Time to get out the map

Citizen Carrie shows us today, among other things, why the Internet is crushing traditional news media. In Stealth White House Meeting with Indian IT Delegation, she reports on a meeting of White House economic officials with a group of business leaders from India. Read it, because it's about all you're going to see from a U.S.-sourced writer about this meeting, and Carrie was able to do that by referencing Indian sources.

But, on to content. The major thrust of the meetings was America's H-1B program, and how desirous the Indian leaders were to have it continue and be expanded. One of the big players in the meetings was Larry Summers, director of Obama's National Economic Council and one of the administration's leading spokespersons for all things economic. Apparently, according to the Indian press, the Indian businessmen came away with confidence that our government, including Obama, was going to continue their support of the program.

India has the natural concern that waning American support for visas that allow Indians to come here and for offshoring will hurt its by-a-thread economy. They see the H-1B program as a cornerstone of free trade; since there are not a lot of goods traveling back and forth between the two countries, it's necessary to keep people and work in the form of services crossing the borders. (Of course, we never hear in any of these articles about the restrictions on Americans taking jobs in India, I guess it would be pretty inconvenient to mention that.)

Carrie cites a Business Week article that fails to mention the White House meeting, but does take up the party line espoused by Infosys co-chairman, Nandan Nilekani, that we need to be concerned that any restrictions on anything will lead to a situation where, "trade between the US and India will be neither free no fair. That’s something people on both sides of the globe need to be concerned about." No mention of possible trade-offs here, but I'll let Carrie have the last word on this point:

Why don't you write a full series of posts along these lines so you can educate Americans on how the loss of good-paying jobs for U.S. citizens is vital for continued good political and economic relations between the U.S. and India? I'm sure if we are fully able to understand the benefits of middle-class workers moving into cardboard boxes, while our "healthy" GDP creates good-paying jobs for Harvard Business School grads, lobbyists, and a select few who are able to latch onto the coattails of the business school grads and the lobbyists, we'd be less likely to call for those uncouth protectionist measures.

One other thing that interested me about the Indian visit was a report of another meeting the delegation had, with "thought leaders" Henry Kissinger and other luminaries (objective sorts like a CEO of a multinational and the former US ambassador to India). What's Kissinger doing here?

It's always possible that Henry has massive contracts with India and so wants to keep the U.S. financial pump flowing, but I had another thought, and, for that, we'll have to refer to the world map (you can look at your atlas if you don't have a map on the wall of your office).

Let's take the 30th parallel north, and start in Saudi Arabia and move east. We start with our "friends" the Saudis, then travel to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China. I'm not going to detail our manifold problems in those nations, other than to suggest that an amazing number of our current difficulties have something to do with those six.

And of those six, not one can be counted upon to be a reliable friend to American interests, except, maybe...India? And, if we have to pay a high price for that support, it's very possible that the calculation is that it's worth it. If we have to give a remarkably generous nuclear package to India, we'll do it. If we have to let them have our call-center jobs, we'll do it. If we have to educate their students, then allow them to stay in this country (at least for six years), we'll do it.

But we can't appear to be appeasing India - we're the strongest country in the world - so we wrap the discussion in "free trade," or "jobs Americans can't do," or "helping the downtrodden masses" (the last argument allowing CEOs to think of themselves as Mother Teresas with private jets).

It seems we've completely fallen away from the concept of evaluating policies on the basis of whether they make overall sense. It's not very far from that to the point where we treat any mention of India as being anything other than our good friends (as opposed to a nation with interests of its own) as somehow unpatriotic; we've done that with other countries, and that's not led to positive outcomes, as the U.S. is seen not as an honest broker for good, but as a country that's in the pocket of another. I don't think that makes a lot of sense.

Review - The Limits of Power

All things considered, the theory that explains the largest number of phenomena is going to be the most compelling. It still needs to be tested against the usual values of truth and valid implication, but, if it is reasonably competent, it has to at the very least be in the ballgame. I've talked about my problems with economics as a science (my usual disclaimer: it's doing some good things, but it is in no way a mature discipline yet), and this is a problem. Many economic papers or theories are so narrowly defined that they are abstracted away from anything close to the real world.

I don't write too much about foreign policy here, because, first, I don't really have an overarching theory that covers the world; every situation seems to have its own set of rules, and it's dangerous to generalize, and second, I don't have any particular knowledge about any particular country or area. So I'm left at the intersection of common sense and the contributions of experts.

All this is preface to an admission that I don't know for certain that Andrew Bacevich, professor and retired Army colonel, is an authority, someone I should trust for an overarching theory of America's role in the world. So I'm left to weigh his arguments based on what I do know and what makes sense, and, on those points, his book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008) is a sobering dose of truth to which we had better pay attention.

For Bacevich integrates our current economic climate with our past and present in foreign policy, and does so convincingly enough that LOP needs to be put on the table as we move forward. This short book, 182 pages, is thick with history and insights, and is profoundly pessimistic that we will reach the heights to which we aspire as a nation, arguing that our goals have been mistaken, our means flawed, and our leaders incapable of accomplishing what they promise (assuming that's what they really want).

I could write a lengthy detailed review here, but Bill Moyers has already done a lot of the work for me. He conducted an interview with Bacevich back in August (transcript here) that summarizes the book more concisely than I would be able to, and I suggest you read through that. I will, thus, pick and choose from the book more than I normally would.

One challenge presented to anyone who tries to argue that the United States is in a passel of trouble is, "We've been through rough times before, and we flourished, we overcame, so who says anything's different now?" The obvious rejoinder, that Rome thought it was going to overcome all obstacles until, oh my, it didn't, always falls on deaf ears. One is left to explicate the ways in which our neglect has made this time far more precarious. In many respects, the whole of LOP is a rejoinder, a response to those who would urge staying the course under the false assumption that history inevitably repeats.

LOP is built on three pillars: that we are suffering a "crisis of profligacy," in which our inability to prioritize domestically has put us in a heretofore unthought-of vulnerable position; a "political crisis," the salient feature of which is an unchecked executive branch of remarkable incompetence; and a "military crisis," in which the decisions of our military leaders have proven to be incapable of dealing with the true challenges we face.

Perhaps the key tenet of the book is the idea that America has been building, in effect, a soft empire. Even globalization is a euphemism for that empire, in which the rest of the world exists to play its role in the American narrative. And, always, standing behind that is the American military machine, providing the muscle to back up that view of the world. This ties directly into the notion of American Exceptionalism, the idea that we play a unique role in the history and the present of the world, that our values are so special that they should be imposed on everyone else, no matter the cost.

Our whole "defense" apparatus is not so much about defending our borders, but about projecting our power out into the world. Shielded by that power, we are freed from having to look at other nations or entities in clear light; we call Saddam and bin Laden "evil" without having to understand their motivations.

Bacevich contrasts a desire for realism and humility (the cornerstones of Reinhold Niebuhr) with their opposites, hubris and sanctimony, respectively. Anyone who sat through Condoleezza Rice's Meet the Press appearance last week saw that in action:

To say that those people deserve the same, the same life that we have, the same freedoms that we have, that seems to me, humble.

Humility or sanctimony?

The crux of the argument is that we're caught up in a self-defeating relationship between expansion, abundance, and freedom. Bacevich's "abundance" is what I have in the past termed "luxury," but the result is the same. We have indulged ourselves in a lot of things that are unnecessary, heedless of the cost it's incurred on other people and on our own future generations. Not that all abundance is bad - in many respects, it paved the way for greater freedoms for more people (only in an expanding economy could we have extended rights to women and African-Americans) - but much of it was earned only because we could back it up with a strong dominating presence in the world.

However, this cycle is now coming up against hard limits; actually, it has been for 25 years or more. That portion of our prosperity that has come from cheap oil has been somewhat illusory, as it has required our military strength to enforce our access, and the cost has been an increasing dependence on other nations. Jimmy Carter saw this, and made the mistake of telling the American people, and he was swept away by the rosy optimism of Reagan.

Now things are different:

Expansionism squanders American wealth and power, while putting freedom at risk....Rather than confronting this reality head-on, American grand strategy since the era of Ronald Reagan, and especially throughout the era of George W. Bush, has been characterized by attempts to wish reality away. Policy makers have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme intended to extend indefinitely the American line of credit.

One might think that one political tradition or another might work to counteract this trend, but Bacevich is not optimistic. Congress has essentially ceded all power to the imperial presidency, leaving us without an important check on the power of one office. Bush has made an important contribution, by taking the ideas to such an extreme that he has laid bare their "defects and utter perversity." In this telling, the Bush Doctrine is not so much revolutionary as an explicit statement of business as usual.

The vast security and intelligence apparatus is completely dysfunctional, incapable of providing any real protection to the American people. Periodic reorganizations have served only to create larger and more expensive fiefdoms, creating fund-attracting power centers to no effect.

Bacevich credits Paul Nitze with creating the blueprint for all that has come since he wrote NSC 68 back in 1950. In that document, State Department employee Nitze formulated the strategy that has governed our dealings ever since. He presented three strategies for containing the threat posed by Soviet communism: isolationism, preventive war, or a massive increase in American power, represented by huge spending on the tools of destruction. Unsurprisingly, we picked the third, and that cast the die that has remained operative through the days of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.

But what is most important to this strategy is that every threat is the big one, the existential threat that will wipe us off the planet if we don't act swiftly and decisively. And so, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq.

For this strategy to work, we would have to possess overwhelming force applied brilliantly, both in strategy and tactics. And Bacevich contends that we've really come apart here, that our military leaders have been unable to rise to the occasion. Three illusions governed this failure: that we had managed to change the nature of war, that it could be precise and targeted and capable of focused destruction; that civilian leaders and the military had forged a new understanding of goals that would target vital national interests; and that American society was now fully on board with whatever the military might do. None of these has proven to be true, as we've seen in Iraq.

Bacevich notes that we have seen the folly of these assumptions, but that our corrections (our focus must be not on destruction, but on nation-building; our military must be given primary responsibility; we will integrate the military into society by reinstituting the draft) are ultimately unworkable, ineffective, and impossible.

There are four lessons we must learn, however, and they are the ones that must inform our judgment going forward.

1. War is and always will be chaos, and will forever be a combination of planning and reaction. We did not begin to understand the effect that IEDs would have in Iraq, and any war will always bring things like this.
2. Force is not the solution to every problem. "Shock and awe" may topple statues and dictators, but they don't bring democracy to a huge region or allow us to control the natural resources of it.
3. Preventive war is "just plain stupid." It is hard to support morally; even if we can get by that, it cannot possibly eliminate all threats.
4. Strategy has become hopelessly muddled; civilian leaders confuse it with ideology, military leaders with operations.

Bacevich harbors little hope that a new president will bring about fundamental change, so ingrained is the idea that America plays a unique role in the world and needs to project that everywhere. As long as we retain the arrogance that allows us to believe that our system needs to be recreated everywhere, and that we deserve to live exactly as we wish, awash in material goods, we are destined to continue our record of failure, and that will ultimately impoverish us. We have, paradoxically, attempted to impose our will on the world and have ended up dependent on others, for oil, for goods, for money.

What we should do is to pursue a policy of containment, coupled with a concerted effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons and reverse climate change, both of which actually are existential threats. These problems, difficult as they are, are unlikely to prove more difficult than "transforming the Greater Middle East, which requires changing the way a billion or more Muslims think."

Ultimately, Bacevich is not positive about our chance to make the changes we need to. He doesn't believe that Americans will accept the limits of power, that we will go on beating our heads against the same walls. This important book closes with the depressing:

"To the end of history," [Niebuhr] once wrote, "social orders will probably destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible." Clinging doggedly to the conviction that the rules to which other nations must submit don't apply, Americans appear determined to affirm Niebuhr's axiom of willful self-destruction.

[For another take on this book, see this from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who finds a way to link this book to "Use Me" by the great Bill Withers, which even he admits is reaching, but it's still worth checking out.]

OK, now... - 1/7/08

[I've had reason to reconsider my absolutist position on libertarianism, though I think it is still a long way from becoming mainstream. I'm glad that the party is discussing what it wants to be in a realistic way, but escaping "fringe" status will be hard.

The rest of this post holds up well. The two candidates we have are unwilling to confront our problems in an adult manner, pandering to the mass electorate instead of reexamining issues in the light of reality.]

I want to follow up on my Saturday comments about Ron Paul. Again, I do not support his "philosophy" (libertarianism is arbitrary and unrealistic), but he reminds me of, well, myself.

I'm a software developer with an MBA who has worked in quite a few industries on different problems. While I don't profess that this background grants me great wisdom (just a little, maybe), it does allow me to comment on things from a fairly broad perspective. I've seen various issues arise, and seen (and participated in) various solutions, some of which have worked better than others.

So, in a meeting, I'm frequently going to be the person bringing up the larger issues ("if we want to support the needs our customers have, we will have to restructure the database access to allow users to query it directly"). A huge proportion of the time, the response, from people ostensibly concerned with the same situation, is stark uncomfortable silence, followed by, "OK, now..." ("what color should the splash screen be?", a topic which then consumes the rest of the hour).

I don't think I'm particularly strident in bringing up these matters; quite the contrary, there are people close to me who say I'm far too quiet and unassuming. What I think is happening is that the room is simply not prepared to discuss such things, no matter how true or significant they may be. It takes a long time for most people to accept that the world is not the way they want to assume it is, that the status quo may be downright wrong.

From my standpoint, however, the worst thing is not that the problem is going to go on, possibly fester, until it becomes so obvious that change is needed that action is finally taken. (Managers, who ought to be taking the longer-term view, tend to be the leading proponents of the conservative, backward-looking approach.) That should bother me the most, but I'm human, and what frustrates me is the is-he-an-alien look that the other people tend to have before moving on to another, far less critical, issue. I want to go Close-ian on all these people who are neglecting what ought to be a major part of their responsibility ("I'm not going to be ignored, Dan").

And this is Ron Paul in a meeting of candidates.

Does terrorism against the West result from the actions of the West in Muslim countries? Does our "occupation" of holy Saudi Arabia inflame anti-U.S. passions (and "they asked us to be there" is no defense; many Muslims feel that the sheiks are as bad in their decadence and embrace of Western ways)? Is our historical interference in their politics a rallying cause? Do our actions come out of a need to prop up a failing, petroleum-based lifestyle?

These are valid issues to discuss, and discussing them would seem to be extremely pertinent in the changed post-9/11 world. (An interesting book on this is Imperial Hubris by intelligence official Michael Scheuer; regardless of how you evaluate his ideas and solutions, it struck me as an important contribution to the literature.) Being simplistic would seem to be the worst thing we could do.

Yet it is exactly what the candidates do. Ron Paul is trying to bring up these issues, albeit in a quasi-lunatic style that does not serve him well. And he gets the look (particularly from Romney, who strikes me as a supercilious smarm-master), that look that says we're not just going to disagree with you, but that you're insane to try to discuss such things.

But we have to discuss such things if we're going to reach a long-term accommodation with Islam. Sound bites like "they hate us, they hate our way of life" may sound tough on the stump, but will not assist the next President in actually engaging the problem. We all fear terrorism and the uncertainty it brings to our lives, but reducing the causes to individual pathology will not illuminate the situation, nor will it lead to a solution.

So I wonder how frustrated Ron Paul is getting, as he tries to be the adult in a room of intellectual children. I suspect that Paul's support, which has surprised a lot of pundits, comes from people who suspect that the issues we face are more serious and complicated than the other candidates are letting on. Blathering on about change is meaningless unless the change is meaningful (and kudos to Huckabee for at least acknowledging that), and meaningful change should only result from a deep understanding of the forces involved, not from focus group-tested, simplistic slogans.

Biden and Iraq

I haven't said anything about Obama's pick of Joe Biden as his running mate. But I will now: I'm in favor of it, I think Biden presents a good complement and energizes the ticket in a way that most of the other reported candidates would not.

My impression of Biden before this campaign was, probably, somewhat negative. I didn't know too much about him, was basically familiar with the plagiarism and the occasional running off at the mouth, knew he was considered strong on foreign policy. However, in the early debates, he intrigued me, not enough for me to ignore the fact that he had no chance, but enough so to make me pay more attention to him.

And I like people who take contrarian views, who challenge conventional wisdom, and Biden was willing to talk about the partitioning of Iraq. The more I thought about that, the more I thought there was value in at least considering that, despite the reality that nobody else was.

While I'm still not certain that partitioning was or is a good idea, it would solve one problem. If we ever do leave Iraq, and sectarian violence emerges, we will face the dilemma of having to go into a country in which certain sizable factions don't want us. Potentially, we would have to violate a nation's sovereignty in order to clean up a mess that a lot of Americans would feel honor-bound to ameliorate (we broke it, we bought it).

In my April review of Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell, I wrote this:

(I think I'll leave the large question of sovereignty to a later post. I need to work out the extent to which claims of sovereignty affect my feelings here; suffice it to say now that that issue complicates the kind of intervention that Power feels the U.S. needs to demonstrate.)

While this post is still not my last word on the big issue of sovereignty, it is true that sovereignty complicates any body's intervention in the affairs of a foreign country. It has happened when nations have been accused of internal genocide, and it would do so if Iraq fell into that level of strife.

At the very least, partitioning would solve a part of the problem. If there is an Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Shi'ites decide to clean up the Kurds once and for all (and claim the oil therein), we can plausibly assist the Kurds in defense of their own nation in a way that would be much more difficult if the Kurds simply occupy a small section of the larger country.

Again, I'm not necessarily convinced that a partition of Iraq is appropriate, certainly not without the agreement of their people. But it has impressed me that Joe Biden was willing to think about it, and, perhaps, he can bring this kind of thinking to the problems that will face this administration. It's certainly worth a shot.

The United States and the world

As we begin the Democratic convention today, many are excited by the new attitude President Obama will bring to the world. Instead of the paranoid fantasies of the neo-cons, we will enter into cordial relations with all who wish it. Oh, we won't be pushed around, not the big dog. But we will see a new era of comity with people of other nations, and can move ahead with solutions to the big global problems.

Wow, this sounds great. But try talking to someone from another country sometime, and you'll retain just a touch of cynicism about this wonderful new land of hugs and kisses. Because, unlike us, the people of other nations don't necessarily perceive magical changes coming from a change of administration. We believe that a move from Bush to Obama will make big differences to the way the country is run (and you probably believe that regardless of whether you like it or not). Many people, however, simply see us as one nation, and are far more murky as to how a party change might affect relations with their country or their part of the world.

We're no different, of course. Does Italy have a premier, a prime minister, or a president? Who is it? Does he or she have different policies toward the U.S. than his or her predecessor?

I can't answer those questions, and I doubt that many Americans can either. In part, that's a reflection of our myopia toward the rest of the world. But, in no small measure, it's pretty natural. It's the height of arrogance to think that other people will understand the nature of changes to our government (though they are more likely to than we are, sadly). Simply electing a new president will not suffice to make changes; we'll still have some work to do.

Sullivan - II

Andrew Sullivan links to a Slate article by Jacob Leibenluft, but the link doesn't work, and I can't find the full article. Nonetheless, and at the risk of misrepresentation, I quote the quote:

The bigger danger from the push for drilling—or more exactly, the arguments used on its behalf—may be how it affects our own behavior. If we pretend that offshore drilling is a fail-safe means of lowering oil prices (or even a likely means), we may hold on to rosy and unreasonable expectations for future gas prices...That will in turn change the calculations we make when it comes to long-term decisions like whether to shell out extra cash for a more fuel-efficient car or a home with access to mass transit. As long as we're counting on gas prices to go down, those green lifestyle choices won't seem as attractive. We may well be surprised once again that we're paying so much at the pump, without having done anything about it.

There's a more general point here, that current actions and policies create an expectation for the future, which conditions current decisions. This is true of every policy that is followed by our government, whether it be in economics, energy, or taxes. If you believe that the capital gains tax rate is going up, you'll make different decisions from those you'd make otherwise. If you believe that we will adopt Al Gore's policy of the elimination of all carbon-based energy in 10 years, you'll make different decisions.

This is the source of our worst kind of corruption. Someone is in a position to know something about a change to a law or a zoning regulation or approval of a TIF, and sells that information to someone who can profit from it. But that's small potatoes.

What's worse is when faux-populist policies are created, and the mass of people respond accordingly. Leibenluft's point is clear - if we sell offshore drilling as the answer to our energy problems, people will believe that and continue burning oil, but, more importantly, they won't support efforts to find other sources of energy. Other countries will continue that research, and we will end up dependent on foreign nations for our energy...sound familiar? (Hillary Clinton's gas-tax holiday suffered from the same weakness.)

If you believe that a war in Iraq can be fought and won in two months, you might well support it; if told it will take more than five years, followed by a 50- or 100-year occupation, you might not. (One of the more noxious aspects of the Bush administration is its unwillingness to understand this, its belief that it has a mandate to do whatever it wants regardless of changes in conditions.)

In baseball, each home-plate umpire tends to have a strike zone that is merely close to the one specified in the rules. Every player will tell you that the important thing is that the judgment remains constant throughout the game, not that a strike exactly conforms to the letter of the law.

Quite often, a consistent strategy, even if flawed, is superior to a changing strategy, no matter how optimal it might be proven to be.

Sullivan - I

From Andrew Sullivan on Russia invading Georgia vs. the U.S. invading Iraq:

Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army - because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power?...It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?

I wrote about this a couple of days ago, and I have found it interesting to follow the discussion in the blogging world. There are two basic camps: those who feel as I do that the U.S. has lost all standing in making comments about this, and those who feel that the U.S. is still better because of its principles and needs to keep speaking out.

Now, I keep up enough to know that Russian troops have backed off, that the crisis is essentially over. So you may think that the issue is moot, that this post and Sullivan's are superfluous.

But this will come up again and again, and it's going to be important to figure out where we stand on this. Maybe the change in president will allow us to reset, to engage the world relatively free of the Iraq baggage...but I doubt it.

I don't know what we have to do to regain our moral standing, but I am very uneasy lecturing the rest of the world about anything given our willingness to interfere with other countries and our unwillingness to change anything we do. I do believe that my country has still been, over the years, a force for good in the world, and we should be proud of that, but recent events (almost everything that has happened at home and abroad during the Bush administration) has made me wary about our ability to act as a moral exemplar. Sullivan:

The point here is not that the invasions are obviously morally equivalent. The point is that the line between American actions in the world and Russia's are no longer as stark as they once were. Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Some links

A busy day today, so I'll just provide some links of interest with minimal commentary:

1) Steven Pinker writes interesting books on language and cognition. They're pitched at the general audience, and they're full of pop culture references and links to current research, but not at a highly technical level. So little is really known about how the brain works, particularly with respect to which aspects of it are hard-wired through evolution and which are flexible, able to be shaped by environment, that there can be huge controversy over each of the schools.

Such is a current dustup over bioethics, as Pinker responds to a report from the President's Council on Bioethics, then becomes subject to criticism himself (article here containing links to the original report and more commentary).

I won't wade into the specifics today, but I worry when someone who is strong in one field starts using that reputation to make claims in another. That's not to say I disagree with Pinker here, just that there's a danger of his becoming another Chomsky, whose controversial views have overshadowed his groundbreaking work in linguistics.

2) Kevin Drum writes a week ago about the trouble that the conservative movement has found, that it has exhausted itself and needs to find something new. Ezra Klein argues that "the moment isn't providing the problems" that conservatives need (apparently feeling that life is a matter of faddish problems that arise, and one side or another is positioned to deal with them). His conclusion is that, once the old problems re-emerge, conservatives will once again be in the ascendancy.

I hope they're both wrong, that we see Americans come together to fix problems that are real, that are pervasive, that won't go away when the media gets tired of them. Medicare and Social Security, competitiveness in the face of foreign efforts, lack of affordable health care, global warming, reduction in the supply of petroleum, even a definition of what this nation actually is and should be - none of these are fads, to be dealt with by whichever party feels like dealing with them. We need all hands on deck working on these.

3) Hank Williams writes about how the Internet is contributing to a lack of focus, tying that to the ineffectiveness of advertising. It's certainly true that, if you see one ad a day, you tend to remember it; if you see a thousand, you don't remember any. And we see more than a thousand, just look around. One certainly has to wonder how many of the ad-supported sites and blogs will survive when they run up against people's need to eat.

4) Tom Friedman continues his new-found concern about the state of America, citing the power we've handed to the petroleum countries. He also refers to the new books by Fareed Zakaria and David Rothkopf, each of which predicts massive changes that will take away from America's influence on the world. As before, I await Friedman's recognition of his own contribution to this effort, how his cheerleading for globalization covered up the very real problems that quite a few of us foresaw.

Talking to our friends

There's been a lot of discussion the past few days about whether we should talk to our enemies, as Obama has stated he plans to do, or whether that's a form of appeasement, as Bush and McCain contend. This is an issue which has bubbled up previously in the campaign, Clinton was quite critical of Obama, but, since Bush's speech in Israel, it's become front-burner stuff.

Matt Yglesias has a post, titled Prestige, that asks, "What are we afraid of?" I'm going to delve into this a little more deeply, if only to try to work out what the implications of talking to, say, Iran would be. The contention of Bush, McCain, and Clinton is that speaking directly to nations that have expressed enmity toward us (or Israel, apparently the only ally we feel quite this strongly about; after all, we continue to be in bed with China despite their hostility to the government of our putative friend Taiwan) gives those nations worldwide prestige, enhancing their status in the eyes of other countries.

I asked a friend of mine who was born overseas what the reaction would be in her country if the United States were to talk with Iran. She felt that it would be a matter of, "What is the U.S. doing?," but Iran itself would not be elevated in any way.

And that's the crux of the matter to me. It's something of a game theory problem, in that we have actions we can take and responses the other side can make. To analyze it requires us to figure out what the alternative to talking is - saber-rattling, economic sanctions, war. I'll talk through it lieu of making a table.

Let's take Iran, and assume our primary goal is to halt their nuclear weapons development program. First, we need to be certain that they have such a program; it would not be unprecedented for a country to insist they had a WMD program to maintain their prestige, even though they didn't have one at all. It would be ruinous to impose sanctions or wage war, hurting the citizens of a country, if they actually didn't pose a threat.

So we'll stipulate that they have such a program. One key is that, if we start by talking, the other actions are not precluded. We can always stop talking and bring out the cruise missiles if needed. Negotiation might succeed, and, if it does so, we will do the least harm to the least people.

The other actions might well ratchet up real tension, will probably spill over into the region as a whole, and are harder to withdraw. Saber-rattling and sanctions are not guaranteed to work, as we have seen in Cuba. War, while effective, carries its own set of problems, as we well know.

So talking has a lot going for it. But, there's the contention that sitting down with Ahmadinejad will enhance his stature in the rest of the world, that the act of shaking hands with the American president will bless the Iranian's viewpoint.

First of all, we're the big dog. Whatever propaganda Iran might try to get out of a meeting, the reality is that we can still wipe them off the face of the earth any time we'd like. That the mythical "world community" might give props to Mahmud pales in the face of the facts.

Second, and more importantly, I have serious doubts that there is a big prestige factor at work. Our allies, particularly in the face of our actions in Iraq, will probably welcome a more subdued approach; it seems unlikely in the extreme that Britain will embrace Iran because we spoke with them. And those people who are already against us, sure, maybe they'll cheer on Iran, but there's some chance they're already doing that (not a very big one; Iran is not very popular).

So what's the problem here? Shouldn't we engage with the world, friends and enemies, until it's clear that other actions are needed? Aren't we big enough to do that? No one wants America to be foolish, but unilateral behavior seems to create at least as many problems as it solves, and we definitely need to stop that.

Foreign aid to CEOs

I've tried mightily not to be unfair to American CEOs. I have known a few in the course of my working life (and even more CEO wannabes), and they're a mixed bag. I've met only one who might possibly be called a visionary in any way; the rest have been fairly myopic individuals, focused narrowly on their businesses with little larger perspective. (And I doubt that it's a coincidence that the one standout came of age in the 1920s and '30s.)

For me to explain why, for the most part, I don't consider them inherently evil, just people who have perverse incentives to do evil things, is not the post I want to write today. I'm not sure that they're amoral or sociopathic, though you'll find no shortage of people who believe so. Rather, I believe them to be a group that lives in a world in which social norms have been suspended, people who are able to rationalize almost any action as long as it leads them in the direction they want to go (yes, I understand that many people would consider that the embodiment of evil, and I won't argue).

What I do want to do is switch gears and talk about something else for a moment. I've read a lot of books and articles lately that talk about the lamentable record of the United States when it comes to foreign aid. (For a lengthy discussion of this point, see here.) It is claimed that, for all our wealth, we help out too little, coming up well short in direct government aid to the people of developing nations.

Our cheapness is somewhat mitigated by our private generosity, but it's clear that we still come up behind Sweden, Denmark, and many others, especially surprising considering our creation of programs like the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. The question is, how can we have so much and give so little?

I can think of two arguments, each of which has some validity. First, we are not a society that believes in public solutions, that, especially since Reagan, sees government as the problem. To tax our citizens and give that money to other countries is counterproductive (so the argument goes), since government can't be trusted to pick winners in the geopolitical game. This has been especially true since the end of the Cold War, as there is no longer a strategic advantage to "proving" the superiority of democratic free-market capitalism.

Second, so much of our aid was mis-directed. We've all heard the stories of tinpot dictators diverting vast sums of food aid to building palaces, so even our best-intentioned programs have failed miserably in effectiveness.

Each of these arguments has reduced the desire of Americans to support direct outlays to foreign governments. Any candidate running on a platform that stressed the payment of foreign aid to other countries would soon find how unpopular that is.

But many of the aforementioned books and articles stress the desirability of these programs, and justify them in various ways, including the reduction in Islamic hate and terrorism. Something you will often read is that, even if only a fraction of the aid gets by the ruling class, it will still help the people - 2% of $10 million will make such a difference to lives that it compensates for the wasted 98%.

The counter to this, of course, is that well-designed programs, under the auspices of the United Nations or an NGO, one that puts people on the ground to monitor the giving of the aid, can up that 2% to something that is really helpful. Since foreign aid is not a specialty of mine, I will leave this topic here.

Back to the United States, and its reluctance to help the poor and downtrodden in other lands. While it is undeniable that our direct aid is underwhelming, we do have an effective and growing foreign aid program: the offshoring of American jobs and the granting of H-1B visas. All of these efforts to give work to people from other countries essentially provide millions of uncounted dollars to those people - a particularly American free-market way of providing aid to other nations. (Note: I'm not forgetting the thousands of students who take slots in our universities, particularly our public ones, and who benefit accordingly; that certainly presents a risk as more of them take their diplomas and go home, but it's not necessary for my current argument.)

Since the employees in or from other countries do not make as much money as those Americans who used to hold those positions (otherwise there would be little incentive to make use of these techniques), there is "extra" money swirling around. Let's look at who gets that money.

The country to which jobs are outsourced benefits (by the way, I'm not overlooking the difference in H-1B programs, but money does flow back through remittances, and the workers eventually flow back with more marketable skills, so the benefits are roughly the same) through the employment of their people and the building of their industries. The people who get the jobs benefit, even if they do receive only 20-30% of the wages that an American would get (in a form of labor utility arbitrage, the wages are still better than the alternative jobs would provide).

In the United States, the benefits are largely under the control of corporate executives. It is likely that prices will come down somewhat, which benefits consumers, but there is ample proof that the lower prices are a small fraction of the returns from outsourcing. Profits will probably go up somewhat, as costs are lower, but it is not clear that they go up by as much as the actual returns from moving the jobs, so investors do not get the bulk of the advantage. Executives could invest those savings in the company, using this opportunity to innovate and make a better world.

But I think we all know where many of the benefits tend to go - right into the pockets of executives. Bonuses are paid to the cost-cutting geniuses (who found about offshoring by reading The World is Flat or Fortune magazine), facilitating the purchase of that fourth vacation home or 15th luxury car.

So far, all I've discussed are the gains. Does anyone lose? Of course. There is an unquantifiable risk to the average American as skills and data are sent offshore; should we be comfortable with mortgage information sitting in the servers in Bangalore? We have convinced ourselves that our coworkers will forever be our geopolitical friends, and I hope that's true, but it still presents a risk.

Any other losers? Oh, right, I almost forgot the workers who lose their jobs, and, in many cases, their careers. They pay a heavy price indeed for all these great society benefits. But it benefits other countries, so we have a trade-off. We're taking money away from American workers and giving it to other people.

Wait a second, that sounds like foreign aid. And that's exactly what it is, except that, instead of using taxes and spreading the burden of helping others across the whole population, we're concentrating the expense in the factory workers and call center employees and software developers who are forced to create their lives again.

So we have a system in which a relatively few (but growing) number of Americans are giving up a lot to provide foreign aid, and the individuals who are benefiting the most are...corporate executives. And the most of the most goes to those sitting at the top of the corporate pyramid, the CEOs.

We have foreign aid moving from Americans to people of other nations, with fat cats in the middle taking a big chunk of it for themselves. This is just like the old system, except that, instead of dictators building mansions with our money, we have American CEOs building mansions with our money.

I guess it's a little better, since the construction jobs are going to Americans...

Review - A Problem from Hell

Having been somewhat critical of Samantha Power's comments about Hillary Clinton a few weeks ago, in which Power, a now-former adviser to Barack Obama, likened "our girl" to a monster, I figured I had better be certain of what I was talking about. So I went to the library and borrowed "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002).

Power was a journalist, with stints in the Balkans where she saw the "ethnic cleansing" firsthand, and I cannot even begin to understand what it was like to be on the ground in those places and experience the horrors she did. But do not think for one second that this book is a work of journalism - it is a severe criticism of American policy as it has been applied to what Power identifies as the major genocides of the 20th century: the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, the Holocaust, the post-Vietnam War terror in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein's purging of the Kurds in Iraq, the tribal atrocities in Rwanda, and the serial killings and dislocations instigated by the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In each of these cases, until Kosovo in 1999, Power argues, using well-researched evidence, that the United States deliberately did nothing to help the millions who were killed. She gives us a bit of a pass on the 1915-6 Armenia genocide, as we were not quite powerful enough to assist. But she tears down the idea that we didn't know, even about the pre-Internet, pre-TV, pre-radio deaths in Turkey.

Let me say right upfront that I think this is an important book, worthy of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize it won. There are heroes here, but they were insufficient to stem the tide of timid politicians who hid behind claims of "national interest" to excuse their reluctance to spend political capital and do something. The book is not lurid; there are examples of atrocities, but Power does not wallow in them - the stories she does tell are all the more effective for being spare. There is a degree of numbing repetition, making this a very difficult book to read through. This is not Power's fault, though, it's simply that, in each case, the pattern was very much the same: a series of events that touched off genocide, the genocide itself, the dawning recognition in the rest of the world, and a series of minimal or non-responses by the United States. It is impossible not to be moved, even outraged, as you read about the deaths of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis in 100 days.

I will not attempt to summarize this book any further than I have, and I will likely not say anything as positive as what I have already said. It is an important book, you should read it, but it is akin to a conversation with a very smart person with whom you have points of disagreement. It is a book with a point of view and, while not dripping with pathos, it is a polemic - and that leaves it open to being questioned; here are mine.

A large part of the book is dedicated to telling the story of Raphael Lemkin, a man who coined the word "genocide" and pushed through the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. His story is interesting in the way that all obsessive quests are, but it culminates, ultimately, in the enactment of a non-binding resolution that has, in Power's own telling, done nothing to prevent or deter genocide, and only just now led to the trial and punishment of those who have committed it.

It is a good thing that Power has documented this quest, but it can be fascinating only to people who are extremely interested in legal matters (as Power, a Harvard Law School graduate, presumably is). She admits that the definition of genocide has proven to be problematic; defined in the wake of the Holocaust, it has tended to be seen through that prism, leaving a lot of wiggle room for those who have a stake in defining subsequent mass killings as something short of "genocide." To a reader such as myself, whether something rises to the level of a UN-approved genocide is far less important that the fact that many people are being killed.

And this inexorably leads a reader to consider those actions that may or may not rise to that level, and that's when ambiguity starts to creep in. Do the ruinous policies of the Soviet Union or China constitute genocide? You might say no, because there was no concerted attempt to eliminate a particular "national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." But you might argue that allowing poor people to die when you yourself live well is as offensive to human sensibilities.

That the definition is not restricted to killing, but to anything that constitutes harm to a group's way of life is also difficult. Does the forced insertion of Israel represent a sufficient threat to the former Palestinian way of life? Do the mass deaths caused by Indonesia in East Timor qualify as genocide?

The most sticky situations of all, at least for Americans, are slavery and Native Americans. Slavery ended just 52 years before the Armenian genocide; Wounded Knee a single generation before. Power touches all too briefly on Native Americans, claiming that Americans used that as an excuse not to get involved in Armenia, but the discussion is short and her cutoff seems fairly arbitrary.

Speaking of the definition of genocide, it poses the same kind of problem that the concept of hate crimes does. The idea that intent somehow intensifies the seriousness of any kind of crime seems wrong to many. We draw an artificial box around certain situations, term them genocide, then write books about them and elevate their seriousness over "lesser" situations. Morally, is one death a millionth as offensive as a million deaths? A thousandth?

Power finds a number of heroes in the course of her narrative. Generally, these are Americans who pushed either the issue of genocide or specific genocides forward, trying to bring them to the attention of our government or our people. One such hero is Senator William Proxmire, who made it a mission to get the U.S. to ratify the UN Convention. While this is stirring, events subsequent to its ratification make it clear that we did not consider ourselves bound by the convention, so the passage was essentially meaningless.

Journalists come in for some criticism here. Power dislikes the use of qualifiers such as "claims" or "according to" when some faction claims that they have been victimized. It's difficult to see what the alternative would be; it may be true that evidence of deaths is hard come by when that evidence lies in a grave in an inaccessible battleground, but it would be rankly irresponsible to assume that every atrocity is genocidal. Reporters are hardly complicit when they fail to take the first story they hear and spin it into stories of mass killings.

Another peculiarity of this book is Power's insistence that the United States is almost solely responsible for handling these matters. After reading this, one would believe that the UN and NATO are essentially front organizations for the U.S. Whatever one might think of the truth of that statement, it ought to be justified in such a comprehensive book. I understand the argument that the U.S., being the world's superpower, has large responsibility in assisting with something as monstrous as genocide, but the level of our involvement, how deeply we must extend ourselves in every matter which is or might become genocidal, begs to be discussed.

(I think I'll leave the large question of sovereignty to a later post. I need to work out the extent to which claims of sovereignty affect my feelings here; suffice it to say now that that issue complicates the kind of intervention that Power feels the U.S. needs to demonstrate.)

The ultimate question is, how can the United States know that these things are happening and refuse to act? Power notes, but does not allow as excuses, political considerations, national interest, the election cycle.

And these aren't excuses, not sufficient ones, but I would have liked to see the book explore these in some depth. If you are going to spend 500 pages indicting the U.S., then you need to work a bit harder at understanding the crime. For example, our system is biased toward inaction. Congress is designed to take the intermediate view (the Supreme Court the long), so it is not, perhaps, the most appropriate body to deal with killings that are taking place right now. The executive branch, therefore, must be charged with most of the failure here. And the considerations that go into that decision-making (or lack thereof) would fill a book of their own.

An issue which complicates these matters even further is the war in Iraq. Power's book was completed a short time after 9/11, so she can only express concern that the war on terror will somehow detract from the war on genocide. But, reading this today, having lived through five years of what a policy of interventionism can do, it is harder to jump on Power's bandwagon as enthusiastically as she might like. If this country could foul up a straightforward removal of a dictator, what might we do in a more strategically ambiguous situation?

Power seems to believe, and she certainly wasn't alone back in the early part of this decade, that surgical intervention to save thousands of people is possible without creating havoc. It's easy to see where she comes up with this; by all accounts, the NATO intervention in Kosovo was remarkably clean.

But Iraq has proven that we don't just walk into a country, make everything all better, and leave it a better place, just for having come. The question of what we leave behind is paramount, and we can't ignore that. Unfortunately, Power does, and given that she would have us injecting ourselves into every situation that promises to be a genocide, no matter how many fronts that presents at once, that lack of consideration defines the biggest flaw in this significant chronicle.

Who's in charge?

I'm finding the stories out of Iraq the last few days to be pretty confusing. I'll summarize what I think I know, but I reserve the right to back out if I misunderstand something.

Prime Minister al-Maliki decided to flex some muscle (for reasons that people are debating) and take back the lawless city of Basra. I gather that Basra is a lot like Casablanca in the movie, where there are swirling factions in uneasy balance, and the British troops were keeping the lid on without taking absolute control. Now the British troops have been reduced, and the Mahdi Army led by al-Sadr has gained influence. Since Basra is a major port and one of the main economic centers of Iraq, the al-Maliki government would like total control.

What some find unusual is that both fighting factions are Shi'a, complicating the issues of what might happen if we pull our troops out. The assumption is that sectarian violence would increase, but it is quite possible that there will be intra-sect fighting as well.

Now it seems that there has been a negotiated peace; ominously, Iran was involved and al-Maliki may not have been. Whatever else may be happening, chaos or near-chaos seem to continue to be the order of the day.

What troubles me is that, from all accounts (including that of CIA director Hayden on Meet the Press yesterday), al-Maliki started this fight all on his own, without consultation with anyone from our side. However, our military was involved because of our commitment to the Iraqi government.

So, if I've got this right, American troops can be committed, put in harm's way, due to the whim of al-Maliki. Does that mean we've given him effective command over our troops? For a country that is reluctant to be part of UN peacekeeping forces because we'd have to cede our control, this seem like inconsistent policy.

Best-case, worst-case

Matthew Yglesias wrote a piece yesterday criticizing the Washington Post for an editorial that expressed the idea that the Democratic plans for Iraq are unrealistic, that allowing the troops to leave will destabilize the country. The newspaper, which has developed a reputation as something of an apologist for the Bush administration (though it's hard to believe that it can be much worse than my hometown Chicago Tribune), does allow that the president's claim that the troop surge has clinched the deal is premature.

But Bush is still given credit for "forestalling an incipient civil war," whereas the Democratic candidates are lambasted for their proposals to withdraw quickly. If Obama or Clinton get their way, Iraq will explode into sectarian violence, what few troops they propose to leave there will be ushered out by betrayed Iraqi leaders, and the Middle East will be permanently destabilized.

At which point Matt writes one of the truest sentences yet: "over and over again we see withdrawal plans being judged by worst-case
scenarios whereas staying scenarios are judged by best-case scenarios."

Oddly enough, the one person who has broken through this dichotomy is John McCain, who has said staying may lead to our having a major presence there for 50 or 100 years (of course, he presents that as a best-case scenario, but we aren't really fooled by that, are we? Oh, he's the Republican candidate? Well, then, I guess we have been fooled by that.).

Let me tell you my biggest frustration with Iraq. Leave aside the decision to fight the war, the misleading intelligence, the itchy Administration even before 9/11. Just take Iraq as of, say, 2004. We're there, we're committed to improving the lot of the Iraqi people, Pottery Barn, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are our biggest challenges?

We need to tamp down violence in order to give the Iraqis time to create a stable multi-factional government with self-determination, pursuit of happiness, all the American stuff. We need to have time to train the Iraqi people themselves to take over internal security. And (this one's a little more quiet) we have to help Iraq establish a free-market capitalist system.

Now it's four years later. We've lost 4000 young men and women, spent anywhere from $600 billion to $3 trillion, money which could have been on "remaining competitive" in the world economy, and immeasurably hurt our moral standing in the world. The best strategic idea we've had is the surge, which has quite predictably reduced violence by throwing more people at the problem. And what are our current biggest challenges?

We need to tamp down violence in order to give the Iraqis time to
create a stable multi-factional government with self-determination,
pursuit of happiness, all the American stuff. We need to have time to
train the Iraqi people themselves to take over internal security. And
(this one's a little more quiet) we have to help Iraq establish a
free-market capitalist system.


If Canada came to Chicago and told Mayor Daley, "we'll take over your police duties for you, we'll bring officers who are better-trained than yours, and we won't charge you a cent," the mayor would be a fool not to take that deal. Chicago would save massive amounts of money, and likely have better-quality policing. The city would have a huge incentive to ensure that Canada stayed as long as possible.

Well, the U.S. is Canada - why should the Iraqis work to get a government, work to take over their own security? We're doing it for free. I'm not saying there is some kind of conspiracy to keep violence just high enough to retain the American presence; I'm just saying there is a horribly perverse incentive for doing so.

It's hard even to conceive of this as a war. In WWII, you could look at a map and see out troops moving across the Pacific Ocean, taking territory as we drew ever closer to Japan. The goal was clear.

In Iraq, the goals are not clear, the conditions for success arbitrary. Setting benchmarks and deadlines would not be a sign of weakness, it would be a sign that we understand that nothing is achieved unless you define the achievement. We can't really afford the "we'll know we've won when we see it" attitude. There are risks in staying and risks in leaving; what most Americans want is a president who will evaluate both sides and make a good decision, rather than looking only at one side and making no real decision at all.

Review - Free World

I first encountered Timothy Garton Ash last month on the Charlie Rose show. Charlie was talking to three British writer/reporters about the U.S. relationship to the rest of the world, and Ash was the one who seemed closest to my own views, not foolishly positive, but realistically hopeful that things would change. [Note: I know the normal pattern with British names would be to refer to him as Garton Ash, but I really don't want to type that every time, so I'll go with just plain Ash.]

What really grabbed me was when he said that Washington in 2008 is very much like London in 1908, in that they're both at the edge of a precipice of power that few people are seeing. Charlie seemed to disagree with him, apparently feeling that a lot of people in Washington do see that, but he didn't press the point. (Good thing, too, because no one in Washington, no matter what they're saying, is actually doing anything.)

Anyway, I headed out to the local library to find what I could of Ash's work, and I came up with his 2004 book, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West. Ash is an author and a columnist who has written extensively on Europe, but he is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, so he's got some American experience.

I'll say upfront that I know very little about European politics; it is one of the great paradoxes that we Americans understand Europe so poorly, but think, because of our roots, that we know them well. One of the leading embarrassments to me is the knee-jerk reaction to France's lack of supine involvement in the war in Iraq. Whether we believe (or believed at the time) that France should have thrown in their lot with us, we never should have ignored France's right to evaluate their own self-interest and act accordingly (and Jay Leno's continual jokes were facile and, in the main, unfunny).

Because of my own ignorance, it's impossible for me to evaluate the sections of Ash's book that discuss the current political climate of Britain and Europe; I don't even know if anything has changed there in the four years since this book was written (and isn't it shocking to realize how little things have changed in the U.S. We're still in Iraq, facing essentially the same issues, we haven't dealt with any of the problems that have been deemed #1 priority in the meantime, like immigration or social security, and now our government has been pretty much shut down for two years as we all watch the presidential campaign. At a time of extreme world change, we have been in extreme stasis.).

That being said, I found Free World an excellent job of reporting, with a few curious omissions, but with the usual bunch of hopes and dreams masquerading as solutions. Ash is an entertaining writer, drawing on his own reporting and popular culture to inform his judgment and ours. At times he casts his rhetorical net a bit wide; on facing pages (34 and 35) he offers a great insight ("Self-censorship is the political writer's appeasement") and too-cute wordplay ("an Atlanticist Atlantis"). For the most part, though, Ash keeps down the cutesiness, and offers what seems to be a solid primer on national and transnational identity in the first years of the 21st century.

And this, I think, is the heart of this book; not the usual program recommendations (though Ash's suggestion of keeping ourselves to a 20-year timeframe is one of his best), but urging us in the Western world to question our own identity - what does our nation mean? As I read history, I find that this question used to be in the forefront, what should the United States be? Apparently, today we've answered that question, as it never seems to be posed any more. (The answer is, we are what we are, the acme of human development, why question that?)

Ash sees Britain as poised at a crossroads, uncertain where to throw its lot. Should they retreat or embrace the world? Should they look east, toward Europe, or west, toward America? I'll let the reader go through the history and the current arguments - it's all very well presented - and cut to the end: Britain should march out into the world, hand in hand with both its West and its East, playing a pivotal role. He allows that it won't always be comfortable, and that Britain can't always insist on being the "bridge" of Tony Blair, but that they can engage with both sides to solve problems but belong to neither.

As for Europe, they too stand at a fork, not certain of what they have created in the European Union. They are slowly working their way toward a reconciliation of national sovereignty with transnational strength and unity, but have complicated it by adding countries that are, historically, barely European. They can continue to define themselves using America as a reference point, but that will ultimately be self-defeating. Europe should figure out what it wants to be, allow those countries to join who are capable of being that, and march forward as a self-confident equal to the U.S. (though their world roles may be different).

One thing Ash understands about America, as many foreigners do not, is that we are unlikely ever to be truly unilateralist because of our internal divisions. The Bush administration notwithstanding, we do have built-in corrective measures to pull us back from certain brinks. However, it is our common beliefs, most having to do with American exceptionalism and our belief that ours is the one true way, that cause the most conflicts with nations we need to treat as partners. However off mainstream belief Bush is, a lot of people would agree with his, "a decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." As Ash says, "What titanic hubris."

Along those lines, he tells the story of Paul Wolfowitz going to the E.U. to insist that Turkey be made a member (you recall, our good friends the Saudis didn't want to host an attack on the Muslim world, not again, so we wanted to use Turkey as our staging area). Ash states, correctly, "imagine a European politician traveling to Washington to tell the United States it must accept Mexico as the fifty-first state, so that Mexico would support a European invasion of Guatemala."

Ash goes on to discuss the rest of the world, more as a series of problems to be solved by the West than in the sense of their trying to develop their own identities. That may sound like a weakness of the book, but it really isn't. For a British writer to climb inside the heads of four billion people or so is not, in theory, any more impossible than doing so for the U.S. But Free World would be a much bigger book, and a different one, and not as valuable, perhaps. He never says he's anything other than a Westerner writing about the West.

The reader has a pretty good sense of where Ash is going before he gets there. He drops hints, such as how freer trade would allow potential immigrants to stay in their own countries; they'd probably prefer that anyway, and it would help the West avoid a host of problems. So the recommendations for freer trade and more direct assistance from the billion "wealthy" people are predictable.

He alludes to the growth of the larger Asian countries, but, I think, understates its potential impact. While we expend resources over the next twenty years helping the Near East and Africa, the Far East can be building themselves even faster without taking responsibility for global problems (yes, I know that China should have the same opportunity to build themselves on cheap oil as we did, but that isn't today's reality). That's in large part why the U.S. pulled out of Kyoto, because of that sense that others would profit in a way that was closed to us. Morally, you can argue it; politically, it's a hard sell. Ash acknowledges that: "[America would have to put] the wider international interest before the narrowly conceived national one; and the long-term before the short-term...such an outcome looks woefully unlikely." Apparently, this intractable problem is such that Ash does not return to it.

One real problem with Free World is that Ash doesn't fully grasp the extent to which, at least in the U.S., the citizenry has adopted corporate goals as "our" goals. I don't understand our slack-jawed adoration of offshoring corporate "leaders," but any discussion of the identity of this country has to include it. We have become so wrapped up in our worship of "free enterprise" that we have created gods out of its masters. Look at the number of books and articles that proclaim the answers to the world's problems will come from private concerns, despite their unsuitability for such work - but you have to go where the money is.

Few things are more contentious than the concept of a true world government. The United Nations often seems to be nothing better than a multi-ethnic debate society. Ash talks about world problems, talks about how current institutions may have to expand (growing E.U., Russia in NATO but not the E.U.), but never quite advocates more than happy free nations all working together, including some currently non-free nations to help (even working, no matter how sub rosa, to help them become free), to solve those problems. He may see this as a non-starter in the twenty years he's giving us to work on these things.

I have not, almost certainly, given you the full flavor of this book. The tone is one I favor, that of positive pessimism, a belief that we have some chance to make a dent in the world's challenges, but not blind to how difficult that path will be to walk. But it will take more than this or a hundred books (or a thousand blogs) to make a dent in the American torpor. We can't even advocate our own best interests well, how can we possibly meld that with the best interests of the world as a whole?

I despair in how far we are from taking even the first hesitant steps. Ash wants the West to, "[define] these universal minima of inalienable human dignity, on which there can be no compromise." I doubt, reluctantly doubt, that 20 years will even allow us to take a first crack at that, and that's an early step. I hope, tremulously hope, that I am wrong.

Review - America the Principled

If I were to summarize my feelings about the future of America, it would be that we are heading for a period of sustained decline. We've been top dog for a while now, and it's clear that other countries are capable and willing to take a shot at that spot. What's most discouraging is the extent to which our large institutions are complicit in this, essentially taking the fact of our nation for granted in return for profit or ideology.

We're undertaking a number of experiments, and so far these have led to increased inequality and risk shifting to the most vulnerable members of our society. Never before has a country decided to stop making things and move to a "service-based economy," and there's no guarantee that that will work, at least not well enough to maintain us at the level to which we've become accustomed.

There are those who would say that's a good thing, that world inequality breeds resentment and, ultimately, terrorism, and we should do anything we can to reduce it. True though that may be, that belief has not come out of a national consensus, and we need to understand, clearly, what is happening.

People understand this, at least well enough to know that they have less confidence in the future. Parents no longer believe that their children will live better lives than they have, and there is a growing sense that we have lost something. The entire presidential campaign hinges on the restoration of that hope; the change people are looking for is not in specific programs, but in the relationship of this country to its major institutions.

Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter weighs in with her book, America the Principled: 6 Opportunities for Becoming a Can-Do Nation Once Again (AtP). Dr. Kanter has long been one of the nationally-recognized experts on change and innovation.

This book is one of hope, outlining six areas in which America can regain its way. However, that such a book needed to be written is somewhat sad. Dr. Kanter has studied change, knows its inevitability, yet believes that this country is in such a state as to need a book like this one. She clearly senses that something is broken, and offers recipes for change.

AtP is what I call a "should" book; every page has "should" (or "can") followed by yet another suggestion as to how we can renew our nation. I can't deny that there is an attractive quality to AtP; our nation would be better if we did as Dr. Kanter suggests. But there has to be a strategy to get there from here, rather than a series of prescriptions that are unlikely to be implemented. Let me discuss them in order.

1) Securing the Future: Innovation and the White Coat Economy
I won't try, in any of the sections, to go in depth through Dr. Kanter's examples; she does a fine job of that. Let me focus on her conclusions. In this first chapter, AtP talks about how innovation is necessary for growth, and how we are evolving toward a "white coat" economy, one based on life sciences.

The suggestions: work on Talent, Technology, and Truth. We will build talent by educating our young people in science and math, keeping this knowledge in this country instead of letting it go back to other countries. Technology can be used to improve health care and education. And we will foment truth through tolerance and inquiry.

My opinions on each of these would make for a lengthy post or posts. I don't disagree with any of them, but there has to be a realistic idea as to how we might make these happen, rather than "because Dr. Kanter says so." I don't know how we educate students in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects, because they can see the jobs aren't there. Technology is coming to health care, but who will pay for that progress to continue? Technology in education has proven to be hit-and-miss, and we've already paid dearly for the failures. And, yes, I would love tolerance and inquiry, but nations in decline tend to shy away from such things.

2) Pursuing Happiness: Work, Family, and the "Woman Question"
This chapter talks about the increasingly soul-deadening, life-sucking workplace, and how it can be improved. (Note: the emphasis on the woman question, namely, how talented, great women can be empowered to have better lives, actually detracts from the main thrust of the chapter. Carly Fiorina and Martha Stewart are not typical examples of anyone in the workforce, and their problems have little to do with gender. Ms. Fiorina was not "put on the spot"; she put herself there by taking a job for which she was marginally qualified, pushed herself into the limelight by putting herself in HP's ads, and was perfectly content being profiled as the most powerful woman in business. That her fall was well-publicized was inevitable, and it was certainly well-cushioned with millions of shareholder dollars. The workplace holds just as many problems for men - it is not a "woman issue.")

So what should we do to improve working conditions? Universal health care. Grants for displaced workers and retirees to pursue education. Tax-advantaged savings accounts to augment Social Security. Modular work, in which employees would come and go with certain restrictions, allowing them flexible scheduling. Flex-years, where parents might take parts of the summer off, older people parts of the winter. A national sabbatical program.

These suggestions, no matter how well-intended, betray no concept of what work is like today, and how resistant executives will be to change. Would these ideas make work better? Sure. Will they improve next quarter's bottom line? The answer to that will determine which ones will occur (which is why universal health care is the only one with a chance).

3) Growing Good Companies: Can Values-Based Capitalism Replace Imperial Excess?
Even Dr. Kanter pretty much acknowledges that the answer is no. Her suggestions all involve external pressures, mainly from government, to rein in the excesses inherent to capitalism.

By its very nature, capitalism isn't about values, it's about money. All you have to do is listen to the bellyaching in the corporate suites about Sarbanes-Oxley, a fairly modest regulation, and you'll understand just how unlikely it is that corporations will wake up and bring light to the process. I won't go on any more about AtP's "shoulds"; they're not going to happen spontaneously, and there's very little stomach in Washington to make them happen.

4) Restoring Respect for Government: From Contempt to Competence
I want to be sure I give enough respect to this book. Dr. Kanter outlines the problems so well that her happy "shoulds" are almost jarring in contrast. Nowhere is that more true than in this chapter. The first 90% will remind you, if you need to be, how utterly disappointing and inept our government has become. As Dr. Kanter points out, this is the result of almost 30 years of being told that government is the enemy. More than half our population has grown up believing that our elected officials take our money, skim some off the top, and return it to us, and that they should be taken out of the process.

So we should enlarge the pool of people who are willing to work in government, by more civics education, pay for performance, loan forgiveness. Once again, how do we get there from where we are? We need to bring the light of the media to bear, bring advanced technology to streamline service provision, and attract great leaders to public service. What is being provided here is not a set of solutions, but a set of wishes and hopes.

5) Engaging the World: Globalization, Leadership, and the Rule of Thirds
This chapter is probably the muddiest in the book. Near the end, Dr. Kanter even admits that, "the world is too big, and events are moving too quickly even as I write, to extract a single set of foreign policy prescriptions." What we are supposed to do here is engage in citizen diplomacy to strengthen our reputation in the world. She cites such one-off projects as the Oprah Winfrey Leadership School for Girls as examples we should emulate.

Of course, one problem we have now is citizen diplomacy, the ceding of foreign dealings to CEOs instead of our representatives. We cannot take a principled stand on, say, human rights abuses in China when they make all our stuff and hold so many of our dollars. It's hard to see how getting into the supine position makes us stronger. To Dr. Kanter, though, our best hope is "a combination of trade-spawned business networks and grass-roots citizen diplomacy." I don't see how this mix of profit-makers and latrine-builders allows this nation to engage effectively with the huge world.

6) Building Community: Service and the Spirit of Summer
One of the enduring solutions to all that ails us is to yoke up the enterprising spirit, particularly of our young people, and provide service to those who need it. Most books like AtP have hit upon this idea, that if we can just get everyone to pitch in and help, the world will get better.

I'm not opposed to the concept that we could all help one another more than we do, but that certainly isn't a magic bullet. As any social service agency near a high school knows, mandatory service requirements can create as much disruption as assistance. It's true that service can be a means of personal growth, and can create a series of little victories. But it is just as true that volunteerism won't stem the negative effects of globalization, won't change our major institutions to be more responsive, won't create an efficient, listening government.

Finally, it is obvious that I was disappointed with America the Principled. I really am all for the ideas presented here, but, as I stated above, they don't constitute solutions but hopes. And I'm all for hope.

Until, however, we change the current incentive structure, and break down the assumptions that the majority of Americans hold, these ideas will remain pie in the sky. My fear is that it will take some kind of crisis to make us wake up and see the threats, that we won't realize that being #1 is not a birthright, but something that requires effort. I wish this book had shown us a path around that quagmire.

The horns of a dilemma

The big Super Tuesday primary is almost here. Strangely, Iraq seems no longer to be the front-burner issue that it was just a couple of months ago. Immigration seems to have cycled around again, health care is being discussed (though everyone, regardless of party, thinks some form of national health care is called for), and, of course, the economy. The economy isn't really demonstrably worse today than it was two months ago - after all, poor holiday spending was the result of financial uncertainty, not the cause, and real estate was already in the tank - but it certainly is what everyone is talking about.

I'll say something about Iraq. I'm no expert on foreign relations or the Middle East, though I probably have read more than the average voter. But it seems to me that, irrespective of the surge's success or failure, we are caught on the horns of a dilemma no matter what happens.

First of all, the surge is being trumpeted, at least by the president and Senator McCain, as a triumph. Deaths of the military and civilians are down, as violence seems to be less prevalent. I would like to think this represents a true change, but I fear it's simply pacification. At any rate, the surge was supposed to buy time for the Iraqi political process to work, and we haven't seen sufficient progress there at all.

There seems to me to be only two outcomes. The first is that, when we leave, whether it be 60 days or 100 years, the country devolves into sectarian violence, a bloody and violent civil war. If we have truly left, it is likely that another strongman will come along who will provide order over chaos, even if it's a Sadaam-style order. It's hard for us to believe, but people value order over choice or rights, when the alternative is daily terror and uncertainty. We actually know this; after all, we reelected George Bush. If we don't fully leave, how involved do we get in the day-to-day violence? We can't stand by and watch Sunnis kill Shiites, but interceding will put us in the middle again.

The second outcome is that Bush is right, that we bring democracy and peace to one corner of the Middle East. When this happens, I suspect the American people will expect something for our trouble. We'll expect to have first-refusal status over desirable Iraqi products, which in their case is pretty much limited to oil. Especially as prices continue to increase, we'll expect our new democratic friends to cut us some really good deals.

But we're also bringing free-market capitalism to Iraq. And China and India are desperate to build their economies on the back of petroleum, just as we did. Iraq will almost certainly sell their oil to the highest bidder, and we won't be in any position to object.

At that point, what do the American people do? We have had problems with our friends in Israel, in large part due to their spying on us. What would appear to be a rock-solid relationship has been strained by these incidents. How will we feel when our glorious allies in Iraq sell our life-blood to someone else, simply to make a few more bucks?

OK, now...

I want to follow up on my Saturday comments about Ron Paul. Again, I do not support his "philosophy" (libertarianism is arbitrary and unrealistic), but he reminds me of, well, myself.

I'm a software developer with an MBA who has worked in quite a few industries on different problems. While I don't profess that this background grants me great wisdom (just a little, maybe), it does allow me to comment on things from a fairly broad perspective. I've seen various issues arise, and seen (and participated in) various solutions, some of which have worked better than others.

So, in a meeting, I'm frequently going to be the person bringing up the larger issues ("if we want to support the needs our customers have, we will have to restructure the database access to allow users to query it directly"). A huge proportion of the time, the response, from people ostensibly concerned with the same situation, is stark uncomfortable silence, followed by, "OK, now..." ("what color should the splash screen be?", a topic which then consumes the rest of the hour).

I don't think I'm particularly strident in bringing up these matters; quite the contrary, there are people close to me who say I'm far too quiet and unassuming. What I think is happening is that the room is simply not prepared to discuss such things, no matter how true or significant they may be. It takes a long time for most people to accept that the world is not the way they want to assume it is, that the status quo may be downright wrong.

From my standpoint, however, the worst thing is not that the problem is going to go on, possibly fester, until it becomes so obvious that change is needed that action is finally taken. (Managers, who ought to be taking the longer-term view, tend to be the leading proponents of the conservative, backward-looking approach.) That should bother me the most, but I'm human, and what frustrates me is the is-he-an-alien look that the other people tend to have before moving on to another, far less critical, issue. I want to go Close-ian on all these people who are neglecting what ought to be a major part of their responsibility ("I'm not going to be ignored, Dan").

And this is Ron Paul in a meeting of candidates.

Does terrorism against the West result from the actions of the West in Muslim countries? Does our "occupation" of holy Saudi Arabia inflame anti-U.S. passions (and "they asked us to be there" is no defense; many Muslims feel that the sheiks are as bad in their decadence and embrace of Western ways)? Is our historical interference in their politics a rallying cause? Do our actions come out of a need to prop up a failing, petroleum-based lifestyle?

These are valid issues to discuss, and discussing them would seem to be extremely pertinent in the changed post-9/11 world. (An interesting book on this is Imperial Hubris by intelligence official Michael Scheuer; regardless of how you evaluate his ideas and solutions, it struck me as an important contribution to the literature.) Being simplistic would seem to be the worst thing we could do.

Yet it is exactly what the candidates do. Ron Paul is trying to bring up these issues, albeit in a quasi-lunatic style that does not serve him well. And he gets the look (particularly from Romney, who strikes me as a supercilious smarm-master), that look that says we're not just going to disagree with you, but that you're insane to try to discuss such things.

But we have to discuss such things if we're going to reach a long-term accommodation with Islam. Sound bites like "they hate us, they hate our way of life" may sound tough on the stump, but will not assist the next President in actually engaging the problem. We all fear terrorism and the uncertainty it brings to our lives, but reducing the causes to individual pathology will not illuminate the situation, nor will it lead to a solution.

So I wonder how frustrated Ron Paul is getting, as he tries to be the adult in a room of intellectual children. I suspect that Paul's support, which has surprised a lot of pundits, comes from people who suspect that the issues we face are more serious and complicated than the other candidates are letting on. Blathering on about change is meaningless unless the change is meaningful (and kudos to Huckabee for at least acknowledging that), and meaningful change should only result from a deep understanding of the forces involved, not from focus group-tested, simplistic slogans.