The American silence

In a few days or weeks, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, a true moral monster, will be overthrown by his own people.  His fate will then parallel that of other tyrants who suddenly find themselves unemployed.  He may go the way of Mussolini, or he may end his days in a retired totalitarian’s home in Caracas or Havana.

Whatever the future brings to Qaddafi, his regime, or Libya, one thing appears certain:  the United States will have had no influence over the outcome.

In the midst of the most astonishing global upheaval since 1989, American foreign policy can best be characterized as an embarrassed silence.  We seem to have no official opinion about these transformational events, no interests we wish to protect, no outcomes we prefer.  President Obama rarely speaks, and when he does, he says nothing.  Secretary of State Clinton makes vague pleas for an end to violence – as if a resumption of the Qaddafi regime’s control over the population were devoutly to be desired.

Never in my long life have I witnessed anything like it.  I have seen presidents with bad foreign policies and good, who succeed or fail in their endeavors.  I have never seen a president with no foreign policy, whose approach to the world imitates the mute self-righteousness of a Trappist monk.

The case of Libya exemplifies this urge to quietude.  Unlike events in Egypt and Bahrain, where pro-American authoritarians were challenged by popular uprisings, Qaddafi’s current troubles don’t represent a conflict between our interests and our ideals.  He’s a bloody-minded egotist, a plague to his own people, a bomber of commercial airliners, a murderer of innocents, including Americans.  He loves us not at all – and we owe him nothing.

So why the vow of silence?  I have heard rumors in the media about a concern that the Libyans would take Americans hostage.  If true, this is naïve on many levels.  It assumes Qaddafi would strike at American citizens only in response to US actions, and not because, at a given moment, he considers this move to be in his best interest.  It also supposes Qaddafi will respond more favorably to silence and passivity than to a show of force.  Yet we have evidence to the contrary.  After President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, Qaddafi pulled his head into his shell and didn’t pull it out again for years.

Another explanation whispered by the media is that we have no influence to bear on Qaddafi or Libya.  This is both hypocritical and false.  Hypocritical because where we did have influence – in Egypt, for example – we refused to apply it, and chose to wait on events instead.  False because, absent this administration’s reflexive twitch to look away and bite its tongue, a great power always has options.

After all, Peru – not a great power – broke relations with Libya three days ago.  Switzerland – tiny and neutral – froze Qaddafi’s assets two days ago.  These countries didn’t ask anyone’s permission, didn’t make excuses:  they acted.  Surely our own government can do as much.

We can state aloud our preferred outcome:  a democratic and peace-loving Libya.  We can say what we won’t tolerate:  the slaughter of the Libyan people by Qaddafi’s forces.  And we can warn, clearly and specifically, of the measures we will take if the intolerable occurs:  impose economic sanctions, say, or a no-fly zone with the Sixth Fleet – or take out Qaddafi’s armor and air force.  None of this will guarantee that events will flow in our direction.  What it will do is ensure that US interests and values are in play, and must be reckoned with by friends and foes in the region.

President Obama doesn’t confide his motives to me, but I doubt the explanations in the media account for the strange American silence.  The recipe for the president’s quiescent slouch in the Middle East, I’d guess, is one part perplexity, one part belief in the nefarious effect of US power, and eight parts indifference to the fate of the world.  He found the time and energy to chastise his political opponents in Madison, Wisconsin, but for days, while Qaddafi’s goons murdered protesters by the score, he looked the other way and kept mum.

Silence is a form of action.  It has consequences.  In Libya, as in Egypt, America’s unwillingness to defend its interests and values will be noted by all political forces currently contending for ascendancy.  Those who hate us and despise our way of life will feel emboldened.  Those who might have advocated liberal democracy will feel forsaken and betrayed.  The vast majority, fence-sitters all, will embrace with various degrees of sincerity whatever ideology fills the void left by our withdrawal.

This is unlikely to be kind or gentle.  It is, in my opinion, a fact of history that when America grows silent, freedom loses its voice.

When dictators fall



On New Year’s Day, 1959, the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista packed his family and his gold into an airplane, and took off for Spain.  A week later, when the charismatic hero of the revolution addressed an adoring public in Havana, he seemed curiously unwilling to celebrate, and instead aimed his considerable rhetorical arsenal against political groups not directly under his control.

That was the beginning of a half-century of horror – a suffocating nightmare from which the Cuban people have yet to awaken.

Similar dismal scripts followed the overthrow of the shah in Iran, and of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.  Celebrations of freedom gave way to a more savage and lasting oppression than the old regime’s.

There are no iron laws in history, however.  The fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines restored democracy to that country.  The same transpired in Argentina when the military junta ceded power after its defeat at the hands of the British.  More surprisingly, the collapse of the Suharto regime began a democratic experiment in Indonesia, a country with no history or tradition of political freedom.

With the fall of tyrants, nothing is fated, nothing is promised.  The problem is that these great upheavals of power are also reversals in the flow of time.  They appear, to the rejoicing crowds, like a happy ending, but are in reality the start of an uncertain tale.

Those who have never endured life under a dictator can’t imagine the nauseating hopelessness everyday life can achieve.  Fear sucks the air from the atmosphere.  The sight of a policeman, a sycophant, a censored news report poisons the happiest moment with feelings of shame and disgust.  Hypocrisy becomes the highest virtue – the ability to smile outwardly, and weep and rage in one’s soul.

Without freedom, the day is long.  Time is the ally of tyranny, an oppressive force which, by sheer dreariness and repetition, breaks down the strongest will.  Tomorrow will be like yesterday:  and the dictator, in his heroic pose, will cast a sickly shadow over both.

So when history miraculously resumes, when the clock begins to tick again, and the regime of lies crumbles before something very like the truth, it’s understandable for the long-suffering population to wish to celebrate an ending.

But consider the task ahead.  Political life, and many social and economic arrangements, have been hollowed out by the dictator.  Corruption like a contagious disease has spread from the palace to the marketplace to the home.  With the despot’s departure, distrust will replace fear as the overwhelming emotion of the public square.

People have little experience in self-rule or civic-mindedness, but own vast stores of knowledge in how to lie and cheat to feather one’s own nest.  The government which follows the dictator’s will be composed of his creatures or of neophytes, will preserve his system or trample on it, will be called “provisional” or “popular”:  regardless, it won’t last.  Citizens will learn that, beyond hatred of the old regime, they share little in common.  Some will advocate democracy.  Others, the triumph of some messianic ideology.  Others still crave economic betterment, or revenge for past humiliations.

At some point, a powerful and attractive voice will cry above the turmoil, “I can restore order” or “I can purify society” or “I can find work and dignity for all.”  And that will be the hinge of history, with freedom and tyranny in the balance.

To say yes to the charismatic voice is to open the door to an Ayatollah Khomeini, a Fidel Castro:  to slip from bad to worse.  The crowd, weary of celebrating liberation, will acquiesce in silence to a resurrected oppression.

The starting-point of these reflections is the fall from power in Egypt of Hosni Mubarak, after 30 years of rule.

Nobody knows what the future will bring for Egypt.  I mean that quite literally:  nobody, on principle, can know, because complex systems are inherently unpredictable and every human being is a complex system.  In the matter of prophecy, President Obama and CIA are off the hook.

But we know that the path to freedom will be long and difficult, and will require the intelligent assistance of friends of freedom everywhere, but most particularly in the United States.  The sanest message the Obama administration can send at the moment is that this is a beginning, not an end.

Egypt has some traditions of self-rule, though few Egyptians alive today will remember.  The country also spawned the Muslim Brotherhood, which the US should make every effort to marginalize:  not because it is anti-American, but because it is anti-democratic.  Although, unlike Al Qaeda, the Brotherhood is happy to play the electoral game, its political objective is identical to Osama bin Laden’s:  the restoration of a powerful caliphate.

As part of their long march to freedom, Egyptians must decide whether democracy is a suicide pact.

A more immediate concern is the Egyptian military, who have inherited power in an opaque arrangement that is unlikely to endure.  Apparently the military enjoy some popularity among the people.  They possess most of the guns and much of the wealth – Mubarak, we would do well to remember, was a fighter pilot.  There will be a temptation for the officer class to divvy up the pot now the boss is gone, as happened in Paraguay after Generalissimo Stroessner was pushed out.

The US should have some influence over the Egyptian military, since we pay them big money.  But we should cherish no illusions on this score.  The rules of the game are now broken:  anything goes.  The military will cut its own deal with Egyptian society, and with the world.  From one of its officers, I suspect, will come the siren song of restoration of order and final solution of problems.  The new riddle of the sphinx will be a choice between faux Napoleonic glory and real democratic drudgery.

On the answer given by the Egyptian people will hang their fate and the possibility of freedom in the land of Pharaoh.

Who defines risk, commands all

Risk frames the great moral conflict of the age.  The capacity to take risks is intrinsic to moral adulthood:  I alone am responsible for the path of my life.  I may bring others – family, friends, doctors, investment advisors – into the circle of my choice-making, but even that is a decision for which I am responsible.  My life is thus high drama, at least for me.  If I gamble with my money, if I jump off a bridge, I alone must face the consequences.

Because individuals vary wildly in their tolerance of risk, its definition becomes problematic.  I once knew a young man who loved rock climbing.  He was tall and handsome, with a brilliant future ahead of him, but he tumbled to his death from a cliff wall.  I thought then – still think today – that rock climbing is a frivolous risk of life.  I thought the young man died pointlessly.

Should the government ban rock climbing?  This type of logic leads to perplexing places.  Many more people die in car accidents than rock climbing, for example.  Should the government ban cars?  An even larger number die of hospital-induced infections.  Should the government ban hospitals?

My daughter was taught in her health class that obesity, because of its cost, is a burden “on the community.”  Should the FDA assign a food police to restaurants, to throw me in prison if I eat too much?

Maybe the problem of risk is qualitative rather than statistical – an attitude of criminal recklessness, a disregard for life.  But who can judge for another?  I wouldn’t presume, not even for the young rock climber.  He chose his fate.  Who am I to do it for him?

Every attempt to move beyond common sense and tradition in the definition of risk will get lost in a labyrinth of arbitrary decisions.  Any attempt to erect an abstract standard for acceptable risk will quickly sink to the lowest common denominator of elitism, conservatism, and bureaucratic immobility.

We know this because such a standard already exists:  the “Precautionary Principle,” first perpetrated by the 1992 Earth Summit but now sanctified as EU law, adopted by the UN Convention on Climate Change and our own EPA, and written into the municipal codes of American cities like San Francisco and Portland.

The original version of the Precautionary Principle proclaimed that a “lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”  This sounds more like the Ignorance Is Bliss Principle, and resembles an infamous Vietnam-era maxim:  when in doubt, take it out.

Here’s a newer version:  “Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm.”  On this account, rock climbing and cars should both be banned – as indeed should every conceivable human activity.

I first read about the Precautionary Principle in Kevin Kelly’s brilliantly original What Technology Wants.  Allow me a moment of astonishment that I had not heard of it before.  Was it ever debated in the full hearing of the public?  Did the bureaucrats in the UN and EPA, or the politicians of the EU and San Francisco, ever say out in the open, “This is the instrument of our power – this is how moral adults deal with risk, on your behalf”?

The Precautionary Principle isn’t a “standard” at all, since only a few insiders know of its existence.  It’s a weapon of control, deployed by elites to obliterate the democratic process and impose their will on the restless rabble.

Whoever defines risk using the Principle commands the power of life and death.  Because excessive spraying of DDT harmed some animals, the US government banned its use and led a campaign to globalize the ban.  Today two million people die of malaria worldwide – a much higher incidence than in the 1950’s, when DDT was available.

Kelly’s abiding interest is in technology and the pace of innovation.  The practical effect of the Precautionary Principle, he notes, would be to freeze technology at the present moment:  “Safety trumps innovation.” (Had the Principle been applied since the beginning of time, we would still be trilobites, scuttling quietly along the ocean floor.)  Kelly continues:

The safest thing to do is to perfect what works and never try anything that could fail, because failure is inherently unsafe.  An innovative medical procedure will not be as safe as the proven standard.  Innovation is not prudent.  Yet because precaution privileges only safety, it not only diminishes other values but actually reduces safety.

There are risks in avoiding risk that the precautionary philosophy has not dreamed of.  To anyone interested in such “substitute risks,” I recommend spending some time with Kelly’s fascinating book.

My concern here is with the moral effect of the Precautionary Principle, which is to establish a class of definers and deciders, of moral adults who absorb all responsibility for making choices on behalf of an infantilized population.  Members of this class, I imagine, will meander down the labyrinth of arbitrary opinions.  For some reason, or no reason, they will allow some innovations and disallow many more.

The details are unimportant.  What matters isn’t whether this or that particular activity is judged too risky, but the impaling in the heart of liberal democracy of a new Aristocratic Principle:  Who defines risk, commands all.

President Obama against the world

I have been trying to make sense of our government’s approach to the uprising in Egypt.  Not just the statements and policies, but the inner logic, the deep structure:  the vision of the world from which the statements and policies flow.

And I keep coming back to the idea that President Obama is uninterested in the world, and would – if the world allowed him – turn his back on it.

Much has been made of the administration’s inability to keep up with events on the ground in Egypt.  This is a fair indictment.  White House and State Department statements seem to shift according to the images on that day’s Al Jazeera feed.

I’ll cite one example.  On 28 January, with demonstrators brushing aside the police in many Egyptian cities while Hosni Mubarak, the country’s “president” of 30 years, maintained a sphinx-like silence, the White House made emphatic noises about cutting US aid.  Three days later, after Mubarak offered to leave office in September, Secretary of State Clinton stated, “There is no discussion of cutting off aid.”

US positions appear tactical, improvised, and often contradictory.  Egypt is pronounced “stable” by the secretary of state, but a few days later the president finds the country to be suffering a “moment of volatility.”  We deny any wish to “dictate” an outcome to the crisis, but this is how White House press secretary addresses the Egyptian government:  “Violence in any form should stop immediately, and the grievances should be addressed.”

This obsession with tactical positioning is a symptom of a much graver malady.  Toward a country like Egypt, ruled by a sickly 82-year-old despot and key to the frail US-sponsored arrangements in the Middle East, the administration had failed to articulate a vision of how American interests and ideals must evolve into the future.  Tactics were necessary because no strategy existed.

The omission can only be described as attention deficit disorder on a world historical scale.  I’m not privy to the motives of the president or his advisors, but they seem to me strangely uninterested in shaping events, in directing outcomes – in making history.  They seem to me like they wish to be left alone by a turbulent world.

Our official declarations have tended to strike an angelic pose, as if the United States lacked any selfish interests.  Of the Tunisian uprising, prime mover to the current Arab upheaval, Secretary Clinton said:  “We are not taking sides.”  For days after a human tide, like the Red Sea, overwhelmed the security forces of Mubarak’s pharaonic regime, US statements worried mainly about the possibility of violence.  “We urge all parties to refrain from violence”:  another way of saying, “We are not taking sides.”

Even when, in the press of events, the administration at length abandoned Mubarak for some sort of transitional process, the appeal was to airy “universal” principles rather than to American interests or ideals.  “We support the universal rights of the Egyptian people,” read a White House statement.  “The people of Egypt have rights that are universal,” said the president, somewhat later, on TV.  To the Egyptian government, Vice President Biden “restated President Obama’s support for universal rights.”  In a statement condemning regime violence against journalists, Secretary Clinton first spoke of “international norms” but soon reverted to “universal values.”

The values in question were “freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press.”  These are truly noble ideals, but I’d like the chance to question Secretary Clinton about their universality.  Neither she nor anyone else in the administration, I feel certain, would take up the debate.  Their talk of universal values is a dodge, a way of pretending liberal democracy isn’t an American ideal.

In fact the US has an existential stake in the outcome in Egypt.  We wish to prevent an Islamist takeover.  We don’t wish to see the most populous and prestigious Arab nation – but also the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood – become, like Iran, a zealous promoter of terrorism.  We wish to see the peace with Israel hold, or else the “moment of volatility” will give way to far more dreadful times.

And because America is an ideological country, and Americans are an ideological people, we wish to have peaceful relations with an Egyptian government which embraces liberal democracy – personal and political freedom – in all its aspects.

President Obama is shy in pressing these peculiarly American interests and ideals.  He prefers the angelic pose.  In a WaPo article, David Ignatius calls him the first “post-colonial” president – which I translate to mean, the first president who believes US influence brings more harm than good to the world.  Maybe so.  This would explain the president’s shyness, and would agree with observations I have made on this blog.

Yet a sincere post-colonialist would possess the theoretical framework to prefer a specific outcome in Egypt – the overthrow of the corrupt NDP clique – and the motivation to seek this outcome by the application of American power.  Instead the president has dithered.  At present he seems to favor a transition managed by the newly appointed Egyptian vice president, a man fully implicated in the crimes of the regime.

If, as Ignatius claims, the president is in his mind a disciple of Frantz Fanon, in his actions he appears to be a servant of the status quo.

Because of his exotic personal background, Barack Obama has been portrayed as uniquely at home outside our borders:  a citizen of the world.  The reality is that, like the typical Joe Sixpack, he is deeply uninterested in, and suspicious of, the sound and fury emanating from the world – the noise of history.  His secretary of state is an invisible woman.  His State of the Union speech scarcely took notice of the existence of contending nations and restless populations, any of which can erupt, as Egypt has, without a moment’s warning, to bring grief to American lives.

On the stage of history, President Obama so far has been, by orders of magnitude, the most passive and conservative chief executive in my lifetime.  He seeks to freeze human affairs in a Faustian moment, with America’s clients distant enough that they won’t entangle us in their troubles, and America’s antagonists flattered enough that they won’t scheme our ruin.  He can then turn inward, and achieve at home his parochial transformations.

But history won’t go away.  The world is too much with us, and the United States is too large a force in the world.  For peculiarly American reasons, that force has been exerted on behalf of freedom.  From Hitler to Saddam Hussein, would-be Caesars have had to contend with the American fighting man, while totalitarians have had to reckon with a fierce American defense of liberal democracy.

American power and influence are identified in history with a way of life.  It will be hard for President Obama to tiptoe away from America’s historical commitments, without wreaking havoc on the status quo he so desperately wishes to preserve.

UPDATE:  Jackson Diehl at WaPo records another instance of the president’s obdurate loyalty to the status quo.

Deep thought

“Anyone who wishes can observe the stupidity of thought, judgment, and action shown to-day in politics, art, religion, and the general problems of life and the world by the ‘men of science,’ and of course, behind them, the doctors, engineers, financiers, professors, and so on.  That state of ‘not listening,’ of not submitting to higher courts of appeal which I have repeatedly put forward as characteristic of the mass-man, reaches its height precisely in these partially qualified men. They symbolize, and to a great extent constitute, the actual dominion of the masses, and their barbarism is the most immediate cause of European demoralization.”

Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses