How to Keep Perspective

Last month I visited with a few relatives, and my brother reminded me of an incident that happened a long time ago (when we were both quite young).  We were supposed to be doing the dishes after dinner, and our parents basically said we had to stay in the kitchen until they were done.  They said this in part because my brother refused to do the dishes - and I refused to do the work by myself. (I was willing to work, just not without him pitching in.)

From my perspective, doing so would set a baaaad precedent.  It basically would have rewarded my brother for being lazy ('cause why would he ever do the dishes, if he knew I'd take care of them for him), and would have probably meant more future work for me.  So we both sat in the kitchen, refusing to do the dishes.

And sat.

And sat.

I don't really recall how we got out of that impasse...maybe he finally gave in, or our parents yelled at us to get going, or something.  All I really remembered was that I was determined to sit in that fricking kitchen all night long rather than do his work as well as my own.

It wasn't about the work.  Not really.  It was about not letting him get away with doing less than his share.

I brought that up for a different reason, though.  I think it's the mentality behind a lot of what goes on when we complain about 'politics'.  For example, I remember trying to coordinate equipment for some training back in 2004(?).  Except way up the chain of command there was a little turf war over the funding.  Seems TRADOC insisted it was a FORSCOM activity and that FORSCOM should fund it, whereas FORSCOM said it was 'training', and obviously TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) should fund it.  The politicking went on long enough that the equipment we needed was rerouted to the front lines, and we were no longer able to get it.  From my perspective, their butting heads interfered with our ability to do the mission right. 

I'm sure, from their perspective, everyone involved believed what they were doing was better in the long run.  Sort of like my refusal to do the dishes that night.  And yet all of our defense funding comes from the same place (i.e. taxes), and from that perspective it doesn't really matter which pot of money it comes out of so long as whatever is necessary gets done.  (From what I understand, defense spending is an unauditable mess...which probably makes things even worse.  After all, it's hard to say that the right things will get funded appropriately when people don't really seem to know what money is going where...and people have a tendency to squirrel away what they can to make sure the 'right' projects get the resources they need.  I'm sure that all had an impact on this, since both commands probably felt that money was tight and they needed everything they could to accomplish all their other missions.)

People have this amazing ability to justify doing the things they do (like my refusal to do the dishes), and I sort of wanted to discuss how you know when it's gone too far.  At what point should you 'be the bigger person', and accept that you got screwed for the greater good?  (I grew to respect Al Gore more after he conceded the 2000 election, because I thought it was better for the nation as a whole than fighting to the bitter end.  There are obviously many Democrats who resented and regretted that, though, and now push for Democrats to fight harder instead.  And Republicans have similar thought processes on their side...it's so easy to say 'we got screwed and next time we won't take it', which ultimately leads to a lose-lose situation. It means both sides dig in their heels and make things harder for everyone.)

It's hard to decide when an argument for being difficult is legitimate, and when it's just a way of justifying things that appear to be in your own interest.

To make another great jump in this discussion - I actually got to thinking about that for a completely different reason.  I attended a webinar on the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force.  Infowar and foreign influences are a hot topic right now, and I do agree that we need to do a better job of fighting misinformation.  And yet I am concerned about government efforts to do so, because there's a difference between fighting misinformation with the truth vs. fighting information that is negative to your side with your own spin on things.  (After all, there may be some truth to the idea that certain things would 'destroy' a nation...but from what I've seen it's more often a self-fulfilling prophecy.  That is, the cover up and the lengths a nation goes to in order to prevent anyone from finding out that they screwed up is what ultimately leads to upheaval when the truth finally gets out.  If they'd been up front initially, there'd have been some fuss but it would eventually die down and their political hold wouldn't be so shaken.) So fighting misinformation and addressing foreign influence makes sense when they're spreading lies, so long as it clearly is lies, but is something to be concerned about if it leads to a willingness to label anything that doesn't suit our purposes as a lie.

That sort of goes back to my concern that we're so focused on those 'outsiders' interfering that we fail to realize the only way they can interfere is they touch on subjects that resonate.  That is - their misleading ideas wouldn't go viral and spread if it didn't appeal to people, and why does it appeal in the first place?  What are the cracks in our society, the weaknesses and fractures, that make us vulnerable to these sorts of things?  And how can we fix them, strengthen them?  (Sort of like a discussion I had over a decade ago with a friend about some tensions between the black community and police.  The fact that African-Americans easily believe that the police overreact and are overly harsh with members of their community highlights a friction point between the police and the community they are supposed to be serving.  The sort of thing that could crack wide open into something ugly, the same way that someone stirred up trouble in Iraq by attacking the al-Askari mosque.  Addressing that friction would go a long way to preventing any future such problems...and how do you reduce the tension?  Well, not by rallying around the flag, insisting that the police are always right, and believing that any victims brought it on themselves for one reason or another.  That just exacerbates things and makes it even more likely that the right incident could act like a chisel and hammer.  Too many people seem to want that to happen, which is stupid since all it would lead to is war and violence.  Didn't we learn enough by the bloody mess Europe made of itself during their religious wars?)

Anyways.  Part of the problem, I think, has to do with our ability to think too hard.  We persuade ourselves to do the 'right' thing, whether that means blowing people up in order to 'save' them and bring them to God, or gerrymandering a district in order to make sure the 'right' policies are put in place even if most people don't actually want them. 

It's that arrogant "I know what's best for you, and I don't think I can persuade you that I'm right so I'm just going to force you into doing it anyway".  It's the same underlying attitude.  The same unwillingness to accept that other people are free to disagree, and choose differently.  That same insistence that "I'm right and you're wrong, and since I know better I'll make it happen anyway." 

It's funny that the Quran supposedly says that there should be no compulsion in religion, because all I see from fundamentalist Muslims is compulsion.

And fundamentalist Christians may not be going against their own teachings in quite the same way, but their desire to legislate what's morally right is doing the same thing.  "We're going to make you choose what's right, regardless of what you want, because we know what's best for you and we're doing God's work."

That, to me, is the underlying sin...probably one of the worst ones out there.  The arrogance of believing you know what's best, to such a degree that you will manipulate everyone else. 

Manipulate, not persuade.  I've long thought that the key difference has to do with the willingness to let people make their own choices.  That is, when you try to persuade someone you try to lay out your arguments and convince them you're right...whereas when you manipulate, you try to make it so the 'only' choice is the one you want them to make.  (Like discouraging other candidates from running in the Democratic primary so that the only credible choice was Hillary Clinton.) 

It's the difference between telling someone why you think you should eat at restaurant A, but willing to compromise and go to a different restaurant if they're not persuaded...vs trying to tell them that the other restaurants of interest are bad choices by manufacturing false reports of food poisoning or failed health inspections.  Or even refusing to tell them about an option they'd be interested in, just because you want to limit their choices.

This is, I think, our major failing in today's society.  Our political so-called leaders are so focused on the politicking that they will justify manipulating society in order to do what they think is 'right'.  They've, in many ways, given up on the free market place of ideas and persuasion (okay, yes...sometimes the general public does seem uneducated and willfully makes horrible decisions.  That's a call for you to educate and persuade, not ignore their wishes and manipulate politics to get around them.  Doing the latter undermines the very fabric of our society in a way that's more insidious than allowing horrible ideas to  make it into political discourse.  After all, there is something to be said about the power of sunlight, and at least when it's out in public we can shine light on it and expose how horrible the idea is.)

If we truly had a free market place of ideas, the horrible ideas will ultimately lose.  That's the classic liberal mindset.  One based on confidence, and belief in our fellow humans.  I know sometimes it's hard to hold on to, there's so much evidence of people buying into bad ideas.  And yet I think the best way of addressing them is not to push them into hiding, but to bring them out into the light of day. 

All right, that was rather long and scatter-brained.  I felt compelled to write it to clarify the thoughts in my head, though, and it seems to have done the trick.

Baltimore, Counterinsurgency, and Why I am an Independent, Part II

I made the comparison between insurgents in Iraq and gangs.  Yes, I am aware that there are differences, very real differences.  But there are times when I think we should pay attention to the similarities.  This, btw, creates a similar parallel between counterinsurgency and policing.  (Since many African American communities feel like the police are an alien, invading force it's sometimes more apt than I'd like.)

Our classes on counterinsurgency talked about what makes a nation vulnerable to an insurgency.  There have to be grievances that the insurgent can exploit.  If the majority of the population doesn't have a grievance, then they are less likely to aid and abet an insurgent.  This, btw, is supposed to be one of the great strengths of a democracy.  Our first amendment specifically says we have the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

For a little more graphic detail - in the Algerian war for independence, the nationalists committed horrific acts.  The French were horrified, and reacted so strongly that they imprisoned and alienated Algerians who were previously neutral.  In so doing, they basically created the insurgency that would eventually defeat them.  (Opened up a whole bunch of issues that trouble the Algerians today, but that's a different story.) 

This isn't just wishful thinking, or naivety.  One of David Galula's famous laws of counterinsurgency is that "Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority."  Bad decisions on the part of a counterinsurgent can and will turn those neutral masses into outright hostiles.  Getting the population on your side, however, makes it harder and harder for the insurgent to hide.

Ferguson, Baltimore - these things could not have blown up the way they did if there weren't grievances to exploit.  The rioting seems to give people (who are unwilling to address those grievances in the first place) an excuse to ignore those grievances.  To blame it all on bad parenting, or stupid criminals.  

Now, I've heard questions about the Baltimore riots.  People saying it was instigated (whether by professional agitators or an overreacting police force, who knows?  I wasn't there.)  I've also heard that the vast majority of the protests were peaceful, and that it was the media hunt for a certain kind of story that has made the riots the face of Baltimore protest.  Again, I wasn't there.  I don't know.  The people saying these things seem to be locals, and seem likely to know more than I do.  And, let's face it, after seeing the media mangle Iraq I could totally believe that they'd focus on a few rioters and ignore the majority that didn't.

What I do know is this - yet again grievances are not being addressed.  They are sidelined.  Marginalized.  Ignored.  Stories about riots overshadow, by a great degree, the question of how someone who was arrested without force or incident could be dead a week later.

Whether or not someone has a criminal record should not affect whether he's alive a week after he was arrested.  It is not justice for a cop to rough someone up because they 'know' he's a bad guy...

Any more than it would be okay for a soldier to beat a detainee that they 'know' is al Qaeda.

Baltimore, Counterinsurgency, and Why I am an Independent, Part I

I would post about Baltimore, but I already put something up on Facebook and I don't feel like repeating myself.  I will say, however, that this article nails what I think pretty well.

I am blogging instead, because something I want to dig a little deeper into a passing thought.  My experiences in Iraq have turned me off the political parties (and the echo chamber of television news) pretty bad.

I like to call myself an independent. I believe I'm focused more on solutions...in public affairs we discussed evidence-based public policy, and I'm all for that.  I turned away from the political parties because I think they are so caught up in their rhetoric, their worldview, and promoting certain ideologies that they've lost touch with the real world and no longer represent the average American.

I can go into long explanations on the reasons why, but that would take too long and I don't have any good solutions to offer.

I could discuss this with almost any topic, but this is about my experiences in Iraq, so I'll stick with that.

It felt like both parties were trying to make Iraq a Vietnam II.  The same rhetoric, the same competing world views.  "Stay the course".  "Why keep losing American lives needlessly?"  "Violence begets violence, you can never win if you resort to violence" "We have to fight terrorists with overwhelming force"

Each statement is packed with all sorts of assumptions and beliefs.  Again, it would take too long to address them all.  Let me start with a few:

"Stay the course" - this goes back to the belief that we won every single battle in Vietnam but lost the war.  Why?  Because the American people lost the will to keep fighting.  If we had just stuck with it, we could have won.

From what I've read, there is *some* evidence for this.  The North Vietnamese lost a lot of people in the Tet Offensive.  But I don't think we lost because we 'were betrayed at home'.  We lost because of bad leadership.  We lost because our leaders lost credibility.  The American people did not believe there was a viable plan, they felt we were stuck in a quagmire, and there was no real counterargument.  To bring this back to Iraq - "Stay the course" was a stupid leadership strategy.  Especially when any soldier over there could see that we were playing 'whack a  mole', losing areas as soon as we left.  The Iraq forces were a joke, and the great plan involved ignoring their weaknesses in order to prop them up and get the hell out.  The surge, as well as the changes in strategy, all constituted changes that should have been done even earlier.  And I think could have, if leadership wasn't stuck in a bubble and unwilling to consider alternatives.

"Violence begets violence, and never wins" - this was something I used to agree with, actually.  It made sense - you hit me, I get angry and hit you back.  We wind up starting a personal feud.  Heck, maybe it even grows to be a family feud.  Or a tribal one.  Or even national.  But I heard so many people use that argument to claim that the situation in Iraq was hopeless.  That there was nothing we could do.  That we should just cut our losses and leave.  Now, this may be hard to convince people of when we're back in Iraq again...but that is BS.  Let's start at a macro level.  If violence didn't appear to work, people would have stopped fighting millenia ago.  Don't get me wrong - I think it's sad to lose any culture, I think every different culture offers new insights into what it means to be human.  New ideas to play with.  I think it's sad for any culture to really die out.  But the modern world was created, in part, by the violence of the past.  Tribal migrations that displaced others.  These things are so far in the past, now, that it's hard to relate to the losses involved...but do you think the Duke of Normandy, if he knew what the history of England would be, would think invading England was a bad idea? This world view is the kind of thing that appeals to people who already believe, and will be completely ignored by the ones who don't.

I think what sticks in my craw, here, is the belief that violence never wins. On a personal level, I still kind of agree...but I didn't think the situation in Iraq was hopeless.  I do think there are situations where an army, with good strategy and good leadership, can make a difference.  I feel like pretending that isn't so actually makes it harder to be effective, because your refusal to understand and learn about warfare leaves you vulnerable to the ones who don't.  The issue, to me, was not that we were doomed to failure.  It was that the horrible decisions made by people who were supposed to know better had very real, and deadly, consequences.

Even worse...we had invaded a country, disrupted the established order, let loose chaos and violence...and then the people who believed this felt that the only answer was to abandon everything.  I find myself struggling to explain why this was so horrifying to me, so here's another way of putting it -

One of the articles I read discussed the viewpoints of Iraqis in a town that US forces repeatedly had cleared.  To them, the real crime was when we came in, cleared out the bad guys and then left.  Why?  Because the bad guys came back, and they killed anyone they thought collaborated with us.  And the next time we came around, there was no reason to believe we were there to stay, or that they wouldn't face threats from the bad guys as soon as we left again.

And these were bad guys.  This wasn't some nice little insurgency where the Iraqis were all working together to oust the evil imperialists.  The Iraqis were not rejoicing when we left, and welcoming back the insurgents with open arms.  (Or not everywhere, at least.  Obviously they had supporters and bases.)  This was Iraqis who were terrified of what the insurgents would do to them if they didn't go along.

I don't know if I could have morally supported us in Iraq, if we had been facing the Iraqi equivalent of a George Washington.  But all too often the ones we were fighting acted more like gangs.

Which brings me to Baltimore.  Since this has gotten long, I'll go into that in Part II.

Iraq

I'd told myself I wasn't going to write about Iraq.

Honest.

I'd spent over three years thinking about the place, blogging, searching for answers...

And one of the reasons I stopped was that I was beginning to feel like an armchair quarterback.  I wasn't the one out there making the call.  And it started to feel silly to think my posts would make much of a difference.  (And if I'm wrong, and you want to read more from me, then please put a little something in the tip jar I've added.  This is not my full time job and it'd be nice to know my  hobby means something.)

Despite my original inclination, I decided to type up a blog post anyway.  There are a lot of good articles out there discussing the situation.  Some not so good ones as well.  I think you all can read them the same as I can.  What I would like to point out is that the people arguing for intervention seem to believe they are playing a game like risk.  Move one colored square here, take this spot, try to keep a Shiite crescent from developing or war between Saudis and Iranians, or what-have-you.

Very realpolitik.  Very strategic.

Only thing missing is this - people are not little colored squares that you can move around at will.

The Iraqis deserve to be more than just victims of some geopolitical upheaval.

And for Americans, the past decade has left practically NO appetite for further involvement. 

I haven't heard a single argument from the ones suggesting involvement that addresses the fact that some of the exact same thinking has left us weaker as a nation.

We have less credibility.  Less capacity to exert our influence.  Less support from our own people.

If we were to get involved, how do we know we won't just overreact, then give up and pull out and wind up even worse off than before?  Or underreact, do too little, and look even weaker?


Why won't we wind up in the same situation seven years later?