General McChrystal’s know-it-all arrogance is nothing new in the power game of war. Headquartered in a far-off land, listening to Yessir, Yessir all day from underlings bucking for promotion, it is no wonder that General Big Shot thought he was smarter than the President, or that he liked seeing his name in print, or that one person playing up to media triggers political jockeying by a lot of people. It is all part of war’s embrace.
What is new is that war, all war, must no longer be embraced, because it confronts us with the terminal doom of nuclear war.
The Taliban are today’s wartime opponents. For the moment they must be confronted militarily. Longer term strategy, though, must confront them, and everyone, with global law and global law enforcement. A prerequisite for the supremacy of law is submission of all nations to law and law enforcement. That will have to be a gradual, staged process. The order-imposing capacity of Superpower, uncertain and unreliable as it is, can be surrendered only gradually, and only to institutions whose law enforcement capacity, and whose democratic accountability have developed in slow stages. Today’s question is, how to reach the first stage.
The future has grown so perilous that history will judge President Obama by whether he lays the foundation for global law. To preserve civilian control of the world’s greatest military force without further politicizing that armed force certainly is one requisite. To aspire to international institutions of law and law enforcement requires the capacity to smother international disputes, including terrorism. The second requisite is global democracy evolved far enough to make it safe and therefore feasible to empower the means of law enforcement.
Plans for when and how the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan should accompany parallel plans for peaceful, legal ways to sort out the aspirations and rights of ideological, ethnic, and political sub-groups that challenge national authority, and figuring how to turn enforcement power over them to reliably strong and accountable international institutions. The Taliban is only one such sub-group.
I predict that Obama will do little or nothing to achieve this, because nations as presently composed are incapable of taking steps directed to ultimately reducing their own power. The Superpower of the United States renders this nation especially incapable of doing it. This is why a secure future for the human race depends on some number of individuals accepting the assignment to re-mold the nation system into an international system. Where power remains available to individuals and their NGOs to influence national policies is in the cities and towns of the world.
The nations have targeted urban populations with nuclear missiles, so urban populations are more than entitled, in fact they are obligated for survival, to think their way out of the doomsday box.
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Friday, June 25, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Jack Van Impe
We all have the same voting power at election time. That does not mean we all have the same responsibility for democratic decision making. Civic responsibility corresponds to one’s understanding of the issues, compared with the understanding of others. The better I understand, or think I understand, and the less I think others understand, the more compelled I am to act.
This is why, in City, Save Thyself! I call for self selection of initiators who will work to end the monopoly that nations hold on issues of peace and war.
Jack Van Impe’s television show the other night illustrated what I mean. The Reverend Van Impe is a dangerous fellow. He reminds me how many are beyond hope of persuasion that we might achieve a world of enforced law. He leads thousands of followers toward a glorious, ordained end time when Christ will lift them to perpetual glory while everyone else burns in hell. The influence of Van Impe and other extremist religionists has to be compensated for by citizens with a sense of humankind’s mutual responsibility for what happens to us.
Van Impe inveighs against weapons in space, but welcomes the holocaust that such weapons will bring, on the grounds that a space war is foretold in the Book of Revelations. He spits out a denunciation of efforts of the five year non-proliferation conference because it cannot, and apparently he thinks, should not, succeed, presumably because it would thwart God’s will.
Van Impe denounces efforts to pressure Israel to treat with Palestinians, on grounds that Israel is a democracy. When his eagerly awaited end time occurs, though, not being Christian, Israelis presumably await fiery destruction along with Muslims and atheists. He displays mockingly a color cartoon of Obama drawn like a Stepinfetchit clown, one of many blatant political comments, made absent any discernible frame of reference to issues about what is good for the country, and in clear violation of his religious 501(c)(3) tax exemption.
Followers of this demagogue cannot be expected to apply rational judgment to public decision making. Van Impe’s ministry of irresponsibility is so transparently self-contradictory, irrational, and destructive of civic discourse, that his followers have to be assumed incapable of rational political thought, due to emotional predisposition, lack of education, or whatever. If the rest of us fail to compensate for their disregard for what the nuclear arms race is likely to bring, Van Impe’s predictions will come true, except that his followers will burn right along with Muslims.
This is why, in City, Save Thyself! I call for self selection of initiators who will work to end the monopoly that nations hold on issues of peace and war.
Jack Van Impe’s television show the other night illustrated what I mean. The Reverend Van Impe is a dangerous fellow. He reminds me how many are beyond hope of persuasion that we might achieve a world of enforced law. He leads thousands of followers toward a glorious, ordained end time when Christ will lift them to perpetual glory while everyone else burns in hell. The influence of Van Impe and other extremist religionists has to be compensated for by citizens with a sense of humankind’s mutual responsibility for what happens to us.
Van Impe inveighs against weapons in space, but welcomes the holocaust that such weapons will bring, on the grounds that a space war is foretold in the Book of Revelations. He spits out a denunciation of efforts of the five year non-proliferation conference because it cannot, and apparently he thinks, should not, succeed, presumably because it would thwart God’s will.
Van Impe denounces efforts to pressure Israel to treat with Palestinians, on grounds that Israel is a democracy. When his eagerly awaited end time occurs, though, not being Christian, Israelis presumably await fiery destruction along with Muslims and atheists. He displays mockingly a color cartoon of Obama drawn like a Stepinfetchit clown, one of many blatant political comments, made absent any discernible frame of reference to issues about what is good for the country, and in clear violation of his religious 501(c)(3) tax exemption.
Followers of this demagogue cannot be expected to apply rational judgment to public decision making. Van Impe’s ministry of irresponsibility is so transparently self-contradictory, irrational, and destructive of civic discourse, that his followers have to be assumed incapable of rational political thought, due to emotional predisposition, lack of education, or whatever. If the rest of us fail to compensate for their disregard for what the nuclear arms race is likely to bring, Van Impe’s predictions will come true, except that his followers will burn right along with Muslims.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Getting To The Promised Land
No one in his right mind would start for the Promised Land unless the trip was imperative and he had a travel plan. Our counterpart to the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army is nuclear holocaust - we have to leave the Egypt of nuclear holocaust behind us. Our counterpart to Moses’ Ten Commandments, though, has yet to be drafted.
President Obama, Sam Nunn and others who advocate getting to Zero Nuclear put off describing a plan, not unreasonably, by saying that it will take decades to reach Zero. Not in my lifetime, says the President; the mountain must be scaled in stages, says Nunn. They hope that evidence of progress like the START Treaty, and improvements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, will evidence progress enough to keep momentum.
Staged progress without a plan will not be enough for some. Examples of what Obama, Nunn, et al are up against appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“The NPT Illusion” by Brett Stephens) and Financial Times (“A Nuclear-Free World? No Thanks” by Gideon Rachman).
Rachman predicts that a nuclear free world would herald the return of war between big powers. He says that only an “implausibly powerful international inspectorate” could calm the fears that produce nuclear arming. These are reasonable observations if one makes no effort to describe the disarmed world.
Stephens offers a good guys - bad guys analysis - if bad ones arm, good ones cannot disarm. True enough, but he can’t imagine enforced mutuality. He hits the target, offering no solution, by concluding that in the “second nuclear age” deterrence won’t work and “we haven’t even begun to think seriously about how to navigate those waters.”
The problem with long-term thinking like Zero Nuclear is, first, if you suggest details about how it might work you are discredited as time passes because so much gets revised. Second, you will be called idealist, and vilified for suggesting a different world, which upsets the non-visionary, non-imaginative folk, those most wary of change, i.e., conservatives, though I do not mean it pejoratively.
The solution for this dilemma of how much detail to hazard when you preach vision, is to describe a means to make the journey - how to travel, not what the destination will look like. Tell who will have a say, how will we experiment, how the rule of enforced law will be expanded in stages, how will we retain the security of armed might while developing the security of enforced law, how targeted populations of different kinds of nations can make common cause against the violence lovers in all nations.
Rachman’s “powerful international inspectorate” must be shorn of implausibility by showing the partial models that already work, the stages of enlargement, the assurances that militarized security need not be surrendered until a safer model is available, and the cross border democracy that must be invented and gradually expanded to keep delegation of enforcement powers accountable.
President Obama, Sam Nunn and others who advocate getting to Zero Nuclear put off describing a plan, not unreasonably, by saying that it will take decades to reach Zero. Not in my lifetime, says the President; the mountain must be scaled in stages, says Nunn. They hope that evidence of progress like the START Treaty, and improvements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, will evidence progress enough to keep momentum.
Staged progress without a plan will not be enough for some. Examples of what Obama, Nunn, et al are up against appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“The NPT Illusion” by Brett Stephens) and Financial Times (“A Nuclear-Free World? No Thanks” by Gideon Rachman).
Rachman predicts that a nuclear free world would herald the return of war between big powers. He says that only an “implausibly powerful international inspectorate” could calm the fears that produce nuclear arming. These are reasonable observations if one makes no effort to describe the disarmed world.
Stephens offers a good guys - bad guys analysis - if bad ones arm, good ones cannot disarm. True enough, but he can’t imagine enforced mutuality. He hits the target, offering no solution, by concluding that in the “second nuclear age” deterrence won’t work and “we haven’t even begun to think seriously about how to navigate those waters.”
The problem with long-term thinking like Zero Nuclear is, first, if you suggest details about how it might work you are discredited as time passes because so much gets revised. Second, you will be called idealist, and vilified for suggesting a different world, which upsets the non-visionary, non-imaginative folk, those most wary of change, i.e., conservatives, though I do not mean it pejoratively.
The solution for this dilemma of how much detail to hazard when you preach vision, is to describe a means to make the journey - how to travel, not what the destination will look like. Tell who will have a say, how will we experiment, how the rule of enforced law will be expanded in stages, how will we retain the security of armed might while developing the security of enforced law, how targeted populations of different kinds of nations can make common cause against the violence lovers in all nations.
Rachman’s “powerful international inspectorate” must be shorn of implausibility by showing the partial models that already work, the stages of enlargement, the assurances that militarized security need not be surrendered until a safer model is available, and the cross border democracy that must be invented and gradually expanded to keep delegation of enforcement powers accountable.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Survival Instinct, Where Are You?
Neil Genzlinger reviewed the first episode of the Discovery Channel’s 11 part documentary, “Life”(New York Times, 3-20-10). The lesson, it seems, is that the “core of life is an instinct for adapting to ensure survival.” Genzlinger finds “something heartening in the notion that when faced with challenge no animal, however small or overmatched, seems content to just throw in the towel.”
How about big animals? Survival should move to the top of human priorities, judging by the warnings from persons in a position to know about nuclear proliferation and possible terrorist WMD attack. The bi-partisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism, former Cabinet members Kissinger, Schultz and Perry, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority for twelve years Mohamed El Baradei, and many more high officials including President Obama, insist that the world must rid itself of nuclear weapons.
A law-abiding American who has never thought about elemental survival for even a minute, if told that a gunman was stalking him, after informing the police, would change his schedules and routines in a hurry. His response would be radical, uncharacteristic, and ruthless. He would move about differently at different times, interrupt his occupation and family life, flit from tree to tree if he had to be outdoors.
Why don’t we shift radically now that we are threatened as a society? The answer has something to do with the bifurcation between our individual and our social lives. As individuals, alone in a jungle and targeted, we would turn and dodge, run and swim and claw, and exhibit the animal characteristics of our non-human cousins in the television series. As tamed and even sedated members of huge social organisms called cities and nations, on the other hand, we wait for directions from on high - Washington or Moscow or Peiking.
What about these huge brains of ours, thinking again in the context of our animal heritage? Don’t they tell us when to fall back on individual resources, and how to regroup in configurations calculated to counter terrorism and end war, configurations in addition to our configuration as war-prone, weapons-obsessed nations? It is time to summon the survival instinct and rationally evade the vaunted instinct for aggression.
How about big animals? Survival should move to the top of human priorities, judging by the warnings from persons in a position to know about nuclear proliferation and possible terrorist WMD attack. The bi-partisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism, former Cabinet members Kissinger, Schultz and Perry, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority for twelve years Mohamed El Baradei, and many more high officials including President Obama, insist that the world must rid itself of nuclear weapons.
A law-abiding American who has never thought about elemental survival for even a minute, if told that a gunman was stalking him, after informing the police, would change his schedules and routines in a hurry. His response would be radical, uncharacteristic, and ruthless. He would move about differently at different times, interrupt his occupation and family life, flit from tree to tree if he had to be outdoors.
Why don’t we shift radically now that we are threatened as a society? The answer has something to do with the bifurcation between our individual and our social lives. As individuals, alone in a jungle and targeted, we would turn and dodge, run and swim and claw, and exhibit the animal characteristics of our non-human cousins in the television series. As tamed and even sedated members of huge social organisms called cities and nations, on the other hand, we wait for directions from on high - Washington or Moscow or Peiking.
What about these huge brains of ours, thinking again in the context of our animal heritage? Don’t they tell us when to fall back on individual resources, and how to regroup in configurations calculated to counter terrorism and end war, configurations in addition to our configuration as war-prone, weapons-obsessed nations? It is time to summon the survival instinct and rationally evade the vaunted instinct for aggression.
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