights, of constraints on what can and cannot be done by government within public institutions.

Quite a few people are calling me, legitimately, on my slippery slope comparisons between harassment of researchers and mass murder. Fair enough, but I would still maintain that once you put yourself in a situation of effectively absolute license to act in service to a moral claim that you see as being beyond argument or not subject to procedural or democratic arbitration, your feet are at least at one end of that slippery slope.

Even in circumstances where there is literally no other option and where the injustice is unambiguously intolerable, moving to a strategy of direct action which preemptively and aggressively rejects democratic or institutional liberalism has costs.

One of the most interesting questions to me in my field of speciality is, “Why did apartheid come to an end?” As recently as 1987, most of the scholars, intellectuals and activists concerned with South Africa were fairly certain that apartheid was structurally strong and would only be brought down by a long period of total struggle. A decent number would still maintain that South Africa’s current commitment to neoliberalism means that much of apartheid survived, and that the struggle continues. I don’t: I think apartheid as a specific social and political system ended, and with great and surprising rapidity.

The debate about why that happened (because even left-wing critics of the current government tend to concede that something changed in 1993) is interestingly enough still fairly embryonic. A few books that appeared in the 1990s voiced the argument from the left that fairly little had changed, and that the transition was only a kind of crisis management by South African capitalism. There’s a few other books and articles that look at particular aspects of the transition (for example, behind-the-scenes analyses of Mandela and De Klerk’s talks, or of maneuvering within the National Party).

My own view is that it’s fairly easy to say what did not matter, namely, the formal “armed struggle” waged by the ANC. For all that the decision to take up arms was seen both within and outside South Africa as a watershed for the ANC, in the end, the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe was fairly irrelevant when it came to bringing pressure on the apartheid regime. Fear of MK may have pushed the regime into over-reaching in its attacks on other countries in the region, and the mythology of MK may have been an important symbolic tool for mobilizing protest in the country, but MK itself mostly blundered and served as an opportunity for some ANC leaders in the MK training camps to demonstrate that they, too, could manage to be pointlessly oppressive and authoritarian.

Whether or not South African troops were formally “defeated” at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1987, the battle certainly outlined the limits or outermost capacities of South African military power, so that played a role.

Sanctions and divestment mattered some. I would argue that the most important international sanction in the end may have been the sports boycott, as it most sharply communicated South Africa’s pariah status to the white population. But the refusal of international financial institutions to roll over loans in the 1980s was what really mattered, and that happened less because of political pressure and more because banks decided (rightfully) that South Africa was a bad risk. I sometimes feel chagrin at how little some of us in the divestment movement understood about the international organization of capitalism or the nature of the stock market. On the other hand, given that divestment was really not that big a deal to do and that it did actually help a bit, I also sometimes get irritated even in retrospect with how hard trustees and others fought against it.

The really major thing, I think, is that the Soweto uprising of 1976 and subsequent campaigns to make South Africa’s townships “ungovernable” put the apartheid regime under what proved to be unbearable pressure, largely on the pure grounds of resource limitations. The apartheid state simply couldn’t cope in the end with the demands that ungovernability put upon it, even when it put up a pretty good show of having everything under a tight authoritarian lid. Few of us saw this clearly in 1986-87 precisely because the state was putting on such a good performance, but underneath, the leadership was increasingly seeing collapse as inevitable.

Let’s review what led to ungovernability. The vast majority of the population without any vote or democratic outlet. An authoritarian state that legally defined almost all dissent as terrorism and gave itself entitlement to retaliate against dissent with imprisonment, torture, and murder. A state which routinely censored all media. A state which ignored property rights of most of its citizens. In short, a state which was in every respect the antithesis of liberalism, in which there was literally no avenue for democratic or liberal protest for the vast majority of its citizens.

Let’s review what ungovernability consisted of. Refusal to cooperate with any institution controlled directly or indirectly by the national government. So leaving school, refusing to pay any rents or fees assessed by governmental bodies, refusal to comply with orders from authorities no matter how routine those orders might be, and an embrace of violent resistance to the state and any perceived agents of the state. Making large areas of the country “no-go” areas for civil authorities unless they were accompanied by strong military forces. Murder or threat of murder of suspected collaborators.

As I said, I think it worked. I think it was justified not just because it worked but because there were no other alternatives. The apartheid state and the National Party spent twenty years steadily crushing all other avenues for political change and rewriting the laws and constitution of South Africa so as to define itself as the permanent and unchanging ruler of South Africa.

It had costs. If you’d tried to talk seriously about those costs in 1986, to have a cost/benefit analysis, I think you’d have been laughed out of most rooms as a weak liberal who implicitly supported apartheid, and maybe with some reason. Things were past that point. But the ANC and its supporters would probably have done better after 1993 if there had been some clearer acknowledgement during the struggle about the consequences of ungovernability and some attempt to prepare to face those consequences. It’s pretty hard to introduce the proposition that people have a public or civic duty to obey the law, pay their fees, and respect public property when you’ve had more than a decade of a declared obligation to do none of that. When children have left school for 15 years, they’ve been permanently wounded for the rest of their lives, in a way that leaves a democratic and liberal society few easy options for remedy. When you’ve said it’s ok to necklace someone who supports apartheid, what are you going to say when someone necklaces someone over some other political or social disagreement? When you’ve said that a thug is a hero of the resistance because he’s being thuggish in the right cause, you may have a problem when he continues to act like a thug. Nobody wanted to talk about crime as an issue in 1990 or 1991, during the transition, but it’s not exactly surprising that it became such a major problem given ungovernability on one hand and the use of police as tools of authoritarian control by the apartheid state on the other.

If the end goal is more or less a liberal society of some kind or another, then illiberal means are going to eventually prove as potentially serious an impediment to achieving it as whatever illiberalism one is trying to fight. Obviously this doesn’t apply if one is looking past liberalism to something else, like a very rigorously conceptualized form of socialist revolution. I suppose it doesn’t apply either if one has an exclusive tunnel vision on a single cause, e.g., if all you care about is whether monkeys and rats are getting tortured in laboratories and the rest of the world can go to hell as long as the monkeys are set free. People with that kind of tunnel vision do tend to be a bit surprised when they take a look around them and realize that the world has in fact gone to hell in part because all sorts of folks went off into their own private activist Idaho and did whatever they thought was righteous.