Letter #65 to friends and family

Security Cooperation: a ‘Plan Colombia’ for Iraq?

Introduction: current situation.
The current rush-to-consensus on applying Plan Colombia may prove over time to be pre-mature and a product of group-think.1 In working with the Iraqi government (GOI) to create a secure, stable and sovereign nation, the U.S. government (USG) must assist and support the GOI in avoiding three national catastrophes:

• a regional war between Arabs and Persians fought on Iraqi soil;
• a civil war between the Arabs and Kurds; and,
• a continuing relapse into civil conflict creating a culture of chronic conflict.2

The danger of the third point is clear: half of the failed states that emerge from civil war relapse into (often-times bloodier) conflict within ten years. Iraq may be starting to relapse. Why?

1. Iraq’s contentious factions remain trapped in a "security dilemma", complicating the prospects of long-term conciliation. (A security dilemma indicates that paramilitary and other armed groups outside the law tend not to surrender their weapons during programs of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, or “DDR”.)3

Specifically, in Iraq, we do not know whether or not the Ministry of Interior really did weed out the death squads brought in during Bayan Jabr's tenure of 2005 and 2006 or thought to be lingering in the Ministry of Defence.4

The Norwegian government and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning have documented an absolute surfeit of weaponry dispersed throughout the extra-legal fighting elements. Any actual surrender of arms is likely to be nominal.

The Maliki government has squandered the substantial progress of "DDR" afforded by the U.S. program of funding the Sunni ‘Awareness Movement’ with concerned local citizens (a/k/a CLCs). This surge-related program protected the Sunni population from possible sectarian genocide and, more importantly, began bringing disaffected elements into the political mainstream while establishing the fundaments of community policing.

Community policing re-frames the current insurgency as a crime wave -- not as an insurgency -- effectively to cut these murderers off at the source. Whether the rationale is ethno-sectarian or economic, people who kill people are still criminals. Neighborhood residents are the best eyes-and-ears for the police as demonstrated in the Kurdish cities.

Perhaps most important, there are too many guns with too much ammunition combusting with pervasive poverty throughout Iraq.

Review of Plan Colombia as a Template.
Colombia and Iraq share compelling similarities -- high numbers of internally displaced people; drug (or illegal oil) trafficking as a source of funding primarily for government coddled militias; widespread corruption; human rights abuses; vulnerable oil infrastructure in need of protection; and, widespread homicide. A few crucial differences, however, trump these circumstantial parallels. Additionally, tactical gains against revolutionary groups aside, the ultimate success of Plan Colombia remains contested.5

Plan Colombia was basically a de-novo militarization by the USG of the counter-insurgency in Colombia. Over six years, the United States invested $5-6 billion in military aid, a significant portion of which funded fumigation of millions of acres of arable lands producing illicit cash crops; not so in Iraq. Over a six year period, the USG allocated $18 billion to the Iraq Security Forces Fund. Thus, Iraq’s equivalent to Plan Colombia has likely taken place already.

With the funding and equipping to date of the Ministries of Interior and Defence (MOI and MOD) as well as the 100,000 CLCs exceeding $18 billion, $3-3.5 billion (60% equivalent of the Colombian aid since Iraq has 60% of Colombia’s population) of funding over six years should prove to be superfluous. Such a situation would be like Noah, on the thirty-ninth day of rains, walking top-side with a pitcher of water to tend to some plants on deck. Instead, such a USG posture would more likely spoil the prospects for long-term stability as U.S. policies would be perceived – as they are already – as taking sides in a civil conflict.

Training more men to kill other men, as suggested by using Plan Colombia, will not enhance the rule of law in Iraq. The police force exceeds reasonable levels already; current infrastructure can not handle the levels of security forces using it. One of every 25-30 Iraqis is in the security forces (i.e., the military and police; or, ISF), meaning more police per population than any of the world's five most dangerous countries. At the height of Plan Colombia, there were -- at least -- one hundred people for every member of the security forces.

Iraq lacks the extra-governmental institutions reaching all levels of its society. Colombia has the Catholic Church and many mature peace-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs), allied with wealthier benefactors in the U.S. and Europe, to build a climate of reconciliation that can supplant a culture of conflict.6  Lastly, U.S. interests (i.e., the war on drugs and “narcorruption” sweeping Northward from Colombia) were more immediate and vital with respect to Colombia than they are with Iraq.7

A (Not-So) New Way for a New Day.
The ideal end-state toward which U.S. can point Iraq includes the following elements:

• police primacy through democratic, communally-based law enforcement;
• an end to ISF-sponsored violence against prisoners and detainees including torture, false arrest and neglect during custody;
• widespread enforcement for the protection of fundamental human rights; and,
• ethno-sectarian tolerance strengthened through mutual support.

These elements define President Obama's idea of a stable, secure and self-sustaining Iraq (or the words actually used in briefings). It may be prudent not to assume an eventual stay-behind U.S. force. Such a residual force would be unwelcome and, given its small number and attenuated lines of communication (LOC), far more vulnerable. A possible exception might be small U.S. Army training contingents in Kirkuk, Baghdad and Basra. These units would prevent potential regional peace-keepers -- about 20,000 in all (if requested) -- from a land-grab of Iraq. NATO or U.N. troops might be better suited than the U.S. Army for this dual-purpose exception. Such a training and oversight force would tap into the peace-keepers’ LOC.

This alternative approach addresses the constraints mentioned earlier to culminate in a post-kinetic partnership between Iraq and the U.S. starting in 2012. This alliance will aim for peaceful co-existence within Iraqi society to address poverty and essential service shortages that would tend to undermine the GOI's legitimacy and rule of law. The security cooperation office, then, would ideally consist of a security assistance component (8-13 people) supplemented by liaisons with civilian agencies (27-32 people) harnessing USG and NGO-sponsored resources.

The Legacy Issue.
For example, for every uniformed military personnel deployed as trainers in Iraq from the U.S., NATO or the U.N. (i.e., up to 3,000), there would be at least five field-workers drawn from the Peace Corps and NGOs as well as from the Iraqi population. These volunteers and the uniformed military would cross-train each other in grass-roots economic development and civil-military operations.

Iraqis could then re-build their villages and their lives in practical ways that they would begin to associate with the United States or the West over the long-term.8 The USG would strive, through this radically different OSC sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, to impart a legacy of democratic policing, law-&-order, human rights and communal self-improvement.9 The annual cost of this legacy-building would total less than 10% of the average ISFF burden.

REFERENCES
1. Irving Janis; Yale & Berkeley; 1972
Dr Janis did extensive work on the subject, defined it as: A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation realistically to appraise alternative courses of action.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink)

2. Paul Collier; Oxford University 2004
“Around half of all civil wars are due to post-conflict relapses…The risks of conflict relapse are very high during the first post-conflict decade – typically around 50%.”
(http://www.un.org/esa/documents/Development.and.Conflict2.pdf)

Matthew Kirwin; Michigan State, 2006

“There are several factors that have led to the conflagration of a security dilemma in Cote d’Ivoire. First, a weak state and economic crisis compelled certain groups to revert to a primordial attachment to ethnic and religious background, which supersedes national identity and creates intense power struggles. This reversion to ethnic identity caused the parties to identify each other as offensive threats. Due to the dire economic situation in states such as Cote d’Ivoire, the struggle for the control of resources has become intense. “Any economic improvement by one ethnic group is frequently perceived as an example by the center: the ethnic security dilemma has an economic component, as all sorts of motives and fears are read into any change in the economic status of each ethnic group (Saideman 1998: 135).” Therefore the distribution of resources to one ethnic group and not another decreases the security of latter and increases the security of the former. Control and distribution of resources is primarily the responsibility of the government. Political appointments therefore confer power to the appointee and his entourage, which in turn can be interpreted as a security threat to certain groups. At one point other ethnic groups assumed that the government of Gbagbo and his ethnic group had a stranglehold on the means of entry into the police and gendarmerie.”
(http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/pdf-files/vol15num1/kirwin.pdf)

4. James C. Jones; U.S. Institute of Peace 2009; Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War (page-365)
“Indeed doubts exist about the degree of real paramilitary [i.e., ‘government coddled militias’] demobilization. Recent reports the emergence of new groups, or reemergence of old ones, throughout the country. Moreover, investigations as well as informed testimony under the controversial Justice and Peace Law have revealed disturbing links between lawmakers – most of them [President] Uribe supporters [in favor of Plan Colombia’s militarized program] – and paramilitaries. And there is strong evidence of widespread paramilitary penetration of governmental institutions.”
Please note that the writing of Dr Jones is likely to be biased against the government of Colombia (GOC); he was under investigation by the GOC for possible ties with leftist guerillas opposing the rightist paramilitaries.
The Department of State gives the GOC higher marks but states in its 2009 narcotics report:

“The GOC does not, as a matter of government policy, encourage or facilitate the illicit production or distribution of narcotic or psychotropic drugs or other controlled substances, or the laundering of proceeds from illegal drug transactions. While criminal organizations are greatly weakened, concerns remain over their corrupting influences. In September 2008, two CNP [i.e., Colombian National Police] generals, Antonio Gomez Mendez and Marco Pedreros, were fired as a result of alleged ties to narco-paramilitary leader, Daniel “El Loco” Barrera. Separately, several members of the GOC were found to have supported right-wing paramilitary groups. Seventy members of the 2006-2010 Congress and 15 current and former governors have been investigated in the “para-political” scandal, with 34 congressmen and eight governors jailed as a result of the aggressive investigations.”
(http://www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2009/vol1/116520.htm)
Deborah Haynes; The Times of London, 2009
“….in January the human rights office of the Defence Ministry found more than 1,000 detainees at three centres in Ninevah, northern Iraq, including about 550 who had orders issued for their release…Many prisoners were held in cramped and unhygienic conditions. More than 700 were eventually freed.”
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article6737870.ece)  

5. Associated Content News; “Top 5 Nations Where Safety is Last” 2007

“Colombia. Infamous for its guerillas, illegal cocaine "industry", and corrupt government, no wonder Colombia ranks as ‘The Most Dangerous Country in the World’. Bombings targeting civilians are common and terrorism is a way of life for most citizens who have grown accustomed to the chaos. It has a high rating for kidnappings with ransoms, with businesspeople, tourists, journalists, and scientists being frequent targets, though no one is actually excluded from kidnappings. Hot spots include ATMs, taxis, restaurants, and simply walking down the street. Those who try to resist robberies usually get shot and killed. Bogota, Baranquilla, Cartagena, and Medellin are statistically categorized as the most dangerous cities, with Medellin holding the title of the Drug Capital and ‘Most Dangerous City in the World’. With 11 murders a day in a city of merely 2 million, its murder rates is quintupled that of New York City. In recent years, murders rates in Colombia have dropped, but not enough to pass the title to South Africa. Though what was previously mentioned [falling homicide rates] may be misinformation, as critics have accused President Uribe of manipulating the crime [rate], making Colombia seem safer than it really is. What is behind all the heinous crimes? An expanding drug market and a plethora of terrorist groups, and a government that does nothing about it. Colombia averages 47 murders a day in a nation of 45 million, giving it the crown of ‘Most Dangerous’.”
(http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/159175/top_5_most_dangerous_countries_in_the.html?cat=9)  
U.S. Office on Colombia; 2009

“The…Working Group on Extrajudicial Executions has identified new modalities of extrajudicial executions where killings are no longer publicly reported, as happened in the case of false positives, but rather hidden, with measures taken to conceal the identity of those responsible. One example is the increase in cases of forced disappearances of human rights defenders and social leaders, with the person being subsequently killed and put into unidentified graves in the majority of these cases. In many of these cases members of the armed forces are alleged to have been involved either directly, through cooperation, or at the least through acquiescence with paramilitaries. According to a recent report by the National Commission for the Search for Disappeared People, between January 1 2007 and October 21 2008 alone, there was a total of 1,686 people forcefully disappeared.”

(http://www.usofficeoncolombia.com/uploads/application-pdf/2009-%20June%20EJE%20memo.pdf)

6. Arturo Carrillo; U.S. Institute of Peace 2009; Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War (pages 148-149)

“As a result, by 2000, the Colombian non-governmental human rights movement was a critical player…Colombian NGOs had powerful allies in the Colombian Congress as well as among foreign governments, intergovernmental organizations…[e.g., U.N.]…and, of course, international NGOs….”

7. Bruce Bagley University of Miami; 2001
“During most of the 1980s the Medellin cartel dominated the Colombian drug trade and its principal trafficking routes passed through (or over) the Caribbean into the United States via south Florida and elsewhere along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. As these "traditional" smuggling routes came under increasing pressure from U.S. drug enforcement over the second half of the decade, a gradual shift away from the Caribbean routes to new ones passing through Central America and Mexico and across the U.S. southwest border took place. By the early 1990s 70 to 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled out of Colombia entered the United States from Mexico while only 20 to 30 percent continued to come in via the Caribbean.”
(http://clas.berkeley.edu/Events/conferences/Colombia/workingpapers/working_paper_bagley.html)

8. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer; The Ugly American; 1958
“But despite the dual meaning, the ‘ugly American’ of the book title fundamentally does refer to the plain-looking engineer Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. It is argued in the book that the Communists are successful because they practice tactics similar to Atkins'. According to an article published in Newsweek in May 1959, the ‘real’ Ugly American was identified as an ICA technician named Otto Hunerwadel, who served in Burma from 1949 until his death in 1952.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American)

9. Bonnie Bucqueroux; Michigan State, 2004
“By embracing strategies that decentralize and personalize police service, police departments that have adopted the community policing philosophy have been able to engage communities in comprehensive, collaborative, community-based problem-solving aimed at crime, fear of crime, and disorder. Many efforts involve assigning individual officers or teams to specific beat areas, to foster a sense of ownership and responsibility. The marriage of police and community brings together the power of the formal criminal justice system with the informal social control that communities can exert. Police departments have also been a catalyst in forging new partnerships with other professional and civic institutions (municipal agencies, non-profit groups, the business community, schools, and the faith community).“
(http://www.policing.com/articles/rcj.html)
Ned McDonnell; Letter to President George W. Bush, 2006
“The three themes of this rationale – crime prevention, national sovereignty and economic development – are based on precedents in Afghanistan and New York City…The Ministry of Interior has been infiltrated by militias backed by Iran...Trustworthy policemen, vetted and approved by local inhabitants, will empower Iraqi citizens to turn over the insurgents who are nothing more than people enjoying the blood-sport of – and financial gain from – killing, destruction, kidnapping and mayhem. This plan will save time, energy and money which can then be better allocated to Afghanistan to complete Operation Enduring Freedom in support of a tenuous democratic government….”

Letter #64: typical week, waning

Dear everyone,

Fortunately for me, I serve with many fine people as Peace Corps volunteers.  Truthfully, each has honoured me – improved me – in his or her unique manner.  Many of us face the anxiety choking at our throats about what will follow.  Sincerely, I have always believed a disjointed path makes for a creative path; needless or heedless to say, I will surely test that notion soon.  This essay is to submit to you what a typical week is like for me.  Submitting openly to the judgement and criticism of others is not an easy task, especially as the value of my service remains uncertain and accountable to the starkest judge of all, time.  So, here is a brief journal of my last week to give you an idea of what I have really been up to down here in México.

Sunday, August 26th.  I enjoyed a nice luncheon with my former fiancée.  Hers is truly a beautiful soul.  The stresses she faces are consuming and yet she soldiers on, almost manly in her stoicism.  That we will not marry says more about me, little of which I want to dwell on here.  I then went out for a run for about two miles; damn, I am getting old and am out of shape.  That nano-second of stillness in motion hung like minutes and then my body slapped against the ground, hard.  Getting up, I noticed a curlicue of red migrating down my forearm, pain setting in.  “Shoot, mister, you have a run to complete…”  And so I did: this is the Neddy McDonnell I always knew, for better or, more often, for worse.  Stayed up until two in the morning working on a project to define the steps toward a financial structure to carry a new invention to market.  Felt like the old days in Manhattan.  Except that I was a financial structuring wannabe; truth is, I never really understood the whole ‘art’ of financial engineering; damn, neither did they, in retrospect.

Monday, August 27th.  A wasted day to be gotten through.  Having been through this drill before, I focussed on the collection of Spanish articles I distribute through my center each week on aeronautics, Querétaro, science, technology, energy and innovation.  In that mindless chamber of intellect and truth, I suspect that precious few people actually read these articles; damn, I wouldn’t either, in retrospect. Quickly, I reviewed the presentation once but did not present it as my counterpart was swamped, as always.  Finally, I sent out eight e-mails to professional contacts.  People love hearing from me, until I ask them for assistance and then they do not; not much different from me in the past, I have to admit.  That damn retrospect will eat me up and spit me out, I tell you.  I went for a run for the third day in a row, very slow.  It is a re-start if not refreshing.

Tuesday, August 28th.  Did a lot of revision of the presentation on this top-secret, compartmentalized, work for a counterpart with an invention.  I am plugging away at this project for two reasons.  Like so many other activities here at this national science center, it is new to me and I am learning.  While I feel inadequate and guilty for having neither answers nor experience, my counterpart likes what I am doing and so I keep on doing it.  Stubbornness about making some kind of difference persists; it keeps me working.  Today I analyzed carefully two key laws in technology transfer – besides the obvious two on intellectual property and on promoting science and technology – about forming corporations and promoting small businesses.  Mexican law is a lot like the bible: so many inner-contradictions that one can justify just about anything.  And so I piece together the bread crumbs of solemn paragraphs -to plot a way out the thickets of bureaucratic legalisms toward the wide and sunny market.  Only time will tell if that sun is the optimism key to the three out of a thousand who succeed with new things or if it is that of the blazing, coursing inferno of the desert, devoid of promise and happiness, consuming the forgotten 997.  

Enjoyed a dinner with one of the volunteers in a supposedly unsafe state.  Interestingly, the stress that has weighed him down is not what I felt in Afghanistan of that unacknowledged possibility that, on any given day, one might be killed.  No, while that possibility exists, his difficulty was the uncertainty of whether he would be pulled from that state, thereby undercutting his work.  Like the others, he has worked hard.  Frankly, I admire these young volunteers in the countryside, living in poor communities without comforts we take for granted and being alone.  I salute them for I am not sure I could do what they do.  In particular, I found this volunteer’s gratitude toward the Peace Corps management in Mexico to be refreshing.

Wednesday, August 29th.  Did a lot of research on how other states are faring in the automotive industry and engineering-related direct foreign investments in general.  It seems that Querétaro is losing out.  Such a fate is unsurprising for two reasons.  First, the state has only two million people.  Second, the advantage of the state’s investment clime has been its relative freedom from violence.  This advantage has lain, it is widely thought, in the many rival narco-families placing their wives and children here.  The honor among gangsters seems to be: hey, pal, we can blow each other’s head off but the mujer and niños are off limits, okay?  That advantage is fading fast as international investors get it that organized crime is having its private under-world war here in Mexico; for everything else there is Mastercard.  

I finally made the one-on-one presentation on the tech commercialization ideas.  So far so good.  Lots of revisions but lying in those critiques is not an indictment of my ability but guidance on where we need to go.  Had an interesting dinner with friends about the role of conscience.  PRI disdain for seven decades or no, Mexico is an intensely Catholic country, even for those who no longer believe.  One old fellow pointed out that a man of conscience, real conscience, is not the one who refrains from action when he espies a despised ulterior motive; he is the fellow who sees that motive but takes the right action in any case.  How like Blaise Pascal that notion is.  It is when I believe my own bullsh*t – or in contemporary slingo, ‘drink my own kool-aid’ – that I am likely to stumble.

Thursday, August 30th.  Wrote an essay about the corporation and small business laws for the book-let I am putting together for CIDESI (i.e., my host country agency) on technology transfer, my only physical legacy.  That book-let will be some sixty-five pages with three volumes of annexes of readings totalling 125-150 pages, with 65-75% being articles germane to the various subjects of tech transfer that I have translated plus my vision of what transferring technology with entail for a far-seeing Centro with a highly hierarchical structure.  Felt sad about the death of Neil Armstrong.  I wish we had a way of knighting our finest heroes.  

Such secular sainthood would befit that MidWesterner well, not so much for his walk on the moon or his timeless tribute to the mission – “one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” – but for the virtues of humility, modesty, excellence and decency this man exhibited for the forty three years he remained on earth after returning from the moon.  How like the namesake of the university where he taught, Cincinnatus.  True heroes rise to the occasion when the situation calls for it and then recede quietly afterward, if fortunate enough not to be assassinated.

That latter action of public quiescence and private humility that proves who they really are.  It also reminds me of how Massachusetts led the intellectual ferment for abolition while three Generals from Ohio preserved the union.  A century later another, another fellow from Massachusetts threw down the gauntlet for space and getting to the moon.  And two astronauts from Ohio did more than any of the others to realize that murdered man’s mission.  

How fortunate I am to be a MidWesterner, notwithstanding excellent schooling in New England and the South.  That’s it: the essay will be deferred a week in favor of a tribute to Neil Armstrong – if this is not Peace Corps II, then nothing is.  Caught most of Governor Romney’s speech at my party’s national nominating convention.  Great speech, if he had just ended it with his biography.  Going negative on President Obama is unstatesmanlike and with pit-bull-sh*tters like Governor Sununu around, Governor Romney can take the high-road. 

Friday, August 31st.  Got the weekly articles out after I had goofed and lost the leaders.  Damn, what a pain in the pizats.  Nothing like bogus time pressure.  I quickly translated an abridged version of the speech by President Kennedy at Rice University when he threw the gauntlet down for the space program.  Did the rarity of including to illustrations in the weekly e-mail: one of the National Geographic cover with Neil Armstrong on the moon and the other of a map of how effective I believe my Centro’s strategy might be.  

Another meeting on the invention – again, more revisions; I was not getting it.  Stinging to the ego as these comentarios are, they do guide me toward the more important goal of the mission.  My counterpart is a typical engineer in that his patience for my liberal arts loftiness is limited and yet he is a far more sensitive scientist than people realize. 

At the end of the session, after we drew out another diagram of what the immediate tasks are, he patted me on the shoulder and said he would like me to extend my service because of my intelligence which, he believes, no one else has; he implied that the Director of the Center agrees.  Such a rarely given and gratefully received compliment fired my engines up – I will figure out a way to get there, dammit…before retrospect.  I have done it before and I shall do it again.  

Closed out the day with the second evening in a row of teaching conversational English, this week being ‘letra-libre’, a fight to the death or suicide between Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson.  Honestly, I picked these two for two very selfish reasons.  For a while now, I have wanted to sample a little of the poetry of these two women but would never do it any other way. Second, I want to go around saying I have been reading Plath and Dickinson – though I have read 1-2% of the poems of each. 

The classes came off really well.  Emily Dickinson, at least the little I read, is majestic – so clear with the big questions.  By the same 2% token, Sylvia Plath’s command of the language is unbeatable but the self-absorption is a little much.  It is like suicide was the logical and timely terminus of her analyzing an endlessly inward but illusory fractal geometry of her humanly limited personality.  The fun part was collaborating on the interpretation with my mexican friends; there was so much more ‘there’ there than I could have imagined.

We switched rather quickly out of Plath and into a beautiful poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde.  He seemed to strike a profound balance in his discussion of death between the breathtakingly detached veracity of Dickinson and the breathlessly dispatched tenacity of Plath.  That makes sense since Lopez Velarde was born in the middle of the century intervening between the lives of the two estadounidenses.

We also talked about many other things like Mexican culture and the place of her traditions in the winner-take-all new economy that appeals to old sins like greed. Of course, we debated whether an after-life exists to which I graced my interlocuteurs with my customary response, "I'll let you know when I get there." We laughed and now my students want to marry me off -- this is a bloody rebellion...Refreshing evening; home at one.  

Saturday, September 1st. Anxiety quite a lot today as my networking is proceeding slowly and the dread of my service ending sets in.  I went for a 2.5 mile run and felt it every step of the way.  I was worried I would quit and was whining inwardly about the all too real decline of my physical strength, speculating that running on an empty stomach was the cause.  I finally looked at the sweat shining in the sun on my arm and said, “Oh, shut-up and glisten!!!”  I kept going, slowly, but trying.  

The first one did not really hurt much; the second sure did.  It was May of 1972 and a bunch of us from Saint Edmund’s Academy -- an idyllic episcopal grade school reserved for the smart or well-born (and, then, me) -- had gone to a garden fair in our uniforms before heading home and getting ready for dancing school later that evening.  The slicks had been giving us a hard time for at least half an hour. 

Finally, it came to a head when some little urchin walked close by me and shrank back, feigning that I had elbowed him.  Picking on a punk was not in my repertoire; the slicks now had their Gulf of Tonkin.  My classmates – one now dead for ten years – split in holy terror.  I started to flee, too, for about five strides.  But the big invisible hand of manliness caught me and turned me around. So, I walked right back to the most overtly menacing slick, a good two years older (and many more wiser) than I, and looked him in the eye. 

Now I had a dilemma: I knew I could not fight worth a sh*t, especially with two other slicks standing nearby, ready to put a whuss in his pusillanimous little place; nor would I run away.  My big dancing school crush – whose great uncle had contributed three buildings, including what turned out to be I.M. Pei’s prototype for the east wing of the national gallery, at my imminent high school – might be watching all of this; I had really spazzed that year in showing her my poorly expressed, if sickeningly polite, desire. 

Yes, I was delicate but I would not be cowardly; this reaction to bullies has not changed much over the years. So I looked at the slick in the eye and said, “So are you going to hit me?”  The slick hit me in the chin, maybe even in the dimple.  Though I lost my balance a little, I quickly steadied myself and looked at him in the eye.  In fairness to the slick, I left him with little choice.  My slight frame and recognizable blazer established my bona fides as a card-carrying whimp. 

Now, in the real world, slicks – or most men for that matter – can’t afford to be upstaged by a self-evident cissy, like me, lest they be castrated publicly.  Now, the slick could have broken my nose or damaged my eye.  He kept his aim to the least harmful part, the chin.  Seeing that I was not moving, the slick wound one up and hit me 'but good' in the same spot.  I winced in pain autonomically, without choice.  Though unsteady, still I would not cut and run.  The slick, really not a bad fellow, knew enough was enough and led his friends away.  

Later that afternoon, we crossed paths again and the same guttural noises ensued, at which I said, with what little moxxy I could muster up, “Oh for sh*t’s sake, not THIS again…”  The slick instead smiled and punched me, not hard, in the shoulder which, in slick etiquette, meant a sign of respect and acceptance and said in the harsh but friendly Pittsburgh accent, “You’re a pussy, alright, but you’re a HARD pussy…” 

Elated, I felt like a debutante being presented; like my sister would feel just five years later on her big night and like my darling niece will be feeling just after I return to the States, which brought me back to why I was subjecting myself to this puritan torture of running in the first place – to fit into my full dress not worn since a winter’s ball put on by the Blue Hill Troupe in Manhattan fifteen years ago.  So, I kept running: this is Neddy McDonnell.  

Got home and watched hours worth of the Republican convention on C-Span.  What an uplift to hear the sheer intellectual majesty of Secretary Condoleezza Rice.  Nevertheless, I am getting tired of people pulling quotes out of context. And I am smiting, smokin' peeved that Representative Ron Paul was blitzkrieged by the "party establishment" like Governor Sununu.

On the misquotes, if we conservatives cannot make our case honestly and triumph, then we should re-think our case.  Another line that annoyed me was this notion that President Obama somehow took credit away from small business owners by saying “we built it”; what rubbish – the President simply stated that thought so well put centuries ago by that great Christian philosopher, John Donne, that no man is an island.

Letter 63: a conservative apologia for the 112th Congress

Dear everyone (i.e., all three people aside me who will actually read this letter home),

This missive tries to answer, from my conservative bias, an interesting argument raised in a Washington Post article in support of the widely held notion that this current Congress, the 112th, has been the worst in American history.  On a housekeeping note, I assume the label of ‘conservative’ knowing that I am not a pure conservative. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/13/13-reasons-why-this-is-the-worst-congress-ever/

Additionally, I believe this Congress has had more than its fair share of Republicans focussed on bringing down President Obama.  Since I often write that the country is in need of a national renewal – starting from within each one of us – such personal animus has no place in the national discourse.  We need creative political ideation, not craven personal obliteration.  So, onto the response…

BLUF: our government, Congress and citizenry are in a time of intense debate, high uncertainty and unforeseeable consequences.  Perhaps this Congress represents a pause before a plunge into the new history of a previously untried political philosophy.

I.                    Number of bills passed.  This measure reflects more the bias of the author since many conservatives believe a fundamental problem for the U.S. is the passing of too many laws, reactive in nature, leading to regulations too restrictive in application, translating into fewer small businesses and increasingly suffocating beleagured middle class.

II.                 9-10% approval ratings.  Disheartening, to say the least, since these rock-bottom numbers indicate that people may no longer be exempting their own Representatives from the scorn formerly reserved for all of Congress.  Demagoguery by the Republicans certainly has played a part in this crisis of confidence in our legislature (e.g., the deliberate misnomer of the health-care bill, brokered by the President, as ‘ObamaCare’, especially as this compromise integrates findings from the Heritage Foundation).  Frankly, my countrymen are smart enough to squinch up their noses at such sophistry.

III.               Polarization.  A wise man once told me that ‘confusion’ is a high state just preceding creativity (i.e., call me a confused mad-Manet wannabe)…If this statement be true, this assertion and the one previous argue toward a time of change, perhaps radical change.  Such prospects are frightening and people tend to lean back on their basic beliefs while the source of discontent – the American people, particularly the middle class – demand something new and different aside from the same ‘threadbare’ prescriptions.

IV.              The G.O.P. has set back the recovery through the debt ceiling ‘bullying’.  I was a Democrat of many years in the mid-1990s.  I remember all my more liberal friends excoriating the Republicans for “shutting down” the government for a short period at that time.  Unstatesmanlike though this Republican action appeared to be, I privately thought that it was a good way to make the main point of the party’s ‘contract’ with America (i.e., by whacking the mule with a two-by-four).  It proved to be the main reason why President Clinton later produced historic surpluses (though based, at least in part, on convenient ‘J-curve’ assumptions on future revenue in-take on social security).  This Congress, unrepentant though it was, made crystal clear through this debt-ceiling spat, that we cannot spend-and-borrow our way out of national economic malaise.  Yes, President Bush (of whom I am a BIG fan) had a part in creating this challenge. 

V.                Lower Credit Rating.  I mean, really.  This assertion clarifies the bias of the author.  Mind you – bias in public disquisition is a good quality for it provokes debate.  In actuality, given explicit and implicit debt levels to G.D.P. – we look more like a single-A rated country than a triple-A one.  Call it a bigger credit bang for the excess military buck.  A end to cheap Chinese credit, imported by the same Treasury charged to protect the integrity of the national currency, will crash the global economy.  This ceiling and its offspring, sequestration, can be better viewed as a stand to preserve our national sovereignty than as some punishment imposed by the privileged.

VI.              Sequestration. Personally, I welcome this admittedly sledge-hammer form of fiscal discipline.  Sooner or later, the country will have to face up its fiscal profligacy.  Sequestration was the alternative to limiting the debt ceiling; a good compromise to enforce fiscal discipline while granting our lawmakers a final chance to do for us what they had previously failed to do by themselves.

VII.            Repeal  times thirty-three.  Got it.  I have previously decried the demagoguery by my fellow conservatives on this issue of the healthcare bill.  Nevertheless, the health-care law is not popular among a voting public that clearly believes, as I do, in a right to basic health-care.  My sense remains that my countrymen do not want that right extended through excessive government oversight.  That said, while I prefer a system that evolves up through the states organically (that is, constitutionally), based on federal minimum standards, this legislation should stay in place until a better alternative emerges. 

VIII.          Budget legerdemains of Senate Democrats.  In truth, I was not aware of this issue.  Good for the author for proving that bias stated in public disquisition, founded on integrity, improves the content of the larger political dicourse.

IX.              Zero appropriation bills passed.  Obviously not a wonderful statistic.  Yet I view this ‘reason’ more as evidence of the previous assertion, empirically supported, of polarization.

X.                The ‘infrastructure fiasco’.  As a fiscal conservative who viewed the stimulus bill as unaffordable and as a failure in its implementation, I am not surprised that my fellow Republicans would be loath toward giving more permission to squandered largesse.  These stop-gap measures are votes of no-confidence against what conservatives view as a failed discretionary spending policy, led by the President, that may have slowed growth over the medium term.  That is to say: the Republicans use this stop-gap approach to keep the President on a tight leash until the President changes or a new Administration is inaugurated.

XI.              The temporary suspension of F.A.A. operations.  I must confess my ignorance on this issue.  It seems to be a particularly powerful example of other assertions; namely, the polarization and absence of enacted legislation.

XII.            The blocking of the nomination of a qualified Governor for the Federal Reserve.  Unless the author has left something out, there is no justification for Senator Shelby’s actions nor the G.O.P. leadership’s tolerance of it.

XIII.          The experts agree.  Beyond my limited knowledge to comment on this point.  Such agreement is not surprising, since at least some Republicans and conservatives do appear to be more intent on curtailing President Obama’s career than in honestly trying to find ways to steer our country through a very challenging time now and yet to come.

XIV.          There are problems to solve.  “, Sherlock”; or, I think we all agree on that one.

Letter #62: a culture of violence and the second amendment

UPDATE: 25th of March 2017.
This essay was drafted four (4) months prior to the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Since the horrid night in Colorado, the United States have hosted twenty-five (25) multiple or mass shootings of innocents, killing 200+ people and injuring in excess of 175 others. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data 
The firearms industry and inattentive or unwilling family members or care-givers share responsibility for these crimes as many of the shooters are mentally ill and / or suicidal.
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/06/446348616/fact-check-are-gun-makers-totally-free-of-liability-for-their-behavior 
The industry can no longer fatten its bottom line by flooding cosmetically changed military weapons into civilian markets; lobbying for lax controls of weapons purchases; and, hiding behind a self-serving law that shields it from the liability of knowingly manufacturing weapons that lead to so many murders and even more suicides. 

ORIGINAL ESSAY 
(unchanged from August 2012, except for typographical corrections)
While the nation mourns, silently, the recent spate of shooting sprees in different regions, for different reasons, perhaps the most perplexing aspect of these unrelated but correlated crimes remains the absence of an assertive response by leaders in either of the two parties.  Such was not always the case.  The day following the murder of the right Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, Senator Robert Kennedy, himself in a heated political contest, gave one his finest of many great orations to an audience in Cleveland, Ohio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Vll-t0H6A  (excerpt)

In those five minutes of brave anguish for the country he loved forty-four years ago, Senator Kennedy addressed the growing endemic sickness engulfing the larger society: that of mindless violence.  His words surely resonate with the sadness of our own time.

With twenty years of violence, through terror, war and crime that kill ever more innocents, it is little wonder, then, that the national leadership – aside from the usual round of gun control bills that no one takes seriously – does not react or reacts sluggishly.  America is used to violence, inured to the harsh consequences for so many innocents, willing to forfeit for security those very liberties that many sacrificed so much for so long, asking for so little in return.  Truth is: we expect violence now because we are immersed in a culture of violence.  These days, much like the 1960s, much of the violence is motivated by overt and even covert hate.

Certain peoples – Arabs (or Sikhs mistaken as Arabs), gays, Mexicans -- often suffer the overt hatred of others who see them as different and vulnerable enough to bully.  Nevertheless, other crimes, like the shooting in Colorado, have no apparent motive other than bloodshed; such people cannot have charity in their hearts to be able to take the lives of others they do not know.  Tagging Saint Thomas Aquinas, such covert hate may be as simple as the absence of love.

What frightens and saddens me so is that this national sickness, under which we suffer today, was first decried by Senator Kennedy two generations ago.  A long time, two generations is; long enough to harden the fear and mistrust of 1968 into a culture of violence today.  Cultures take a long time to change – as Moses found after liberating his countrymen from slavery so long ago – and, perhaps, they take even longer to heal when they turn criminal.

Indeed, this perceived culture of violence, with apparently unchallenged depredations against the vulnerable, may be acclimating us toward a culture of hate.  Yet there is still time to avoid the self-same darkness that swept over what had been arguably the world’s most civilized country, Germany, during the first half of the last century.

That prospect points toward the necessity of a national renewal.  Events over the past six months have dizzied us – shooting of people and looting of power (in the name of security).  Indeed, Berlin, Munich and Nuremberg may be resurrecting themselves (in another, equally seductive, guises) as Boise, Milwaukee and North Carolina.  

This comparison may sound extreme and it no doubt is needlessly alarmist.  Yet we need to recognize that, while our society is far from hopelessly blood-drunk, we have a national sickness.  While the proliferation of guns has certainly aggravated the violence, neither guns nor the second amendment created this culture.  We did.  Likewise, we can undo it.

National renewal will require national dialogue on many levels.  Many of the diverse dimensions of this national gauntlet – cast at our feet by years of neglect of what really makes America great rather than what makes her mighty – lie well beyond the scope of this essay and the confines of my mind. Nevertheless, we can start this national dialogue, this national contemplation, with an open and free debate on the second amendment.

The question I would pose to us is: ¿is the right to bear arms unlimited as (at least I believe) the National Rifle Association argues?  The United States struggles within two dilemmas imposed by this menacing culture of mindless violence:

• theoretical in that two rights – one to life, liberty  and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., property) -- articulated in the Declaration of Independence and to be protected under the Constitution -- as opposed to the right to bear arms are currently in collision; as well as,
• existential in that the bad guys may already have the (often semi-)automatic weapons and so the decent people ought to be able to defend themselves with similar arms.

Even the dilemmas clash since they imply opposite policy outcomes.

As this long overdue debate begins, if in fact it ever does, for my part, I support a stricter view of the second amendment for the same reasons that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did: because that prescribed right enabled her family and their neighbors collectively to take to the streets with guns to forestall the rising retaliation of bullying bigots against the simple assertions by African Americans of their God-given rights in 1950s Birmingham.  In Baghdad, I fell off the fence on the conservatively constitutional side many years ago.

A guard at Adnan Palace, then the senior headquarters of the Ministry of Interior, had to go home each evening, wearing the uniform of his company.  Neither that private security contractor (i.e., his employer), nor the Coalition forces nor even his fellow Iraqis would permit him to carry a gun.  Yet he had to walk through a city sliding into a sectarian cleansing (primarily, Shi´ite on Sunni).  Not only would this fellow stick out as a ‘collaborator’, he could easily be mistaken as a Sunni by the Shi’ite death squads.  His name was Adnan – therefore, likely a Shi’ite – but who would know?

Mr Adnan supported his extended family. He had already been kidnapped once by corrupt police, tortured for sport and shaken down for months of his pay.  Such an attack may have been forestalled had Mr Adnan owned his pistol.  Bullies prey on the vulnerable; even a pistol can deter those wielding heavier weapons in favor of looking for easier pickings.  My Iraqi friend was a sitting duck and the sole breadwinner for a dozen or more relatives in those desperate times.  In that situation, his humble request for money for a small caliber pistol – permits be damned – seemed eminently reasonable.

After all, a man has a right to protect his family by protecting himself as the source of income.  Now America is not yet anywhere close to where Baghdad was seven years ago; hopefully, we shall never endure a time like that.  Nevertheless, those trying circumstances of Mr Adnan certainly vindicated in bold relief the natural right underlying the second amendment of protecting oneself against the tyranny of kings or the depredations of gangs.

LET THE SHOUTING BEGIN and go on and go on and so on until we approach a modus Vivendi, if not a full and proper consensus.

Letter 61 to Friends and Familiares: counterinsurgency and why it does not work

This text is, in actuality, a response to a colleague's thinking through a new counter-insurgency framework designed to leverage the proven benefits of the free markets to address the failing counter-isnurgency in Afghanland.

by NedMcD | July 2, 2012 - 9:52pm

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Gentlemen,

As a life-long civilian, outside the tight culture of the active duty military and even tighter one of the Special Forces, I would like to make three points in my note.

1.     I appreciate the Army decision-making model, as a civilian who has worked with the State Department in Iraq and USAID in Afghanistan.

2.     The breadth of this Small Wars Journal article makes a succinct response impossible.

3.     One's conviction ought not to be assumed as arrogance.

Decision-making for the really dangerous real world. What outsiders often find surprising is the amount of open debate within the Army (and, by that, I mean all of the uniformed services). The chain-of-command applies far more to the implementation than to the conception. Yours is a great model for decision-making in highly uncertain, not to mention dangerous, atmospheres.

Missive Impossible. Over the last few days, I have written several drafts of this note; all end up being long and rambling because I try to answer specific points from the text. In desperation, I clipped thoughts verbatim from the article to narrow my view to the basics and ended up with two full pages. 

Don´t convict conviction. In writing you all, I really have to confess to strong disagreement with assumptions underlying the appended comments. The author's conviction reflects the world of finance from which he and I each came. The fact is, in that world, if an innovator displays tentativeness, both he and the idea are gone.

Defense of the vision underlying this proposal. We most assurèdly face the uncomfortable truth right now that the ‘whole-of-government’ mission in Afghanistan is not turning out the way we had hoped. Such a truth is understandably difficult to accept in the face of your comrades lost, our toil devoted and everyone’s treasure invested. Hopefully, facing this truth can set us free from narrow or desperate thinking.

That possibility does not make things easy. Part of modernizing (i.e., joining the world of and via globalization) entails ‘creative destruction’, not only of industries but of traditions along the way. This process has occurred over time and across time-zones in places as diverse as Europe, Africa and the Pacific Rim. Nonetheless, time takes time and, sadly, many transitions exact blood with the toil.

The transition from tribalism to globalism in Afghanistan will entail an eventual ascendancy to power of the middle and upper middle classes against static power structures. With two years left in Afghanistan, we are very fortunate to have this author with his strong sense of the ground truth there, elaborating a new counter-insurgency model. After all, almost all of the counterinsurgency literature out there is written by those who lost one or formulated their ‘cutting edge’ ideas on K-Street for money or in Cambridge for attention.

When one cuts through the essential details of this proposal, what we have here is something that addresses why most counter-insurgencies fail: modernization takes too long for kinetic adventurism. I am reminded of Viêt Nam. Within twenty-five years of the fall of the South Vietnamese, that society was beginning to resemble far more what we Americans had so wanted to see during our intervention. In a sense, we won through losing.

What! How is that? Our presence planted the seeds for that society's inner growth toward its cuturally reconciled version of capitalism, modernity and democracy. The best of the example we set remained with the people to be ingested over time and without the off-setting distraction of the presence of ‘occupiers’. That is exactly what this program can do: set an example of freedom and hasten the process of modernization through empowering a nascent middle class inside the villages to change the culture from the bottom up.

When enough villagers, born with that rare capacity of dual-minded decision-making, have the confidence to apply it, they may well begin to create a vanguard of change. How? By bringing up children as a new generation of entrepreneurs and by mentoring others of their generation. The diffusion of skills over time will present a more compelling model for counterinsurgency than what we see today. Call the process one of ‘cultural evolution’.

All this will take time, several decades in view of the country’s low education rates, for the newer middle class culture to emerge. That is what we should expect, not because Afghans are inert or stupid but because this modernization will have to come to terms with various deeply ingrained indigenous traditions to make a lasting change -- one that is likewise reconciled with the culture. That is why I like to say that the battlefield in situations like this one remains the future.

This proposal, then, enables select Afghans – an entrepreneurial segment – to bring modernization gradually, through a growing and uniquely Afghan version of a venture capital community at the country’s current center of gravity: the villages. The departing example set by the U.S. remains our choice. Nevertheless, the future of Afghanistan belongs to our host-country counterparts. This program widens their choice for an alternate, better, destiny.

Thank you for your patience.

Old letter from March 2003

TIME FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO DECLARE WAR FORMALLY (c. 15-Mar-03)

I remember sitting in front of my television in amazement at Hodding Carter III’s statement on a talk-show (“Night-Line”, I believe) almost a decade after he soothed so many of us every day as a foreign service officer briefing a frustrated, wounded nation on the Iran hostage ordeal. In this instance, Mr Carter made a casual comment on how the U.S. should react to Libya’s evident and lethal complicity in terrorism targeted against Americans. He stated something to the effect that Congress ought to declare war openly. What was amazing to me about Mr Carter’s comment was that it made so much sense yet held so little currency among his compatriots, including me.

These days, we, all of us, worry about the unknowable consequences of a war against Iraq. My support for this U.S. / U.K.-led aggression – and this invasion will be aggressive – lies in convictions that I have held for some time.

• Saddam Hussein is an odious man heading an atrocious régime with documented proof of a willingness to use poison gas and a reasonable presumption that, if the option were available, he would use nuclear weapons.
• His gangster régime has actively courted, condoned and sponsored terrorism, reportedly paying $25,000 to the families of suicidal murderers in the streets of Israel, the Middle East’s only enduring democracy and most vibrant, progressive society.
• With the co-precedent of Afghanistan, the downfall of Iraq’s régime – and the destruction of Iraq itself – will send a clear message across the world, beyond the Axis-of-Evil, that governments sponsoring terrorism face bloody consequences for their actions.
• Western democracy is under attack and if a religious or class-based war (more likely, both) is in the cards, it is almost certainly inevitable by now; that being the case, we have to win this war, a war we did not start.

Hatred of our country in the Middle East, and among many of the world’s one billion Muslims, is quite real, quite durable, quite deadly. Further, America has had several “wake-up” calls over the past generation as indicated by this incomplete list drawn from memory.

• The assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy by a Palestinian for R.F.K.’s supposed acquiescence to some imagined “Jewish” elite (1968);
• An attempted assassination by Iraqi agents of President George H.W. Bush shortly after his leaving office (1993);
• The murder of two U.S. diplomats, Cleo Noel and George Moore, in the Sudan by surrogates of Yassir Arafat (1973);
• An assassination of a U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Francis Meloy, in Beruit (1976);
• The taking of American citizens as hostages in Iran (1979-1981);
• The attack against and destruction of U.S. embassies and the murder of hundreds over two decades in Pakistan (1979), Lebanon (twice in 1983 & 1984) Kenya (1998), Tanzania (1998);
• More hostages taken by Hizbullah (1980s).
• The murder of 241 U.S. peace-keeping troops in Lebanon (1983);
• The deadly, unprovoked attacks on the U.S.S. Stark (1987) and the U.S.S. Cole (2000)
• The stark slaughter of 189 U.S. passengers on Pan American flight 103 (1988);
• Three attacks – two mass murders – against the World Trade Center (in 1993 and 2001);
• The attack against the Pentagon (2001); and,
• The murder of 93 passengers on the 9/11 United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

 When I wrote out and later documented this list of evil, I felt like someone had hit me up-side of the head: we are already in a war!

President Bush’s strong and blunt response is clear: America did not start this war but we mean to finish it. It is likely to be impossible for the U.S. to dismantle terrorist networks around the world; we will need help. Why not enlist the most effective allies of all: the nations that sponsor these killers? By holding these criminal countries directly accountable for their actions that their surrogates commit against humanity, we give them ample incentive to rein in their mercenaries.

While the Reagan Administration’s bombing of Tripoli seemed like a coarse response to Libya’s conspiratorial role in terrorism during the 1980s, it proved to be effective in abating Libyan sponsorship, at least in the short-run. It is important that we hand on a safe world to our children. Gangster régimes, like Saddam Hussein’s, cannot continue on as they have in the past, fettered or not.

Yet conviction and military might do not relieve the United States of America from the obligations of its moral leadership. And we shall remain accountable to these higher standards exclusively for a while until the euro becomes a global currency on par with the dollar and the European Union emerges as a super-power some time over the next five or ten years. The evident concern expressed by friend and foe alike about the fall-out of a possible invasion of Iraq is that the U.S. has lost its sense of proportion, that we are beginning to act with a sense of impunity.

There are grounds for such concerns. Every day, it seems, our media portrays the leaders of allies who disagree with us as somehow unequal to the tall order of statesmanship and manliness. The amount of proven reserves in Iraq, the U.S. consumption patterns of fossil fuels and the frank acknowledgement by Bush Administration officials of an extended occupation of Iraq arguably add up to an ulterior motive for this conquest: subsidized oil.

• Concerns of carpet bombings of Baghdad make me aware of the suffering of a populace devastated by ten years of sanctions that have increased infant mortality rates, under-nutrition and appalling health-care conditions. Collateral damage could degenerate into unilateral, if unintentional, slaughter.
• And, yes, the ghost of Viet-Nam still lurks amongst us: do we as a nation really want place in harm’s way so many of our fine young people? This war may end up being an urban war, one that is more costly in the lives of young Americans than was Desert Storm. These concerns deserve a fair and open hearing for many reasons.
• Germany, Russia and France are nations surviving a century of war; they host large muslim minorities.

Specifically, French President Jacques Chirac was one of the galvanizing forces behind N.A.T.O. finally intervening in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s.

Soon after 9/11, German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder gave a heartfelt speech proclaiming Germany’s solidarity with and affection for the American people, not a speech announcing an abdication of the responsibility of a great nation – and stalwart ally – to voice its reservations with U.S. policy.
The Supreme Commander of N.A.T.O. in its intervention into Kosovo – U.S. General Wesley Clark – views this imminent invasion as a colonialist endeavor.

As reported by Albert Hunt in his recent column in the Wall Street Journal, Marine General Anthony Zinni – often a trouble-shooter for U.S. interests in the Middle East – has cautioned wisely against head-long pursuit of military objectives without a clear and persuasive post-battle plan for Iraq.

• That the U.S. could re-coup the $200 billion magic-number price-tag for invasion with a 7-16% subsidy – akin to a traditional volume discount – on purchases of 20% of Iraq’s reserves precludes a simple dismissal of the “oil-grab” reservation.
• A precisely argued dissent by Scott Ritter, a former arms-inspector, of the current evidence presented by the U.S. that Iraq is re-arming remains unanswered.
• Also unanswered are questions relating to the potential detection capability of allied jet-fighters to provide sufficient reconnaissance while enforcing the no-fly zones.

While I sound like a detractor of our President’s policy, I do not mean to be. We are, however, embarking on a risky policy since, in this war, our loved ones will be vulnerable to the terrorist reprisals almost certain to follow an invasion of Iraq. Further, we place the principles of our republic, not to mention our humanity, at risk to the allure of empire and a grisly new ‘reality’ TV.

Nevertheless, democracies really are under attack and we all want to do our part, at least as each of us perceives it. And this challenge to each American reminds me of the wisdom of Hodding Carter’s comment on television so many years ago. If we are to start a war against Iraq and win it, we should do so rightly by…

1. …a full and open declaration of war against Iraq by Congress
2. …announcing any oil concessions expected by the U.S. / U.K. to recover the costs of régime change before the declaration of war passes Congres
3. …pivoting nation-building in Iraq on an independent and self-determined government.

These three principles would serve as a general guideline for attacks against national governments plainly backing terror against the U.S. We have to remember seductive euphemisms for Empire from the past such as “mission civilisatrice” or “the white man’s burden”, remaining mindful that nation building does not become a new velvet glove on the same old iron fist. Finally, we have to keep in mind that nation-building – which I interpret as implanting democracy in regions that have endured tyranny – may not work.

Pluralist societies flourish in those places where every group gives up something – that is: the prospect of complete victory or unrivalled use of resources – to gain a lot (i.e., peace and security). Some regions may simply not be ready to end the misery; at that point, we do what we can and leave.

An additional principle, not completely relevant to Iraq’s secular society, would also pivot nation-building upon a guarantee of universal liberties including the liberty…

1. …from fear (guaranty of rights to, and protection of, ethnic or religious groups, specifically, in this instance, the Shi’ites and the Kurds)
2. …from ignorance (guaranty of universal education)
3. …from superstition (guaranty of the re-education, re-empowerment and re-integration into the work-force of women).

Why?

Accountability is the life-blood of representative government. That means our Congress has to have the courage to declare war in a very public manner; we have to go forward as a reasonably unified society for we fight not only for stability of oil prices but to hold high the Wilsonian dream of leaving a world to our children that is truly safe for democracy. Further, our president and the leaders of the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal have staked out a lonely, difficult and, I believe, terribly brave position. Each may be a marked man.

If we can not in good conscience – after two or three days of congressional debate, publicly televised on all networks – support an invasion of Iraq at this time, then our president needs to know that, now. If Congress and the Administration lack the confidence to make a quick, public and effective case followed by a prompt declaration of war, perhaps we ought to listen to our wary friends, this time, and stand down.

As a restive Johnsonian democrat, I would find it difficult to support any carping by my party after-the-fact, especially if such complaining included statements to the effect that this war was never declared. Congressional acquiescence last autumn was bi-partisan. We have the time – two days, if we work at it – to air the evidence and for Congress to declare a war in a manner consistent with the thoughtfulness recommended by our Constitution.

If the U.S. and the U.K. relent in the end, I hope that I can remember to give Messrs Blair and Bush due credit for the statesmanship required to place the welfare of their subjects – and of democratic liberties, everywhere – above their personal standing in the short-term. In the meantime, we would have to continue on with redoubling our preparedness.

For this war on terrorism, fraught with moral ambiguity as it is, is certain to be around for us to fight another day at a time when we are ready militarily, emotionally and morally. Notwithstanding the incessant publicity about Homeland Security, etc., we have a long way to go and need to apply more resources to firm our domestic flank. God-willing, we will not have to face another day-of-ignominy like 9/11 to get there.