Why America Resists Learning From Other Countries

One of the aspects of the United States that I find most annoying and arrogant and at times down right dangerous is the myth of American exceptionalism and a refusal to learn from the experiences of other countries, many of which have existed for centuries longer than America (e.g., the Romanov family ruled Russia for 60 years longer than America has existed; the Byzantine Empire lasted over 1000 years).  Sadly, both political parties cite this myth, but it is most popular on the right where Europe - which now has more upward social mobility than in America - is derided and the mindset is that American do everything better and has nothing to learn from others.  Time and time again, factual reality proves this myth wrong and now, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, if anything, America is showing that it is exceptional in its bungling of its response to the pandemic.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at America's continued refusal to learn from other countries, often to its own detriment.  Here are article highlights:

Americans have long considered their nation a shining “city upon a hill,” with the “eyes of all people … upon us,” as the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop put it almost 400 years ago. Now those eyes are riveted on the United States for all the wrong reasons. The country is consumed by the worst COVID-19 outbreak on the planet, and the beacons of light are popping up elsewhere in the world.

R. Daniel Kelemen, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has studied what the United States could learn from European public policies, told me that those who subscribe to the ideology of American exceptionalism, or as he described it, “the notion that the United States is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations,” have traditionally resisted seeking out lessons from other countries’ experiences. At the very least, “this view leads many to think that the U.S. is simply so different that policies that might work in other countries could simply never work here,” he wrote in an email.

American exceptionalism has been pronounced dead numerous times, from the Vietnam War through the global War on Terror, and nevertheless managed to stick around through those difficult periods. But the coronavirus crisis may pose the greatest threat yet to the belief that America has little to learn from the rest of the world.

American politicians typically resist engaging with ideas from abroad. Most U.S. public-policy debates, on matters including education reform and social mobility, occur in a bizarre vacuum, as if the encounters (good and bad) of the large majority of humankind with these same challenges yield no useful insights for the United States. On the rare occasions that politicians do invoke the policies of other governments, they often wield them as political props during highly polarized debates over issues such as health care and gun control.

And many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.

This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College (and a former contributing editor at The Atlantic), told me by email.

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

Instead, the United States squandered that advantage on many fronts. The Obama administration had developed a playbook for pandemic response that drew in part on lessons from other countries’ experiences, but the Trump administration disregarded it. When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March. “We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.” By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country, despite Donald Trump’s assertions since March that anybody who wants a test can get one. It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. . . . . He has stated, referring to America’s coronavirus response, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and “so many” other world leaders, “almost all of them—I would say all of them; not everybody would want to admit it—but they all view us as the world leader, and they're following us.” Even after he has asked the South Korean government to send tests and medical equipment to the United States to help combat the coronavirus, Trump is insisting that the country cough up much more money for the privilege of stationing U.S. troops there. It’s a measure of traditional American hard power that seems obsolete these days, relative to South Korea’s newfound clout as a world leader in addressing COVID-19. My colleague Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump’s proposal in April that people inject themselves with disinfectant, to the horror of scientists and laughter of people at home and abroad, marked an “acceleration point” for a “post-American, post-coronavirus world … in which American opinions will count less.”

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton critiqued Bernie Sanders’s proclivity to look to other countries for policy insights and innovations (“We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America,” Clinton said), but many of Sanders’s fellow candidates during the 2020 Democratic primary echoed his admiration for other countries’ achievements. “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

The United States, of course, still has tremendous capacity to teach. But it also may need to emerge from this crisis recognizing that it has equal capacity to learn. To learn is to admit room for improvement, and thus to improve, especially in dealing with modern-day threats such as pandemics, which America doesn’t have much experience contending with as a superpower. The United States could, for example, easily seize on the momentum among many of its allies to pool lessons learned and coordinate policies to combat the virus and reopen economies.

I will not hold my breath waiting for Americans - especially those who support the GOP and its growing embrace of ignorance and white nationalism to learn from others anytime soon.  Meanwhile, people will literally dies because of the belief in American exceptionalism. 

Afghan War Plagued by "Mendacity" and "Lies"

With the Trump/Pence regimes relying on lies to try to take America to war with Iran, it is perhaps timely that the truth about the Afghan War is finally coming out and that truth is ugly: Americans have been repeatedly and deliberately lied to both senior members of the military and by politicians. Meanwhile, Americans died and were grievously wounded, some bearing the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives.  Afghanistan has been called the "graveyard of empires" and with good reason to anyone with a knowledge of history.  It turns out that America, despite its hubris and misguided (and false) sense of exceptionalism has done no better that would be conquerors of the past. Belatedly recognizing this will not bring back the dead, heal the forever wounded or restore the squanders taxpayer dollars. It should, however, educate the American public to refuse to be played for fools again by the military and/or hawkish politicians.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the trail of lies and wasted taxpayer money.  The takeaway, in my view, is that if Afghanistan was unwinnable, Iran would be an even larger disaster.  Here are excerpts:

The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction told Congress Wednesday that U.S. officials have routinely lied to the public during the 18-year war by exaggerating progress reports and inflating statistics to create a false appearance of success.

“There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris,” John F. Sopko said in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.”

As an example, Sopko said U.S. officials have lied in the past about the number of Afghan children enrolled in schools — a key marker of progress touted by the Obama administration — even though they “knew the data was bad.” He also said U.S. officials falsely claimed major gains in Afghan life expectancy that were statistically impossible to achieve.

In addition, Sopko criticized the Trump administration for classifying information that shows the war is going badly, including data on Afghan troop casualties and assessments of the Taliban’s strength. . . . . “It turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.”

Since 2001, the United States has spent more than $132 billion to modernize the country — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to rebuild Europe after World War II.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee summoned Sopko to testify in response to a series of articles published last month in The Washington Post that revealed how senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the conflict had become unwinnable.

The inspector general had drawn on the interviews to publish seven reports — called “Lessons Learned” — about policy failures in Afghanistan. But the reports left out the harshest and most frank criticisms and omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project.

The Post obtained about 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from the interviews under the Freedom of Information Act, but had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to force it to release the records.

Several lawmakers said they were shocked by revelations in The Afghanistan Papers, including blunt admissions from generals, ambassadors and White House officials that they didn’t know what they were doing in Afghanistan and that the war strategy was fundamentally flawed.

Sopko defended his agency’s attempts to withhold the documents, saying he had an obligation to protect the identities of people who criticized the war and wanted to remain anonymous.

“These people who spoke to us risked a lot,” he said. “You know what this town is like, you know what it’s like if somebody bad-mouths their old boss or ­whatever.”

Everyone seeking to cover their own asses and keeping their own jobs while Americans needlessly died and billions of dollars might just have well been set on fire and burned.   We must not be tricked by lies again when it comes to the Middle East.

Trump Is Making Us Rethink American Exceptionalism

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As earlier post have indicated, I am NOT a fan of the myth of "American exceptionalism" that is so popular with "conservative" politicians and right wing Christians.  The concept to me displays (i) great hubris, and (ii) a lack of knowledge of accurate history.  Worse yet, it can provide a smoke screen that blinds far too many to America's many deficiencies.  Now, in the age of Trump, the fact that America is not immune to rampant societal ills - often maintained by those preach American exceptionalism the most - and that ugly forces that have haunted other parts of the world are also at play in America.  Indeed, with Trump in the White House, if America is "exceptional," it is found in the moral bankruptcy of the Trump base and today's Republican Party.  A piece in Politico looks at how the concept of America exceptionalism is a myth.  Here are excerpts:

Americans have always thought their country was exceptional. They thought it even as early as 1630, when John Winthrop delivered a now-famous sermon in which he called the Puritan community a “city on a hill”—long before there even was an American country.

In more recent years, the idea of American exceptionalism has become tainted by politics—a rhetorical cudgel that politicians, particularly conservatives, wield to bludgeon their opponents. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, Republican leaders expressed concern that, in Newt Gingrich’s words, there was “a determined group of radicals in the United States who outright oppose American Exceptionalism.”

When most conservative politicians invoke the term “exceptionalism” they use it as shorthand for raw national chauvinism—the assertion that the United States is not just different, but better. Trump has replaced it, at least temporarily, with an angrier tag line that conveys the same sense of national power and entitlement—America First, itself a term ripped from history and freighted with dark meaning. When America is first, it owes little to everyone else. It’s a more Trumpian way of saying what other politicians often mean.

When they use the term “exceptional” to connote pure superiority, though, politicians generally betray a facile grasp of history. In its original formation, American exceptionalism was a much more complicated theory. It conveyed the idea that the United States was immune from social, political and economic forces that governed other countries—specifically, that it was invulnerable to communism and fascism, and to violent political convulsions of the sort that jolted Europe throughout the long 19th and 20th centuries. It also implied that Americans bore a providential obligation to be exemplars of virtue in a sinful world.

While some political scientists continued to explore potential variants of American exceptionalism, most historians concluded that the idea was meaningless and the very conversation itself stale.  Then came Trump.

His election and the conditions that accompanied it—a growing rejection of science and evidentiary fact, extreme political tribalism, the rise of conservative nationalist movements around the world, a popular reaction to immigration and free trade—may offer final and conclusive proof that there is nothing at all exceptional about the United States. We are fully susceptible to the same forces, good and ill, that drive politics around the globe.

But before we sound a death knell for the idea, it would help to remember what it actually means.  Ironically, the phrase that so many conservatives traditionally claimed as their own first entered the popular lexicon in 1929, when Joseph Stalin censored what he called the “heresy of American exceptionalism.”

If the phrase was new, the underlying sentiment—that America was somehow different, or special—was not. Since the earliest days of colonial settlement, the Puritan settler John Winthrop conceived of America as a “city on a hill,” a distinct place with a heaven-sent obligation to build a new and pure world. In the aftermath of the War for Independence, many citizens agreed with William Findley, a farmer from western Pennsylvania who would later serve in Congress, that Americans had “formed a character peculiar to themselves, and in some respects distinct from that of other nations.”

Though exceptionalism claimed deep roots in American tradition, the concept truly came into its own in the 1950s, as a generation of historians, writing in the wake of World War II, sought to make sense of why their country, alone, had escaped the violent disruptions that beset Europe over the previous 150 years: revolution, regicide, class uprising, total war and genocide. None of it had happened in the United States, these historians noted. They conveniently glossed over the violently repressive regimes of chattel slavery, Redemption, war on Indian nations, and Jim Crow, which, of course, most historians writing in these years blithely did.

The idea of American exceptionalism fell into intellectual disrepute by the early 1970s. After a decade of political turbulence over civil rights and Vietnam—police violence against peaceful black protesters, urban riots, political assassinations, pitched anti-war protests, acts of political terrorism by left-wing extremists—it seemed hardly certain that the country was any less fractured and unstable than its European cousins. Exceptionalism no longer seemed like a sure thing.

It wasn’t just external events that inspired a reconsideration. As successive generations of scholars grew interested in such phenomena as transnational immigration and borderlands conflict—not just between Mexico and the U.S., but between nation states far and wide—the clearer it has become that American history is inextricable from global events.

In short, many historians today argue that it was always folly to assume that invisible forces drove all of global history, but greater folly, still, to assert that those forces were somehow inoperable within America’s ever-changing borders and among its perpetually evolving citizenry.

If you still need convincing, look no further than recent events. It’s become axiomatic that Trump’s victory was of a piece with populist insurgencies as far and wide as France and the Netherlands, Britain and Greece. Driven by backlash against open borders, free trade and common markets, they share an angry ethno-nationalism, a rejection of elite institutions and actors, and a wispy nostalgia for an imaginary past. These movements reject sexual and cultural pluralism and, in some cases, claim a common patron in Moscow.

Nor is it clear that America’s democratic norms and institutions are fundamentally any more rock solid than those of, say, Poland, Hungary or Venezuela. As bad as? No. But any more unassailable? To observe Republican legislators in North Carolina attempt to abrogate the results of a gubernatorial election—to say nothing of Senators Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who have all but abandoned the legislative committee process in their feverish effort to cram the courts with conservative judges and pass deeply unpopular class legislation by cover of night—one can’t help but worry that the United States has slipped into what sociologist Larry Diamond calls a “democratic recession.”

As was the case one hundred years ago, America today is very much part—if not at the center—of history. It isn’t immune to the same currents of immigration, free trade, population aging and technological change that are upending political and economic systems around the globe. To believe that we’re “exceptional,” in the way that historians understand the term, is to reject reality for national theology.

The Unbiblical Idea That God Has Blessed America Most

When I hear politicians - especially Republicans - and Christofascists bloviating about how God has blessed America more than other nations, I want to vomit.  Not only is a America an upstart on the long view of history - a mere 240 years compared to the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire, for example, each of which endured for more than twice that time period and were "great powers" in their time - but is it not hubris to believe that one nation is more blessed than others?  Likewise, the propaganda line ignores so much of the ugliness of America's history.  A piece in Patheos makes the case that such claims are un-biblical.  Here are some excerpts:

Franklin Graham is known for saying controversial things, but the other day he said something that wasn’t very controversial at all. He said that God has blessed the United States of America more than any other nation on earth.

This concept isn’t unique to Graham– I’ve heard it said a thousand and one times in my life. The idea that America is somehow God’s favorite, that America is the place God has blessed more than anywhere else, is widely accepted in Americanized Christianity.

But here’s the question: Is it true? . . . has God blessed us more than anyone else? Are we somehow God’s favorite?

Surely, the United States has enjoyed great wealth and prosperity– but this alone is not evidence of God’s blessing. In fact, to associate blessing with material wealth is to completely miss the New Testament concept of blessing. Certainly, in the Old Testament blessing was often associated with prosperity, but in the New Testament, instead of wealth and prosperity, blessing has connotations more in line with a state of happiness and contentment that comes from living out the teachings of Jesus.

However, even if an abundance of wealth were part of God’s blessing, it is completely possible to have an abundance of wealth and not be blessed by God.  Yes, the United States is wealthy, but it is wealthy for a good reason: since its inception, American wealth and prosperity has been at the expense of… well, everyone who’s not white. The nation was born on stolen land, genocide, and slavery– realities that directly relate to our prosperity as a nation. We cannot divorce our wealth from the genesis of it all– one that was rooted in rebellion against God instead of Christian living.

Thus, our prosperity has nothing to do with God’s blessing, unless God’s “blessing” for us is really, really, bad news for a whole lot of others.

While both the OT and NT concepts of God’s blessing fail to describe America, the idea that God has “blessed America more than any other nation” really fails in light of the biblical truth that God doesn’t play favorites that way. In fact, it’s one of the major messages of the New Testament.

When Jesus came on the scene of world history, Israel had a long history of thinking they were the bees-knees when it came to God’s favorites. Jesus’ first public speech actually ended in an assassination attempt, and one of those reasons was because he hinted to the fact that God’s “favorites” would be the very people who rejected him and denied him honor.

Further along in his ministry, Jesus very specifically commands his followers to love and bless everyone equally. The reason Jesus gives for this is simple: because that’s what God does. 

To claim that God has blessed America more than any nation on earth is the height of arrogance and biblical illiteracy. Viewing one’s self, one’s people, or one’s nation as being more favored by God is a destructive and toxic belief– one that Jesus came to deliver us from.

Instead of thinking we’re the greatest because God blesses America more than everyone else, we are invited to have the experience of Peter in Acts.

We are invited to look at those around us and to realize, “Oooooooh. I get it now. God has blessed all of them, too.”

So, no. God doesn’t bless America more than any other nation on earth– and that’swhat Franklin Graham is wrong about today.

And, yes, I view Franklin Graham as a truly horrible person who is little better than a hate monger who preys on the ignorant and bigoted.  He is, in short, a false Christian and resembles the Pharisees of the New Testament.

Is the West Playing Into ISIS's Hands?

Many fundamentals Christians want a war in the Middle East because passages in the Bible are claimed to predict that Christ will return after Armageddon.  The fact that they love to see non-Christians and most Jews slaughtered in the process is only icing on the cake for them.  The Koran has an equally dark prophecy, except the victors will be followers of Islam after defeating invading armies from the West.  Thus, once again poisonous "holy books" set the blue print for death and destruction, with each side falsely claiming that God or Allah is on their side.   An article in the New York Times looks at how those in the West who want to send ground troops to the Middle East could be aiding ISIS's propaganda war and setting the stage for the recruitment of more followers who will be manipulated by evil religious prophecies.  Of course, Donald Trump's declaration of war on Muslims will only further this cause and perhaps radicalize American Muslims.  When religion is involved, generally logic, reason and decency are the first things to be thrown overboard.  Here are article highlights:

As the debate on how best to contain the Islamic State continues to rage in Western capitals, the militants themselves have made one point patently clear: They want the United States and its allies to be dragged into a ground war.

In fact, when the United States first invaded Iraq, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the move was the man who founded the terrorist cell that would one day become the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He excitedly called the Americans’ 2003 intervention “the Blessed Invasion.”

His reaction — ignored by some, and dismissed as rhetoric by others — points to one of the core beliefs motivating the terrorist group now holding large stretches of Iraq and Syria: The group bases its ideology on prophetic texts stating that Islam will be victorious after an apocalyptic battle to be set off once Western armies come to the region.

Should that invasion happen, the Islamic State not only would be able to declare its prophecy fulfilled, but could also turn the occurrence into a new recruiting drive at the very moment the terrorist group appears to be losing volunteers.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on.

“It’s a very powerful and emotional narrative. It gives the potential recruit and the actual fighters the feeling that not only are they part of the elite, they are also part of the final battle.”

Terrorism experts say it has become a powerful recruiting tool for the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which sells potential fighters on the promise that joining will give them the most direct chance to battle Western interests and will bring ancient Islamic prophecies to fruition.

The specific scripture they are referring to describes a battle in Dabiq as well as in al-Amaq, small towns that still exist in northern Syria. The countdown to the apocalypse begins once the “Romans” — a term that militants have now conveniently expanded to include Americans and their allies — set foot in Dabiq.

Regardless of a ground intervention’s potential to succeed, some veteran analysts caution that the act of invasion would play handily into the group’s prophetic vision.

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

The effort has been limited by the fact that the only viable partners so far have been Kurdish militias, who are willing to fight only in a ribbon of land in northern Syria, which is predominantly Kurdish. . . . To date, the United States and its partners have failed to find a Sunni Arab partner force.

Proponents of a ground assault argue that an even bigger recruiting drive than the militants’ end-of-times prophecy is their promise of an Islamic state.

Two take aways, in my view: (i) religion is always ultimately an evil that seeks division and hatred of "non-believers" and (ii) many in America continue to want to perpetuate the blunders of Bush/Cheney who set the stage for the current ongoing nightmare through hubris and disregard for the local culture and religious factions.

The GOP Pretends That 9/11, ISIS and Iraq Were Not the GOP's Fault

With the run up to the 2016 presidential elections in the offing and increase focus on foreign policy issues thanks to the Iran nuclear arms agreement, the GOP is again sabre rattling and in the process striving to make Americans forget that 9/11, ISIS and the Iraq fiasco all trace back to the bungling and fabricated facts of the Bush/Cheney regime that were all happily rubber stamped at the time by Congressional Republicans.  Clues were ignored that might have prevented 9/11, the Iraq war was based on deliberate lies, and the rise of ISIS is the result of Bush/Cheney's failure to have an post war plan to address the poisonous influences of Islamic extremists and Sunni/Shiite hatred.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP effort to whitewash history and lead America into yet another debacle that will squander lives and again bankrupt the country.  Here are excerpts:

T]the trajectory of resurgent international conflict during Obama’s second term—epitomized by ISIS, though not limited to it—has already infused the 2016 election with much higher levels of foreign policy concern. If 2012 was all about trying to blame Obama for not adequately fixing Bush’s spectacular domestic economic catastrophe, then 2016 is shaping up—at least in part—to be about blaming him for not adequately fixing Bush’s spectacular foreign policy catastrophe, either.

At the moment, Obama’s historic nuclear deal with Iran is center stage, but the much more widespread geopolitical problem typified by (though not limited to) ISIS has a much more pervasive political influence. Case in point: the emergence of ISIS, with its provocative spectacles of violence have unexpectedly renewed American’s willingness to send troops to fight overseas, completely forgetting that this was precisely bin Laden’s reason for 9/11 in the first place: to lure the U.S. into a “holy war” with Islam. Election year dynamics being what they are, there’s no telling how badly this could turn out.

So before we go off and blow several trillion dollars recruiting the next wave of terrorists, perhaps it would be a good idea to reconsider what we did the last time around.

Republicans, naturally, want to blame the rise of ISIS on Obama, which is absurd. Three extremely foolish actions undertaken by Bush were absolutely crucial for the emergence of ISIS: First, by responding to 9/11 as an act of war, rather than a crime, Bush gave al Qaeda and its future ISIS off-shoots the holy war and the status of holy warriors they so desperately craved, but could never attain on their own. Second, by invading Iraq—which had nothing to do with 9/11, and was actually a counter-weight both to al Qaeda (ideologically) and to Iran (both theologically and geo-strategically)—Bush destabilized the entire region, creating a tinder-box of multifaceted incentives for sectarian violence.  Third, by disbanding Iraq’s Sunni- and Bath-Party-dominated army, Bush both ensured an intense power struggle and civil war in Iraq (with vastly more power in Iran-friendly Shiite hands) and provided Sunni terrorist ideologues with hardened, experienced military command personnel.

The combined effect of all three Bush actions was to turn Iraq into a virtual hell—along with various portions of several other countries as well.  America had one 9/11, one massive loss of 3,000 innocent civilian lives, and that was enough for us to lose all sense of proportion, restraint, and good judgment. Why should the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan respond any better?  . . . around 400 Iraqi, Afghani, and/or Pakistani civilians have died for every American who died on 9/11 . . . It puts the total dead in in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at around 1.3 million, roughly two orders of magnitude more than most Americans realize.

Given how heavily the drums of war have been beating lately, this is a timely reminder what a huge role Bush’s post-9/11 response played in creating the current violent conditions throughout the region and beyond.

The U.S. authorities have kept no known records of such deaths. This would have destroyed the arguments that freeing Iraq by military force from a dictatorship, removing Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and eliminating safe-havens for terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas has prevented terrorism from reaching the U.S. homeland, improved global security and advanced human rights, all at “defendable” costs.   However, facts are indeed stubborn. Governments and civil society know now that on all counts these assertions have proved to be preposterously false.

[T]he estimates of U.S. military casualties were strikingly accurate, while the estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties were wildly under-estimated—by at least a factor of 7, and probably more like 70.  Clearly, if Americans had had anything close to a realistic view of the war, their level and intensity of opposition would have skyrocketed—as might their expectations of terrorist blowback, as well. There was nothing defendable about the costs involved—which is why those costs had to be hidden. Tragically, as the new report makes clear, the media itself has been deeply implicated in hiding the true cost of war in its most brutal form—the extent of lives lost.

“The numbers relayed by the media (previously 43,000 and now 110,000) should in themselves be terrifying enough, as they correspond to the annihilation of an entire city’s population. But apparently they are still perceived as tolerable and, moreover, even easy to explain given the picture of excessive religiously motivated violence,”

The original pretexts for going to war quickly turned out to be spurious, and from then on only the “liberation of the country from a violent dictatorship” and the “democratization” and “stabilization” of Iraq remained as justification for the war and occupation. This picture, laboriously constructed with the help of the media, is of course impossible to reconcile with the many hundreds of thousands of war casualties.

Perhaps, if we think of how America rallied behind George Bush after 9/11, and we think of 400 9/11s (or maybe “only” 200 9/11s) being suffered through since by the people whose countries we’ve invaded, perhaps then the horrific, barbaric savagery of ISIS might begin to become comprehensible—not, of course, excusable, but comprehensible, meaning something we can figure out and respond to effectively. More importantly, if we actually understood how we got where we now are, we might begin to figure out how to get out, get someplace else, someplace better.  The question of how to get someplace better has been staring us in the face at least since 9/11. It’s high time we began to face up to it.

Otherwise, we will simply be repeating the same foolish response to 9/11 that bin Laden was counting on.

Failed GOP policies created the disaster in the Middle East.  Therefore, more GOP advice that wants to compound the disaster further should be the last thing anyone sane listens to. 

Is Obama Drinking George W. Bush's Kool-Aid?

Other than perhaps America's bungled intelligence that allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked 73 years ago today and the Vietnam fiasco which began in earnest 50 years ago, perhaps the biggest military/foreign policy mistakes America has made during the last century is the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Anyone with any knowledge of the history of the region and not blinded by American hubris should have known from the outset that these invasions would end in disaster.  Yet, after working to get American troops out of the nightmare Bush/Cheney created, Barack Obama seems headed towards throwing away more American lives and squandering billions more of American tax dollars.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at Obama's moves to commit more American resources to this fool's errand.  Here are highlights:

No one has sounded more determined to extricate the United States from Afghanistan than President Obama. It is “time to turn the page,” he said in May when he announced plans to reduce American forces to 9,800 troops by the end of December, with a full withdrawal by the end of 2016. That goal appeared to be on track — until now. Mr. Obama’s recent turnabout and other developments seem to be sucking America back into the Afghan war, a huge mistake.

First, Mr. Obama authorized a more expansive mission for the American military in 2015 than originally planned. His order would put American troops right back into ground combat by allowing them to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militants. He had previously said that the residual force would be engaged only in counterterrorism operations aimed at remnants of Al Qaeda. The new order also permits American jets and drones to support Afghan military missions.

Already, the number of American troops to remain in Afghanistan after December has been increased by 1,000, up to 10,800. NATO allies are supposed to provide 4,000 troops next year, bringing the total of foreign forces to 12,000 to 14,000. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that any additional American troops above 9,800 are temporary and are merely covering for NATO allies that are still trying to decide how many forces to contribute.  But if NATO fails to contribute sufficient troops, then what?

Mr. Obama seems to be having second thoughts about his Afghan strategy after the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the sudden collapse of the Iraqi army. He may be trying to avoid blame if something similar happens in Afghanistan, where Taliban attacks are on the rise.

But he should resist the advice of military commanders, who are again pushing for broader involvement. They were unable to defeat the Taliban when more than 100,000 American troops were in the country; there is no reason to think that a very limited American force will be more effective now.

One lesson learned over the last 13 years is this: No amount of foreign assistance — not tens of thousands of troops, billions of dollars or unlimited amounts of military equipment — will make any real difference if the Afghans cannot or will not pull together a functioning, relatively uncorrupt and competent government, and take primary responsibility for themselves and their country.

Administration officials are still insisting “the combat mission ends” by the end of this year, but that’s simply not credible. Mr. Obama should stick to his original plan. . . .

Living in an area with a huge military presence, one thing you learn quickly is that military commanders will ALWAYS claim that with more troops and more money they can succeed no matter how much such claims are opposed to objective reality.  Anyone who believes these commanders is a fool - or drinking Bush/Cheney Kool-Aid. 

World War I: Prelude to Disasters that Continue Today

Map of Europe - August 1914 - click image to enlarge

I will be the first to admit that I am a history nerd.  I've always loved history because, in my view, it explains how the world has gotten to its current situation and, if one will bother to understand it, how to avoid the same mistakes of the past.  Sadly, most politicians - particularly Americans - and rulers around the world seem to never learn from history's lessons.  Anyone with a knowledge and understanding of the history of the Middle East could have predicted the disasters that ensured (and continue to unfold) in Afghanistan and Iraq which have now spread to envelop more of the Middle East.  One of America's biggest problems is one of hubris and a misguided belief in "American exceptionalism."  Americans think they know better than others and that they can succeed where others have failed.  The truth s that America is no different that other countries despite the xenophobia of the Christofascists in particular.  

A piece in The Daily Beast looks at two new books that examine how hubris and a lack of any serious true long term plan on the eve of and during World War I set the stage for many of today's problems not to mention the blood bath of World War II.  What happened during World War I - a war that many expected to be over in 6 months when it began - ought to make all politicians think in terms of the long game and not short term policies that will excite their party's base and/or policies that ignore the historic realities of the regions where America would seek to impose its will.  As the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Right now, there is plenty of reason to be very afraid. Both books ought to be mandatory reading for every politician in Washington and every senior military officer.  Here are some article highlight (I encourage readers to read the entire piece):

During the first half of the 20th century European civilization embarked on a journey into the abyss: it moved from being the epicenter of sophistication, civilization, high culture, and knowledge, to become home to the most savage episodes of collective-barbaric-violence ever witnessed in the history of mankind.

World War I was a catastrophic turning point for humanity: 70 million men were mobilized to fight; nearly 10 million perished; communities were annihilated, and massive populations were displaced across Europe. The so call “war to end all wars,” paradoxically, created a more violent planet than what had existed before the first shots were fired.

Much of Europe in 1914 resembled a world of cosmopolitan tolerance, noble aesthetics, grand opera houses, and paternal kingdoms—which in some cases, but not all, ruled with benevolence, providing the subjects were loyal and obedient to their masters. By the time the Great War had ended just four years later, however, the sweep of democracies that had replaced the Tsarist, Habsburg, Ottoman, and German empires resembled something closer to Dante’s Inferno: a chaotic-hellish nightmare razed to the ground. And any semblance of normality that had previously existed seemed to have evaporated.

So did this seemingly stable world, which inherited its rational values from key Enlightenment thinkers— who believed in the progress of humanity— tumble into chaos by mere chance? Or was there any truth to Leon Trotsky’s remark that while history offers no guarantees, it is not without logic.   

Technology played an important role in helping to destroy the existing social order. In his 1901 book, Anticipations, the British science fiction author H. G. Wells predicted the decay of political systems across Europe, describing how the mechanization of warfare—which developed rapidly in tandem with modernity—would bring about unprecedented violent changes to the world.

Horrific suffering and horror emerged across both the eastern and western fronts during this period. And by 1918 there had been a tumultuous upheaval of the four dynasties that dominated East and Central Europe. Politics across the continent would never be the same again.

As early as 1905, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned that while a war between his own nation and Germany would be the “end of everything,” an even darker force was presenting itself in the East: revolutionary socialism.

[I]t would return European civilization back to a period of darkness not witnessed since the Middle Ages.

The sudden collapse of these societies is what the late British historian Eric Hobsbawn referred to in his book The Age of Extremes as “capitalist in its economy; liberal in its legal and constitutional structure; bourgeois in the image of its characteristic hegemonic class; glorying in the advance of science, knowledge and education, and profoundly convinced of the centrality of Europe [whose] major states constituted the system of world politics.”

To fully comprehend the short century that Hobsbawn has famously referred to as the “Age of Catastrophe”—that is the years 1914-1989—we need to understand how, and why, the existing social order dramatically disintegrated, almost without warning, as the First World War concluded.

{t}wo new books by two distinguished British historians both take a fresh approach in analyzing the conflict.

In the introduction to Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War 1914-1918, Alexander Watson claims this is the first modern history book to narrate the Great War from the perspective of the two major Central Powers.

The war began a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohneberg, by Serbian terrorists, on June 28, 1914. And it was existential fear, rather than feelings of certainties in the central powers’ military capabilities, that propelled the conflict into existence in the first place.

[T]he major losses of the First World War profoundly changed the political landscape of central Europe indefinitely.  The ramifications of this can still be seen today. One needs only to look at the violent culture that pervades in places like Ukraine, and some of the Balkan states—where respect for the rule of law is minimal, and ethnic tensions run extremely high—to see how they are a direct result of the politics of the First World War.

Watson also reminds us that the armistice signed at Versailles in November 1918 humiliated Germany into taking full responsibility for the war, as well as landing them with incredible debt that crippled the German economy and brought on massive hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic of the ’20s. In turn, this economic catastrophe subsequently led to the rise of the Nazi party.

Because the region was such a diverse mix of ethnicities, the self-determining-homogenous nation states that the American president, Woodrow Wilson, rather naively wished to see flourish actually sent this part of Europe into complete chaos, rather than creating the stability that he had predicted. . . . ethnic conflicts in the countries that emerged in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire nearly doubled after 1918.

If Watson’s book focuses predominantly on the voices of ordinary citizens across Central and Eastern Europe who actually fought in the war, Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931 views the conflict from a geopolitical perspective.

Tooze is intent on analyzing this period from a revisionist perspective. He wants to make sense of how the politics of World War I shaped the interwar period and led to the nightmare of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and all hell broke loose.

Tooze’s thesis continually comes back to a single point: how the United States emerged from the conflict as the most dominating force in the world economy. In this sense, he argues, it is unique as a nation. In no previous era in human history had one country ever completely dominated world finance with such ease.

In Tooze’s view, the political landscape that emerged from World War I was a failed ideological liberal-progressive project launched primarily by Woodrow Wilson, who used America’s position of privileged detachment to frame the transformation of world affairs.

Wilson wanted to end imperialist rivalries in European politics. And only a “peace without victory”—the goal he announced to the U.S. Senate in January 1917—could ensure that the United States would emerge as the undisputed arbitrator of world affairs.

Tooze provides the reader with numerous questions here, such as: What had gone so wrong after 1918? Why was American policy miscarried at Versailles? Why did the world economy implode in 1929? And why did the Western Powers lose their grip in such a spectacular fashion in the decade following the end of the war?

By way of answering these questions, Tooze guides us through the numerous diplomatic and economic catastrophes that emerged from World War I. Eventually we start to get a well-rounded and extremely comprehensive insight into why Wilson’s American foreign policy was so misguided.

Wilson placed his faith 100 percent in American capitalist values, which he believed were natural byproducts of American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States is guided by God’s will to be morally and spiritually superior to the rest of the world.

But Wilson was gravely mistaken when he placed his faith in the idea that “markets and business would replace politics and military power.’ As Tooze writes, “the consequences of this push to depoliticize the world economy were perverse.
Wilson’s biggest mistake was to place “the self-determination of peoples’” at the center of his post-war vision. While this slogan may have made for healthy wartime propaganda, and increased his popularity in the short term, it was an extremely naïve view of how the emerging order would eventually play out on European soil. And it merely delayed the apocalyptic maelstrom that followed rather than preventing it.

Both authors suggest that today we must recognize that a failed American foreign policy during this time only helped to aid the drastic ideas that emerged in the coming decades.

Following the Great War, tolerance across Europe would be replaced by extreme hatred. And ideas promising utopian living—in the form of both fascist and communist politics—would fairly quickly come to shape the new era: which was a zero sum game style of politics.

Back in 1918, as the remains of 10 million corpses began decomposing into the bloody soil of a world that would be forever changed, there were constant cries from statesman, citizens, and civil society of “never again.”

But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the past doesn’t prevent us from making the same mistakes, over and over again.

With each passing day the battle in the Middle East between Islamic State militants and the West more closely resembles Europe’s religious wars of the 17th century, and global stability once again looks increasingly under threat.

Therefore one can only remain optimistic: hoping that the brighter sides of our humanity, which increases our altruistic side as a species, will somehow overcome fear and hatred at all costs.

A first step in avoiding disaster is for American politicians to cease always believing that they/America knows best and toss aside the hubris embodied in the myth of American exceptionalism.   Will this happen?  Likely not, especially among the Republican Party base.

the fruits of hubris

Two Millenia Later - Not learning from History and Unwinnable Wars

Bust of Alexander the Great

At the risk of beating a dead horse, the history major in me - my degree focused on British, Russian and Ancient History - is about ready to scream as worthless news outlets continue to give Dick "Emperor Palpatine" Cheney platforms from which to attack Barack Obama and spew utter drivel about how "Obama lost Iraq" and other putrid bullshit.  On virtually every issue, Cheney is wrong and one has to wonder why reputable journalists will even give the man the time of day.  Especially when virtually EVERY lesson of history tells us that America was on an unwinnable fools errand in Iraq.  A piece on Oxford Press Blog underscores why Bush/Cheney are little better than brain dead if they cannot grasp that America should never have gone to war in Iraq, throwing away the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (who done count in the minds of the "godly Christians" of the GOP.    Here are some excerpts:

Recent events in Iraq, as the militant group ISIS (or ISIL) strives to establish an Islamic state in the country that threatens to undo everything that western involvement achieved there after 9/11, illustrates well the volatility of the entire region and the interplay of religion and politics. Sunnis who felt cast aside to the periphery of political affairs by the Shiite government are rallying to ISIS. American-trained Iraqi forces (at a cost of several billions of dollars) have proved ineffectual, and who knows if the Iraqi government could fall, and what the country will look like — and be doing — in a year’s or even a matter of months’ time.

For well over a decade we have witnessed Western involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly to benefit the wellbeing of the native peoples and in the case of Iraq, to stamp out the exploitive and murderous dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The result was going to be the introduction of democracy for an oppressed nation; the diverse factions and different religious faiths would unite, and ties with the West would thus enter a new (and grateful) phase. But the Iraqi war that Dick Cheney confidently asserted would take only six weeks and certainly not more than six months took far longer than that and cost an inexcusable number of lives. And the strategies to what might be called nation building failed miserably. The last few weeks are proving that. The campaign in Afghanistan likewise hasn’t met its objectives. Taliban influence remains strong and even growing, and as the death count for military and civilian personnel bloodily grew, people realized Afghanistan was the unwinnable war. So the question is inevitable: will Afghanistan go the way of Iraq as well?

There is a lot to be said for the phrase “history repeats itself,” and a lot of lessons to be learned from history. Although analogies have sometimes been made to the earlier and unsuccessful British and Russian involvement in Afghanistan, Alexander the Great’s campaigns in the former Persian Empire and Central Asia over two millennia ago need to be studied more. He was the first western conqueror in the east, and the problems he faced in dealing with a diverse subject population and the strategies he took to what might be called nation building shed light on contemporary events in culturally dissimilar regions of today’s world.

[A]s Alexander [the Great] discovered to his detriment, and as makers of modern strategy know all too well, defeated in battle doesn’t mean conquered. Moreover, he hadn’t anticipated how he was going to rule a large and culturally diverse subject population, whose religious beliefs and social customs weren’t always understood by the invaders and even disregarded. When the last Great King of Persia, Darius III, was murdered, Alexander faced a dilemma: how to rule? There had never been a Macedonian king who was also ruler of Persia before. Alexander had to learn what to do on his feet, without a rulebook or foreign policy experts.

He couldn’t proclaim himself Great King as that would create stiff opposition from his men, who wanted only a traditional Macedonian warrior king. So he opted for a new title, King of Asia, and even a new style of dress, a combination of Macedonian and Persian clothing. In doing so he pleased no one — his men thought he had gone too far and the Persians not enough. Alexander also didn’t grasp — or didn’t bother about — the personal connection between the Zoroastrian God of Light, Ahura Mazda, and the Great Kings, whose right to rule was anchored in that connection. The religious significance of the great Persian palace centers were disregarded by the westerners, who saw them only as seats of power and home to vast treasuries. Then in what is now Afghanistan, Alexander banned the Bactrians’ custom of putting out their elderly and infirm to be eaten alive by dogs kept for this purpose. A barbaric practice to us, for sure, but another instance of high-handedness and imposition of western morality in a foreign land.

It is little wonder that Alexander was always seen as the invader, that his attempts to integrate his various subject peoples into his army and administration failed, and that “conquered” areas such as India and Afghanistan revolted as soon as he left so they could go back to how things used to be. 

Unwinnable wars indeed, then and now. Alexander’s dilemma of West meeting East set a pattern for history. He unashamedly set out to rule a great empire by force, and failed. Today, the West might embroil itself elsewhere to help spread democracy, but those best intentions can fall apart without understanding the peoples with whom you’re dealing. The problems Alexander faced in dealing with a multi-cultural subject population arguably can inform makers of strategy in culturally different regions of today’s world. But at the end of the day politics and religion are so tightly interwoven and misunderstood, and animosity towards the invader, be it Alexander then or the West now, so great, that for anyone from the West to talk of imposing stability and a new order is hubris. Iraq now is proving that, no different from the Persian Empire to outside rule two millennia ago.

Alexander the Great was perhaps one of the greatest generals in all of history - deliciously, he was also gay and a male friend, Hephastion, was the great love of his life -  and compared to Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney was the consummate diplomat (he married Roxanne and the daughter of the last Persian emperor for diplomatic reasons).   If Alexander could not tame the religious and social infighting and volatility of the region, no one could or can.  As the piece notes, America's delusion that it could do what no one before had done was total hubris - something that seems to plague America too much of the time.