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Dubious Solutions to Complex Problems by John Stanforth - March 23, 2003 |
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With all due respect--and I mean this in the nicest
possible way--I hate you all. Every one of you. And your six billion
friends who infest this otherwise-pleasant little corner of the galaxy. Yeah,
that's just a cutesy caricature away from being a Hallmark card,
but these days, it seems like there's just no one left on the planet who makes
any sense at all.
Ok, so maybe I'm a little high-strung these days. Maybe it's the weather. Or maybe job stress. Or maybe--just maybe--I'm OD'ing on adrenaline from 48 hours of view-from-the-tanks CNN coverage. Or maybe it's the twitching of that vein in my forehead everytime someone asks my opinion about this whole fiasco of a war. Have three hours for a full explanation? No, didn't think so. Long story short, and with apologies to those on both sides who have it all figured out so neatly and cleanly, I've never before been so completely, utterly, mind-blowingly totally-fucking-Confused with a capital C. And that's just the executive summary. I hate the fascist regime that's pushed us into war, and I hate the fascist regime we've flown there to fight. I hate the anti-war protesters who think publicly defecating at the Civic Center sends a message. (Message: You're fucking idiots, damaging your own cause.) I hate the well-meaning pretentious-actor types with their pompous rhetoric and no grasp of reality. I hate the arm-chair quarterbacks that have come out of the woodwork to offer oh-so-fucking-obvious solutions. But more than anything, I hate that the world is so mangled that even some of the sweetest people are turning into raving conspiracy theorists, without any room to allow for a leader's bumbling incompetence in their haste to presume evil intent. You know what else I really hate? I hate that we're led by a President who is the Anti-Communicator. What the hell was up with that speech Monday night?? I listened intently, repeating the words aloud as he gave his 48-hour ultimatum, and frankly, it was a beautiful speech, perfectly crafted, with a rhythmic cadence that really flowed. But listening in horror to him say it, I'd say there's at least a 50-50 shot that the animatronic Lincoln at Disneyland could have delivered a more compelling emotional performance. I also really hate those who exploit the confusion, lumping together all possible reasons supporting their desired outcome and summarizing with trite over-simplifications, without regard for the confusion this perpetuates. We insisted we were en route to Iraq to disarm Saddam Insane's weapons of mass destruction. But once there, we suddenly realized we'd need some local support and changed our tune-- the Coalition Symphony presents The Iraqi Liberation Concerto in D Minor. Strings sound lush but the voices are hollow. Of course, you can generally piece out real priorities with clean hypotheticals, and if it--hypothetically--came down to wiping out every Iraqi in Baghdad just to stop an imminent repeat of 9/11, you can bet your Haliburton stock that we'd be spinning right back to that old-skool classic, WMDs 'n tha' Hizzy fo' Shizzy. But given equal time, both sides prey on the confusion to shamelessly posture. The well-spoken Tim Robbins was on Bill Maher's show this week, speaking out against the killing of innocent civilians. Certainly a good point, though he offers no alternate solution of what to do with that lunatic madman either. Instead, he suggests that "visionary leadership" after 9/11 would have been "encouraging people to teach a child to read, or build local parks." Huh? Really? Certainly not bad ideas, at any time, but that's visionary leadership? I'd take these guys a lot more seriously if their solutions were more pragmatic than talking to a butterfly or hugging a sunbeam. Try "pouring all available resources into developing alternate energy technologies," for starters. Visionary indeed. Still, it could've been fine if he'd just stopped there, instead of going on to rant with complete incredulity that the criminal junior Bush---ok, no, but that would've been amusing if he'd called him that---could wage a war in a democracy when so many opposed. Ummmm---hang on. Which is it? Pick one. Current polls suggest that 76% are in favor of the war with only 20% opposed ("hurray for the confused four percent!"), so I hope you're not suggesting that killing innocent civilians has anything to do with what our people think. It shouldn't. So then, don't wrap yourself in a warm blanket of democracy that you only support as long as the numbers split your way. And don't let that seething partisan hatred destroy what could have been a great opportunity to rationally point out what the US is doing wrong in Iraq. PS: Also consider a basic history book before your next televised rant. Marketing brochures aside, this isn't a democracy, and the leaders of a republic can, in fact, wage war to their heart's content until their terms run out. May not be right, but it is the American way. Just FYI. So many people, so many views, so many theories, so many solutions... and here I remain, more Confused than ever. Don't get me wrong-- I was confused by the best. As a PolSci foreign affairs major at UCLA, I studied Middle East politics with some of the leading US experts, like Dr. Steven Spiegel, who'd appear before Senate and U.N. sessions when not lecturing in LA or speaking on NPR. These were the guys with detailed stories of American operations to prop up the Shah in Iran, for instance, because they'd recently lunched with the CIA operatives involved. Neato. Sorting papers this weekend, I stumbled upon gems like my 15-page, ever-so-catchy Impact of Ideology and Historical Foundations on the Foreign Policy of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in which decent topic coverage was completely over-shadowed by the achievement of having written it all the night before it was due. Ahhh, the joys of caffeinated adrenaline---the college experience. Then again, a whole night at that point felt like a lifetime after four years as a foreign-events extemporaneous speech competitor in high school. Those were the days, traveling around California on weekends as an arrogant, snobby IXer (Int'l eXtemper), wondering if we'd be household names someday ("Brokaw did this, you know"). Ahh, that was the life. Those cool IX cats always got the cute girls. And 6-8 times each tournament day, they also got a world-events topic and 30 minutes to research, write, memorize, and practice a flawless seven-minute performance. No note cards. No fear. These guys volunteered for this. Every weekend from October through May. Hard to imagine scrawny nerds lugging several times their bodyweight in plastic fileboxes full of magazine clippings, but yeah... I saw it. I was there. And I've got the shoulder muscle tears to prove it. As if this weren't hell enough, the best of the best would convene each year in the literal hell of a 100-plus-degree Santa Fe summer for the prestigious (and ever-so-pretentious) CDE National Institute. There, in the middle of the New Mexico desert, we young aspiring politicos---we whose own parents had deservingly abandoned us in the desert---learned invaluable lessons that would serve us for years, cowering in fear before Chairman William J. "Not Drug Czar William H." Bennett and his trippy-cool wife Kat "Call me Kat" Bennett. We learned about current events of the day and about deep-seeded centuries-old conflicts. We learned to precisely organize articles and which news sources were most biased. We learned all about the most random far-away places, even when the facts were disturbing beyond belief. Sometimes the only thing more horrifying than not knowing an answer during the early morning breakfast interrogations ("who runs Liberia and how'd they come to power?") was that someone would know-- "Samuel K. Doe, the illiterate 28-year-old sergeant who came to power after capturing and disembowling former President Tolbert, is best remembered for later surviving a coup attempt, beating to death and castrating his opponent, and riding through the capital parading the remains, before having his men eat the dismembered body in a show of strength." Yeah. Gotta love the attention to detail. Especially at breakfast. I suppose there was an important lesson for us in there, though---make sure you have the stomach for foreign policy before you get involved. This is a messy game with dirty secrets and an entirely different (and largely Machiavellian) playbook unlike anything in the domestic arena. CIA operatives have few operational limits, no Miranda requirements, and---oh, did I mention, even the illustrious Samuel K. Doe was our ally? Yep. Those who think domestic politics make for strange bedfellows should see the kinky S&M beastiality on the international side of that bed. To the uninitiated and generally morally-absolutist American people, the brutality of world events too often inspires a knee-jerk reaction. No one wants to publicly admit it (and no politican would be quoted saying this), but our distaste for the details and our inability to accept seemingly disturbing compromises even when they serve a greater good makes foreign policy the achilles heel of democratic forms of government. Hostile states like Iraq, over time, could easily wear down the resolve of the general American population, and in so doing, cause internal American conflicts of proportions far exceeding anything seen during the Cold War. Then add in the fact that our leaders cycle out every four to eight years, each bringing a new foreign policy to bear, and that even while in office, they dance with public opinion polls to weigh long-term good against short-term approval ratings. Yeah, it's no wonder that we just plain suck at maintaining coherent, comprehensive, or consistent foreign policies for anything more than a few years, at best. Even that seems like a miracle, in context. "For every complex problem," famed newspaperman H.L. Mencken wrote almost a century ago, "there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Nowhere is that more true than in American foreign policy. These days, at each fork in the road, the US chooses the simplistic answer, to eventually find ourselves mired in conflicts with no clear objectives and only Dubious solutions (that is the adjective form of Dubya, isn't it? Should be...). "Shock and awe"?? Ok, then what? The Administration still hasn't presented a plan for the next ten years of occupation because the money just isn't in the budget. And it's not going to be there if we keep handing out tax cuts like they're Tiffany's gift certificates. No matter how you slice it, good long-term foreign policy decisions are not easy, and they're usually not popular domestically. Whatever happened to the saying that "sometimes you have to sacrifice popularity to choose the hard right over the easy wrong," as Al Gore told us a few years back? Oh yeah... It doesn't actually work in a democratic government. A lack of popularity these days translates into protesters in the streets, and when that reaches a sufficient threshhold, that won't bode well for a self-serving President seeking re-election next year. I'm not suggesting that what the current President is doing is right, but rather, that he'd be in even more political trouble if he had a good-but-unpopular foreign policy doctrine. And I realize how pretentious this sounds, given that I have no real solutions to offer either. But the pre-requisite to searching for lasting solutions has to be an acceptance that this is a complex issue that requires much deeper analysis instead of summary knee-jerk reactions. Until we reach that point, we can't even continue any sort of meaningful dialogue to discuss the real issues that still remain. Thinking back, the last Gulf War was indellibly etched in my psyche both because I had close family fleeing Kuwait and because it happened at the height of my extemp career. The pseudo-random topics we'd get all inevitably drifted in that direction, and we added two more fileboxes full of Iraq and Kuwait clippings to deal with that. We also spent a good deal of time coming up with summaries of common themes, and I found myself doing that today as I struggled to make sense of some of the current issues. So, with apologies to Julie Andrews, here are a few of my least-favorite things... On War: Should we be at war right now? No, I don't think so, but not for the common anti-war reasons either. The handling of this has been mangled, the long-term consequences have not been delineated clearly, and the appearance of impropriety, at the very least and even giving them the benefit of every doubt, destroys any chance of the Administration claiming the moral high-ground here. Awarding post-war clean-up contracts to a Haliburton subsidiary before the first shots were even fired??! Are you fucking kidding me??? If you start a war in this era, you absolutely need to hold that moral high-ground just to break even. Shouldn't there have been a White House memo on this?  The fact is, we got boxed into going to war
by a series of factors ranging from weather conditions in the Gulf (imagine
full military chemical-protection gear in the summer?) to the
fact that you can't keep the military just sitting around indefinitely. And
clearly we think we're going to be done in the next month or two because even
the electronics in our tanks won't work when ambient desert temperatures
rise in the summer. Yes, I understand the logistical issues, but no, sorry--
simple scheduling just cannot be a valid justification to start a war
right now. And even worse, some officials have said that we had to go to
war so as to not lose face, "because we've come this far already."
No kidding, geniuses. What part of looooooong-teeeeerm fooooooreign poooooolicy
do you not understand?? But no-- no "Get out of jail free" card here... Your
lack of vision doesn't justify a war solely because you bumbled your way into a corner.
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