Anagnorisis

2003-05-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm no economist (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night!), so some of my thinking may be off. That disability hasn't stopped the current junta, er, administration from setting a bold course towards (drum roll and fanfare, please) Reduced Dividend Taxes! You know, to stimulate the economy.

Let's look at this not as a matter of economic theory, but as one of common sense. As a general rule, the poor consume more of their available wealth, on a percentage basis, then the rich do. The rich are savers, by and large, while the poor (and lots of the middle class) are spenders. So what should we logically expect to happen if the taxes that get cut are dividend taxes? Well, who owns dividend-paying stock? More rich folks than poor, to be sure, and more rich than middle class as well (this is leaving out institutional investors like state retirement funds). So who would get the benefit of a dividend reduction? The rich. And would this result in more economic stimulus in the form of spending? No, not really. It would result in more savings by a few, and in effect would amount to a near-permanent wealth transfer to one narrow class. If we're looking to stimulate the economy, which is the stated rationale for the President's tax agenda, shouldn't we be giving money back to people who actually spend it, as opposed to saving it? Wouldn't that put more money into the retail economy, especially in the short term?

I'm not saying saving is bad and therefore we should only give tax relief to those who spend. I'm saying that stimulus does not come, in the short term, from saving. It comes from buying merchandise and services. From a retail perspective, money saved is money taken out of the economy. So if we want more retail spending (and we do, because consumerism is the engine of our economy, more than anything else), we need relief directed towards those who will stimulate the economy directly. Maybe this could be in the form of an enlarged Earned Income Credit, or (as Warren Buffet just suggested) a "vacation" from Social Security withholdings for a little while. Or it could be a direct tax rebate to those in certain brackets, with the lower brackets getting more of a rebate.

One big question that comes to my mind is this: if Clinton's '93 budget was the Largest Tax Increase in History (as my GOP comrades say), shouldn't that have just about killed off the economy? What happened, instead, was the largest peacetime boom in American history. Even with the resulting bubble crash, there is a still a tremendous amount of real wealth that was created after the Clinton tax increase. If lowering taxes is a stimulus, then raising them should be the reverse, so one would think we would have seen a recession or worse under Clinton. We didn't. We HAVE seen a recession under Bush, one that admittedly began in March of 2000, but has continued unabated even after the '01 tax cut. Shouldn't that cut have done something measurable to improve the economy? We still look like we're in pretty bad shape economically, well over a year after the miracle-gro tax cut. Where's the growth? Oh, right, we didn't cut enough, soon enough. So instead of phasing in the cuts that already HAVE passed, we need MORE cuts. To stimulate the economy. Because it's worked so well so far.

Why don't we just go ahead and say that the goal of this tax policy is to reduce the burden on some heavy taxpayers? The rich can legitimately claim to pay the lion's share of income tax. Of course, they hold an even greater percentage of the real wealth in this country, but that doesn't change the fact that they pay more taxes than Joe-Burger-Flipper. So why not just go ahead and say we want to reduce or eliminate progressive taxation schemes, as a matter of social policy? Why claim that this is aimed at little old lady investors who sit and knit sweaters while waiting for their dividend checks? Could it be, maybe, because the notion of a naked tax cut targeted at the well off won't sell among voters who are supporting the GOP on social agenda grounds, rather than economic grounds? Is the President scared to call his spade a spade, as it were? At least we could have a real, honest debate about whether we want or need progressive taxation. Instead, we're calling something that won't stimulate a stimulus. How very...Orwellian (war is peace).

2003-04-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

Superman as Teenage Punk

We all know the basics about Superman. Last survivor of Krypton, sent to Earth in a rocket, godly powers because of rays from our yellow sun. We all know what he stood for: Truth, Justice, and the American Way (remember, he was created immediately pre-WWII, so there was trouble in the air already). While I myself have never been all that inclined to read a lot of Superman comics (frankly, he seemed to pull a new Super-power or Super-whatever out of his cape every month), I always admired the fact that here was this tremendously powerful guy who could literally have the world on its knees before him, and instead he dedicates himself to protecting the weak and the innocent, improving the world, et cetera. If you don't read comic books, you may be wondering where I am going with this. It goes like this: to my mind, Superman is an American myth, one of the most powerful myths we have created. By having Superman stand for pure ideals, and sacrifice himself in the name of a greater good, we Americans said a lot about what we want out of heroes, and what we expect from great men. Yes, I say "we Americans" created Superman, because the myth was formed not only from Siegel and Shuster's comics, but from America's almost primal response to Superman. He struck a resonant chord. Everybody wanted to be Superman for a while, the guy who lives a quiet, ordinary life on the one hand, but secretly possesses the greatest powers on Earth.

But what if it had been different? What if Superman, instead of dedicating his powers to the greater good, had decided he was going to use them only to satisfy his own whims and fancies? What if he had gone out for the football team and creamed every kid on the field, because it made him feel good and made them look bad? What if he had simply made it so that he and all of his friends were rich and powerful, with no regard for the needs of others? What if he was, for lack of a better word, a punk? Well, then he wouldn't have been a hero, he would have been just an incredibly powerful bully. It is the purpose to which Superman devotes his power that makes him heroic, not the power itself.

Now, imagine this: Superman is really a metaphor for the emergence of American power onto the world stage. He's an ordinary-looking guy, glasses and a suit and tie just like any number of regular folk, but when the need arises, off comes the suit and out comes the Man of Steel. the same thing happened with America in WWII (and had begun with WWI). Once an ordinary country, we became a "Super" power. That's no linguistic coincidence. Superman's dedication to larger goals said a lot about what we wanted to dedicate our own power to, the aspirations that we held collectively during the era of his birth. It wasn't power wasted on trivial personal gain, and it wasn't power squandered on attempts to dominate or oppress. We saw what the Nazis and the Soviets did with their power. We were better than that. We believed in high ideals.

But what happens if all of our power isn't used for good? What do we have if the entire point of our collected might is for .002 percent of us to gain and maintain enormous wealth? If the only reason we are strong is so that we can enrich ourselves, are we heroic at all? Is it really any better than the oligarchies of power run by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia? Freedom we have, sure, but to what end? Will we amount to nothing more than a global version of Superman, Teenage Punk?

I have tried my best to have faith that our leadership has good intentions with their war planning, that there is a higher purpose they are striving for. But I keep seeing news reports about lies they've been caught in, evidence they've concocted, contracts they've handed out to very connected companies. As just one example, read the report at www.ips-dc.org/crudevision/crude_vision.pdf

The authors of this report used internal memos, and government docs, that lay out a pretty convincing case that policy is being driven by the interests of certain powerful companies and industries. Yes, it's cynical to say we invaded just for oil, or so we could gain a foothold in their government to win huge contracts for our corporate friends. But what if its true? Is it cynical to simply observe what's right in front of our eyes?

If this war was really driven by back-door economics, that would be like Superman beating up Lex Luthor not because Lex was a threat, but because Supes wanted Jimmy Olson to get this really cool gig that would make tons of money. Superman as Teenage Punk. America as Teenage Punk. Damned shame, that, if it's true...

BTW, sorry if that link doesn't work. I can't get this Blogger interface down just yet. If it doesn't work, just copy and paste the address into your browser's address bar, and hit return.

2003-04-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

*&^^#%$^ system is jamming...

2003-04-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

Stumbling Towards the Precipice of History

We are fast approaching, if we have not already arrived at, a major turning point in history. Not American history, or European history, but world history. Never before has there been one country powerful enough to deploy forces the world over, occupy entire countries with minimal usage of troops and material, and dominate the global economy and much of the global marketplace of ideas. In fact, if not in name, we are an empire. There is no place on Earth that American military power cannot be directed towards, no foe that could outright defeat us on the battlefield (leaving out the nuclear deterrence issue, which obviously puts Russia and China on an entirely different playing field than our other geopolitical rivals). We have, for lack of a better word, emerged onto the world stage in the course of a mere 227 years as not simply one of a host of powerful nations, but the most powerful nation. Rome never had nearly the geographical reach. England had reach, but had far more sea power than land power and couldn't simply land troops willy-nilly all over the world.

With that power, of course, comes enormous responsibility. Unprecedented responsibility, such as we have never had to face up to before (or any other nation). How we choose to shoulder the burden will define how we are remembered, perhaps for all time. With all of the great power we possess, the tremendous wealth, we must set out to do great things. We must accept tasks that only a nation of penultimate power could achieve. We must live up to our potential on the world stage.

The Marshall Plan that we used to rebuild postwar Europe is the best model for the peace in Iraq, if carried out correctly. But we must go beyond that. We must turn our military might into a transformative power. There are two key regions that call most urgently for our attention. Most obvious is the Middle East. Like it or not, we are now officially in the Middle of the East, quite literally (look at Iraq's position relative to the other Middle-Eastern states). Second is Africa.

First and foremost, we must not shirk our duties in Iraq. We must apply every ounce of ingenuity, every drop of determination that we have to set the stage for a democratic revolution in Iraq, one that is inclusive of all of the various groups in the country. This is a statement of supreme arrogance, of course. Who are we to impose our government on any other country? But if not us, who? Saudi Arabia? We don't want them building any countries, thank you very much. They already did a great job with Pakistan and Afghanistan (who do you think trained the Talliban's religious leaders? We armed them, but Wahabi Islam, taught in the Saudi-funded madrassas made them fanatics). Iran? No, not unless we want the Talliban's more conservative uncle to take over most of the known oil reserves in the world. The U.N.? Well, sure. They can do just like they've done in...wait, never mind. They've never done nation building, because no self-interested nation would allow a world body to thrive that goes around building nations. The Iraqis themselves? They obviously have to be the central players, but they need our wealth and at the very minimum our legal expertise to develop a constitutional framework than can accompany pluralist interests. And we owe them quite a lot, because we played a huge role in supporting Saddam in the eighties, and now we've removed him and effectively destroyed the entire government of Iraq. This is our problem.

Next, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No other nation has our influence over Israel, because no other nation does as much to support them. We have to use that influence to get them back to the table, and we must push through a viable two-state solution to the problem. This is going to take a lot of promises to the Palestinians, of course. We're going to have to provide infrastructure, secure loans for development, and invest in schools. And we actually have to do it, not just promise it. Of course, the other side to that is that the Palestinians have to live up to their end of the Oslo accords, namely removing from the PLO charter the stated goal of destroying the state of Israel and pushing the Israelis into the sea. If they don’t do that, no one can take their professed intentions of peace seriously. We have been close to achieving this goal before, and with the right kind of diplomatic efforts, we may get there again and finally cross the line.

After the Middle East has to come Africa. Again, with our proxy wars against the USSR, we have played a large role in arming the region, but not in stabilizing it. And the tremendous benefits that this country reaped from the African slave trade are indisputable. African slaves literally built large parts of this country. We owe that continent our very economic blood. It is time for the U.S. to set an example by forgiving the African debt. All of it. Remove the burden of those tremendous debt payments. That step alone will cause an enormous increase in the abilities of the local governments to provide for their citizens. And we should make the two most critical infrastructure improvements there are: clean water supplies, and usable roads. Continent-wide. Seriously. I am not saying we should foot the whole bill. Where governments can contribute, they must do so. But we need to facilitate, and to put our money out there if there is no other funding. An African continent with clean, drinkable water will be healthier, and a continent with roads connecting it all together will be more prosperous. The last step we should take is to find some way to provide low-cost AIDS drugs to Africa. A huge portion of the world's AIDS cases are in sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority of victims there cannot afford the expensive drug regimes that are manufactured by mostly U.S. drug companies. Given that the U.S. patent system has a lot to do with maintaining high drug prices, our government has a role in the affordability issue. Subsidies of the price differential between what the African public can pay and what the drugs cost may be one solution. Another solution may be to give tax credits to pharmaceutical companies who provide lower-cost drugs to Africa. The devastating effect that AIDS is having on the economic and social fabric of many African nations is obvious. Providing relief for the AIDS crisis, even only partial relief (complete relief would require heavy sex education courses and providing condoms, which I don't see any U.S. administration doing) will allow the African economy to stabilize, and set the stage for growth.

These are huge, bold steps I am proposing, and expensive ones, politically and monetarily. I am not saying that in all of theses cases we should help strictly based on a moral obligation (even though we have great moral obligations in both regions). We should help because we can help. What are we accumulating all this wealth for, as the world's richest country, if we're not going to do anything with it more worthwhile than buying bigger houses, fancier cars and more expensive clothes? A lot of the wealth that we accumulate as a nation and as individuals is made possible because of low wages in other countries, and cheap extraction of resources abroad. We benefit from the world, and we must give something meaningful back. If we fail in these endeavors because the jobs I have set forth are not possible, then so be it. But if we fail through loss of nerve or failure of resolve, then we have failed to give back to the world as much as we have taken. This time we simply cannot let Atlas shrug.

2003-04-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

Colonialism, mercantilism, and the Bush Doctrine

There has been a fair amount of controversy over the fact that the White House apparently awarded contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries to rebuild Iraq, or at the least was in a pretty advanced stage of preparation towards making such an award. Giving Halliburton the job of rebuilding Iraq reminds me of something...oh yes, the East India Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Virginia Company. You know, colonialists.

The colony system, at least as practiced by England, was never an entirely government-run venture. Private company's were chartered, at the discretion of the Crown, and given the right to exploit certain areas of the "New World." Much more than some mass movement of idealistic Englishmen looking to break free of the yoke of the Crown, the American colonies started as commercial ventures, plain and simple. The East India Company was similar, having been given a monopoly on all trade with the East Indies. It gradually wound up ruling the whole of India. There was government oversight and involvement of all of these ventures, to be sure, but private, profit-seeking interests had enormous influence over what went on in these colonial territories.

What, then, to make of Halliburton and Iraq? Or, for that matter, any other American company and Iraq? Given the statements of the Administration in recent weeks, one can assume that the lion's share of all contracts pertaining to rebuilding Iraq will go to American and British companies. We won't say it, but what you're dealing with here is essentially a spoils-of-war system. Whatever companies wind up profiting from the re-building phase in Iraq, they will be given a plum position, one that America feels it has the right to give because of military victory.

My question is, who would really be in control there, the companies or the local American government? It is easily apparent that certain major corporations hold a great deal of influence with the Bush White House. One does not invite a group of executives from private companies to sit down and help write energy policy if those companies have no influence. So let's assume for argument's sake that Halliburton gets the major job in Iraq. Let's also assume that for some reason the interests of Halliburton and those of the local government come into conflict. Who has Bush's ear, the American administrator of Iraq, or the company that the Vie President used to run? Whose interests are likely to win?

Whatever the actual motives were for invading Iraq, the pattern being shown in the aftermath hints of strong parallels to earlier colonial ventures by other Great Powers. One of which just happens to be our most significant ally in the "Coalition" (They have what, five countries that will admit in public to supporting this escapade? Some coalition.)

As for the Bush Doctrine, it seems to be premised on the notion that America has the right to strike preemptively at those countries that are perceived as risks to America, whether short-term risks like Afghanistan (harboring Al Queda) or long-term risks like Iraq (because, you know, one day they might develop some really lethal weapons and share them with a terrorist group). The Doctrine also seems to focus on unilateral action, without deferring to the input of any other countries. No messy diplomatic entanglements here, just ole fashioned American Resolve. Speak badly and carry a big stick. Or something to that effect. Bush has yet to articulate or implement a second phase to the Doctrine, namely what happens after such a preemptive strike. If the best Bush & Co. can do is let their buddies reap huge windfall profits on the deal, we have real trouble on our hands.

2003-04-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

2003-04-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

Is the reconstruction of Iraq to be a new enactment of the Marshall Plan, or a New Reconstruction?

Being from the South (still in it, actually), the word Reconstruction has very specific, symbolically weighted meaning to me. Many Southerners, if not most, hear "Reconstruction" and immediately think of a period of Northern oppression, a time when politicians and businessmen from the North came down into the South and set up shop, so to speak, taking advantage of a defeated populace. Others see it as a tremendous missed opportunity, a case of the Federal Government losing its ultimate resolve to see the transformation of the South through to its logical conclusion. The job was abandoned, and what followed was the most repressive period of Southern history, the Jim Crow era.

The Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, and its corollary in Japan, is generally seen in a much more positive light. The results, in the end, were obviously more satisfactory. If you look at U.S-German relations sixty years after World War 2, and U.S.-Japanese relations at the same point, then compare them to the relationship between the North and South sixty years after the Civil War, the difference in terms of remaining hostility, perhaps even loathing, is striking. More than 130 years after Reconstruction began, we are still dealing with negative repercussions.

Die-hard Confederate partisans will tell you that the reason Reconstruction failed is because it was a case of foreign, i.e. Northern powers imposing unwanted rule over an unwilling populace. That the Northern arrogance, the destruction of the Southern economy, and the decimation of the social order were to blame. What they won't say, especially not today, is that a lot of what they are complaining about is the simple fact that suddenly the former slaves (and more prevalently the former free people of color) were able to vote, to hold office, and to generally have a say in how things were run. To Southern whites at the time, that was like the apocalypse coming down around their ears. The legend of corrupt reconstruction governments running roughshod over the South is really a complaint about the ascendancy of African Americans in political circles. Numerically, they had always been there (and were a majority or sizable minority in several states). Their power had always been suppressed by force and by a system of laws designed to preserve slavery for as long as possible.

Now look to Iraq. There are sizable minorities there, the Shiites in the south, and the Kurds in the north, that have been suppressed by the Baathists. Any real, functioning democracy would see a tremendous increase in representation by both groups. And quite possibly a similar feeling of resentment on the part of the current Sunni ruling elite. Like the white landowners of the antebellum South, they have not ruled because they have the numbers to win the vote, they have ruled because the system was rigged in their favor, and because they had far superior weaponry. And now that rule is effectively over. Like the whites of the South in Reconstruction, the Sunnis and the Baathists are about to witness the transfer of power, or at least a sizable fraction of power, to groups whose political views they have suppressed. Like the U.S. Congress of Reconstruction, whatever new government is put in place is likely to pass measures that are essentially punitive in nature. And the U.S. Army, along with civilian powers like the State Department, is in the same position that the Northern Army was in immediately after the war. Whatever goes wrong will be blamed on them. Much of the anger that flares up will be aimed at them. The fact that apparently the U.S. government is making contracts with domestic companies to go in and cherry-pick the rebuilding of Iraq is also strikingly reminiscent of our own Reconstruction, and not in a good way.

Contrast Reconstruction to the Marshall Plan, and what you see is that, while the leadership elites of both the South and Germany had been essentially shattered and stripped of power, the Southern elites maintained close networks of support, planned in earnest, and essentially positioned themselves to retake power when the North lost resolve. In Germany, the very laws that were passed precluded any resurgent Nazis from seizing power. The party itself was banned, and speech laws made espousing their views a crime. Most importantly, the U.S. did not lose interest in the occupation. We stayed long enough to complete the process. German society as a whole was remade as a result. Similar results can be seen in Japan, which has all but entirely renounced militarism as a philosophy. The other difference as that you did not see the sudden emergence of long-suppressed ethnic and cultural minorities as significant political players in Germany and Japan. The lack of that additional stress factor was significant.

So what is to become of Iraq? Will we stay only until our attention is shifted elsewhere? Are we going to simply withdraw back to the States once the political stress of occupation and nation building gets too great? Or will we rebuild Iraq as a long-term pro-U.S. regime? The better choice is obviously the latter. Given the mental channel-switching that our President seems prone to (and the fact that apparently he can only watch one "channel" at a time, as it were), the former seems more likely. I'd like to say otherwise. Then again, so would the Afghanis.

2003-04-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer."

Is Bush our modern Alexander? Consider the fact that the U.S. has substantially achieved what will likely rank as one of the swiftest invasions in history, if not the swiftest. Victory, as I have said before, has never been in doubt. The sheer speed with which it has happened (victory in the form of the dissolution of Saddam's regime, if not his entire army) poses some unique risks. Will Bush, like Alexander, look for new worlds to conquer? Within two years we have invaded and overthrown the regimes of two countries. Wars of liberation, perhaps, but conquest comes before liberation. And lasting liberation in Afghanistan has yet to occur. Will we go looking for more?

Afghanistan was the Vietnam of the Soviet Union. We toppled the government in a matter of months, fighting against the same mujahadeen that the Soviets fought (and we armed and trained). Iraq was supposedly the largest and most capable military power of all of the Arab states. Largely defeated in three weeks. Will the lack of challenge, the fact that we have quickly achieved what others could not, lead to hubris? What I fear is an overextension of our reach.

We are already making threatening statements towards Syria. Iran has been a foe since 1979. And now we have a large military presence in the region, centrally located between those two countries. Credible arguments could be made in favor of toppling both regimes, Syrian and Iranian, but we must consider what message this will send to the rest of the Middle East. Do we want to be seen as the colossus, striding the landscape of the Middle East, imposing our will? Are we the Roman Empire all over, with proxy control over the Holy Land through our close alliance with Israel? Napoleon, overthrowing the Marmalukes and then remaining as an Empire, rather than a liberation army?

These are all questions that will only be answered in coming months. Whether Bush will attempt to "liberate" the bulk of the Middle East remains to be seen...

2003-04-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

It's the peace, not the war that matters.

No one doubts that the coalition, that is to say America and Britain, will win the war in Iraq. The military mismatch between Iraq and the U.S. is patently obvious. Winning the war is not what counts here, though. Lots of armies have won lots of wars throughout history. What matters most is what we do after the war, in other words how we go about winning the peace.

Prime Minister Blair has made a number of very sound recommendations, most significantly that we put all Iraqi oil revenues into a U.N.-administered trust so that the citizens of Iraq can benefit from their natural resources, and that we set up only a very temporary coalition regime with the intention of turning things over as quickly as possible to the Iraqis themselves. Whether we decide to take this advice, at least in broad form, is absolutely crucial to American relations with the Middle East for the next several decades. We have defended our military campaign as a war of liberation, not of occupation. If that is the truth, and if the world is to believe us, we must ensure that our conduct after the war actually liberates Iraq from Saddam and from ourselves.

The obvious example is what we did after World War II. We fought an absolutely bitter, brutal war against Japan and Germany. But after the war, rather than set out to utterly destroy our vanquished enemies, we made it our mission to rebuild them. The lasting peace that we have enjoyed with Germany and Japan is a direct result of the magnanimity that we showed to them when they were defeated. Compare that to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. Many historians looking back on it now feel that some of the conditions of the peace were overly draconian, especially towards Germany. Hitler, of course, argued exactly that, and used the harsh treaty conditions as his excuse for why Germany during the Weimar Republic was a shambles. On the basis of perceived injuries during the peacetime, Hitler built up the German drive to go to war again. The Allies learned from this, and the outcome after World War II was dramatically different.

In considering what to do post-war, we also have to look at what the Allies did in the Middle East after the end of World War I. The modern map of the Middle East was created by the Allies at that point, practically out of whole cloth. Nation-states that had no real corellation to ehnography or culture were put in place. A lot of the current resentment in the Middle East stems from the imperious manner in which the Allies went about re-creating the political boundries of the region. The arrogance of that endeavor, looked at objectively, is simply stunning. How the Allies could have imagined that completely redrawing the map of the region wouldn't create lasting, palpable anger is beyond me. Some say they knew full well that people would be angry, adn didn't care. Others say that the map was intentionally drawn to maintain the Middle East in a position of weakness, so that the Great Powers could preserve access to Middle Eastern oil without worrying about an emergent power in the region challenging their control. There is more than a little credibility to that analysis. Whatever the motives for its creation, the current map of the Middle East is an artificial political construct, and a direct reminder of Western colonialism. Tie this in with the cultural memory of the Crusades, and the negative implications are obvious.

What we must do is something that this administration has shown neither the inclination nor the aptitude for. In the 2000 campaign, Bush repeatedly said that he did not see nation building as America's responsibility, or our place. In a perfect world, perhaps not. But we engaged in it after World War II because it needed to be done, and the need after this war will be similar, if not greater. After 9/11, when the campaign in Afghanistan began (I'm not going to refer to it by whatever the stupid marketting title was - Operation Mom and Apple Pie or something...) we said we were going to put a new democratic regime in place, and support the rebuilding effort. We've put Hamid Karzai in, but after that how much have we done? Only Kabul is actually under the control of the Karzai administration. The outlands are in the thrall of the warlords, the same ones in power prior to the Talliban. To prove ourselves to the world, we must do more. In all truthfullness, if we're going to prove to ourselves as a nation that the campaign in Afghanistan was anything more than simple revenge for 9/11, we have to do more to create the foundations for a stable, lasting government that can educate its populace and provide for basic needs.

If we do not improve our efforts in Afghanistan, the Afghanis will pay in chaos, and we in turn will pay in the terrorist acts that are sure to follow down the line. If we do not make a credible effort in Iraq, we will wind up in a quagmire that Israel should find very familiar. Their occupation of Lebanon was a disaster for them. Their continuing occupation of the WEst Bank and the Gaza Strip does nothing for them but cause endless grief. Unless we want to have a Nablus all of our own, we'd better make sure we have a real plan for peace before this war is won.

2003-04-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know, the title is a bit (a bit? a lot!) pretentious. But don't worry, I won't get excessively egg-headed around here.

The title has to do with self-recognition, that moment when the protagonist realizes who and what they are, and what role they play in the events around them. Think Oedipus. After that point, everything changes. The plot is reversed, or radically altered because of the new knowledge, the acceptance of what is, as opposed to what was assumed. The protagonist in this "play," as it were, is America.

So why pick this title for a weblog? Well, what I want to see, and what I'd like to facillitate in whatever small way an anonymous guy in the far-flung corners of the Internet can do, is some real self-recognition and self-awareness on the part of America. Not just our leaders, but on some individual basis. We have all collectively contributed to the present state of things, because our political actions have put the current regime in place.

I think, at least with regards to the rest of the world, we Americans, as a people, are self deluding to a harmful degree. We believe the world thinks one thing about us, sees us in a certain light (namely as the worldwide beacon of freedom and democracy or some such), when more and more we aren't seen that way at all. Our role in the world is changing, because the way we are perceived has changed.

What are we becoming in the world? What is our true nature? To many, if not most, we are fast becoming a hegemony, if not an empire. In some ways, this is a natural result of the post-cold-war power vaccuum. In many other ways, however, we are chosing this path intentionally. It is not a path that will lead us towards greater peace, or gain us more friends. Rome had no allies, only subjects.

This site will focus mainly on current events, and will try to offer thoughtful assesments of what our actions abroad mean in the larger context of geopolitics. Inevitably, the current war will come up, as will the philosophies and decisions that got us here. History will play its part.

If you like what I'm saying, and I make you think, I'm guessing you'll come back. If you don't, you won't, and I'll be another shmuck with free time and a 'net connection.

We shall see.