American Amnesia and the Unaddressed Legacy of the Iraq War

“Having spent the better part of the Bush era arguing foreign policy with a fury not seen since Vietnam, Americans have settled on a remarkably durable consensus: It was a mistake. We’re winning. Let’s leave.” ~Ross Douthat

We can never be sure of the alchemy by which historical conflicts and experiences influence the decision making of national leaders in comparable situations. Were it not for the rapid escalation of World War I, would European leaders have proved as cautious in appeasing Hitler? But alternatively, Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the American humiliation in Vietnam did not deter the Bush Administration from trying to tame Afghanistan and Iraq.

As for the legacy of the current war in Iraq, one aspect of its legacy in foreign policy decision-making seems clear – that no one is considering it.

Since 2003, the Fertile Crescent has been the setting of a great test of Neoconservative American foreign policy. This grand Neoconservative vision, resurgent and emboldened in the 90’s by America’s triumph over the Soviets, calls for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” That is, a foreign policy of an American hegemon exerting global leadership and moral superiority, protecting fellow democracies while utilizing strong military intervention against hostile regimes to recast them in America’s own democratic image.

As President Clinton prepared for his 1998 State of the Union, he received a letter signed by a score of prominent Neoconservatives. Citing the inevitability of Saddam Hussein producing weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing the Middle East, threatening the safety of our troops and allies in the region, and cutting off the oil supply, they urged Clinton “to turn [his] Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” a strategy that “will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”

Three years later, the signers of this letter populated Washington with only a Texas cowboy between them and control of the American war machine: Dick Cheney was Vice-President, Donald Rumsfeld the Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz his Deputy, and Elliott Abrams Special Assistant to the President and a National Security Council member. When September 11 introduced the Middle East to the national consciousness as a land of sinister threats, it offered the opportunity to push their Neoconservative vision into action.

Not long ago, this vision appeared to have been torn asunder by IED’s and lying dead in the ethnically charged landscape of Iraq – de-legitimized by its failed implementation as Iraq descended into chaos and civil war. The Neoconservatives planning and running Operation Iraqi Freedom were criminally negligent, arrogant, unprepared and perhaps even corrupt in a plethora of ways so well discussed in the last several years they need not be repeated, although it can largely be summed up by an Army lieutenant colonel’s presentation to war planners days before the invasion, which described post-invasion re-construction plans as “To be provided.” They never were.

But the surge no longer reflects President Bush going down with the Neoconservative ship. Competent US military personnel, reconstruction experts and Iraqi citizens have wrought an amazing transformation, achieving modest successes in Iraq. I began this post with a quote by journalist Ross Douthat describing the collective American reaction to success in Iraq: relief and an attempt at amnesia. But lurking behind this collective silence on the meaning of Iraq remains the question of whether continued improvements will redeem Neoconservatism’s ideals and principles, and whether it will allow this strongly interventionist foreign policy, which simultaneously promotes American democracy, values and interests, to re-enter the decision making calculus of American leaders.

While our collective silence on Iraq leaves the fate of Neoconservativism unclear, the events unfolding there hold implications for other foreign policies. The Neocons have no monopoly on interventionism as a policy tool. American intervention has long been advocated, simply without the Neoconservative military focus and assumed moral clarity/superiority. The chaos of 2003-2006 Iraq has hurt prospects for more modest interventionists – realists advocating intervention to maintain international stability and idealists advocating intervention for democracy or human rights promotion. In addition, the forum in this past Boston Review contains a number of prominent political scientists who believe that interventions in one form or another could be the best hope for ending civil conflict and bringing development to the world’s “Bottom Billion.” Without dialogue, the differences between these approaches and the Neoconservativism that resulted in Iraq’s failures will be neither addressed nor discerned.

We are silent today, but the question remains: as history plays out in the keystone country of the Middle East, what will it mean for the foreign policy of the world’s superpower?

Bibliographical note: I drew extensively on Gilles Kepel’s excellent book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West in writing this post. For further reading on Neoconservative intentions in the Middle East, see Wolfowitz’s leaked “US Defense Planning Guidance” and this Neoconservative memo for Israeli leaders, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

The Experts of Happiness

A Taoist master once spoke to me disdainfully of those who fill their lives with others’ large, faraway problems while leaving their own life unexamined. So, even as I remain alert to every update from Iran, I invite you to join me on my current meditation.

Several weeks ago I watched Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert’s TED Talk on why we are happy. Presenting some of his experiments, he argues that what makes us happy is not getting what we want. As we should see from the astonishing fact that an equal 50% of both paraplegics and lottery winners are happy several months after their tragedy or day of fortune, we exaggerate the impact events will have on our lives and we really “synthesize” happiness – find a way to be happy with what we have. In fact, what really causes unhappiness is not failing to achieve our desires, but uncertainty. Recently Gilbert used this finding to explain that many Americans are anxious and unhappy during this recession not due to decreasing income, but due to uncertainty about the future. Imagine Camus’s Mersault, content and happy in the routine of his life in prison, realizing the richness of life.

I remain skeptical. While I see this manifested in my own experience, the dark side of this idea is all too reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: the priest responsible for the Spanish Inquisition who believes that in relieving men of their freedom he is rectifying the mistake Jesus made in giving this terrifying, unwanted freedom to man in the first place.

What Gilbert’s theory needs is to be fit into a holistic whole. And he need only look across campus to psychiatrist George Vaillant’s longitudinal study of the physical and mental well-being of a disparate group of 268 Harvard men, classes of ’42 to ’44, composed of those who “literally fell down drunk and died,” aged full of regrets, had no regrets… and John F. Kennedy. Studying their lives for nearly eighty years, he has seen how the pieces of emotions fit together. In contrast to Gilbert’s inward focus, Vaillant’s outlook makes room for synthesizing happiness, but concludes, “The only things that really matter in life are your relationships to other people” and “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

Now I called this a meditation, and this is why: At spring’s onset, I suffered a setback, finding what had been a path of happiness ended abruptly. As I often do, I dealt with the blow by tying up my sneakers and pounding out some miles up and down the hills above campus. Now this painful episode no longer grips me the way it once did, when I felt the sun I revolved around was gone. Gilbert could easily explain this – a part of my life closed, so I synthesized happiness out of what I have: sharing an apartment with friends in sunny California (not difficult to do). But Vaillant would see more. I have since made that episode the object of darkly ironic jokes and, as you can easily see in this post, of careful thought and consideration. He would see my humor and intellectualization as two forms of “adaptations” or “defense mechanisms” in response to pain. These defense mechanisms allow us to shape our reality in response to painful realities: I changed a past setback into humor and intellectual material to be happy in the present.

One can easily read into defense mechanisms the idea of synthesizing happiness. But for Vaillant, they are not the whole story. Beyond its synthesis, important objective factors for our happiness exist ranging from the profound (stable marriage) to more banal (some regular exercise). Suffering a setback, I found a way to transfigure the pain and be happy, but that setback is not arbitrary, and depending on its nature, could still be a key to my happiness. I find it hard to say whether that is unfortunate, or a relief.

Looking at these two experts of happiness, I find myself paradoxically surprised and deeply resonating with the assertions of both: that happiness comes from within, that we manufacture the happiness we are constantly chasing, and that happiness comes from outside us, that “the only things that really matter in life are your relationships to other people… Happiness is love. Full stop.” So I challenge you to ask yourself the simplest, most obvious question that we always fail to ask: what makes you happy and why? And of course, don’t forget to ask whether happiness is really the final goal.

Education Reform: A New Synthesis and Wide-Scale Reform

Earlier this May, David Brooks wrote an editorial touting Promise Academy of the Harlem Children’s Zone as a “Harlem Miracle.”  In the long-running debate in educational reform between, on one side, an approach that focuses on the larger community and environment surrounding young students and, on the flipside, a focus exclusively on “no-excuses” schools, Brooks cites Promise Academy’s amazing gains in educational achievement among inner city youth as evidence on the side of a school only approach.

This is completely disingenuous. As can be seen in Boston Review’s new article “No Ordinary Success,” Promise Academy actually represents an emerging synthesis between these two camps in the education reform debate. Author James Forman Jr. writes, “In response to the ongoing “fix communities” versus “fix schools” debate, those doing the work in the trenches increasingly are settling on a single answer: do both.”

Brooks correctly notes that Promise Academy experiences high turnover in the search for the best teachers, has longer hours than a typical school and rigorously focuses on every detail of the students’ educations. However, founder George Canada has also described his system as a “conveyor belt taking children from cradle to college,” so for example, Harlem Children’s Zone offers guidance to parents when their children are of a very young age.

This synthesis may be moving from the trenches to the policy world, as can be seen in Obama’s educational platform, which calls for both “tougher, clearer [testing] standards” and aggressive action to improve teaching, as well as a “cradle up through a career” approach that focuses on pre-Kindergarten parent counseling, student health and student education – see Obama’s platform on his website or this more recent March 2009 CNN article.

Is there a clear path for education reform? Brooks ends his article: “We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?”

But this of course is too easy. James Forman Jr. notes that models of reform like Promise Academy boast extraordinary resources, both human and material, which are simply unavailable for wide-scale reform. With apologies to Mr. Brooks, we do not have a model of reform simply waiting to be implemented across the nation. This is why I was so interested to read today in the New York Times an editorial calling for a focus on so-called “dropout factories.” According to Alliance for Excellent Education, around 2,000 high schools are dropout factories that lose 40% or more of their students that started freshman year, and they produce 51% of the nations’ dropouts. As is rightly pointed out, if we are looking for a sustainable approach to education reform that can be realistically implemented, perhaps the focus should be on these dropout factories. 

When the Media Cries Wolf

Yesterday I turned to my friend and asked, with only a hint of irony, “So are we assholes now?”

We had, several days earlier, mocked the undue attention and hype swine flu was receiving from the major news networks, which was causing irrational responses even at our university. As my friends majoring in human biology were kind enough to enlighten me – the metric ton of anti-bacterial distributed around campus would do diddly-squat against the swine flu virus. It seemed fairly obvious that this was yet another example of the 24-hour news networks embellishing a small story to fill time and draw in viewers  (now unduly concerned for their children’s well-being). To see some healthy satire of the media’s most absurd swine flu coverage moments, check out some of this past week’s Daily Show and Colbert Report episodes.

Having now read measured news coverage from print journalism (this New York Times article being my first indication), which notes the small numbers of outbreaks but also the serious attention governments and the health community are giving the potential pandemic, I realize the situation merits some coverage and concern. But how was I to know? The media has cried wolf too many times, ranging from moderately sensationalized kidnappings to the utter absurdity of Glenn Beck’s thinking through of “Worst-Case Scenarios” in his deranged “War Room.”

So in solidarity with the townspeople, hearing once more from the mountains a boy’s voice crying out for help, I ask you to, in a complete lack of seriousness, learn more about swine flu at http://doihaveswineflu.org/.

The Democratizing Power of the Internet… And What Does that Mean Exactly?

In a recent article, Evgeny Morozov challenges “a new form of technological determinism according to which the Internet would be the hammer to nail all global problems, from economic development in Africa to threats of transnational terrorism in the Middle East.” In addressing the internet’s ability to spread democracy abroad, he notes that “Cyber–utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down.” He notes that governments throughout history have manipulated new media like radio and film, and the internet is perhaps jus as easily susceptible to manipulation. (read more from Morozov on his blog)

If the internet’s vaunted blogs, social networking and information databases cannot act as a democratic panacea abroad, what are its prospects in the United States, where we remain fairly confident that the net will remain free of manipulation by government or other powerful interests? Here too the myth of the net as flat and anarchical breaks down, for as an online Boston Review article notes, “Web and blog traffic follow a power–law distribution, with a small number of sites drawing the lion’s share of the traffic.” This begs the question, is the internet really democratizing?

Here the notion of the internet as inherently democratic (because it offers an equal voice to all) needs more precision. Just as we cannot assume the internet is free from manipulation, we cannot assume that the predominance of certain voices is problematic. Although just as with old media, online some voices are heard more than others, the internet lacks the high barriers to entry of television, radio and print journalism. The infrastructural costs of those media gate the entrance to the public forum. Online, the lack of barriers allows any voice to be heard – that readers deem worthy of being heard.

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, speaking at Stanford recently, compared the influence of online media to the appearance of the printing press. Suddenly a deluge of books were being printed by those outside the old elite that hand-printed them, resulting in a crisis of confidence as no one knew who could be trusted. The same could be said today with the advent of the net, and already we can see certain blogs emerging from the ranks as well-respected sources. Unsurprisingly, many of these bloggers are those whose voices would still be heard without or before the net: individuals trained in journalism, university professors, etc. Only this time, citizens from Mumbai can report directly on their experiences, or a knowledgeable Iranian can present information that has the power to diversify the typical public forum in America. And that could make all the difference.

Sauri, Kenya: Africa’s Natural Experiment in Foreign Aid

In his article “Africa’s Turn?” (now a Boston Review book featuring a collection of responses from relevant experts), Edward Miguel remains agnostic on  the question of how foreign aid has affected Africa’s economic growth:

“Many social science researchers have sought to establish foreign aid’s causal impacts on economic growth, but there are still no definitive statistical answers. Yet a look at the raw data on foreign aid across regions and time suggests that aid has probably played a rather small role in Africa’s recent economic success.”

Although this statement certainly seems fair, it is surprising that as someone writing extensively on Kenya, Miguel does not mention perhaps the greatest natural experiment about foreign aid to date.

In 2004, Sauri, Kenya, experienced a massive influx of aid: $100 of aid per villager, every year for five years. The project was an experimental part of the Millennium Promise to end extreme poverty. Of course, results are inconclusive. Villagers are healthier, poverty has decreased, children are receiving a better education and Sauri is envied by surrounding villages; Sauri also suffers from corrupt and inefficient use of the aid, political, ethnic and class tensions and the concern that the gains are unsustainable. See Sam Rich’s 2007 article on Sauri for more details.

The results of this natural experiment will not, however, be able to give us a definitive answer on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Sauri is the pet project of famed economist Jeffrey Sachs, who famously laid out full plans to end world poverty within our time in The End of Poverty (with an introduction by Bono). Many economists, none more than Bill Easterly (see his book criticizing Sach’s approach to foreign aid here), criticize this approach while still advocating for a humbler strategy that is sustainable and empowers locals, while done piecemeal to measure effectiveness.

While these debates about foreign aid will not be solved anytime soon, their importance is perhaps greater than ever before, as the  most recent G-20 summit   resulted in world leaders pledging over one trillion dollars to the International Monetary Fund to aid the world’s poorest nations in the face of the economic crisis.

Well as Long as We are all Infatuated with Pirates…

            As any historian worth her salt could tell you, the Somalian pirate phenomenon is nothing new in American history. At her birth, America faced the prospect of dealing with the threat of pirates from North Africa – a dilemma that resulted in America’s first covert operation. For a fantastic read, check out The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines and the Secret Mission of 1805.

Gates’s Defense Budget and the Past of Warfare

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s proposed new defense budget is the result of a rising awareness of the irrelevance of traditional warfare in the face of September 11 and, more recently, the threat of Somalian piracy. While this fundamental readjustment is long overdue, there seems to be a potentially misleading public sentiment that these cuts represent merely a reigning in of military spending on unnecessary, wasteful and impractical projects more suited to the Cold War or the pages of science fiction novels (for a humorous representation of this view, check out this Daily Show coverage).

I would argue that a more accurate assessment of Gates’s defense budget is that it represents an over-extended military shifting resources to the most pressing defense needs, at the cost of other important military programs. A prime example is the cancellation of the Air Force’s next generation F-22 fighter. The March 2009 Atlantic reported:

“American air superiority has been so complete for so long that we take it for granted. For more than half a century, we’ve made only rare use of the aerial-combat skills of a man like Cesar Rodriguez, who retired two years ago with more air-to-air kills than any other active-duty fighter pilot. But our technological edge is eroding—Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan all now fly fighter jets with capabilities equal or superior to those of the F-15, the backbone of American air power since the Carter era. Now we have a choice. We can stock the Air Force with the expensive, cutting-edge F22—maintaining our technological superiority at great expense to our Treasury. Or we can go back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of men like Rodriguez.

In cutting F-22 production, Gates has made this choice of more resources for the future of warfare over resources for a more traditional arena of warfare. This choice is necessary, but does not come without costs. The F-22 may represent the past of warfare, but we have not left this past behind forever – a fact that may be manifested in American blood.