Letter 150: Technocracy and American Foreign Policy; brain-gang OR brain-game OR brain-blame OR brain-bust?

"You know this vision. You have seen it so often at the movies. It is the vision in all those science fiction dystopias. You know, with the gilded masterminds ruling all from their swank towers and conference rooms.
....
"It’s a quite contemporary vision. For instance, it is not far at all from the way I think the rulers of China imagine themselves and their future." --Dr Philip D. Zelikow, 5th August 2017.

BLUF (bottom-line, up-front): Dr Philip Zelikow gave a long address -- the speech takes 45 minutes, or more, to read -- at some out-of-tune wonkstock festival. His thoughts superficially remind one of those of Kennan. 

INTRODUCTION

They are not alike, primarily because this scholar is opening up the discussion and not selling its conclusion as Kennan did for SecState Marshall and President Truman. There are certain elements missing in the Zelikow's presentation by order of importance that guarantee us languishing longer in violent decline:

1. a frank recognition of the financial constraints facing the United States to usher in a more traditional exceptionalism as the American Century fades;
2. justification by technocrats of their being entitled to positions of power and privilege by 'degrees' of arrogation;
3. a clear idea by the U.S. of the end-state of a just society (i.e., an intelligibly universal appeal through a 'proposition of values' rather than a Zelikovian value proposition marketing technocracy through, of course, the current brain-gang);
4. exclusion from the 'outside-in' evaluation seeking to clarify how other peoples and governments (or élites) view the U.S. (and not how we think they view us);
5. a serious questioning of the nature of our adversaries and our role in that rivalry;
6. confusing tactics with strategy though that erudition and foot-notes often shroud that mistaken thinking; as well as,
7. a deeper inability, shown from President Reagan's time in office, of reducing the size of an over-wrought and financially unsustainable Federal government as well as the corrupting influence of (in)vested interests like the XXX-industrial complexes.

Of course, my critique is hampered by the same intellectual constraint as Dr Zelikow's far deeper and more nuanced analysis; he is a brainiac, after all. I am using a handy framework -- the recent military model that I learned in Iraq -- which is, of course, rooted in the past; not transcendent into the future; and, quite likely stale by now.

CASE STUDY OF TECHNOCRATIC VACUITY

This juncture is where President George W. Bush gets short-shrift, first by the hawk squawks led by the gang-of-four (Messrs Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld); then by Generals specialized and socialized as engineers; current intellectuals; and, lastly, the Obama Admin. President Bush understood, perhaps on an intuitive level, that, for the current wave of terrorism to be eradicated, an Arab Spring would have to occur.

Iraq was the geopolitical keystone of an arch of dictatorship and repression, resembling a reversed crescent moon from the horn of Africa on up to the 'No-man-stans'. The geopolitical mindset was easy to grasp, perhaps too easy:

• knock Iraq out in favor of a more popular government;
• link that with a far more tenuous experiment in Afghanistan; and, 
• incent the cosmopolitan middle class in Iran to grasp for the same freedoms.

From that arc, at that point primarily a Shi´ite phenomenon, others across that arc would be catalyzed into throwing off their shackles imposed by tottering Sunni dictatorships. Nations and peoples like to play ‘keeping up with the Jones’, too. WHY THEM AND NOT US? This new domino idea almost worked as seen by the 'Arab' Spring in Lebanon (2005), Iran (2009), Tunisia and Egypt (2010), Libya (2010) and Syria (2012) and beyond. 

The vision was simple but the follow-through too difficult, under-cutting the justice of the policy. The two parts that President Bush did not contemplate, due to a sweeping vision short on detail, included:

• making an all-out case for the necessity of this transformation, despite its wave of turmoil and violence; as well as, 
• warning the rest of us just how messy it would be. 

Instead of a three-dimensional thinker like Kennan to sell President Truman’s policy of containment, President Bush relied upon the lesser, if equally self-assured, minds of SecDef Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. 

When the U.S. gained the tactical advantage in Iraq, the gang-of-four -- and their face-man desk-clerk, Ambassador Bromide -- reverted to type, seeing Iraq as ours and, now, something to lose. That compromised and eventually corrupted the end-state the President had envisioned. The rest is history: what some troops in Iraq referred to as the Texas Cheney Massacre; Texas for Halliburton-KBR, not President Bush.

The key lessons for people to learn and always to hear include, but are not limited to, the moral fortitude that change requires; the narrower than expected limits of any power, particularly fire-power; the challenge of follow through; as well as, the difficulty of keeping hands-off once a cycle of change is initiated (that is, letting history run its admittedly hazardous course). That is to say: be careful what you instigate, for its life will likely be different from yours.

The failure of the Bush policy of an aggressive promotion of democracy in response to 9-11 was not only an example of Dr Zelikow’s astute insight of wasted energy, money and people on areas of lesser importance.  Additionally, it was an ill-thought out strategy that led to a chimerical consensus. The brain-gang failed signally to consider the lowest cost options (i.e., those least deleterious to the lives and livelihoods of peoples in the 'beneficiary' countries). 

COWARDICE CROWNING CONFLICT? Yes AND no.

The failure of President Obama’s policy was an unwillingness to witness the upheaval the Bush vision had counted on during the run-up to invading and occupying Iraq. This changed to a reactive policy perceived as a lack of nerve rather than a widely shared perception of ‘strategic patience’. Many of my fellow conservatives view President Obama as a coward; that is patently untrue and unfair. President Obama was and is a man of peace. 

His appeasement – and, yes, that is what his policy unmistakably was -- may well have forestalled a conflict that could quickly have cascaded into the "systemic crisis" that the dystopian Zelikovian multiverse contemplates and for which the U.S. is anything but prepared. President Obama’s alternate view may have saved a great many lives; sadly, that systemic crisis was more likely deferred than defused. 

President Obama’s alleged but apparent cowardice may have required a quiet courage to fend of the brawny bluster of men who do not have to suffer the consequences of their own rhetoric. If cowardice be assigned at all, it would lie with V.P. Cheney, SecDef Rumsfeld and AMB Bremer -- and their staffs -- for failing to think big, like their President, and, worse, not permitting others (e.g., SecStates Powell and Rice and their competing brain-gangs) to have the floor for alternative views. 

CONCLUSION

Dr Zelikow fails properly to account for this narrative as a teachable moment. Why? Because he was, and has every intention of remaining, a part of it. Now, we labour under a President without vision and inclined toward force as the primary medicine. Fortunately, he is unpopular and being repudiated on several different levels. Otherwise, we might undertake an amputation when only an analgesic is called for.

In the end, however, technocratic élites will fail us; they almost always do. Why again? Because the very notion of technocracy is conservative, more like preservative, of a given status-quo. To expect more from the Dr Zelikows (or the far more numerous and insignificant Ned McDonnells) of the world to anticipate and structure an ex ante strategy for fundamental changes in world orders or global policy paradigms is futile.

THE MORAL OF THE QUARREL
Expecting technocracy to avoid dystopia is as fruitful as tasking mechanical engineers to invent from scratch the impressionism of palette or expressionism in poetry.

Letter #149 to Friends and Familiares: Charlottesville, what might have been

“That differences of opinion should arise among men on politics, on religion and on every other topic of human inquiry, and that these should be freely expressed in a country where all our faculties are free, is to be expected. But these valuable privileges are much perverted when permitted to disturb the harmony of social intercourse, and to lessen the tolerance of opinion.” –President Thomas Jefferson, 1809.

“I must respect the decision of the Supreme Court allowing this group (the Nazis) to express their views, even when those views are despicable and ugly as they are in this case. But if such views must be expressed, I am pleased they will not go unanswered. That is why I want to voice my complete solidarity with those citizens of Skokie and Chicago who will gather Sunday in a peaceful demonstration of their abhorrence of Nazism.” —President Jimmy Carter, 1978.

“I was raised in a household in which the only intolerance I was taught was intolerance of bigotry.” –President Ronald Reagan, 1982.

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BLUF (bottom-line, up-front): We could have made Charlottesville much ado about nothing. Instead we ushered in tragedy.

INTRODUCTION: Sit-Rep. The sight of white supremacists rallying on the grounds of the co-author of the Bill of Rights and the Founder of the University of Virginia, one of the nation’s great learning centers, will remain grimly ironic. Few people – liberal, conservative and moderates alike – really have the time of day for these unsavory human beings.

These ‘Unite-the-Right’ (sic) types openly challenged the sacrosanct ideal of the Freedom of Speech. Yet, sacrosanct that ideal remains. Earlier this week-end, we confronted the real-world, real-time dilemma of Free Speech.

What to do about odious speech, publicly expressed? The First Amendment intends to protect ‘protected speech’ only.

That statement is circular and anyone can see that. But its being circular does not make it specious. What it really says is that there has to be flexibility in setting limits to this precious right since unfettered Free Speech could lead, for example, to the murderous disorder we witnessed in Virginia, directly harming the more peaceable citizenry.

Dealing with Hard-Core and Political Porn. The Supreme Court grappled with this issue in the area of pornography in a case from 43 years ago, deftly deferring to community standards for the definition of obscenity (i.e., in that case, ‘hard-core’ porn). There has been controversy over the subsequent decades on how to apply that vague and federalist wisdom.

During the 1980s, a Republican U.S. Senator sought to withdraw financial support for a sacrilegious photograph and a big-city Democratic Mayor pressured vendors to pull off their newsstands an equally sacrilegious magazine. Generally, these issues revolved around how community standards were, and are, to be identified and enforced.

Something like this idea of local agency applies to what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday 12th August 2017. Can elected officials act as agents of community standards in responding to openly disseminated hate-speech? That is what the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Mayor of Charlottesville were trying to do.

While they were in the right, as any reasonable man or woman could see the right, these leaders mismanaged a situation through political bungling. The idea of local agency to suppress bigotry makes sense. What became very difficult was agreeing upon just how much latitude these local agents should properly have.

Like pornography, one is hard-pressed precisely to define hate-speech, beyond the well known slurs and epithets, but yet any dunce, even Dylan Roof, knows it when he hears it.

That 1970s Show, Again. This current situation reminded me of a similar event in the Summer after my freshman year at W.&L. In that year, neo-Nazis planned a march, in their full dress and wretched regalia, through a Jewish suburb of Chicago. Local elected officials sought to forestall the event. Yet the American Civil Liberties Union – an organization I perceived as ‘Jewish’ (shame on me) – came to the aid of the neo-Nazis so the latter could march.

Like most others whom I knew, I wondered at the time, ‘What in the Hell is the A.C.L.U. doing?’ As the Summer moved along and I listened to interviews of the Jewish attorney taking up the case on behalf of the A.C.L.U., I gained immense respect for him and his organization for standing by the Freedom of Speech, even in this obviously odious expression of it.

After working its way up through various benches to the Supreme Court, the march proceeded without incident a year later as a counter-rally shouted down the handful of hate-meisters.

Back then, however, the country was still held together, with increasing frailty, by what many of today’s self-labelled conservatives (sic) would deride as a ‘leftist consensus’. Truthfully, it was an expectation of public civility. This more liberal consensus of decorum was fraying; its ideology exhausted. The mainstream G.O.P. was dissolving and a Democratic President struggling.

Nevertheless, the Kulturkampf had yet to arrive as a regrettable by-product of President Reagan’s conservative ascendancy. There is little doubt in my mind that President Reagan would not have countenanced today’s rally in Virginia and would have said so, decisively. But we do not have a principled Republican like President Reagan in the White House to remove this blemish publicly and pro-actively.

The Loss of Principle and Purpose in Personalities. Instead our current President is a demagogue, though he deserves some credit for his delayed and piping tepid response, to the bedlam of bigotry in Virginia. Previously, President Trump had created today’s context with slurs uttered against whole segments of the population – call them the 3M post-its written with passwords to revile Mexicans, Muslims and Mixed-genders – in word, deed or tweet.

While General Kelly may finally be imposing adult supervision on this President, it is sadly too little, too late. The cage doors of civil containment have been flung open, like Pandora’s Box, releasing the evils of the ghoulish, bad and ugly. Like Pandora’s Box, however, there is Hope, the last to exit. And what is this Hope? Three elements, at least as I view them from my limited and conservative view: deflection, humor and refutation.

Remember Skokie. And that brings us back to Skokie, 1977. At the time, one caller, apparently a steel-worker, into a radio talk show on the local mainstream station proposed an interesting response. Why not have the Skokie mayor announce that the town would permit the swastika-laden mob to march, opting for a town picnic on other side of Skokie for the residents to celebrate Judaism?

Why not seal off the parade route, requesting the Press not to cover the event? An interesting idea but one that was easier said than done, obviously. Skokie had a population of 70,000 back then, versus an almost equally unmanageable 50,000 in Charlottesville. Picnics were feasible in neither case. Additionally, the Press arguably had a stronger sense of the higher, common good in 1977.

The Press may or may not have shunned the event in Skokie, thereby effectively castrating the Nazis during their hour of provocation, truncating their fame, or infamy, to fifteen minutes. Yet, in this day of an arid yet rabid journalism that often click-baits men’s darker impulses and grievances to chalk up ad revenue, such a higher restraint seems inconceivable.

Furthermore, this year’s hate parade was many, many times the size of the eventual Skokie dud-march in 1978. Nevertheless, minimization-by-deflection may well have proven more effective and less tragic today. Imagine if a state of emergency had NOT been declared, with government leaders instead opting to call on the Press not to cover the event and to ignore Charlottesville?

Hope is a Many Splendoured Thing. Then imagine if Charlottesville’s Mayor had requested that no one from the town attend the march or for outsiders not to participate in counter-demonstrations on site? Yes, there would still be Press coverage but, perhaps, less than complete, especially if the national outlets had decided not to show up (CNN, The NYT, The WSJ, et al.). 

Imagine the optics of vacant streets portraying marchers with police protection…and nobody else around! That would likely have deflated the importance of the event, at least to all onlookers outside the Bannon-bubble. Imagine if Governor McAuliffe or Mayor Signer had not to condemned the speech so stridently, resorting to meeting fire with fire, preferring instead to attend to their routine affairs with Charlottesville and the Lee statue a million miles away? 

Imagine if these leaders – these local agents of community standards against hate speech – had preferred humor that could have fed right into ‘Saturday Night Live’? One such remark might have been, “Boys will be boys. Growing up is oh so hard to do, from the Oval Office on down…”

If this initial quip were not effective, then creative people and comedians -- ¿Senator Franken, anyone? – could surely have come up with something to say to castrate these ‘tough-guys’ publicly and indirectly. Imagine the pre-emptive optics of transforming these bigots, and the President who had unleashed them, into a collective laughing stock.  That would have been Classic Churchill or F.D.R.!