The news offers more than the usual opportunities for optimism and pessimism today, usually within the same stories. Optimism allows for a brighter outlook on the future; pessimism tends to minimize the risk of disappointment. When given the choice, in the short to medium term, it is more pleasant to take an optimistic view, but when your money is involved, it is more prudent to take th pessimistic view. In the long term it is always better to take an optimistic position since the alternative is nihilism.
With those provisos, here is an SW rundown of some disparate topics of interest, with an optimistic and a pessimist read:
The War in Iraq:
The prevailing wisdom is pessimism rules. Most commentators expect the surge to fail, and the recent behavior of the Iraqi government suggests that expecting them to "get their act together" and actually govern for the benefit of the entire nation is a fool's hope. The most pessimistic view is that the surge fails, the Congress and Executive come to an agreement to abandon the field and the terrorists win, with all the catastrophic results that will flow from our defeat.
However, reasons for optimism are two fold. First, the surge may actually work. There is significant progress being made in Anbar province and Diyala, where al Qaeda has been making their last stands in Iraq. Admittedly, this is a long shot, as Ralph Peters points out:
Gen. Petraeus may pull this off - if the let's-take-a-long-vacation Iraqis can get their act together. Should he do so, he'll deserve a place in the history books as one of the all-time greatest military turn-around artists: By historical standards, he'll have less than a third of the troops he needs, even after the surge is complete.
The second reason for optimism is that even if the surge fails in its political objective, ie establishing conditions whereby the Iraqi government makes the difficult political decisions necessary to end the sectarian estrangement, thereby ending the support for the insurgency, both Democratic realists and Republican strategists have a nidus of a plan which any future administration can use as an ongoing foundation for the war against Islamic fascism. Westhawk, a Milblog favorite, describes a plan (based on a post by Bing West at the Small Wars Journal Blog) :
Bing West and a ‘bottom-up’ approach
Mr. West’s post at SWJ suggests a possible strategy that might emerge after the September “blowup” in Washington: a decentralized, “bottom-up” approach wherein American advisors work exclusively with local security units (the one part of the security equation that seems to work), while ignoring the dysfunctional central government (which doesn’t work).
The U.S. military could use the relationships it has already established with the tribes in Anbar and with a wide variety of Iraqi soldiers and police to establish security on a decentralized basis. The national government, such as it is, would have to fend for itself. If the U.S. gave up on defending the central government, while U.S. forces shifted their attention to a local advisory effort, conventional U.S. forces might be able to pull back from their own patrolling. It would not matter that much what would happen to the central government if the U.S. was able to increase its influence in the provinces. This approach, as chaotic as it might seem, might offer a path to a stable sectarian partition of Iraq, one of the few stable end-state possibilities predicted last January by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
An additional reason for optimism is that the leading Democratic candidate already seems to have embraced this plan "B", which means that success or failure of the surge will be less significant in the longer term than many expect:
Asked in Red Oak how she would disengage from Iraq, she gave a precise, nuanced and up-to-the-minute answer: Withdraw the troops from the areas of sectarian conflict like Baghdad, keep a small force fighting al-Qaeda in al-Anbar province, move some troops to the Turkish border, protect the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and other civilian facilities, maintain a special-operations capability. And then, instead of the usual lip service to training Iraqi forces, she said, "We may also leave some forces to help train the Iraqis if there seems a chance this Iraqi government will get any better. But I'm doubtful about that."
My assessment: Guarded Optimism
Israel and its neighbors:
Reasons for optimism are always hard to find in this area of the world. The MSM work overtime, as do our Diplomats, to couch every millimeter step forward as a sign of the coming thaw and the news today is no exception:
Arab League drops conditions on talks in Israel
The Arab League has dropped its preconditions to sending a delegation to Israel to discuss the Arab Peace Initiative, Israeli diplomatic officials said Thursday. It had considered demanding that Israel first agree to stop building the security barrier and that the IDF withdraw to the September 2000 lines, they said.
An Arab League delegation is expected in Israel within the next few weeks, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Thursday, following talks in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
"I do believe that the Arab world, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is important," she said. "It can support the process, it can give Israel a political horizon, and it can help the Palestinians make further progress when it comes to future meetings between Israel and the Palestinians."
Livni said the planned meeting in Jerusalem would be historic, marking the first time Israel would have formal discussions with the 22-member.
The most optimistic assessment is that the Sunni Arab League has become so alarmed by the growth of Sunni terrorism (al Qaeda) and Iranian Shia muscle flexing that it is willing to treat with the Zionist anathema. Compared to the well established tendency of the Arab World to favor all parts of the Ummah, including the most radical and intolerant, over anyone not part of the Dar al Islam, the upcoming meetings offer a particularly thin reed upon which to base any optimism, and the weakness of the Israeli government and the pressure for Israeli concessions from the American State Department do not offer much reason for optimism either; relaxing Israeli controls over the West Bank and Gaza inexorably leads to Israeli civilian casualties which tend to put a crimp in good feelings toward the "Peace process". The Palestinians consistently choose the least positive response and remain still so addicted to hatred that they have even mutilated Mickey Mouse (and have not, despite their protestations, decided to take this particular hate off the air.) Nonetheless, from even less fertile ground have such "optimistic" disasters as Oslo sprung.
On the other hand, reasons for pessimism always abound in the Middle East and pessimistic expectations are almost always rewarded. Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas have been arming and re-arming, preparing for the next war with Israel, scheduled for this summer. The Israeli government is paralyzed by its leadership vacuum (is there any leader more deserving of the label of Narcissist for placing his own short term gain above the needs of his country that Ehud Olmert?) The reasons for pessimism offer such a long list that it is impossible to do them justice.
My assessment: Pessimism is the heavy favorite with Optimism going off as a 50:1 long-shot.
Our political discourse:
The reasons for pessimism are well known; simply extrapolate from the present. The tendency of the Blogosphere to reward more extreme rhetoric and positions (the combination of preaching to the choir and excommunicating dissenters guarantees that orthodoxy will move toward the extremes), mirrored by the fading MSM tendency to do the same in order to hold onto their failing audience share, supports the idea that polarization and vituperation will continue to replace respectful discourse.
However, there are some good reasons to expect an improvement in the medium term and in the next Presidential election season. Here I will offer just three reasons for optimism.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front runner, is a smart woman who knows that for her to descend into shrillness on a National Stage would be the kiss of death for her candidacy. She may have no trouble pandering to the base and throwing them red meat from time to time, but once she has secured the nomination she will find that there are compelling incentives for her presenting herself as a reasonable sounding candidate. (I think that "reasonable sounding" is her default position in any case; she often sounds shrill but I think that happens when she is trying to artificially fire up the crowd; Bill pandered and played the crowd effortlessly, but it does not suit her temperament or come naturally to Hillary.)
On the Republican side, all candidates are currently displaying a reasoned sound. Rudy Giuliani has been my favorite based on his turn around in New York even before his 9/11 heroics and has the potential for treating politics as a gladiatorial contest but it is unclear if he has invested his passion in the race for the White House. Mitt Romney shows himself to be more impressive the closer one looks. He has built a grass roots organization geared to the long struggle for the nomination, is telegenic, extremely bright, and has already shown he can talk to and work with Northeastern liberals. That is a powerful combination and by all accounts, and to all appearances thus far, he knows how to slip in the stiletto without the victim feeling any pain until they have already been dispatched. As a bonus, perhaps the Romneys can begin a trend (from Drudge today):
Romney's wife, Ann, who converted to the Mormon Church before they were married, is also interviewed. When asked whether they broke the strict church rule against premarital sex, Romney says, "No, I'm sorry, we do not get into those things," but still managed to blurt out "The answer is no," before ending that line of questioning.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a Presidential election without having to know about our candidate's sexual lives, underwear habits, and sundry other extraneous information which fails under the heading of "too much information"? I understand that the Romneys answered the question in the breech but maybe it is a start on the road to civility.
Finally, in terms of our political discourse: no matter who gains the Republican nomination, it will not be George W. Bush.
My assessment: Optimism abounds!
Finally, to the key question of the War between civilization and its greatest expression, liberal democracy, versus the twin allied scourges of leftist and Islamist, there are reasons for hope and for pessimism.
An outright defeat (surrender) in Iraq with an American withdrawal from the field will strengthen the forces of fascism around the globe. The primary significance, that the United States lacks the Will to win a fight with vicious, amoral, sadistic killers will reverberate. The likelihood of a true paradigm breaking WMD attack from Islamic terrorist will increase, anxiety and fear will endanger our economic advances, and societies facing the prospects of greater uncertainty and terror will regress and default to less democratic functioning. The anomie nurtured in the Middle East will spread to infect other nations in the gap and eventually start to degrade conditions in the newly developed countries that are currently making a successful transition to the core. A dystopian future for all portends.
The optimistic case is made quite capably by Tom Barnett (who you should be reading every day in any event):
What Steve and I are trying to do with Enterra is--in our opinion and that of the unnamed-but-famous big investors stepping up behind us--make a generational leap-frogging occur in our systemic resilience.
But even what we're doing, assuming we pull it off, is but one of several next steps for our systems, nets, and infrastructure as a whole. This will be a long and fascinating journey, and one of the most important guides we can have for that journey is a book like John's--admittedly a very black-hat, worst-casing sort of vision for warfare waged against us.
I believe that warfare will unfold, and I believe we'll handle it in stride--not casually or without losses, but "in stride" in terms of globalization's continued successful march. Remember, those hard-scrabble types in covered wagons this time are Indians and Chinese and Filipinos (all over our boat) and so on. These people are tough, they're way smart, and they don't f--king give up easily.
War will be with us for the foreseeable future. The Arab world will, or will not, join in the march toward modernity and the future. In 10-15 years, whatever they decide will be irrelevant to us. If they join, it can only help; we need all the human capital we can find. If the do not join, they will be walled in (out?) and win the fate of Fortunado in The Cask of Amontillado.
My assessment: Long term, I'm with Tom; however, getting there without too much pain is all the problem.
Overall, I remain optimistic, with greater optimsim the further out I look. I highly recommend the approach.
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