Mesmerized by the Hard Choices

As a child, I remember reading an illustrated version of Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the Sun.  The Wind, no matter how hard it blowed, only made the woman (in the illustration I recall) clutch her coat more tightly.  When the sun came out, however, it soon grew too warm and she took the coat off...thus making the Sun the winner.

Changing gears a bit...I linked to an article a while back that discussed a new way of interrogating suspects.  It mentioned that "If you want accurate information, be as non-accusatorial as possible—the HIG term is “rapport-building.”

This is apparently backed up by science, whereas the classic good cop/bad cop can lead to false confessions and doesn't actually have much of a scientific basis.  So why do we focus on that sort of interrogation so much? 

I personally think it's about power.  Control.  The interrogator wants to feel like they forced someone to talk. Made them 'crack'.  Overpowered them.  (Though sometimes that can get used against you, as Usual Suspects illustrated so nicely).

People think that in order to get what they want it has to be difficult, a competition...one that they win.  So even though you may get a better interrogation by building rapport, it doesn't satisfy as much.

Kind of reminds me of the complaints, when I was in the service, of the "kinder, gentler Army".  Don't get me wrong - if being soft on recruits makes them less capable of handling the pressures of war, it's a problem.  A big problem.  And yet somehow this 'kinder, gentler' army fought in Iraq and Afghanistan without too many reports of cowardice or cracking under pressure.  Is it because those wars weren't on the level of World War II?  That intermittent mortar attacks and IEDs isn't the same as facing a constant barrage of artillery?  Or were the fears of softness overblown?

I'm not trying to say any one way is right or not, to be honest.  I talked about ideologies and underlying assumptions before, and I freely admit I have my own.  Yet the heart of mine is that 'the map is not the territory', that all ideologies are just ways of making sense of a complex world...and that means they're always oversimplified.  (If they weren't, they'd be useless).  So I figure you have to consider which theory or ideology is most appropriate to the situation at hand, and shouldn't get too hung up on any particular one of them. 

That said, I feel some of the arguments for harder, harsher policies are less about a sound strategy and more about emotions.  Making you feel like you defeated something (or someone).  Making it seem like you fought the good fight.   That we have to defeat terrorism by waterboarding, for example, even though there's good reason to question the effectiveness of those techniques.

Good luck convincing anyone who supports such techniques, though.  It's the kind of thing that a supporter has to buy into whole heartedly.  Otherwise you'd have to consider whether or not you're a good person.  You can justify harming someone if you say "it saved lives" and "it was the only way".  Plus there's a healthy dose of de-humanizing.  "They deserve it".  "They would do worse to us if they could.  They have done worse".

But if it wasn't, if there was a better way, and one that satisfied your conscience and didn't involve doing horrible things to another human being - then what does that make you?

Analysis, Prescriptions, Etc.

Due to previous experience as an analyst, I know that the way we describe something often shapes the decisions made to affect it...whatever that 'something' is.  I suppose that's not too different from 'framing' the issue, in a sense.

It goes beyond that, though, as well.  There is a lot of white noise out there, so you have to pick and choose what's relevant.  What's worth noting.  And what isn't.  Add to that the usual complexities of life (i.e. delayed responses, difficulty attaching outcomes to causes, etc) and sometimes it's a wonder we can predict anything.

On this, my second blog, I've been trying to keep my posts a bit more focused...and less meta.  It's hard to do justice to the topics, though, since so much depends on my particular worldview and how I filtered things in the first place.  If I skip all that, then I can write a simple and clear analysis that may disagree with someone else's analysis because I didn't go into the underlying assumptions.

I got onto the topic for a variety of reasons.  First, because of where we are in history today.  Can we "Make America Great Again"?  Did we stop being great?  Were we ever great?  If we were great and aren't any more, then what caused us to stop being great?  (As analysis often drives the conclusion...that's a pretty key question.  I think most people know what Donald Trump's answer to this is.  Even if you agree with him that America was great and is not any more, you can disagree on why or how that happened and come up with a completely different solution.)

Second - well, pinpointing how or why something occurred in human history is notoriously difficult.  Just look at all the books that discuss the fall of the Roman Empire.  Or The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and other books in a similar vein.  It's hard to do analysis like this on historical events, it's even harder to do in the present time.  Particularly because people have reasons for pushing one particular cause over another, and nobody knows what the end result will be.

I kind of wanted to add something here, as well.  Sometimes the side that 'wins' does so because they made fewer mistakes.  It doesn't mean that they had the perfect strategy...and sometimes they can mistake the real reason for their success.  I think of that, in particular, when I consider why dictators take power (and the lessons their offspring all too often learn about how to keep power).  A strongman may seem like a blessing when you've lived through a devastating civil war, and many people seem to think the brutality of a dictator is what allowed them to end the devastation.  Yet I think Caligula shows that brutality in and of itself isn't enough, at least if your Praetorian Guard decides to do away with you. 

So anyways.  With regards to foreign policy, there are a variety of theories on war, international affairs, etc.  There's the concept of realpolitik, there are realists, idealists, etc.  The policies you prescribe often have to do with what your underlying assumptions are, and those schools of thought have a lot to do with that.

This also gets at the hidden transcripts I talked about earlier.  Some of the people making these decisions believe they're making the ugly but necessary calls, the ones that look horrible in the light of day...yet they feel that's the way it has to be done.  And has always been done.  That any criticism shows you're too idealistic and should never see the hidden (ugly) inner workings that lead to such decisions.  Sort of like the famous quote that "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

So there can be a couple of competing narratives, two of which seem particularly relevant to America for the past fifty years or so.

In one, the people can not understand the reasons for decisions that look wrong on the face of it, and so must be sheltered and protected from the dirty work.

In the other, the elite are trying to hide their corrupt and self-serving decisions from the light of day.  Whether it was justified or not, doing so maintains their own control (and at the expense of the people.)

I said the last fifty years or so because these competing narratives seem to play out with the Vietnam War.  That is, you have some people who justify all sorts of things in order to fight Communism.  I am going to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and say that they truly did think Communism was a tremendous threat that needed to be fought with every tool at their disposal.  These are the ones, then, who feel practically betrayed when the public so directly turned against them.  They aren't willing to question the decisions they made, to consider whether they were truly the best options at hand.  You see a more recent version of this with George W. Bush's argument that we needed to "stay the course" in Iraq.  In this worldview, the right decisions are being made and the right things are being done...ugly though they may sometimes appear...and we just need to stick with it and see it through.  (This is not helped by the fact that sometimes sheer perseverance really does win the day.  I would argue, however, that anyone who is horrified at Mao's willingness to lose 300 million Chinese should understand that perseverance can be a devastating way to 'win' and should probably not be your sole strategy.)

On the flip side, you have an entire generation that grew to distrust their government (because of Vietnam, and more)...and see repeated attempts to hide information less as a a necessary part of the business and more as a sign that we are no longer a true democracy.  That our government doesn't really respond to the will of the people, so much as to that secretive cabal of government, business and military interests.

Presidential Election 2016, Cont.

In the military, you can never be too dependent on any one individual.  It's too easy for them to go missing at a critical moment in time, and so you need an entire system designed to work regardless of who is or isn't there.


That isn't necessarily true in real life.  You can act as though people are interchangeable, and yet they really aren't.  It's a bit of a paradox, actually.  There are many different types of leaders, and what works for one won't work for another.  And yet sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't.  Certain stylistic differences (such as one leader who is loud and talkative versus another that is quiet and reserved) may not matter at all.  "Quiet and reserved" can come across as dignified, and heighten respect.  Or aloof, and become a negative.  Too much depends on context, and the relationship between the leader and the led.


That said, there are times when the person filling the role makes a tremendous difference.  Going back to my earlier discussion on counterinsurgency and grievances, it makes a great deal of difference if the leaders addressing those grievances argue for non-violence (i.e. Martin Luther King, Jr or Mahatma Gandhi) versus one that opens the doors to violence.


Which kind of reminds me of the Great Man theory.  Rather than take sides on this, I will say that the truth is probably more complicated than either side wants to admit.  That there are times when large social or political forces are at play (like nationalism and the fight against imperialism), and takes on a life of it's own.  And there are other times where a 'Great Man' (or 'Great Woman') living in a certain context, can somehow rise above that context and make a history-changing difference.


You can run this analysis on all sorts of situations - in war, for example, some people like to focus on the economics behind the war.  That is, during the American Civil War the north had more economic power than the South, particularly after following a strategy that minimized Southern economic strength (i.e. the Anaconda Plan and the South's failure at cotton diplomacy)...and perhaps the underlying economics did favor the North.  Yet if the North had repeatedly lost battles wouldn't the economic tides have eventually shifted?  And didn't the personalities matter?  General McClellan, President Lincoln, General (and later President) Ulysses S. Grant, wouldn't history have been different if any one of these had been a different sort of person?


You can go deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole, too.  That is, could Ulysses S. Grant have been able to make a difference if the structure of the army (and society) at the time had been different?  What if he had never had a chance to lead a charge, and remained a quartermaster all his life?  What if he was unable to gain a militia commission?  What if his drinking problem prevented him from gaining a formal promotion?


I'm not really trying to say the system at the time was better or worse than what we have today, just pointing out that there are different contexts that can make it easier (or harder) to have the right person in the right place at the right time.  And that's assuming that Ulysses S. Grant was the right person at the right time, and that no other could have filled that role quite as well.


So I got to thinking about this, because of the current presidential election and Hillary Clinton.  It's like - if our system is healthy and robust, then to a certain extent it shouldn't matter too much who fills the role of President.  Or rather, it matters in a certain sense (Democrats and Republicans have very different points of view, and even though Congress has more influence on what becomes law than the president, the power of the President is not negligible.)  Yet, in another sense, what does it matter whether it's Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders?  Or, on the Republican side, whether it's Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

I bring that up, because it gets yet again at what has bothered me about the Democratic primary.  In 2008 we had a very wide field of Democratic candidates.  In addition to Obama and Hillary, there was John Edwards.  Joe Biden. Dennis Kucinich. and plenty more.


In 2016 it was Bernie Sanders.  And some minor characters that hardly had any air time, to be honest.  (The names I listed in 2008 were ones I recall seeing and hearing about significantly during the race.)  Even though I was vaguely aware that Lincoln Chafee, Lawrence Lessig and Jim Webb were running they never really gained any credibility as a candidate.  And I don't even really recognize Martin O'Malley.


I've heard mutterings about the Clinton 'coronation' almost this entire primary, and it kind of looks like someone (or a group of someones) tried to do exactly that.  Bernie Sanders was the ONLY real competition, and the Democratic Party resented him for that the entire time. 


It's...un-American.  And, frankly, disturbing.  Why Hillary?  Why should so many people be so determined to make her the next President? 


Not "why do we need a Democratic president".  No.  Why must that candidate be Hillary?  Why was this settled so early in the race? 


I say that, because it almost seems like the Democratic Party is stuck with a 'sunk cost fallacy'.  Let's go back to before the e-mail scandal grew legs, before we got deep into campaigning, and look at what we knew about Hillary.  She has always had high unfavorables.  Always.  This is something the entire party apparently thought they could work around.  (You can argue about whether it's fair or not, sexist or not, justified or not...but you can't argue that it's not there.)


Yet that apparently didn't matter.  Next - we know the Republicans go after the Clintons like a dog chasing a squirrel.  Funny how, in the last eight years at least, they didn't seem to go after the Obamas to quite the same degree.  That implies that (again - fair or not, sexist or not, justified or not) you will see the Republicans make life difficult for Hillary Clinton to a degree they probably wouldn't for any other candidate. 


On top of all of that, we have Hillary Clinton's noted preferences for privacy.  Again, her supporters say it's all justified, having survived those aforementioned attacks. (Isn't it great when you can use a word like 'aforementioned'?)  She's found a tactic that she seems to think works, and she sticks with it.  Unfortunately, her preferred tactic ends up making issues that might have been minor otherwise turn into something bigger.  See, Democrats and Republicans focus so much on each other that they forget most people don't really pay attention and hardly care.  It's kind of like in a counterinsurgency, where you're so focused on getting 'the bad guys' that you forget about the neutral farmers and workers who are just trying to make a living.


At the end of the day, half of what the news reports about politics is just white noise.  It only matters to politicos (and I'll include myself here) who follow that sort of thing.  So while Hillary may think she's got a great strategy for dealing with Republican harassment, the thing outsiders tend to pick up on is that her strategy involves privacy and secrecy.  And that she will go to ridiculous lengths to keep it that way, to the point where it seems like she really must have something to hide.


Even worse, is that I suspect she thinks it's okay to do whatever it takes to defend against Republican attacks, and doesn't seem to care that her defenses make her sound like a liar or an idiot.  See my previous post about her testimony on the (C) in her e-mails.  Okay, I can see why you'd think it's okay to lie to Republicans.  But to the FBI?  And to the general public?  They're more forgiving than the Republicans, and they probably wouldn't care too much if you had just told the truth from the beginning.  It'd probably be more like the wikileaks of state department cables, where anyone actually paying attention just shrugs and says "whatever".  (I added 'from the beginning' because if you don't do it right away, everything that gets dragged out into the light is suspect.  And if you apologize after denying you did anything wrong it sounds more like you're just doing what it takes to get people to forget and move on, not because you sincerely believe you actually did something wrong.  Especially if you undermine your own apology with later statements.)


This is tied in with something else I said earlier - why did nobody in the Democratic Party pull Hillary aside and tell her that being the subject of an FBI investigation was bad news, and that maybe she should withdraw?  Why, instead, did the entire establishment somehow act as though it was no big deal?  (yeah, yeah...those of you who still think it's not a big deal will disagree with me on this, entirely.  The funny thing is, though, that the people arguing that are almost inevitably people who have never worked with classified material before.)


So anyways.  The more that the Democratic Party insisted that Hillary was their gal, the more they put resources into supporting her, the more difficult it becomes to change course when her weaknesses come to light.  And the timing gets worse and worse.  If she had withdrawn at any point in the last year, the Democratic Party probably could have found another candidate.  At this point, however, they'd be in a lot of trouble if that happened.


Same thing with the possible 'October surprise' Assange claims he has.  If he released it now, the Democratic Party would have time to deal with it.  The fact that Assange is holding on to it indicates he cares less about sharing information and more about deliberately releasing it in order to shape the course of the 2016 presidential election.


If I were the Democratic Party, I would want to know what he thinks he has.  If it truly is enough to shape the race I would either try getting it out pre-emptively (if it's not as big a deal as he thinks) or get Hillary to resign right away (if it really is).  Why wait until October? 


Anyways.  To tie this in to my beginning musings - why is the Democratic Party (and the media, and all the various other organizations who have overlooked her weaknesses as a candidate) so determined to make sure she's the next President? 

Presidential Election 2016

I haven't posted in a while, partly because I didn't feel I had much to contribute on the Clinton-Trump campaign. 


I know where I stand, and think most other people do, too.  So there's just not much room for discussion or persuasion.  I also don't want to align myself with some of the worst conspiracy theorists and mudslingers.


I find myself dwelling most on my objections to Hillary.  Not because I support Trump, or think he's somehow a better choice. He's not.  I dwell on Hillary more because I want to explain to those who generally agree with me on Trump why that doesn't automatically mean I support Hillary.  And why I consider her a more subtle danger to the American I know and love.


First, one of the key differences that has come up in discussions with friends.  Some of the Hillary supporters basically think "all politicians lie.  Lying doesn't bother me, so long as they support the policies I want."  As such, they will support Hillary no matter how many scandals the Republicans throw at her, because in their eyes those scandals are not really unusual or beyond the bounds...and Hillary supports the policies they want.  These are the ones who dismiss the e-mail scandal as a 'pseudo-scandal', and don't understand what all the fuss is about.


This really, truly, and honestly bothers me.  We excuse politicians for lying, we accept that they will do whatever it takes to cover up their mistakes, and so long as those mistakes are not really meaningful we're okay with it?!? 


And what does anyone consider 'meaningful' for a scandal, anyway?  How do you decide the severity?  Granted, we all do this to some extent...I dismiss the Benghazi hearings, for example, partly because it seems a bit much to pin the whole thing on one person.


Sure, the Lewinski scandal was kind of trashy and one could argue that it had nothing to do with how effective a president Bill Clinton was, yet is it really okay for a president to outright lie like that?  (Apparently, to not a few people, the answer is 'yes'.)  Will the person who justifies lying about an affair really act too different if the issue is even more serious?  Can you trust them to make the right call if it will get them into trouble? 


I may go on about the importance of character at some later time, but I don't want to digress right now.  The important point is that I disagree with this point of view entirely, and I think character is pretty important when picking a candidate.  (This also, btw, is not an area where Trump compares favorably.)


So, then, what next?  Well...I have seen a number of articles trying to argue that "if we only knew the real Hillary, we would like her".  As if that means she has great character, and that we should ignore the smears.  Likeability...well, truthfully it's not the greatest assessment.  There are a lot of brutal people who can be quite likeable.  There are a lot of likeable people who aren't really qualified for the jobs they are applying for.  But okay, fine...it's great that she's a good listener.  I'm sure she will work the levers of power quite capably. 


Honestly, that's where my main concern comes from.  As the middle class has shrunk, as income inequality has grown, America is poised to become an oligarchy.  Perhaps we already are.  We are becoming divided into the 'haves' and the 'have nots'.


And the 'haves' are quite buddy-buddy with each other.  We are seeing the development of a global elite, one that may go shopping in New York one day and Tokyo the next.  One that may give a nod and a wink to the idealists who value human rights, while behind the scenes they do what needs to be done.  Or so they think.  These are the people that will put a Karzai in charge of Afghanistan, who will argue that realpolitik means that we must support Saudi Arabia.  And perhaps, in some cases, there's some truth to their claims.  (Maybe.)


This is where I believe the public and hidden transcript comes into play.  Because there are things we all know and suspect these elite do, behind the scenes, that never comes out in the light.  Is that bad, in and of itself?  Or is that just the nature of power?  Should we be concerned?  Or is it business as usual?


The internet has given us this capability for transparency that is amazing, sometimes.  And the responses to that transparency show that fears the public wouldn't understand may sometimes be overblown.  Wikileaks released thousands of state department e-mails, and most people just shrugged.


Which is why I was disappointed in Colin Powell when his e-mails to Hillary were released. For pretty much the same reason I think Hillary was wrong to have her private server in the first place.  What are you saying or doing, that you are worried would become part of the official record and subject to the law?  Do you think the public would misunderstand something?  If you truly believed it was the right thing to do, why can't you argue and explain that?  Why are you so afraid of public scrutiny?  (Public scrutiny.  Yes, I get why you'd be afraid that your political enemies would use whatever is public against you...and you may face pressure in the news and at home...but those things are actually really rather different, and distant from, the public.)


So anyways.  What bothers me with Hillary is that there seem to be so many, many, many people trying to make her the next president.  And they are willing to overlook so much, in order to do so.  It worries me, because it shows the elite manipulating the system to get the result they want, and in the process they are closing that system out to alternatives.  Not only that, but they seem to think that Hillary really hasn't done anything wrong. Nothing different from what everyone else is doing.  Which, rather than saying what Hillary does was okay, rather implies that the whole system is so screwed up that the elite no longer even know what's right and what's wrong any more.


This article, btw, captures some of my own perspective watching the political election this year.  She didn't know what the (C) meant?  She's either lying through her teeth or too stupid to believe. 


I keep thinking this election is a false dilemma, one unfortunately aided and abetted by the elite...so that out of a nation of 300 million we are left with these two horrible options.  Why didn't the Democratic Party quietly pressure Hillary to bow out when she was under investigation?  Why, instead, did the DNC support her so much?