Arms and influence

Memorial Day, Athenian-style

Another way you might mark Memorial Day is by reading Pericles' funeral speech. After being struck by its brilliance, you might then ponder the deep flaws and contradictions of imperial Athens, especially in the midst of the Peloponnesian Wars, when Pericles delivered his famous oration. The faults of the speaker or the Athenian polis do not undermine their virtues and accomplishments, however.

Memento mori

Memorial Day started as a day of remembrance with strong political overtones. After the Civil War, local communities set aside a day to remember those who had fallen in the Civil War. There was no national consensus about the date for this remembrance, nor was there even an agreement over whom to remember. Northern communities naturally favored the memories of Union troops; Southern communities preferred to mourn the Confederate dead. Since the focus of the event varied, so did the name, from the neutral "Decoration Day" to the explicitly secessionist "Confederate Memorial Day."

With memories of the war still raw, the nation nevertheless survived, in spite of these divided views over which casualties deserved to be honored. By the 20th century, enough time had passed that Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line could agree on having a single day to remember all the hallowed dead from all of America's wars.

A neutral holiday eventually turned into a neutered holiday. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and the Fourth of July have stopped being events about the nation's history. These are now largely private events, held in the backyards of American homes--with the exception of Fourth of July fireworks displays, which lack any historical or civic content. The public reminders of our collective history, even one as controversial as the Civil War, and our contemporary duties, as seen in the mirror of our war dead, are largely missing.

Nevertheless, we can take at least a moment today to remember the casualties of our wars. We can also use the opportunity to make our feelings known about our current and future wars. When is it worth sending men and women to die, to protect the rest of us? The United States is strong enough, as a democratic union, to endure both our agreements about whom we memorialize, and our disagreements over how many new casualties we mourn next year. In fact, American democracy needs both these agreements and disagreements, in equal measure. If we survived the Civil War, we'll survive our current conflicts.

Ignoring at our peril: Turkey

Among other matters the US government and public are both largely ignoring, with Iraq on the brain, is Turkey. While American leaders wring their hands over the prospects of building democracy in Iraq, democracy in Turkey is navigating through treacherous waters. A political stand-off between the governing Justice and Development Party (the Turkish initials are AKP) and the opposition has turned into a constitutional crisis.

After the opposition succeeded, through a bit of legal legerdemain, in blocking the parliamentary election of Abdullah Gul, the AKP's candidate, to be the next president, many Turkish politicians are now demanding constitutional reform. Since the disgruntled AKP is an Islamic party, many Turks are worried about what sort of constitutional changes the AKP may have in mind. Not surprisingly, the Turkish army, the traditional guarantor of secular government, has started threatening that it might have to resolve the issue, er, forcefully. From the Le Monde article on this political crisis:

The constitutional court had seemed to be consulting the political weather vane as closely as its law books. The Friday before its decision, the military had taken the nation by surprise by posting on its website what amounted to an ultimatum to the government to abandon a presidential election which it said risked compromising the secular character of the republic. The Turkish chief of staff, General Yasar Buyukanit, had already hinted at what was to come in a rare press conference in Ankara on 13 April when he said that that he hoped the next president would not simply pay lip service to Turkey’s secular constitution but respect it to its core.

As the political temperature in Turkey rises, basic liberties, such as freedom of expression, begin to wilt. Intolerance is hardly the monopoly of any faction. Most visibly, nationalists lobbied for the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak for writing books that somehow insulted the nation of Turkey.  (Pamuk, by the way, won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature.)

Meanwhile, Turkey faces other serious challenges. Turks want to be part of the European Union, but many Europeans remain skeptical. (The worse Turkey's internal problems get, the higher the skepticism goes.) Many Turks are themselves skeptical about joining Europe. Turkey sits on the northern border of Iraq, where it feels some of the backlash from that conflict, particularly around all things Kurdish. The Turkish economy is emerging from a troubled period of low GNP, a weak currency, and inflationary scares.

Turkey may not provide a repeatable model for every predominantly Islamic society, but the Turks did successfully build and maintain a secular, constitutional, and democratic government.  Turkey is also struggling in areas where the United States might directly help. For example, US officials can help round up more economic support in general, and political support within Europe. American civilian and military leaders can act as honest brokers between their Turkish counterparts and the Kurds, when either the Turks or Kurds feel nervous about each other's intentions. The US might take a stronger public position on the legal harassment of Turkish writers. Instead, Turkey is lost down the memory hole, where everything not directly related to Iraq or Iran have disappeared.

Random cool stuff

I've tripped over enough neat things on the web this week that I had to share them. Let's start with a completely novel cover version of The Who's "Baba O'Riley." This video is cool in the same way as The Langley School Project, another source of unexpectedly compelling covers.

Here's the Mother of All Movie Trailers. (When will studios get the message, and start producing better trailers that can't be so easily lampooned?)

And, finally, let's imagine Donald Rumsfeld on the job market.

Escalation through the back door

I'm not sure why the Bush Administration thinks that a back-door escalation of troop levels in Iraq, through mechanisms that are all too familiar--for example, by extending deployments--will work. The problem isn't merely the current troop levels. The Iraqi occupation needs a sustainable base in domestic politics, the right kind of troops in theater, and the right counterinsurgency strategy guiding their actions. I'm not going to bother listing all the other requirements of victory, such as leverage over the Iraqi clan and sectarian factions, that are needed. But heck, the White House is consistent, if nothing else.

A bold new idea?

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who read the news of a new covert action program against Iran and thought, "Hmmm, what happened to the one we should already have?"

If only history had a rewind button

The Al Qaeda organization in Pakistan--Osama bin Laden's personal staff, plus the fighters occasionally crossing into Afghanistan--are the happy beneficiaries of the war in Iraq. The US occupation of Iraq has increasingly radicalized many Muslims, who are then willing to contribute to Al Qaeda.

Once again, we cannot afford to let Iraq crowd out every national security priority, including the war with the enemy that attacked the United States on 9/11/01. Hunting down bin Laden is tough, as the LA Times article explains:

"We're not any closer," said a senior U.S. military official who monitors the intelligence on the hunt for Bin Laden.

The lack of progress underscores the difficulty of the search more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Despite a $25-million U.S. reward, current and former intelligence officials said, the United States has not had a lead on Bin Laden since he fled American and Afghan forces in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in early 2002.

"We've had no significant report of him being anywhere," said a former senior CIA official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing U.S. intelligence operations. U.S. spy agencies have not even had information that "you could validate historically," the official said, meaning a tip on a previous Bin Laden location that could subsequently be verified.

Of course, having the Pakistani government as an ally is a mixed blessing:

Driven by domestic political pressures and rising anti-American sentiment, the agreements called for the tribes to rein in the activities of foreign fighters, and bar them from launching attacks in Afghanistan, in exchange for a Pakistani military pullback.

But U.S. officials said there was little evidence that the tribal groups had followed through.

"Everything was undermined by the so-called peace agreement in north Waziristan," said a senior U.S. intelligence official responsible for overseeing counter-terrorism operations. "Of all the things that work against us in the global war on terror, that's the most damaging development. The one thing Al Qaeda needs to plan an attack is a relatively safe place to operate."

Some in the administration initially expressed concern over the Pakistani move, but Bush later praised it, following a White House meeting with Musharraf.

The pullback took significant pressure off Al Qaeda leaders and the tribal groups protecting them. It also made travel easier for operatives migrating to Pakistan after taking part in the insurgency in Iraq.

We have enough to do here, with Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. If you don't believe me, look at the slow progress that the US government made against the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador, a country much closer geographically, historically, and culturally to the United States than Pakistan. Who's a tougher ally to prod in the right direction, the right-wing ARENA government of Roberto D'Aubuisson, or the nuclear-armed regime of Pakistan, with a semi-independent intelligence agency more sympathetic with the Taliban than the United States?

These problems require all the necessary resources, expertise, and attention of the US government merely to contain them, let alone help solve them.

Top SF movies

After reading Armchair Generalist's "My favorite science fiction movies" list, I couldn't resist drafting one of my own. Be forewarned: some of these I haven't seen in a long, long time, and I might look at them differently, were I to watch them again now. I remember them fondly enough, however, to put them on this list.

I've emphasized movies that are science fiction, not another genre in SF garb. (For example, I wouldn't put a movie like Battle Beyond The Stars on the list because it's merely a Western with aliens. Plus, it's not that good a movie, even if John Sayles wrote the screenplay.) Science fiction is the literature of "what if," and not merely from a scientific perspective.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey. You don't get ideas bigger than the past and future evolution of mankind.
• Alien/Aliens. Really, two parts of a single story. We can forget the next two movies ever happened. A biological thriller in a blue collar future.
• Blade Runner. Take a good SF novel, and make an even better movie.
• Brazil. One of the best "SF as social satire" movies.
• Children of Men. The more I think about this recent parable, the more it strikes me as one of the most challenging SF stories I've seen on the screen in a long, long time.
• Dark Star. A weird comedy, with a pure SF premise.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still. The movie that does the best job of saying how humanity needs to grow up before it moves into the rest of the universe.
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To this day, one of the creepiest movies ever made, with just the right undercurrent of social satire about modern paranoia.
• The Man Who Fell To Earth. See a kind alien come to Earth for help, but end up devoured  by mass consumer culture.
• Star Wars. Rebellion! Planet killers! Psionic knights! Aliens! If only Lucas had stopped after the first two movies.
• The Terminator. While the sequel was the better action movie, the original was the better SF tale.
• Them! If you think a 50s movie about giant ants is too goofy to merit your attention, think again. Mankind is on the cusp of extinction because of the unintended side effects of--you guessed it--nuclear technology.
• The Time Machine. This George Pal movie holds up better than War of the Worlds, in part because of its faith to the original H.G. Wells story.
• The Thing (From Another World). While I love the John Carpenter remake, I'm putting the original on the list in case you've never seen it. In its own way, it's just as good, in part because the plot focuses more on the dilemmas the scientists face in dealing with the invader.

Why not more movies from the last 20 years or so? The answer isn't, Because I'm an old fart now, dagnabbit! Fewer SF movies are being made, even though more movies about the future, aliens, spaceships, psionics, and other stock SF elements get filmed. Aliens don't make a movie automatically SF, just as on-screen murder doesn't turn The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into a mystery.  We can argue over what defines science fiction, but the answer is, "Many things that look on the surface as if they were SF, really aren't."

 

My guess why there's less real SF in the movies? Special effects. When you can't fall back on stunning visuals, you have to tell a jaw-dropping story.

(P.S. I'm a big Firefly fan, too, but I don't think that Serenity is one of the best SF movies ever made.)

More than an oxymoron

The phrase "Lebanese army" must be more than an oxymoron for Lebanon to pull out of its political nose-dive. Lebanese troops need to be able to exercise the sovereign power of the Lebanese government to police its own borders. Anything else means that there is no Lebanese state, and we continue on the dark road to the Lebanon of the 1980s.

Of course, the Lebanese army might do a poor job. The Washington Post article about the ongoing operation against Palestinian government starts with a troubling phrase:

Lebanese troops pounded a Palestinian refugee camp with artillery and tank fire for a second day Monday, raising huge columns of smoke as they battled a militant group suspected of ties to al-Qaida in the worst violence since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.

Here's another paragraph that makes one concerned about political backlash:

Hundreds of Lebanese troops, backed by tanks and armored carriers, surrounded the refugee camp Monday. M-48 battle tanks unleashed their cannon fire on the camp, home to 30,000 Palestinian refugees. The militants fired mortars toward the troops at daybreak.

Cross your fingers, and hope that the Lebanese army is fighting these battles in the right way--and that its getting the support and advice it needs.

Hanging on

With British Prime Minister Tony Blair about to retire, the natural question is, Will the UK remain in Iraq much longer? His successor, Gordon Brown, seems far less inclined to support an indefinite occupation. Brown's personal political fortunes aren't tied to US President George W. Bush in the same fashion that Blair's were. Brown certainly doesn't want to have his tenure as PM defined from the very beginning by Iraq alone. All assurances to the contrary, the British government has strong reasons to consider an exit from Iraq, particularly since the UK has been a regular target of Islamist terrorism since 9/11. And that's not even counting the British casualties in Iraq.

The natural next question is, Can the US sustain the occupation, once the British leave? Unfortunately, that's the wrong question to ask. Obviously, it's physically possible to sustain the US troop deployment in Iraq. As long as that's true, the Bush Administration is disinclined to consider any exit strategy.

The Republicans were thrashed in the 2006 midterm elections. Bush's personal approval ratings have continued to disintegrate. A strong majority of Americans polled want deadlines for withdrawal. Other foreign policy priorities--Afghanistan, the "Islamist terrorism franchise" network, Iran, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the horn of Africa, Venezuela, you name it--need attention.  The White House has yet to discuss how the US will pay the final bill for the Iraq war. The US military is strained to the breaking point. And yet, the last thing the President wants to discuss is withdrawal.

The credibility trap
Why? For a simple, and unfortunately very familiar, reason: credibility. An American president has, yet again, snared the United States in the credibility trap. In the minds of the people in the White House, the Iraq war is now a test of resolve--not merely for the United States, but for the people who run the executive branch. (That's one reason why the Administration remains hostile to dissenting opinions from within the national security bureaucracy.)

Sadly, the trap is largely an illusion. The United States lost the Vietnam War, but won the Cold War. American credibility suffered more from the frequent brain-dead determination to pursue ineffective strategies than it ever did from the final American withdrawal. Worse, the credibility trap fed on itself: to preserve its credibility, the US government pursued a Vietnam strategy that undermined its credibility. The more its credibility seemed to suffer, the more the Johnson Administration seemed determined to preserve it by "staying the course."

Pray for insecurity
Insecure people see admissions of failure or reversals of policy as a caustic rejection of themselves. It's not that they're unwilling to change direction: as many have already shown, Candidate Bush sounded very different than President Bush on many issues, including "nation-building." However, it's when the President stakes his personal prestige on some grand design, such as the invasion of Iraq, that options ossify into hard, unalterable positions.

It may sound apply the adjective insecure to Bush, but I think it's appropriate here. There are only three kinds of people who believe that any retreat is a cataclysmic failure: (1) those who believe that a Greater Truth has been revealed to them, through the hand of God, dialectical materialism, or some other transcendent agency; (2) those who believe, as Hitler did, that sheer willpower (Willenskfraft) can change any balance of forces; and (3) those unwilling to admit failure, for fear of sudden political collapse, or the harsh judgment of posterity.

I don't claim to know George W. Bush's heart, but I fervently hope that he falls in the third category. If his unwillingness to discuss the possibility of withdrawal is a symptom of either or both of the first two attitudes cited in the last paragraph, then he is completely immune to reason. No compelling argument, no one's personal charm or gravitas, no display of mass emotion will make him waver. Only brute political force, such as the assertion of the Congress of its shared role in foreign policy, will change the core principles of American strategy in Iraq. At least, if insecurity is his problem, some trusted person can explain to him that history will judge him worse for "staying the course" than for making a painful but necessary choice.