ShrinkWrapped

Psychological Attacks

In 1964 the American Psychiatric Association, in one of their more shameful acts, attacked the Republican candidate for the Presidency on Psychiatric grounds.

PsychBlogging and the Goldwater Rule

The Psychoanalysis of public figures, a subset of Applied Psychoanalysis, has a rather checkered history.  In 2004, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times on The Perils of Putting National Leaders on the Couch.  She described an occasion where Psychiatry was seriously misused:

In 1964, a few months before the presidential election, Fact magazine, now defunct, surveyed the membership of the American Psychiatric Association about the personality traits of Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee. The psychiatrists savaged Goldwater, calling him "warped," and a "paranoid schizophrenic" who harbored unconscious hatred of his Jewish father and endured rigid toilet training.

Such forays into applied psychoanalysis have not been immune to criticism. After the Fact survey, the psychiatric association issued the so-called Goldwater Rule, advising members that it is "unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion unless he/she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement."

In general, the Goldwater Rule is a smart guideline to follow for Mental Health writers, including bloggers. Exceptions occur and are no less shameful in the recent past than in the distant past:

There have been Psychiatric "hit jobs" performed on the current President, which purport to explain his policies and positions as resulting from his early experiences.  Justin Franks, MD, is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.  Needless to say, Franks has never interviewed the President let alone put him on the couch, yet his book takes extreme liberties with various published sources to skewer Bush. 

Porphyrogenitus, at Winds of Change, offers a useful reminder that such amateurish psychologizing can occur on the Right as well as on the Left:

Blogchair Psychoanalysis

Criticisms of these sort, blogchair psychoanalytics, are insipid and self-defeating regardless of who engages in them. They do nothing to advance the debate, and a lot to poison it. I mean, c'mon, who is fooling who here? Nobody is fooling anyone but themselves. People who think Obama or Reagan should have never been President don't do so because they're the product of alcoholic households or for any other psychoanalytic reason, and nobody who does think either were or are fine Presidents are going to be convinced otherwise by bogus arguments of this sort. The psychoanalitic deligitimization comes after already deciding they don't like their policies. It's never "you know, I really like what this guy's trying to accomplish and support his policies, but he's probably got this deep-seated mental disorder I attribute to him. He might be unfit for office by reason of crazy."

The article to which Porphyrogenitus linked was posted at the American Thinker blog. As far as I can tell, the article was not written by a Psychiatrist, which means that it is simultaneously less perceptive psychodynamically and less authoritative. The writer uses pop psychology memes to categorize the Presidents character and behavior. This would be foolish (and unethical) were it done by a professional; having a lay person write such an inane article is merely foolish.

There is a well understood tendency of those in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis to use the insights they gain in their daily life. This of course is one of the goals of treatment, the hard won attainment of insight which facilitates a widened and more free decision repertoire for the patient. However, many Patients use their insights, typically when the insight is primarily intellectual and has not yet produced character change, as a weapon with which to attack important people in their environment. It is not unusual to hear a patient complain that their significant other attacked them with something their therapist said in a session. “My husband's therapist told him that I am a selfish woman.” Whether or not the charge is accurate is irrelevant; it is meant as an attack and taken as such.

[It is also not unusual for our patients to use our comments as weapons; this typically requires some distortion in how a comment is understood since a good therapist rarely comments directly on the behavior or character of people who they know only through their patients. At other times our patients use others' voices as a weapon to attack us: “My husband said you aren't helping me.” It is sometimes hard to directly criticize and attack one's therapist.]

Whenever I decide to write an applied Psychoanalytic essay that concerns a living person, it is designed explicitly to illuminate weaknesses in their character that might be exploitable. I reserve such efforts for genuine enemies, like Ayman al Zawahiri, rather than political opponents like Barack Obama. We can, and should, oppose Barack Obama on his policies, which I believe are often foolish and occasionally dangerous, but we do ourselves and our arguments no favors when we attempt to hijack Psychology to pathologize our political opponents.

Societal Anxiety

Anciety comes in two basic forms. 

Mild anxiety warns us of danger; when it is appropriate, we refer to it as "Signal Anxiety." 

Higher levels of anxiety can overwhelm our coping mechanisms; when this happens we refer to it as "Traumatic Anxiety." 

Traumatic Anxiety also comes in two primary forms.

In an Anxiety Attack, an unrecognized trigger sets off the primitive "fight or flight" reaction.  Catecholamines flood the system, preparing the body for an emergency response.  When there is an identifiable threat, the person is primed for an appropriate reaction; when the threat is so poorly perceived as to be unconscious, the biochemical stress hormones have no way to be discharged and the anxiety builds until it is traumatic, overwhelming the mind's ability to cope.  Feelings of helplessness and impending doom often accompany such traumatic anxiety.  Usually Anxiety or Panic Attacks have a sudden onset as the unrecognized trigger evokes the Panic cascade: the release of stress hormones causes physical reactions that are then perceived as anxiety, which  sets off a positive reinforcement loop where the awareness of anxiety creates yet more anxiety that an Anxiety Attack is occurring.  The Attacks are generally fleeting and resolve within minutes. 

The second type of Traumatic Anxiety, often referred to as Strain Trauma, might better be thought of as a slow motion chronic Anxiety Attack.  In this case, the person is always feeling in danger from unknown and known sources.  The anxiety is relatively steady for a very long time until it starts to slowly escalate; it is often barely perceptible at first and it never dissipates.  In such situations the person tends to slowly regress to more primitive, ie immature, levels of coping.  Life itself becomes an arena for chronic feelings of helplessness and impending doom.  The disaster is always just around the corner.

What happens when a Society is under chronic duress of a kind that is poorly recognized by the majority?  As I have noted on many occasions, a stressed Society is likely to become a Regressed Society.  Feelings of impending doom and stories of our impending collapse are becoming more common.  Today, Mark Safranski discusses one such scenario and offers an partial explanation for how such a collapse could proceed:

An Interesting “Collapse” Hypothetical 

Free markets are generally efficient, so long as you do not expect them to automatically create public goods of a certain scale or be perfectly self-regulating. They require a scrupulously impartial rule of law in order to not become corrupted by abusive players seeking rents. Unfortunately, a scrupulously impartial rule of law is incompatible with technocracy, where expert administrators are granted arbitrary discretion without democratic accountability, the prevailing ethos in the EU supranational bureaucracy, to cite a real world example. The late, unlamented, Soviet nomenklatura would be another, more sinsiter, historical one.

The primary problem with the American political economy is that in the last 10-15 years, elite, moderately liberal technocrats have made common cause with the elite, moderately conservative rentiers of the financial and corporate world to form an incipient oligarchy. One sees their fellow Americans paternalistically as children. The other sees us as sheep to be sheared. It’s a common enough ground on which to unite and it is the reason you see a very liberal Democratic Obama administration and a Pelosi-Reid Congressional leadership counterintuitively putting corporate regulation in impenetrable shadows not seen since before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as if they were the minions of Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan.

Don’t expect mainstream Republicans in Congress to die on any hills fighting for the free market either - they aspire to be the party of no-bid contracts to the Democratic party of government by clout.

The article to which Mark links, by Paul Craig Roberts, is interesting and entertaining in a Dystopian way:

The Year America Dissolved

It was 2017. Clans were governing America.

...

The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.

With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.

The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.

Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.

As has been noted by many people, paradigms collapse slowly at first, and then suddenly.  What is interesting is that there were two other articles yesterday which dealt with the same anxiety.   Niall Ferguson addresses the concerns directly:

Sun Could Set Suddenly on Superpower as Debt Bites

Great powers and empires are complex systems, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder, on "the edge of chaos", in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton.

Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting.

But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical". A very small trigger can set off a phase transition from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.

Complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes, what scientists call the amplifier effect.

...

What are the implications for the US today? The most obvious point is that imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises: sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.

Maxed_Out_Mama addresses the anxiety from a different point, the sense that the groundwork has been/is being laid for a more authoritarian government developing as the stresses upon the system increase:

That Quarter Twist

Ah, yes. The fatal quarter twist. It is a sad societal truth that utopias with grandiose plans often quickly take that last twist.

Consider, for example, the sad tale of Geneva under Calvinwith its rapid evolution of a religious police, an inquisition, and a truly repressive society, exemplified perhaps by the deliberately slow burning of Servetus(Calvin would have let Servetus be beheaded, but Calvin also didn't exert his power to stop it, and Calvin had predetermined that if he ever got his hands on Servetus death would be the penalty) and Calvin's subsequent defense of the idea that the church was right to execute heretics. From there it was a hop, skip and jump to the issuance of quite strict regulations over clothing and food, and eventually Calvin required every Geneva citizen to address him in terms of the utmost respect. Criticism or disrespect was not tolerated. Calvin's startling theory that tyrants should be obeyed by individual citizens as should a good government, regardless of the abuses of such a ruler, might have something to do with this. (Such a ruler was still an instrument of God, perhaps serving as an instrument of God's wrath.)

This keeps happening over and over again in societies with utopian goals. One moment you are really concentrating on establishing an efficient train system for passengers and freight and making the trains run on time, and in just a couple of social breaths you are loading undesirables on the trains for an efficient and timely extermination - all in the service of the same goals. When individuals matter less than grand social goals, moderation goes to the wall.

Read M_O_M's post, if for nothing else than the Chesterton quotes; he was prescient.

As Mark noted, our elites, our ruling class, has become increasingly disconnected from the people over whom they exert power.  They believe they are smarter and wiser than the people, who need their wisdom and guidance, even if we don't appreciate their beneficence.  Since their prescriptions are not working (and this includes the Republicans in DC as well as the current Democratic leadership)  this leads to anxiety in Washington.  Out in the boondocks, where we can still add and recognize that borrowing trillions to get our economy growing after it stalled because we already have too much debt, is madness, the anxiety grows as well.

The ruling class feels threatened, which evokes their nascent authoritarian instincts and the still free people in America sense that a collision is coming.  Whether or not the denouement will end in a slow, painful course correction rather than a collapse remains unknowable.  What is clear is that Anxiety is growing, there is a danger of significant regression in response, and forces are at play that are now being reflected in more vivid Dystopian imaginings.  We will not know for quite some time if what is occurring is Signal Anxiety, correctable by our current institutions in November, or a state of slowly growing Traumatic Anxiety.

The Banality of Evil

This man is either a deeply foolish individual with no awareness of the consequences of his actions or a truly evil man.  Either way, if a single Afghan civilian or Allied soldier dies because of this creep, he should be charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Blood in his hands

WikiLeaks Reportedly Outs 100s of Afghan Informants

What he has done is sickening; there are no words.

See Fausta's post for a summary and links.

Debate Video

I have no time for a post today but suggest you head on over to Reed the Viking's site to watch a video of a particularly spirited recent political debate.  Although one of the participants (I can't tell which one is the Democrat and which is the Republican, though I have my suspicions) is unintelligible to me, the gist of the dispute comes though. 

I Believe the War is Over: Part II

The reactions to the Wikileaks docudump are accumulating.  Arguments are propagating as to whether this is more or less significant than the Pentagon Papers.  A common meme seems to be that there is nothing new here (accurate) and that everyone already knows about the perfidy of our "allies" in Pakistan and the unreliability of our allies in Afghanistan:

WikiLeaks and the Afghan War

The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.

We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a “shocking truth” out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.

While "everybody" knows has some validity in the blogosphere, the last line of George Friedman's post is telling.   To the casual consumer of news who has been subliminally sensing the drip, drip, drip of casualties in Afghanistan, much of this is news; to all those who already "knew" it is now no-longer-ignorable news.  Pakistani duplicity has been denied and hidden by our government and the "government" press since well before Barack Obama became President.  Now his politically motivated miscalculation, the decision to make Afghanistan his "Good War", may be, like the proverbial chickens, coming home to roost.

This iconic image of our defeat in Vietnam is familiar to everyone. 

Even though the loss of Saigon took place under Gerald Ford and followed events set in motion by Richard Nixon, our defeat was forever laid at the feet of the Democrats.  Lyndon Baines Johnson had made Vietnam his "Good War" and when we finally left and the South Vietnamese Army was sufficiently trained and equipped to carry on without us, the Democratic Congress pulled the plug on military supplies, effectively dooming the South.  In retrospect, fighting to keep Vietnam safe for Democracy was always a losing proposition once its foundation began to erode. 

By the late 1960's it was clear that, in the perception of the majority of the American public, Vietnam was not a Democracy, but rather a corrupt dictatorship, and that the Vietnamese people were uninterested in what we had to offer.  It was not clear until well after the fact that the South Vietnamese government, with all its problems, was not as egregious as depicted, and that the North Vietnamese Communists were hardly paragons of Democratic aspirations.  By the time Middle America realized we had been spun by the Media (after having been spun by the Administration for so long via body counts and other false metrics) it was far too late for the people of Vietnam.

Barack Obama has made the Afghanistan War his own, just as LBJ made Vietnam his war, and now has no good options.  Since we do not have a real Strategy there, we have no prospects of winning any time soon.  Just as Vietnam was understood as a proxy war with the Chinese and the Soviet Russians, Afghanistan is becoming understood as a proxy war with Pakistan (and indeed with the larger world of radical expansionary Islam.)  The ethnic boundary and vast distance between America and Vietnam meant that there was an insufficient reservoir of concern and empathy which might have helped us continue in a war that by the late 1960s had begun to feel like an inconclusive "forever war".  This lack of racial and ethnic solidarity is compounded in Afghanistan and Pakistan because by the late 00's, much of Middle American has come to see poorly differentiated "Arabs'* as irrational lunatics who hate us and are willing to blow themselves up to kill us. 

*[I suspect a significant percentage of Americans have a hard time caring about the differentiation of Shia from Sunni, Pashtun from Punjabi, or any of the other variety of Muslims who blend together in the popular imagination as "Muslims", sometimes simply abbreviated as "Arabs".  Most Americans have better things to do than to worry about all the different and competing sects and ethnicities that make up the Umma.  "They want to kill us" is sufficient for most people's understanding.  This does not make most Americans racist but is a reflection of the provincialism that exists within the vast majority of people around the world.  This view, that Muslims are irrational and want to kill us, is constantly reinforced by the diffidence of our government and the Media who treat Islamist radicals the way the supposed adults treated Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, ie He-Who-Must-Not-Be-named.  Despite constant reminders that Islam is the "religion of peace" every time there is a terrorist atrocity, by now almost everyone expects it to be a member of said RoP and when the ethnicity of a suicide bomber or terrorist attacker is carefully omitted, the natural inclination is to recognize that it must have been a member of that very same RoP.  Our Media and leaders tend to marginalize the actual Moderates and Liberals within the Islamic world and elevate the radicals who speak and look urbane to positions of respect and official imprimatur; perhaps only radicals can be authentic?]

On November 23, 1967 protest singer Phil Ochs declared the War in Vietnam was over:

Have You Heard? The War Is Over!

Is everybody sick of this stinking war?

In that case, friends, do what I and thousands of other Americans have done -- declare the war over.

That's right, I said declare the war over from the bottom up.

The War did not "officially" begin to end until Walter Cronkite weighed in after the Tet Offensive:

Walter Cronkite’s remarks at the end of his February 27, 1968 evening news broadcast, four decades ago today, were a watershed in the history of the MSM’s credibility. 

Unless you’re at least 55 years old, you probably don’t remember that CBS broadcast 40 years ago.  The most trusted man in America had recently returned from Vietnam where he hosted a documentary on the VC/NVA TET (New Year) offensive that began January 31, 1968.  Back in NYC, he closed his program that night by introducing “an analysis that must be speculative, personal, [and] subjective.”  Among his comments were these:

Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities?  I’m not sure.  The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we.  The referees of history may make it a draw.

It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.  (Emphases added)

The Vietnam War was lost because we had no prospects of victory.  Our Strategy was a non-Strategy; we were there to play defense, for geopolitical reasons could not widen the war to include those who were supporting our enemies, and had no way to actually win.  Once that sunk in for a majority of Americans, the prospect of losing more lives and treasure became unpalatable.  The same thing is now underway in Afghanistan and Obama has no good options.  If he leaves there will be an iconic image from Afghanistan analogous to the image above.  If he stays and we continue to bleed, he will lose his re-election campaign in a landslide, a Republican will be elected, and, if he is smart, will immediately start a draw down in Afghanistan (perhaps retreating to bases in reasonably pacified parts of the country but more likely exiting with the knowledge that the disaster will be fully owned by Barack Obama and the Democrats.) 

In Afghanistan we have an implacable enemy willing to commit atrocities which our media tend to minimize except when they further an anti-war stance.  We have a corrupt Afghan government which appears to represent only themselves and their Heroin growing allies.  We have a nuclear armed sanctuary state that is duplicitous and increasingly associated with Islamic radicalism who, as the Wikileaks papers are metabolized, will be increasingly understood to be the real enemy, and we cannot and will not expand the war to Pakistan.  As the awareness that we cannot win in Afghanistan reaches a critical mass, support for the war will evaporate and the feeling of "a Pox on all of them" in Afghanistan will destroy any ability of this or future administrations to continue an endless and unwinnable war.

Barack Obama's designation of the Afghanistan war as the "Good War" was a foolish and poorly thought out piece of political pandering; once he engaged in Afghanistan escalation, the die was cast.  It is his war, it cannot be won, and the defeat, whenever it occurs, will be his whether he remains President or not.  Americans hate losing wars but we hate fighting wars that cannot be won even more.  The next (Republican) President, if he is wise, can come in with a clean slate, declare victory, and "bring the boys back home."

Silent Soldiers on a silver screen
Framed in fantasies and dragged in dream
Unpaid actors of the mystery
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free
And what's this got to do with me
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Drums are drizzling on a grain of sand
Fading rhythms of a fading land
Prove your courage in the proud parade
Trust your leaders where mistakes are almost never made
And they're afraid that I'm afraid
I'm afraid the war is over
It's over, it's over

Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grisly game
One is guilty and the other gets the point to blame
Pardon me if I refrain
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is to young to die
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

One-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe
I believe the war is over
It's over, it's over

--The War is Over--Phil Ochs, June 30, 1968 from Tape from California  

I Believe the War is Over: Part I

The War in Afghanistan began to end the morning of Monday, July 26th, with the publication of the first, highly sensationalized, stories about the Wikileaks document dump over the weekend; the New York Times did its part:

Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.

The Times includes a minor caveat, a caveat that in the long run will be completely forgotten and essentially immaterial:

Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.

But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.

As Steve Schippert  notes, there is almost nothing in the documents that should surprise anyone who has been paying attention:

Wikileaks Hath Spoken
Now Step Aside Or Get Stampeded By Journalists Seeking Pulitzers

But what have the documents, on an initial cursory read, revealed?

Pakistani military intelligence is double-dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Really? Shocked? Then you haven't been paying attention for at least 9 years, probably longer. It's a fact, not a 'Wikileak' ™. The thing is, before you permit yourself to engage in a bit of New York Times-inspired righteous indignation, do an inventory of your solutions to this real world problem first. It's akin to complaining about how someone else is keeping you poor while you refuse to work. Righteousness is cheap. Solutions? Not so much.

If there is nothing new here, how and why would I say the War is Over?  There are two primary reasons.  The first reason is the natural conclusion derived from an eminently sensible post by Donald Sensing:

Why Petraeus won't matter

Let me be clear up front: there is no better general for the command of Afghanistan than Gen. David Petraeus. And, if the Stan is the main effort today in what used to be called the War on Terror, then there is no better general to take Petraeus' place at US Central Command than Gen. James Mattis.

Mattis and Petraeus go together like peas and carrots. They jointly wrote the U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (though Petraeus usually gets sole credit). There are not two senior commanders anywhere as well versed and expert in counterinsurgency (COIN) as these two.

And they will fail.

They will fail not through lack of effort or of insight or because of poor planning and execution. One would be surprised if every operation and campaign they plan is executed much less than magnificently well. There is nothing that they carry with them into Afghanistan that will fail them, nor will they fail their troops.

They will fail because COIN is a tactic, not a strategic objective, and the United States has no strategic objectives regarding Afghanistan. [Emphasis mine-SW] The generals will be conducting COIN for COIN's own sake, not really to achieve something else. As far any anyone can tell, President Obama's only national objective regarding Afghanistan is to pull American forces out by the end of next year. That's not a strategic objective. It's an admission of aimlessness.

As Donald Sensing points out, the lack of strategic objectives in Afghanistan has been true since shortly after we toppled the Taliban.  During the Bush administration, Afghanistan was left on the back burner, a low level conflict which served primarily to keep that country relatively quiet while the real fight was going on next door in Iraq. Since Afghanistan was a side show to the main event, the lack of a set of strategic objectives was unremarkable; ie, the Press did not notice, it was focused on Iraq.  When President Obama came into office he was burdened by a terrible strategic miscalculation of his own, an unforced error that will come back to haunt him. 

And that leads the second reason I can say the War is Over.

Obama boxed himself in by rhetorically elevating Afghanistan to the "Good War" in order to establish his foreign policy bone fides and count coup with his opposition to the "bad war" in Iraq while building military credibility among the easily convinced.  His support for the Afghanistan War was always lukewarm but once in office, he discovered, as have so many before him, that various external forces narrowed his range of options in Afghanistan.  Since abandoning Afghanistan and declaring defeat in the War he adopted as his "Good War" would have led to cries of betrayal from the Right, with enough credibility to be believed by the center of the country, he was forced to stay the course.  General McCrystal's meltdown might have given a less beleaguered and more militarily confident President an opportunity to actually reassess and determine what our strategy is or could become, but with all the problems facing Obama over the summer, such an option was beneath his concern; the short term politics were all that mattered to the Obama administration, and politically, appointing Petraeus was a coup.  Now Afghanistan is going to become Obama's Vietnam.

President Obama never recognized that Afghanistan represented anything more than a minor annoyance for his political agenda.  He was uninterested in the War, probably thought it would be best to get out ASAP but couldn't figure out how to do so without paying a terrible political price.  Again, the McCrystal resignation afforded him the possibility of actually reviewing the Strategy but instead, for reasons hard to fathom (with the most likely explanation being that he and his political advisers simply have a blind spot when it comes to the disaster in the making of Afghanistan) Obama missed the opportunity, treated the review of Afghanistan as a tactical review rather than a Strategic review, and proceeded to change tactics without any evidence that consideration of Strategy were entertained.

The Wikileak document dump is a disaster for the Obama administration and probably has doomed his chances for re-election.  I will expand on this in Part II.

Apparently James Fallows has also noticed the echoes of LBJ in this story: [HT: Jeffrey Goldberg]

On the AfPak / Wikileaks Documents

A word of historical comparison. Unlike Marc Ambinder or Alexis Madrigal, neither of whom was alive at the time, I remember when the Pentagon Papers came out. By that point American involvement in Vietnam was "ending" -- even though it would be another four years before U.S. troops left the country after the fall of Saigon, and even though many, many  American, Vietnamese, and other people were still to die in the "wind-down" phase. The major effect of the Papers was to reveal that for many years officials closest to the action had understood that the war could not really be "won," at least under the real-world political circumstances the U.S. faced. Of course the U.S. could have waged all-out unlimited war, and prevailed -- but it wasn't going to do that. Perhaps the most shocking single document in the papers was the famed "McNaughton Memo" of 1965, which assessed American reasons for staying in Vietnam this way:

1. US aims:
70%--To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).

20%--To keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

10%--To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. Also-To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. Not--To "help a friend," although it would be hard to stay if asked out.

In retrospect, that seems an amazingly prescient assessment of why the U.S. stayed in Vietnam for a full decade after the memo was written. But it is not how the case for war was presented at the time.

The gap between what the President has stated as his rationale for escalating the "Good War" and the "reality" as it will come to emerge from the Wikileaks documents will eventually mirror the Credibility Gap of the Johnson administration on Vietnam.

Finally, An Honest Discussion of Race

From a surprising source, Senator James Webb (D-Va):

Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

How so?

Read the whole thing.

Israel as the Ram in the Thicket

One of the great errors that Freud made while establishing Psychoanalysis as a science of the mind was in relegating religious belied to the realm of the irrational, essentially the equivalent of any other primitive magical belief system.  While Freud understood the power of Myth to organize our thinking and our societies, he failed to appreciate that the Mind sustains itself, in part, on a belief in an idealized vision of reality as a reflection of our Ego Ideal.  (I discuss this in more depth in Political Deification.)  A utilitarian argument can be made that, if one must believe in something, a belief in G-d works better for a society, long term, that most secular replacements. 

One of the central Myths of the Bible is the Binding of Isaac, which represents the first repudiation of human sacrifice:

The majority of Jewish Biblical commentators argue that God was testing Abraham to see if he would actually kill his own son, as a test of his loyalty. However, a number of Jewish Biblical commentators from the mediæval era, and many in the modern era, do not agree with this notion. They read the text in another way.

The early rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah imagines God as saying "I never considered telling Abraham to slaughter Isaac (using the Hebrew root letters for "slaughter", not "sacrifice")". Rabbi Yona Ibn Janach (Spain, 11th century) wrote that God demanded only a symbolic sacrifice. Rabbi Yosef Ibn Caspi (Spain, early 14th century) wrote that Abraham's "imagination" led him astray, making him believe that he had been commanded to sacrifice his son. Ibn Caspi writes "How could God command such a revolting thing?" But according to Rabbi J. H. Hertz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire), child sacrifice was actually "rife among the Semitic peoples," and suggests that "in that age, it was astounding that Abraham's God should have interposed to prevent the sacrifice, not that He should have asked for it." Hertz interprets the Akedah as demonstrating to the Jews that human sacrifice is abhorrent. "Unlike the cruel heathen deities, it was the spiritual surrender alone that God required." In Jeremiah 32:35, God states that the later Israelite practice of child sacrifice to the deity Molech "had [never] entered My mind that they should do this abomination."

In Psychological terms, Freud, et al, recognize in the Binding of Isaac a repudiation of the Myth of Laius, the inverse of the Oedipus Complex.  While most people are aware of the Oedipal Complex, having been incorporated into our pop psychology and offered as a reason for behavior of which people disapprove (see Iraq, George W.) the Laius Complex is, if anything, more deeply conflictual.

The story of Oedipus is familiar.  In response to the Oracle at Delphi's prediction that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he ran from Corinth and set out for Thebes.  On the road he encountered King Laius, who remained in character as a nasty piece of work, and in the struggle, with neither aware of the true identity of the other, Oedipus killed Laius.  When he arrived in Thebes, he solved the riddle of the Sphinx and he was hailed as their new King, married Jocasta (his mother) and ruled until the famine set in which caused the whole tragedy to take place.  In the Oedipus Myth, what makes the story so painful and tragic is that Oedipus, out of love for his presumed parents is unable to escape his fate and the tragedy that would destroy him and his family.  What is rarely commented upon in discussions of the Oedipus Myth and the Oedipal Complex is the much more problematic Laius Myth and Laius Complex.

Laius was a selfish, narcissistically preoccupied man. 

He was concerned first and foremost with his own pleasures and desires.  Those who might thwart his wishes were to be destroyed.  His death can not be considered tragic; if anything, he gets his just desserts.  Consider Laius and his relationship to his son.  He tries to murder his son when Oedipus is an infant.  Note that he attempts to avoid responsibility for the crime even as he plans the murder by proxy.  He does not kill or abandon the child but has his agents do the dirty work for him.  Then, to compound his evil, he attempts to murder the adolescent Oedipus who is fleeing, out of love, from his fate.  If Laius had not been an evil, hateful man, the Oedipus tragedy would never have occurred.

There are echoes of the Laius complex within all parents, who from time to time recognize their envy of their offspring's youth and vitality as they are slowly descending into senescence, and can also appreciate their intolerance of the kinds of flaws they can discern in their children that are intolerable (and thus kept unconscious most of the time) within themselves.

In the Myth of the Binding of Isaac, the seemingly unresolvable conflict between our terror of a distant unforgiving G-d who demands everything that is most precious from us in order to propitiate His wrath reinforced by our murderous feelings toward our offspring who demand so much and are so draining, is resolved through the use of the Ram, conveniently provided by G-d as a message that life and love are more powerful than fear and hate. 

[I have written about the Laius Complex in posts discussing its role in the Psychology of Abortion, our attitudes toward the Tea Parties, and in The Idealization of Defect.  It requires a fair amount of unconscious hostility to future generations to abort them, saddle them with insurmountable debt, or condemn them to a life of unnecessary physical deficits.]

All of this is prelude to an important article by Dexter Van Zile, the Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. [HT: Donald Sensing]

Israel as the Ram in the Thicket

In the course of my work, I have become increasingly worried about the message offered by mainline Protestant churches (and some quarters of the Roman Catholic Church) about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Not only is the narrative offered by these institutions distorted, it has a negative impact on the safety of Jews throughout the world.

My concerns, which are still coalescing, can currently be summarized as follows:

1. There is a continuum of anti-Israel rhetoric. One end of the continuum is marked by hate toward Israel and Jews rooted in deeply hostile beliefs about the nature of the Jewish people. The other end is marked by polite de-legitimization through an obsession with Israeli policies and silence about the behavior of its adversaries.

The article is long and deserving of a careful reading.  Time does not allow for a full discussion here today but I would urge you to read his article and consider his conclusions carefully:

6. Part of the problem is that many people in mainline churches have embraced a view of history that portrays Western civilization as the dominant, if not unique source of suffering in the world today. Given this understanding, and the self-hate it engenders, members of these churches feel as if they deserve punishment.

In this sense, the members of mainline churches are like Abraham’s son Isaac on the way to MountMoriah. They see the wood and the fire and have a vague sense that an immolation is going to take place, but hope desperately that they will not be the victim of this sacrifice. They feel on one level that if it weren’t for their exquisite moral sense, that they would deserve to be immolated.

And how do they demonstrate and give voice to their exquisite moral sense?

By condemning Israel.

Israel, for these folks, is the ram in the thicket on Mount Moriah. Israel is the entity that they can thrust into the fire of moral judgment.

In sum, what we are witnessing is an intellectual process by which people are preparing themselves to justify the re-abandonment of the Jewish people. If we continue with this process, it will have great consequences for the Jewish people in particular and Western civilization in general.

Psychologically, the Jews have ranged from being the Parents of the two other great Monotheistic religions to being an older sibling.  The psychology is complicated and fraught with all the passions that are common to parent-child and sibling relationships.  The current low level dehumanization of the Jewish people and overt delegitimization of the Jewish state suggests that Dexter van Zile has captured an important aspect of the current resurgence of anti-Semitism.  Once Jews are successfully dehumanized, they can be easily sacrificed.

He was concerned first and foremost with his own pleasures and desires.  Those who might thwart his wishes were to be destroyed.  His death can not be considered tragic; if anything, he gets his just desserts.  Consider Laius and his relationship to his son.  He tries to murder his son when Oedipus is an infant.  Note that he attempts to avoid responsibility for the crime even as he plans the murder by proxy.  He does not kill or abandon the child but has his agents do the dirty work for him.  Then, to compound his evil, he attempts to murder the adolescent Oedipus who is fleeing, out of love, from his fate.  If Laius had not been an evil, hateful man, the Oedipus tragedy would never have occurred.

On the Health Care "Reform" Disaster

I continue to believe that the "Health Care Reform" bill is an unmitigated disaster and every new revelation (remember, this was one of those giant unread bills which would have to be enacted before we would find out what's in it) reinforces that belief.  Here is some good news that should motivate anyone who cares about their health care now and in the future:

The GOP House Leadership Speaks Out On Defunding And Repealing Health Care Reform

The centerpiece of Barack's Obama first two years in office has been the health care reform that the Democratic Party shoved through Congress over the objections of the Republican Party and the American people. Not only was the legislation unpopular when it was passed, polls have consistently shown that the American people want to see the legislation repealed. That's doubly true for conservatives, who view health care reform as a disastrously expensive government program that will destroy the quality of health care in America.

...

Now, the first thing you have to keep in mind is that in order to fully repeal health care reform, the GOP will need to have 60 votes in the Senate, the presidency, and the House. While the GOP could conceivably take the House in November, they won't be able to acquire the needed votes in the Senate or the presidency. Still, there is an effective tactic they can use: refusing to fund health care reform.

So, my first question was, "If the GOP retakes congress, would you support cutting off the funds needed to implement health care reform?"

Boehner, Cantor, and Pence all answered in the affirmative while McMorris Rodgers essentially punted on the question. Still, 3-out-of-4, including the top 3 members of leadership, isn't bad.

Its a start, and there's more:

While that's the most practical step Republicans will be able to take if they recapture the House, it's not the key question most conservatives want to have answered. That would be question number two, "If the GOP retakes congress, are you willing to pledge that you'll work to 'repeal' or 'repeal and replace' the health care reform that passed Congress?"

In this case, all four members of leadership were willing to come out unambiguously for the repeal of health care reform...

Read the whole thing.

Anti-Semitism as Thought Disorder Emended

John Jay Ray, MA, PhD, Psychometrician of some note, has done me the signal honor of addressing yesterday's post and has taken issue with my thesis:

Are antisemites mad?

To be a little crass about it, Shrinkwrapped argues that antisemitism sends you mad. That argument is of course not a new one. There are several versions of it and “The authoritarian personality” version of 1950 is perhaps the best known.

It is however basically an “armchair” theory. As far as I can tell, the people putting it forward have little if any personal knowledge of actual antisemites. For some reason, however, I have always had the compulsion to test theory against reality — which usually does nothing for my popularity. And much of my research career was devoted to testing inferences derived from “The authoritarian personality” theory.

Readers who know my skeptical stance on global warming and health science will not be surprised to hear that I regularly found inferences from the theory not to be supported by the data.

And one of the things I did was to apply the characteristic methodology of anthropology to an examination of antisemitism. Anthropologists have the view that you can never understand a group “from the outside” — You have to join the group and become accepted into it before you will ever have any chance of understanding it. I did that with the neo-Nazi group in my city. In other words I got out of my armchair and had a close-up look at what I was talking about. My resultant observations were published in The Jewish Journal of Sociology.

And what I found was actually something extremely common — perfectly normal sane people who had just got hold of a wrong theory — not unlike most Global Warmists today and not unlike the hordes of grade school teachers who think that just looking at words without any mention of phonics is a good way for kids to learn to read.

...

So I disagree with Shrinkwrapped in seeing antisemites as being in some way psychologically abnormal. I think they are all too normal in fact. And it is precisely their normality which makes me despair of changing their views.

So in the end I am more pessimistic about antisemites than Shrinkwrapped is. He seems to think that psychological “help” could change their views whereas I doubt that anything will change their views. Israel can kill the antisemites that surround it but it will not change their minds.

John Jay Ray spent many years studying Australian neo-Nazis and his conclusions, published in The Jewish Journal of Sociology, are illuminating:

IS ANTISEMITISM A COGNITIVE SIMPLIFICATION? SOME OBSERVATIONS ON AUSTRALIAN NEO-NAZIS

In one sense, then, what these people believe is simple. There is only one enemy to their kind of civilization -- the Jews of Wall Street who control the United States and the Bolshevik Jews who control Soviet Russia. On the Australian scene, too, this picture is replicated. On the one hand the State Governor and the Prime Minister are to be seen attending Jewish public functions, and on the other the leader of the Communist Party of Australia bears the hardly ambiguous name of Aarons. This view of the world, however, is simple only in a rather trivial sense: it is simple in so far as it is a belief that there is only one enemy. In that sense and for that reason Dr. Goebbels provided beleaguered Germany with a single focus for its fear and hate -- and thus enabled a readily intelligible explanation for the actions of his own regime.

When Goebbels and Hitler first spoke, however, their contention that there was only oneenemy was a plausible one. Germany had just waged a world war with herself on one side and Russia and the 'Allies' on the other. France, Britain, and the U.S.A. were disliked because they were the gloating victors, while Russia was disliked not only for historical reasons but also because it was Bolshevik. All were united in opposing Germany. In the need to find a connecting link between two disparate enemies who, on any obvious criterion, should not be allied, Jewry represented a godsent and accessible solution. By the one stroke the shame of Weimar could be expunged and Germany could be portrayed to its people as the aggrieved victim --not the aggressor. Russia and the West were in fact united against Germany; the 'Jew- controlled' thesis provided a palatable explanation for that unity.

In the modern-day world the situation is vastly different. To see Israel, Russia, and the United States as unified is in fact perverse and necessitates an extraordinarily complex and devious view of world affairs -- a view that not only receives no support but is violently contradicted by almost every news bulletin and information source. And yet among 'the Right', the slogan 'Communism is a Jewish plot' rings out as bravely as ever. If it is comforting to unify the twin enemies of Communism and Jewry, this comfort is bought at the expense of simplicity -- not in furtherance of it. The most devious and implausible explanations are needed to support such a belief, given the present state of world affairs. 

I would urge you to read both papers, the latter much more specific and complete with sources. 

In reading John Jay Ray's critique and paper, and in thinking as well about Gloria's comment, I realized that my post was unclear about something fundamental.  My analogy was between a Psychiatric patient suffering from a psychotic disorder in which a delusion contaminated all of his thinking and anti-Semites for whom their anti-Semitism, a quasi-delusional construct, contaminated all of their thinking.  I did not mean to imply that the anti-Semite is psychotic or mad.  In fact, John Jay ray does an excellent job explaining just how anti-Semitism contaminates thought in the bolded section I quote above! 

In John Jay Ray's paper, he makes the point that by forcing all of reality and all perceptions to be filtered through an anti-Semitic lens, the holders of the beliefs use their rational minds to construct increasingly byzantine and unstable world views that typically, but not always, lead to disaster. 

Here is the gist of my argument.  Anti-Semitism, a shared quasi-delusional system, disturbs the thinking of the group that adopts the ideology.  Historically, whenever a large group has adopted Anti-Semitism, as time passes, the delusions of anti-Semitism become increasingly central to the functioning and thinking of that group.  It serves to contaminate the "thinking" of the large group (which can be an organization, a terrorist group, or a nation state)  and causes them to behave in irrational ways in the same way that a paranoid delusion eventually causes the psychiatric patient to behave irrationally.

With this framework it becomes clear, for example, that those nations most in thrall of Anti-Semitism are likely to behave most irrationally.  The Palestinians can no more make Peace with Israel through mutually acceptable compromise than they can stop breathing; their Jew hatred could never allow such an outcome.  Iran will almost certainly not stop attempting to produce nuclear weapons, even though their efforts are likely to lead to their destruction.  England, in thrall to its own traditional and resurgent anti-Semitism, is allowing the rule of law to erode in fundamental ways that endanger their future, all because they cannot repudiate anti-Semitism (though they are not as far down the road as parts the Arab/Muslim World.)  Once a large group has entered the road to anti-Semitism they have committed themselves to outcomes that are self destructive and irrational.  The individuals who comprise such bodies share the full range of normal and abnormal psychology that can be found in any group, but the effects of anti-Semitism on the group do indeed mimic the effects of delusions on the disturbed individual. 

Once again, a blog post is insufficient to do the subject justice, but I hope I have been able to make the distinction between the individual anti-Semite, who is perfectly rational, and the anti-Semitic large group (using the term as per the American Psychoanalytic Association panel on Terror and Societal Regression) which loses its reason by virtue of its contaminated thinking.

Finally, I am in complete agreement with John Jay Ray on his conclusion.  I do not think any kind of psychological "help" could change the views of the anti-Semite and I am just as pessimistic as he is.  As he notes "Israel can kill the antisemites that surround it but it will not change their minds."