Author: John

Impeachment as Soulcraft

~ John ~ Leave a comment

Well, it’s all over but the shouting.  And it turns out that shouting is all it would ever be.

In the view of many, impeachment was a fool’s errand, useless or worse, further emboldening the president, forcing his party to demonstrate the depth of its feckless fealty, and supercharging our polar politics to the point of electrocution.  With a result so starkly bleak, and so quixotically foretold, what can we possibly have gained?

Surely not knowledge.  Everything we saw on display we knew, or should have known, already.  Our politics are marketed so precisely as mold to us like second skins, which once worn, are impossible to peel.  As a result our democracy, once a contest of ideas, is increasingly one of identities.  The political implications of this are ruthless and dire.  When majority rule is no longer a matter of persuasion but of population, its ideal type is no longer Athens – it is Rwanda.

So there is some symmetry to the warring tribes ringed around the pugilists of the impeachment trial. But as I listened to them – and to the nightly reverberations from MSNBC, CNN and Fox – of course I heard different versions of the facts: but beyond that, contrasting stories about America.  Around the turn of the millennium, Eric Foner published “The Story of American Freedom,” which traced the concept from the days when colonists yearning for “freedom” described their relationship to Britain as “slavery” even though they themselves owned slaves.  Freedom has always been a contested, crooked, broken thread weaving through the fabric of American history. 

In the post-World-War-II era, two divided paradigms of freedom have dominated our politics: the conservative ideas of freedom as free enterprise and American international supremacy, and the liberal ideas of political liberalization, civil rights, and economic justice.  These paradigms have been our yin and yang, always in contention, sometimes — at our moments of greatest achievement — in alignment, but never truly at war.  Until, perhaps, today.

Today Republicans openly embrace an authoritarian leader and a lockstep party structure on the grounds that it is good for the short-term economy.  They champion native-born privilege at the expense of the historic immigrant narrative, thus reserving American freedom as a privilege for its citizens only and sacrificing the universalistic concept of America as an idea.  They enable and excuse a president who admires and emulates dictators.

Democrats, in turn, champion a politics of identity that emphasizes difference over unity, regulation over opportunity, centralization over autonomy, taxation over economic liberalization.  The farther Donald Trump moves to the right, the American left moves in equal and opposite reaction.  The more conservatives fuel economic inequality, the more Democrats demand a wealth tax.

And between them, a small group of civil servants.  Members of the national security establishment, the diplomatic corps, the administration itself.  Professionals who have served the nation under Democrats and Republicans, and who have seen how these ideas grind together where the rubber meets the road.   Who know that, to keep the struggle from turning into complete chaos, there are boundaries to be respected.  Rules of law.  Norms of integrity.  Standards of practice.  And if these are lost, so are we.  They stood up and objected to Trump’s Ukraine dealings, not out of political calculus, or because they thought they could win.  But because they had to.  Because they knew that the boundaries were at stake, and if they didn’t defend them, nobody would.  I supported impeachment because I stand with them. 

We are entering a phase of our history in which there will be less and less middle ground.  I deeply value free enterprise and individual autonomy.  But if forced to choose, I value democracy and justice more.  And if forced to stand up and be counted, I will do so, because the alternative is to accede to the twilight of authoritarianism that is eclipsing the globe, country by country and year by year, as we speak.   

The impeachment trial, and the election this fall, are ultimately about those differing ideas of freedom.  The Senate ultimately succumbed to the idea that whether presidents should be subject to rule of law and justice is now a question open for debate, to be decided by the electorate.  American voters will be asked the question again and again, through the primaries and the general election.  I don’t think there’s any such thing as asking the question too often right now.  If the current trends continue, we may miss it.

War by Accident

~ John ~ 1 Comment

As the world sighs with relief that Iran’s counterstrike against Iraq’s Ain Al-Asad air force base appears to have ended the most recent cycle of US-Iran escalation, many are now confident that there will be no war between the two countries — because neither seems to want it. But the question arises – can a war start by accident?

Accidental events can certainly drive us to the brink of war – or away from it. Nobody intended Iran’s shootdown last week of the Ukrainian jetliner that claimed 176 innocent lives – and yet this accident was the direct result of the escalated tensions between our two countries. Iran’s retaliation for the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani appears to have been accidentally bloodless – the post-strike analysis shows that it was only through happenstance and evasive action by the Americans that deaths were avoided.

So we were good — and also lucky — enough to avoid going over the edge this time. Other episodes haven’t gone so well. A recent New York Times article mentions the 2016 debacle when 2 American gunboats accidentally strayed into Iranian waters and were captured by Soleimani’s Revolutionary Guards. The article also recounts the sorry state of US Naval readiness, leading up to two 2017 peacetime collisions that killed 17 sailors, and a 2018 Marine midair crash that killed another 6. Such accidents are bad enough. But under conditions of military escalation with casualties involving a hostile power, their consequences can be another thing altogether. In 1988, US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian jetliner, killing all passengers, over Iranian airspace during a period of international tension related to the Iran-Iraq war. In order to repair the damage from that episode, President Reagan, not commonly thought of as a weakling, was obliged to express “deep regret” and ultimately pay Iran $68 million in compensation. It is difficult to imagine our current president exerting the self-control necessary to pull that one off. After all, in his world, being American means never having to say you’re sorry.

It is much easier to imagine a scenario like that of February 15, 1898, when the USS Maine, docked in Havana harbor, struck a mine, exploded, and sank, killing all 260 officers and men. The ensuing public furor, abetted by the bellicose “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst, resulted in the Spanish-American War. Given how our current president reacts to the power of suggestion from the more extreme strands of conservative media today, the parallels are interesting indeed.

The contrary view to all this is that wars may result from miscalculation, but never from true accident. The Spanish-American War, on this view, was a happy little “blunder” that nicely satisfied American strategic goals. World War I may have been a mistake in its dimensions and consequences, but its fateful initial steps were all taken on purpose. As this thinking goes, nobody truly trips and falls into a war.

I wish it were so. Today, our weapons systems are so complex, and the windows of time within which decisions must be made are so infinitesimally short, that the possibilities of error are far greater than they were in the past. Cold War leaders understood and sought to control this risk with the advent of nuclear weapons. They developed elaborate, ceremonious protocols to protect against accidental launches, as well as layers of tactical bureaucracy to assess and evaluate threats, consider options, calibrate responses, and avoid false moves. It’s one of the business ends of the “deep state.” Unfortunately, we know how our current leader feels about all that. As a result, we are just a banana peel away from war.

Calmly to Armageddon

~ John ~ 1 Comment

With the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, people are anxiously debating whether the situation will spin out of control. It already has.

We talk about “spiraling conflict” and “escalation” as though, at a certain point, leaders simply lose their minds and start blindly pushing buttons. But that’s a false view: history offers a pageant of men marching calmly and rationally on to Armageddon. All it takes is the failure to think five, or ten, or fifteen moves ahead. If your decisions are too near-field, you will consider only the options visibly before you. Choosing one – in today’s world, usually the least bad one – will immediately present a new set of options, like the turns of a maze. If you proceed rationally choice-by-choice, or worse, on the belief that you must always turn one direction, you will soon hit a place where your choices narrow to none – the wall that forces you to turn around. And if the maze in question is a corridor down which your enemies are pursuing you, and you have been running with the confidence inspired by a grenade in your pocket, then when you hit that wall you will have no choice but to throw it, even if the shrapnel is likely to kill you too. 

The most famous example is World War I. A Serbian radical assassinated an Austrian Archduke, causing Austria to declare war on Serbia. Russia was obliged by treaty to defend Serbia and thus declared war on Austria. This provoked Germany to declare war on Russia and its ally, France. Germany invaded Belgium as part of its attack on France, obliging Britain to enter the war in defense of Belgium. In due course, Bulgaria, Romania, Japan, British colonies as far flung as Australia, and the US entered the war as well. In four years, 19 million people lost their lives, 21 million were wounded, and a worldwide influenza epidemic was killing millions more – results intended, surely, by nobody. Nor were the leaders war-mongering madmen or even, by contemporary accounts, particularly cheesed off. They were mostly just incompetent, bungling their way into global catastrophe.

Fast forward 102 years. After a time of ratcheting tensions, Iranian militia killed an American contractor in Iraq. So we ordered airstrikes against those Iranian militia and killed a bunch of them. Pro-Iranian militants then attacked our embassy in Baghdad. And Trump, according to reporting in today’s New York Times, chose the most extreme menu option his generals presented – and not the one they realistically wanted – assassinating the second most powerful man in Iran.

While everyone ponders what Iran will do next, here’s how this act has already transformed our strategic landscape. Soleimani’s work in fostering alliances with Shiite groups from Afghanistan to Yemen has put American troops and civilians at risk everywhere across the region. Since the killing, there have been major protests in Baghdad, with renewed efforts to approach the embassy. The State Department has ordered civilians to evacuate Iraq as a result of these tensions. Thousands of Shiites also demonstrated today in Islamabad, Pakistan, making an unsuccessful run at the US embassy, putting more American civilians at risk. The Sunni terrorist group al-Shabaab launched an attack on US troops in Kenya, killing three Americans. Although the timing may be coincidental given that Sunnis did not love Soleimani, it’s also possible that the assassination may be creating opportunistic alignments that bridge the most enduring chasm in the Middle East, between Sunni and Shiite, as they unite against a common enemy, the United States. 

This is in fact happening in Iraq, its government until last week deeply divided and unpopular, now riding a wave of universal anti-Americanism that has led to a parliamentary vote, supported by both sects, to expel US forces from the country. Recall that we had to rely on our military presence in Iraq to stabilize the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border after Trump’s surprise withdrawal of troops there. Were it not for our Iraqi bases, our military commanders would not have been able to salvage that presidential fiasco. If we are ordered out of Iraq, the Kurds, once betrayed by our withdrawal in Syria, will be fully and finally abandoned. They will have no choice but to ally with Russia and Assad against Turkey. Meanwhile, any efforts to combat the resurgence of ISIS in the region will likewise be abandoned, if they have not been already – the Defense Department announced today that it is “pausing” all operations against ISIS in Iraq and focusing solely on protection of US forces.

If the outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister approves Parliament’s withdrawal request — which he publicly supports – the US will have the choice of allowing all of these short-term consequences to become permanent. Iraq will then likely become a terrorist haven controlled by Iran-backed militias, as well as a haven for a resurgent ISIS in the north. Or, the US can defy Iraq’s expulsion, in which case we become an occupier in violation of international law. Did I mention that there are US battlefield nuclear weapons stationed just 50 miles from the Turkish-Syrian border, where ISIS fighters were allowed to escape from their prisons following the US Syrian pullout?

All of this is the best-case scenario, involving only a few known, self-inflicted consequences of our actions thus far, with Iran taking no retaliatory steps at all. If, as is virtually inevitable, Iran and/or its proxies retaliate and react through their interlocking series of alliances and rivalries, each following long-and short-term objectives that align and collide like little cluster bombs, then any policy-making decision-tree exercise explodes into a horrifying fireworks display.

And in charge of it all is Donald Trump. Not only is he incapable of the kind of long-range thinking required for survival in these times – he’s actively hostile to it. He tweets, and perhaps even believes, that no matter what blind alley he drags us down, we’ll be fine because he’s got nukes in his pocket.

I wrote after the Syria debacle that he needed to go. It is more urgently true today.