ShrinkWrapped

August Optimism

I am planning to cut down on my blogging in August, the traditional month for Psychoanalytic vacations.  My original plan was to eschew blogging completely, both because after two and a half years of blogging five days a week I could use a break to refresh myself, and because August is shaping up to be a very busy time.  However, I do plan on posting from time to time, including a number of reviews of books that I have been reading or plan to read in August.  (Blogging less = reading more.) 

With that preamble I thought I would end July on a hopeful note.  By now the idea that we might actually win the war in Iraq has been insinuating itself into the zeitgeist.  The left leaning media and the Democratic party are rather far out on a limb that depends on an Iraq defeat, so this should be an entertaining story in the fall when General Petraeus finally reports on our progress.  When I wrote about the surge working in my post yesterday, I made the comment that:

Of course, the surge could still fail utterly, and we may yet abandon Iraq to its fate unceremoniously, but at the moment the tide is running against al Qaeda. Iran has some powerful interests in keeping the Shia under control and the Sunnis have an even greater investment in stability (since they would lose any civil war that ensues from an American withdrawal.)

I thought I would elaborate a bit and zoom out to look at the greater Middle Easts and how some recent developments offer grounds for guarded optimism.

The path to disaster is well marked:  In brief, radical Persian millennialism trumps their mercantile aspirations, leading to a ramping up of rhetorical and military support for the terrorists in Iraq (Sunni and Shia) and managing to provoke a military response from the United States.  Following an American attack, the level of violence in Iraq increases exponentially, Congress forces a draw down and the entire gulf descends into chaos.  That is an outcome that some in Iran/Iraq fervently desire, but is unlikely any time soon.

The more optimistic scenario involves a successful surge.  As Iraq becomes more stable and the Iraqis more able to maintain security, and the Iranians continue to show evidence of difficulty in building a bomb, the entire region continues the transition, well under way, from a war footing to peace time prosperity.

The Surge, the Times, the Democrats, and Success

A New York Times Op-Ed today shows that the progress being made in Iraq by the surge has become so marked that it can no longer be completely hidden.  The piece is by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the liberal Brookings Institution, and expresses some surprise that the surge could actually work:

A War We Just Might Win

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

The observations will only surprise those who gain much of their information form the MSM; Iraq as a failure and quagmire, completely ignoring the surge, has been the conventional wisdom in the MSM for some time now and nothing as meager as reality has affected that narrative.  Whether such a narrative can be sustained in the face of the surge is likely to be determinative of the outcome of the war. 

John Hinderaker voices a concern many supporters of the surge feel:

Know Your Enemies

With all the attention on the Iraqi front in the war against radical Islam, it is all too easy to lose sight of exactly who we are fighting, or more properly, who is currently waging war against us.  This suits the needs of the anti-war cohort who have their own complicated motives for seeking to undermine our efforts in Iraq, ranging from those on the far left who actively seek an American defeat (to discredit American "imperialism") to those who cynically see an American failure as being their path to power in the 2008 elections, to those who honestly understand the war in Iraq as an error and an impossibility.  By depicting Iraq as a separate and unique war dissociated form the greater war of radical Islam against the West, abandoning the front in Iraq is held to be inconsequential to the overall war (which, in any event, is also denied by those who oppose our efforts.)

Robert Tracinski addresses some of these questions in his article today at Real Clear Politics, The Intellectual Stakes of the Iraq War:

... it is important at this moment to understand exactly what is at stake, and why it is vital to persist and win in Iraq--no matter what else the United States does.

Most commentators on the right have argued, correctly, that an American retreat in Iraq would embolden our enemies by validating their conviction that America is psychologically weak and can be driven from any conflict by a few months' or years' worth of mayhem and car bombings. I will expand on that argument in part two of this article. But what I think is less well recognized is the intellectual effect of a repudiation of the Iraq War. A withdrawal from Iraq would constitute a national disavowal of the principles used to justify the war--yet these include vital principles that are indispensable for the wider battle against radical Islam.

The crucial context for the war in Iraq is that it is part of a wider conflict against radical Islam, and any recommendation for what should be done in Iraq should be judged by the standard: will it make that wider war harder or easier to fight?

Tracinski does an excellent job of explaining some of the stakes involved and explicating the rationale for our involvement in Iraq and its part in the greater war, but his conclusion is incomplete and problematic:

Politicians and the Press

My Psychiatric Residency training was centered around Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City.  Bellevue is the oldest public hospital in America and has a well deserved reputation as providing its young Medical Students with the type of diversity of clinical experiences that can be found at very few other Psychiatric hospitals.  Anyone who has spent their time in the Bellevue Psych Emergency Room has been through the Psychiatric crucible; a Bellevue/NYU graduate will almost never see anything in their post-graduate work that will intimidate them.  They have seen the most violent, most psychotic, most drug-toxic patients and have learned how to cope and how to handle even the most difficult of situations.

The fact is that this is not unique to Psychiatry and Bellevue.  In every field there are situations that test one's mettle and those who face the most intense difficulties and overcome them are immeasurably strengthened by the experience. 

Politicians face their own tests and those placed under the most intense glare and survive are the better for it.  This brings us to a tale of two politicians.

Rudolph Giuliani and Eliot Spitzer both used their positions in law enforcement to leverage their way to high level elective office and to national prominence.  Both were widely considered to be relatively noxious, grandstanding prosecutors, not above using the threat of prosecution and humiliation to bend useful political targets to their own ends. 

Giuliani had a penchant for going after high profile Wall Street barons, like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, for crimes that were nearly institutionalized parts of Wall Street culture.  Dragging out his white collar victims in handcuffs in front of TV cameras was a favorite tactic of Giuliani and one of the reasons so many were concerned about his authoritarian tendencies.  By going after wealthy Wall Street types who garnered little support from most New Yorkers, Giuliani was able to bolster his populist bona fides; when he ran against David Dinkins, the Democratic homage to mediocrity and machine politics, Giuliani won the Mayoralty of the "ungovernable" city of New York and had his chance to turn around the fortunes of our city.  He succeeded in turning around New York my support for him is based more on his pre-9/11 accomlishments than his 9/11 leadership.

Eliot Spitzer apparently studied Giuliani's playbook when he was elected Attorney General in 1998.

Making Peace

There are two ways that warring parties can come to terms with each other and make Peace.  The first and clearest occurs when one party loses the war and the other party wins.  This can happen acutely as the result of overt warfare, as with the Allied victory and the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers ending WWII.   It can also happen as the end product of a long, more indolent process of cold war; the United States defeated the Soviet Union when the Soviets realized that they could no longer sustain the fight against the United States and essentially agreed to end the war.  In both cases, one enemy recognized (or tacitly accepted) they had lost and as a result Peace ensued.

When a long war takes place and neither party loses, the only other option is for the war to continue until both parties are sick and tired enough of the war to arrive at an armistice, a cessation of hostilities.  In the best case scenario, such an armistice eventually evolves into a true Peace, with all that is implied by that formulation.  In the worst case, the armistice lasts for some time before it fails and warfare breaks out anew.

There are two important corollaries to this having to do with the necessity of preparing the populations of the combatants for Peace after they have spent some indeterminate number of years at war. 

War is a societal trauma and as such, as I described in my post on Terror and Societal Regression, when a country is traumatized, there is a tendency toward societal regression.  This leads to the failure of higher order cognition in favor of more primitive cognitive and psychological mechanisms:

Societies, as highly complex structures, can regress from their optimal functioning in the face of a trauma.  The American Psychoanalytic Association panel considered just this question, and while their focus was on various traumatized societies (Albania, after Hoxha, and Argentina, after the military coup of 1976 and the ensuing suppression of the left, were of special interest) there is obvious relevance for America, post 9/11.

How the MSM Fails the Democrats

I have written quite often about the failures of the MSM which have been most marked since they abandoned any attempt to achieve objectivity in the service of a partisan agenda, a trend that accelerated after the election of George W. Bush and our involvement in what was formerly known as the "Global War on Terror."  I recognize that some of my resentment comes from feeling betrayed by the MSM organs that I once saw as striving to tell "all the news that's fit to print" and some of my resentment relates to finding the cherry picking done by the MSM to be dishonorable and harmful to our nation's interests.

There is, however, yet another way in which our MSM have failed us, and this threatens to have powerful repercussions once the next President's honeymoon has ended.

The New York Times has a small article by  Adam Nossiter on the front page of its web site today.  In Standing Against the War, but Unsure How to End It, he reports on a Minnesota Congressional District that tossed out a Republican in the last election in favor of a Democrat who vowed to end the war in Iraq:

Tim Walz, the new Democratic congressman from the First District here, has made tough statements, voted with his party for withdrawal and emerged as a leader among the Democratic freshmen who owe their November triumphs to weariness with the war.

It is not at all surprising to read the comment from the quoted constituents that Iraq is a civil war, Iraq is in chaos, Iraq is a quagmire, and all the typical rather empty memes that have been so successfully established in the public mind as the image of authenticity in relation to our war.  Also unsurprsing, nowhere in the article does the reporter comment or elicit a comment that questions such conventional wisdom about Iraq.  The article is written as if the surge never existed, let alone acknowledging that there are many promising signs of progress on the streets and in the villages and cities of Iraq.  As a result, in the absence of any apparent awareness that conditions have shifted in Iraq in the last few months, a perplexing and potentially crippling problem forfends.

Congressman Walz may be starting to notice the problem:

Reaping the Harvest

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

Otto von Bismarck

One of the ways our freedoms have been preserved has been a direct result of the inherent tension between the branches of government and between the parties.  A tri-partite government will naturally have significant tension between the branches, and the tension will wax and wane in relation to the kinds of problems facing the Nation.  During times of war, the executive will accumulate significant power and when the immediate thereat has diminished, the legislative and judiciary will naturally assert their prerogatives and act in ways to diminish the power of the executive.  This is effectively a built-in and quite necessary structural impediment to tyranny.

One outgrowth of this natural tension is reflected in the Bismarck quote.  Legislators and the Executive, even when there is significant personal animus, must find ways to work together if they want to enact any meaningful legislation.  Unfortunately, we are currently facing a perfect storm of governmental animus, fecklessness, and incompetence.  If we were still living in the roaring 90s, with a Dow heading toward 25,000, history at an end, and the Charmer in Chief in the White House, this would not be cause for concern.  After all, the split government of the 90s, despite the rancor in Washington, did minimal damage to the country's institutions and if not for 9/11 would have left a legacy of exuberant economic activity amid attempts to diminish some of the worst excesses of government, marred by Republican over-reach in misguided attempts to fashion impeachable offenses out of moral laxity. 

Our current circumstances are far more parlous.  We have a sizable investment in lives and money at risk in the Middle East, a growing movement of Nihilistic sadists marching under the banner of Islam, severe weakness in the elite institutions of democracy, and a pace of empowerment of the worst among us that is accelerating.   This is a poor time to be quarreling about ephemera in Washington, yet the leadership in Congress seem more than content to substitute venom for accomplishment.

Mick Stockinger wrote a very insightful piece on Saturday that underlines the danger of the Democrat's approach to governance.  The fact that the Republicans practiced the art of demonization in the 1990s should not blind us to the fact that while this time honored approach may be business as usual for Washington, it is particularly dangerous now:

The Dangerous Appeal of Simplicity

In my last two posts I focused on the tendency of ideologues, especially on the Left, to use splitting to facilitate their arguments (in the sense that "our" side is always all-right and "their" side is always all-wrong) and the way the discussion of the recent NIE has been side tracked by ephemera.  Both of these aspects come together in a post by Arianna Huffington today (linked at Real Clear Politics.)  In her post, In the Name of Objectivity, Media Clouds the Reality of Terror Report, Huffington decries the tendency of the MSM to offer balance when it is so obvious that there is no balance; rather she sees indisputable facts:

Here we go again. Another devastating report being spun as a mixed bag -- with the spin dutifully echoed by the media. Another administration brain tumor being "offset" by shiny hair.

This time it's the new National Intelligence Estimate report on the threat of terrorist violence against America that is being given the utterly ludicrous "on the one hand... and on the other hand" treatment.

A prime example of this came on AC 360, where Anderson Cooper reported that "both sides in the Iraq debate are spinning [the NIE] to support their case." To prove his point, he rolled a video clip of Bush making the case for staying the course in Iraq. Back on camera, he said, "The Democrats, of course, see it differently."

Huffington is troubled by the fact that the CNN report offered three different and distinct points of view on the NIE.  One view (Michael Ware) has it that al Qaeda is a minimal presence in Iraq and the entire venture is misguided.  Another view (Peter Bergen) has it that while al Qaeda represents a small number in absolute terms, they have had a disproportionate effect by virtue of their ability to inflict mass casualty attacks and facilitate sectarian conflict.   The third view (retired U.S. General David Grange), a bit of an amalgam, holds that by attracting Jihadis to Iraq we are in a better position to confront and kill them, even while the war has "multiplied" the number of terrorists.

The situation in Iraq, of course, is extremely complex and multi-faceted and there are elements that support each position.  However, Arianna can not tolerate the ambiguity and uncertainty that such complexity produces:

Diagnosing the Left

It is always problematic to attempt to diagnose populations or political opponents using Psychiatric nomenclature; at the same time, it is extremely tempting.  Most of us imagine our ideas to be reality based and rational.  As such, when people disagree with us and appear to use arguments that fail to reach a threshold of cogency, it is all too easy to consider them psychologically disordered. 

It seems to me that the primary purpose of any such diagnostic efforts should be to offer ways to combat what one sees as dangerous or distorted argumentation. 

As an example, I have referred to Post-Modernism and Political Correctness as aspects of a thought disorder.  Both PM, and its derivative PC, construct an illogical scaffolding that interferes with an accurate perception of reality.   What emerges from this is the knowledge that for the PM/PC adherent, their beliefs are inseparable from their sense of themselves and are almost never amenable to logical debate.  The only real hope of making a mutative interpretation would be to develop a relationship with the person which will enable them to consider your arguments and your facts without immediately dismissing you as an evil enemy.  This is easier said than done.

As a caveat, I would add that I have much less qualms about diagnosing our enemies and I think it remains important to differentiate enemies from opponents.  Islamists want to kill me; they are my enemies.  Most leftists and liberals are opponents; they may want to institute policies that I believe will empower the Islamists but their goal is not to kill me.  This may make them "useful idiots" but does not make them enemies.

There is also a cohort, rather larger than generates comfort, of those on the Left, whose anger and distaste for America and the West too easily slips into overt anti-Americanism.  Many of these people also express a very thinly disguised anti-Semitism.  They tend to hate free markets and the chaotic individualism of America, and prefer collectivism to such an extent that they are de facto enemies of the West.

That being said, two recent efforts to offer diagnoses of our enemies are worth consideration.

The Non-Sense Debate Over the NIE

The newly released NIE is being used by both sides of the Iraq War debate to support their positions.  The anti-war side latches on to the conclusion that al Qaeda is stronger today than yesterday to "prove" that the war has been a mistake.  The supporters of the war use the NIE to show that al Qaeda is on the run and repeat the time worn meme that we need to fight them there or we will have to fight them here.  This debate, or argument, or shouting match, is filled with sound and fury but signifies very little.  In point of fact, al Qaeda was always going to grow stronger in the long run no matter how we responded to 9/11.

There are several points that must be kept in mind when debating whether our responses to 9/11 have worsened the terror threat or lessened the threat.  The worst point is that, again, almost nothing we have done or could do will meaningfully lessen the terror threat long term, until we decide to treat the threat as an existential threat, a point I will return to.

Jihadi extremism is a growing ideology.  Sunni extremism and Shia extremism are merely different manifestations of an underlying supremacist ideology which has grown in response to the failures of the Muslim world in the face of modernity.  Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda in Iraq are all different franchises and brand names.  Franchises are successful when there are markets for their products, consumers, and workers to support the enterprise.  Financial support, an eager population ready to consume the product, and an army of willing workers are all required for a franchise to thrive.  Al Qaeda, the McDonald's of Islamism, and Hezbollah, the Burger King of Islamism, have been growing their franchises for years.  It is only post-9/11 that the West has begun to offer alternatives.  Unfortunately, the alternatives the West offers are completely incompatible with the cultures in which we are attempting to gain market share.  We offer Sushi (democracy backed by the US military) and Tofu burgers (Western "soft" power) and as a result find few takers.

The Muslim world contains a combustible mix that is amenable to Jihad and inimical to modern liberal capitalist democracy.  There is an extremely large cohort of young men with very little opportunity to achieve status, huge sums of money that have been generated by their parasitic perch on the primary source of the world's energy supplies, a culture that supports a supremacist ideology, and an information environment that facilitates the spread of Jihad propaganda.

Richard Fernandez links to an important analysis of Jihad information startegy: