June 16, 2003

• Democracy, Whiskey and Sexy!

  NAJAF, Iraq, April 2– In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today. What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring? “Democracy,” the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. “Whiskey. And sexy!”
       –the New York Times

  

  Quick R.D Kap nuggets to consider:

  The world is a gritty, messy place, and there are no perfect solutions.  But the fact is that Third World military men are more likely to listen to American officers who brief them about human rights as a tool of counterinsurgency than to civilians who talk about universal principles of justice… The protestors who perennially chain themselves to the gates of Fort Benning, calling its previously named School of the Americas the “School of Torturers,” are implicitly championing the worst possible strategy if they want Latin armies to take human rights seriously — a strategy of isolation, which cuts foreign officers off from American society and values.
  …
  
  As for international law, it has meaning only when war is a distinct and separate condition from peace.  As war grows more unconventional, more often undeclared, and more asymmetrical, with the element of surprise becoming the dominant variable, there will be less and less time for democratic consultation, whether with Congress or with the UN.  Instead civilian-military elites in Washington and elsewhere will need to make lightning-quick decisions.  In such circumstances the sanction of the so-called international community may gradually lose relevance, even if everyone soberly declares otherwise.
  …
  
  The media increasingly and dramatically, affect policy yet bear no responsibility for the outcome.
  …
  
  …our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support and ultimately be effective.  And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan.  The idealistic shorthand of democracy, economic development, and human rights, by means of which the media make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh and complicated ground-level truths.
  …

  Remember that even Gladstone’s vision (re: the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan) was more effectively administered by the realpolitik of statesmen such as Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, and the Marquess of Salisbury…

  And perhaps most dramatic and notable…
  
  The masses “show no concern for the causes and reasons” behind their own well-being, observed the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), a book that was equally prescient about the Fascist rallies of the 1930s and the youth rebellion of the 1960s.  Indeed, the peace demonstrators last February appeared to have no idea whatsoever that their very freedom to demonstrate had been won by war and conquest in the service of liberty – precisely what the U.S. and British governments were proposing to do in Iraq.  Of course, the masses are uninterested, as Ortega noted.  “Since they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, … they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.”

  +
  Snippets from Robert D. Kaplan’s essay (as featured on the cover)
  in the July/August Atlantic.  Very insightful and to-the-point.  Definitely worth your time.  He’s the author of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. 

  

  “We live by ideals; we exist through realpolitik. A disturbing thought but there’s no way around it.” -S.G. 

  —————–
  
  

  !!!  “…Me see ‘em?”
  
  ———————
  
  Currently listening to:
  
  
  RH – Hail to the Thief
  “Backdrifts”

  —

  I know I shouldn’t but I love those pop-up ads from Orbitz.

  Matt11:28

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