Another Failed Bismarck with Delusions of Wisdom

Henry Kissinger has, in The Washington Post, a classic case of neoconservative amnesia: he imagines, incomprehensibly, that there is a demand for his advice, while stealthily dropping hints that the Obama administration wants to let North Korea keep its nuclear weapons. Best of all though, Kissinger hews to a few clangy old ideas that happen to be drug out by every neocon as foreign policy panaceas: increase missile defense and fight terror.

One thing’s for certain: Kissinger deserves credit for sticking his horrible wares out there in the free market. Somewhere in Egypt there’s a guy trying to sell sketchy-looking pigs who realizes his might not be the toughest sales job in the world. But to insist, after a thorough repudiation of neoconservative brinksmanship, that “the issue for diplomacy has become whether the goal should be to manage North Korea's nuclear arsenal or to eliminate it” and then make sly innuendos that President Obama will adopt “acquiescence” to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions – when that country tested its first nuclear bomb in 2006 – seems like a huge display of historical revisionism if not simply mad cow disease.

In spite of the facts, Kissinger frets. “The negotiating process is on the verge of legitimizing North Korea's nuclear program by enabling Pyongyang to establish a fait accompli while diplomacy runs its stately course,” worries the great statesman. He seems unaware that North Korean nuclearization has been a fait accompli for about three years now. But he has suddenly discovered that the status quo is unsustainable:

Furthermore, some public statements imply the United States will try to deal with specific North Korean threats rather than eliminate the capability to carry them out. They leave open with what determination Washington will pursue the elimination of the existing stockpile of North Korean nuclear weapons and fissionable materials. It is not possible to undertake both courses simultaneously.

So the United States must pursue either an elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons or – um – deal with its various actions after they’ve happened? The neocons have finally discovered the ominous mushroom cloud of their speeches and dreams – in the rogue nation their sabre-rattling has long nurtured.

And how would our master diplomat, advisor to Dubya about Iraq, architect of the lasting peace in Vietnam and offerer of unsolicited advice handle such a threat? With missile defense and – um – a global response to terrorism:

The enhanced role of non-state actors with respect to terrorism would have to be addressed. The concepts of deterrence against state actors are familiar, though not in a world of multiple nuclear powers. They have little or no relevance to non-state actors operating by stealth.

So our reaction to North Korea must somehow involve an emphasis on non-state terrorism? It sounds curiously disconnected from reality that the most isolated regime in the world might somehow develop ties with fanatical Muslims in southwest Asia. But stranger things have happened. In an odd bit of symmetry, eight years ago the previous administration was focused on North Korea and missile defense at the exact same moment that it should have been focused on terrorism.

Maybe Mr. Kissinger is just trying to rectify that past miscalculation. Or maybe he’s continuing Dick Cheney’s legacy of advocating extralegal wars fought in the shadows. Either way, it’s a good reminder when the man most associated with the secret bombing of Cambodia so much as suggests sinister clandestine operations why we are overwhelmingly mistrustful of unchecked government authority. And in that sense it’s fitting, really, that Henry Kissinger will always stand as a powerful argument against his own advice.

Excommunication Breakdown

Too often in America we see faith portrayed as an unmitigated virtue, a means of making us good people even though our understanding of what makes up that goodness only reaches about the third grade level. Christians accept Jesus’ assertion of “love thy god with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself” is the basis for all of the law, although this makes little sense alongside some of the more bizarre proscriptions in Deuteronomy or the salacious rantings of Saul of Tarsus. Ultimately a morality based solely on circular reasoning and argument from authority, as most faith-based moralities are, leads at best to confusion and opportunism. At worst, faith manages to take the misery of the human condition and use it as an excuse to inflict even more pain and suffering.

Such is the case with a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather for years. Recently, on a doctor’s visit after complaining of stomach pains, it was discovered that she was four months pregnant. With twins. She was given an abortion because even under Brazil’s restrictive abortion law, which allows the procedure only in cases of rape or danger to the mother, the girl met both conditions.

The laws were applied and the girl was given an abortion while her abusive stepfather – who is also suspected of molesting the victim’s physically-handicapped older sister – was arrested as he was trying to flee town. And then, from the 14th century, the Catholic Church weighed in and excommunicated the girl’s mother and doctors:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.
The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

In the ensuing row, Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, also a Catholic, disagreed: “In this case, medicine is more right than the church,” he said. While the qualifying “in this case” seems pretty superfluous – in what instance has faith shown to be better than science at finding anything out? – Lula’s sentiment is reasonable if not painfully obvious. The Vatican, however, has backed up Archbishop Sobrinho. The cardinal in charge of Latin American bishops, Giovanni Battista Re, justified the decision on the grounds that the fetuses were innocent and had a right to live. Even if a nine-year-old girl suffered and died as a consequence. And even if her twins ended up dying as well.

And as a final illustrative outrage comes the complete silence on the church about the responsibility of the girl’s rapist stepfather. While it’s obvious to the archbishop and cardinal – and their brethren with a long institutional history of enabling and covering up pedophilia – that any Catholic performing an abortion deserves excommunication, the pedophile father who put a minor, her mother, and several doctors in this situation seems to have escaped the church’s attention entirely.

It’s certainly true that human laws can be draconian and outrageous. But at least human laws have in them an inherent basis for change. An informed electorate can overturn them; judges can overrule them; even in a dictatorship, another arbitrary leader can come along and negate them. Not so with the Catholic Church and, to extrapolate, all other societies where morality and law are identical and morality is handed down by revelation from an uncontactable being that won’t explain itself.

Think about that the next time some religious fundamentalist argues that the United States is a Christian nation and that the Constitution ought to be brought in line with the Bible. The Enlightenment Humanism on which our Constitution is based is vastly more compassionate, reasonable, and egalitarian than a concept of morals that deems itself “above any human law.”

Update: Archbishop Sobrinho actually did think about the father -- and concluded that his crime was less serious than getting an abortion: "'It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,' Sobrinho said." How such barbarians have any claim to morality is one of religion's great mysteries.

A Position of Strength

So the last time we couldn’t leave Iraq, it was because (among other things) we couldn’t let someone like Moqtada al-Sadr believe that he had defeated us. If he thought he won, the argument went, then he would be emboldened. Al-Qaida would be emboldened. Rogue nations around the world would be emboldened, and suddenly the forces of Good would have no safe haven, while legions of little Hitlers seized power all over the world and mad scientists worked feverishly to plant death rays on the moon.

Of course this opinion wasn’t universally shared. There were some (i.e. Democrats, traitors) who argued that a) the terrorists weren’t going to follow us home, b) we were part of the problem in Iraq, and c) we could deal with other problems better if all our troops weren’t tied down in a war whose planners don’t regret a thing, even though they admit their initial cause didn’t exist and they can’t agree on a retroactive cause now.

This would be wrong, said the war planners. To deal with a host of threatening nations, the world must know that we have force and the will to use it and to do so even if it’s irrational or downright harmful. After all, it’s well known that the rest of the world is composed mostly of inscrutable foreigners – various hordes, despotisms, satrapies and emirates, all shouting out ultimatums and entreaties and demands in their strange staccatos and clicks and ululations. There would be no way to bring this wretched refuse to order unless you were prepared to stomp on one – hard – and tell everyone else that this is how it’s gonna be.

And since we chose Iraq as the example we were going to set, and our various continued successes have kept us gummed up there for five years, we’re told we cannot extricate ourselves because it might give someone the wrong idea. And yeah, there might be a point to that argument. But in order to do a real cost-benefit analysis, you have to weigh the risks of the action against its benefits. And the main benefit is that we would actually have the resources to deal with another problem in the world. Even a petty tyrant from his overstuffed couch in his harem is enough of a strategic genius to know which of our actions frees him up to invade the neighboring chiefdom’s hippo wallow and which doesn’t.

And this is what brings us to the occasionally-independent nation of Georgia and its ever-looming neighbor, Russia. Last week Georgia invaded its semi-autonomous region of South Ossetia – on the Russian border, mostly ethnically Russian, and manned by Russian peacekeeping troops. It was probably a bad idea, to say the least. Russian army, navy and air forces sprang on the Georgian troops like a bear trap on a puppy.

This hasn’t been going over well with the Bush administration, which has taken the time to register an opinion even though most of it is on vacation. One brave soul who’s carried on vacationing, however, is Secretary of State and alleged Soviet expert Condoleezza Rice. Rice’s absence means that she’s either given up entirely, or it’s a signal to Putin that no matter what Bush or Cheney say, the US isn’t going to jump out of its hammock and put a stop to this invasion anytime soon.

And hell, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. We don’t have an infantryman to spare, and even if we did, it would require a huge number of troops constantly at the ready to guard against any re-invasion. The fact of the matter is that Georgia stinks as a defensive position. That’s too bad, really – because ever since September 11, this administration has been swearing that its highest ideal is democracy and that exertion of military power gives it a strong bargaining position. And now here we are – faced with the option of defending a democracy that we have nurtured and set up as an example, fighting for its life in a military conflict. Oh, and we sorta told them we had their back, too.

The only problem is, we’ve got nothing. We need the Russians at least as much as they need us. Our NATO allies, who live a medium-range missile trajectory away, don’t see the fun in poking Russia with a stick. Whether this amounts to appeasement, they know one thing – Russia’s getting whatever it wants in Georgia, and no amount of US righteous indignation is going to change that. Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was educated in the US. He speaks fluent English. He instituted democratic reforms and rooted out corruption in government. And he’s probably toast, because we’ve foregone every option except the military one, and we clearly don’t have that either.

So Putin looked at the US military situation, added up the figures, and was apparently emboldened by the fact that we hadn’t left Iraq, not cowed into submission by our great display of will there. No doubt other military geniuses are awakening to the fact that, in the last months of the Bush administration, the world’s ass-kicker is tapped out, unheeded, unwanted and practically unbearable. And with the world’s economy in the toilet, this is an even better time to impress the populace by getting them that annexation they’ve always wanted.

We’ve spent the past seven-and-a-half years trying to solve every problem by menacing it with a six-shooter and showing it that we’re willing to put up with more crap than it ever dreamed of. Unfortunately we’ve spent so much on the example that we’re too beat to reap any of the rewards of the violence and insanity we’ve spread. It’s a shame, really – you spend the best years of your life beating your subjects into submission, and then they all rise up against you while you’re reloading.

Maybe a cleverer leader than George Bush would have tried to make more friends than enemies. Tried to solve problems in the age-old way of tedious negotiations, planning years ahead for diplomatic triumphs rather than kicking in every door and tasering the people on the other side. On September 11, 2001, the neocons claimed we were engaged in a battle of biblical proportions armed to the teeth. And yet today we find ourselves in a tragic comedy weilding only the jawbone of an ass.