America Can Lead the World Out of This

This is what a global existential crisis looks like. Migrants are fleeing war and environmental catastrophe, arriving at the borders of our relatively rich and stable democracies. At the same time, the average citizen finds the world more expensive, insecure, and unfulfilling than any time in living memory. We are all questioning the fundamentals of the existing order, and one way or another, our geopolitical reality urgently demands a moral response from all of us. We must find a positive alternative or else face large-scale unrest, even social collapse or annihilation.  

The positive alternative must take a hard look at immigration. What happens when thousands a week float across the Mediterranean arriving half-drowned at your country’s coastline? What happens when another thin and hungry family is caught in the high beams of a border patrol’s Suburban somewhere in the Sonoran desert? Do we take them in and assure that they have the same rights and responsibilities as any other resident of our countries? Do we send them home? Do we hand them over to the hostile vagaries of the bureaucracy? These are questions that demand answers; as individuals and as nations we will answer them differently, but we must have an answer. Too much of the world seems to be ceding that response to our worst instincts.   

There is a point at which every society perceives threats from outsiders. In Japan, it is next to impossible to become a full citizen if you are not Japanese by blood. Relatively few immigrants are admitted, much less refugees. In Hungary, a massively popular leader is deporting anyone who does not have official standing with the authorities. The issue of migrants has France and Germany at the precipice of reactionary rule, and here in America, our own government has forcefully separated families and used that and other threats to intimidate the helpless away from our shores. It is clear that many, perhaps most highly industrialized countries have shown strong and perhaps dangerous reactions to today’s circumstances.   

War and famine over a broad stretch of Africa and the Middle East has sent millions in search of refuge. Drugs and violence in Central America have made life impossible for many there. Growing storms ravage islands and coastlines. In looking at these catastrophes on people’s lives, we must never absolve ourselves of responsibility, both historical and ethical. We must come to understand and admit that our societies have played enormous, sometimes central roles in these events. We must also accept that some portion of our nations’ wealth should help to ameliorate these concerns. But first, we must save our democracies from fascism, or else the whole world will go with us.

Immigration alone does not drive today's rage. There is a pervasive sense that our societies no longer offer many of us a good, just life. For all its problems, why does America offer a unique response to this dilemma of mass migration and civic insecurity?

First, a far greater share of the American public is more comfortable with immigration and immigrants than in many other liberal democracies. After all, we are a nation of immigrants.

Second, we are unique in our cultural and social energy. Our diversity has long demanded a strong legal and a cultural order, and our gains in civil rights have always been hard-won, at great loss. We have a deep appreciation for the power of communities. For all our failures, America has an unusual way of spontaneously organizing ourselves in responding both to threat and opportunity. This is precisely what we are doing in response the sorry state of our governance.

Last, while our current state of politics resonates strongly with the European far right, unlike Europe, we have a popular alternative lying in wait. Perhaps this is simply because we do not already have a robust social democracy that meets our people's needs, but look at France or Germany, where the incumbent leadership only ever offers more warmed-over tropes about the status quo. What vision does UK Labour offer anyone other than maintaining an unhappy order? For all our shortcomings, we do not take our nation's promise for granted. 

The good news is that the American alternative is no longer fighting a rear guard against the reactionary hordes. Months before our first chance to weigh in on our government’s positions towards the world (and indeed its own people), a new vision is coming into focus. At the risk of future ridicule, I believe it will be this American vision that once again gives our cousins across the globe an answer to the insular, atavistic, and downright dangerous world view that has become endemic in all our nations.

For me, a first step is that it must offer a clear and final answer to our problems with managing immigration. Our nation will always be susceptible to demagogues, but much of their power can be diminished by simply addressing the fears they exploit head-on. 

The demagogue's border wall does nothing to someone who just chooses to stay here after their visa expires. Forced deportation is never humane, but neither is our dependence on the expansive black market for undocumented labor. People deserve to be paid a just wage, and be offered all the protections of the law. All this means that we need to have a universal and mandatory system for verifying individuals’ eligibility to work in our country, and it needs vigorous enforcement. At the same time, we must accept that most of the people who are here now are here to stay, and we must come to terms with some just status for those people. In the end, we can and must balance the concerns of our vast immigrant communities and the public conscience with those who feel threatened by changes to their way of life. The American consensus position on immigration is far closer to these answers than anywhere else. We must be an example for how to manage and adapt to a globalizing world.    

Second, if we are to take our role as a world leader seriously, America must devote real resources to foreign aid and investment. We should dedicate large sums to rebuilding the infrastructures, economies, and societies to our south, in both hemispheres. Imagine the good will and positive outcomes if we mandated that one percent of our present-day defense budget, or about $6 billion should be allocated towards aid, loans, technical assistance, and diplomacy.

Imagine what could happen at five percent, or $30 billion a year. We could truly address our ethical and historical responsibilities towards the world’s most helpless; an alternative to Islamist rhetoric or the cartels. A better truth than Russian propagandists can concoct, and a fairer deal than Chinese investors will offer.

Last, the American vision must look inwards. We need a full reckoning of why so many of us feel that our institutions are failing us, that opportunity is becoming ever-scarcer, and that modern life leaves so many of us severely wanting. Sacred cows will go to slaughter. Unions and shareholders alike will need to own their part in this.

It will take a wholesale rework of our education system to assure that someone emerging from its conclusions has the basic skills to succeed. It requires an overhaul of our health care and social services delivery systems to assure that everyone receives the care they need, and that we can most certainly afford. A new way of thinking about how labor and capital interact that assures reward for honest work. A renewed push towards service, both civic and military for our own cultural cohesion. A painful but compassionate look at our own society’s uglier tendencies met by a pride at our national strength and accomplishments. 

   

I leave the specifics of this American vision intentionally vague. Visions are best interpreted and not simply revealed. They evolve to the liking of their interpreters, and different regions both here and abroad will have different priorities. A vision's true value is in motivating people, both in the streets and at the ballot box. 

I also leave this largely free from partisan terminology because our present problems will not be resolved without some reasonable broad-based consensus. The greater point is that a new global paradigm is needed. I believe that the present American will is closer to identifying one than anyone else. I believe that our collective will can show the world a way out, if only as an uncertain ideal. Come November, and come 2020, I just hope that our democracy represents that will, if only for the sake of all of us.    

Our National Pastime: Running Ideas Into the Ground

George Carlin had it right when he said, "Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground."

This is what we do. It's what's made us a great country. Running ideas into the ground gave us the Apollo program and rock and roll. It took computing, something that was once the sole province of statisticians and engineers, and made it a ubiquitous, and essential piece of daily life. This tendency to run ideas into the ground also gave us the Civil War, mass incarceration, and an unending rotation of saccharine, common-denominator-driven-packaged-for-export bubble gum culture.
America takes ideas, invented or appropriated, and exhausts all possible avenues of thought and action. The deep complexities of Mexican food becomes the Seven-Layer-Crunch Taco. The Star Wars trilogy, an original and successful idea, is expanded into spinoff movies, prequels, sequels, and billions in ancillary marketing opportunities, royalties, and other enterprises. We create great cacophanies of media, volumes of thought, and litanies of inventions, for better or worse. It's what we do.

Another big American idea is Freedom. American Freedom has been an essential source for the world's oft-exhausted reservoirs of hope and optimism. It's inspired nations to better themselves, and it's expanded global prosperity. In the century after the nation's founding, the idea of American Freedom helped to end the unquestioned rule of monarchies, and went on to spend much of the last century defeating several distinct forms of tyranny. But this is a new century now, and we're not done running the idea of American Freedom into the ground. We now believe in freedom to shop for both chemotherapy and assault weapons. We believe that bankers and oil companies should be free to dump their debts and detritus onto the public trust. We believe that individuals should be free from the social burdens of living in a complex society; free from universal public education, free from paying for someone else's health care, free from making any sacrifice to our short-term livelihoods for the greater good, or even to improve our own long-run chances. We also believe in other nations' freedoms to trade with us on our terms, and to run their governments according to our notions of Freedom. We apply our cultural proclivities, often noble and hard-fought, to all of human nature. It is in this way that American Freedom will one day run itself into the ground.

It bears repeating that our penchant for running ideas into the ground did the world a lot of good. The American idea of Freedom was more popular and successful than the competing ideas of Soviet Communism. The American idea of democratic rule inspired the defeat of sclerotic, kleptocratic governments the world over (even as we sponsored others). The good we did came with our own extreme ideas around the purity of markets, and ignoring the ancient hierarchies and power struggles that prevent poor, women, and minorities from exercising their own freedoms on equal footing. We fought the cold war on such absolutist terms that we sponsored Apartheid, right-wing death squads across Latin America and Africa, and the persecution of our own citizens for their beliefs at the hands of the FBI and congress itself. We intervened in the Middle East in order to foster democracies in places that were unprepared and uninterested in following our leads. At home, we grew to believe that any state intervention in the economy is a harbinger of total annihilation of our values. 

It seems very likely that like all American ideas, good and bad, American Freedom will have to be run into the ground before we can evolve. After all, we couldn't end slavery here without a bloody conflict that nearly destroyed the country and leaves scars across our culture even today, long after the war itself departed the realm of living memory. Now it is this modern American idea, itself an exaggerated mirror image of prior bad ideas like communism and the divine right of kings, that is left standing. At some point in our future, possibly very soon, the moderating forces against a total political adoption of American Freedom will no longer be in place. Some day soon, we will run this idea of American Freedom into the ground. And the world will have to live with what comes next, for better or worse.    

Winston Churchill famously said that, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." And that's just what we're doing. It's what we do.

What I Know For Sure About Donald Trump and 2016

Wow, almost a year with no blog. I've got to do better.

Donald Trump Will Screw You

…and I don’t care who you are. If there is one consistent aspect of this man’s behavior, it is that he will say or do anything to advance himself, with no regard for anyone else.  

The first trait this behavior is a belief system that views nearly all of the human race with contempt. If you are his friend or ally, he sees you as a weak submissive. If you are his enemy or opponent, you are the subject of a pathological hatred. People move from one category to the other with every news cycle, and it doesn’t much matter where one is. The common denominator is his contempt for us all, friend or foe.

The second part of this belief system is a need for love, but not a mother’s love, or a lover’s. I think of it as akin to the love that the Japanese Emperor demanded of men who were willing to pilot a bomb-laden plane to their own death, all for the man who says he gives you everything, for a need to retain an imagined order, and the anonymous safety that a steep hierarchy grants the average person.

Psychoanalysis aside, can anyone name one principle that this man has held constant aside from his own grandiosity? Is there any business associate from his decades of alternating rapaciousness and bankruptcy who will step forward and honestly say that he actually made them money? What would his ex-wives and confidants say if not for fear of legal action?

Watching Trump’s rivals bend the knee and pay homage to this man, after the personal venom he spat at them without remorse, makes me think two things. First, politicians sense that they have to get behind power at all costs. Second, a lot of people, even smart, powerful people, can be made into lackeys by saying just the right thing, or offering just the right meager concession, however fleeting. He will say anything to get you on his side, and if you cannot be won, he will do anything to destroy you and salt the earth of your ambitions.

For me, watching the crowds view this man with such adulation isn’t about who is right or wrong. I see people who are being told exactly what they want to hear, regardless of the world’s hard truths, the known limits to power and economics that constrain us all. We will not reopen the coal mines. The oil fields of North Dakota were never going to last forever, and the immigrants will never go home. He only gave money to veterans once he was caught red-handed, months after he swore to do so. It’s not even an indifference to you, but a malevolent contempt.

I can’t speculate on where this election is headed. The one thing I am certain of is that, no matter who you are or what you believe, Donald Trump will screw you. If you are running for office and choose to side with the man, you will either go down with that ship, or be taken on a ride to places you do not want to go. If you are a voter and place your trust in this man, you will one day be sorely disappointed. Donald Trump will not help anyone’s campaign but his own. Donald Trump will not build a 2300 mile long wall at the Mexican border. Donald Trump will not get your good union job back. He will do none of these things not because they are impossible, but because there is no chance they will help him to acquire more power or fame in the long run, when words end and money must change hands.

I believe that the next 6 months will be the man’s undoing, and in the end, one way or another, he will slink into the reeking shadows of ignonymity, with only his inner circle there to tell him how great he is. What I do know is that no matter how ugly this election gets, he can only screw me if he becomes president. And I will do anything necessary to make sure that does not happen.   

A Good Week

Last week began with the vague feeling of dread and uncertainty that have become too common in this age of war, economic and social upheaval that is now well into its second decade. A young man decided to enter a historically monumental black church in Charleston and kill nine of its congregants in hopes of sparking a race war. The Supreme Court was due to announce a decision that would harm the health and well-being of millions were they to rule in favor if the plaintiffs, and another that would determine the scope of human rights as understood by modern jurisprudence.

By the end of the week, Southern state houses were removing confederate flags from their masts; symbols that have stood as a bulwark against racial progress for decades. The causes of the Civil War are being revisited without nostalgia, and we are in the midst of a national conversation about race relations that is more honest than we have had since the civil rights era saw an end to state-sanctioned racism and left us with the more insidious versions that any black person who has had encounters with the police knows all too well.

By the end of the week, the Supreme Court had declared that the federal subsidies that 6 million people in 37 states depend on to purchase health insurance were legal, and would continue in perpetuity. A day later, the court ruled that marriage is a right for all couples, regardless of their sexual orientation. All couples, from Massachusetts to Mississippi are now allowed to marry under the authorities of both their county and the states they call home.

It's important to step back and acknowledge that some weeks are good. They may not start out that way. Such a glibly simplistic idea might not look at the larger contexts of war and displacement, poverty and environmental degradation that continue unabated. But some weeks are good.

This week is good too. It's a 4-day work week, ending with our nation's celebration of its independence, and a time to revisit all the trials and missteps that have led us to what we are today, and provide some idea of where we are headed.

We are not perfect. We are not the beacon of justice and equality that we wish we were. We have an odd national habit of making many wrong decisions before settling on the right ones. We are too often ignorant of the rest of the world, and indifferent to the suffering of our own. But this country is good. This country is unrivaled in its people's optimism, and its ability to change the world, whether it be through innovation of products and processes, or through its influence in affairs across the globe.We have immense power for good or evil, and remarkably, is viewed by many, perhaps most, as largely a force for good. No other great power has ever achieved the scale of power, admiration, and genuine respect that the United States enjoys today. Deep pockets of insecurity that are unconscionable for such a rich nation remain among many of our citizens, and we continue to commit grave errors abroad. But on balance, we are good, and we are getting better.

Consider how things looked just a week ago. Things do change, and often for the better. For all our problems, we are a nation that is always getting better, and today the result is a place that is largely good. Next week we will be better. Next week, perhaps, we will be a nation that is great.    

Progressives: Don't Get Hung Up on Single Payer

As a health policy wonk, whenever my vocation comes up among people of a progressive stripe, the conversation inevitably leads to (and usually ends with) the refrain, "if only we had single payer." Having dealt with the American health care system both as a consumer and as someone who reads hundreds of pages of its rules and regulations on a weekly basis, I understand the allure. Health care in America is an unholy pain in the ass. I would love to be given a card that lets me go to any doctor I want any time I want for free. But that's not happening, even in the rosiest scenarios,

Yes, we can and must do better, but "single payer" isn't some holy grail. If we just handed out Medicare cards to everyone in the country tomorrow, we'd still have to choose between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage. We'd still have to choose a Medicare Part D plan if we want prescription drugs. We'd still face 20 percent coinsurance and a litany of copays, meaning that we'd probably also shop for supplemental coverage.

Even if we somehow swept the Canadian system of paying for care down from the North, we'd still have to deal with the endemic perverse incentives of hospitals who are paid by the procedure, medical malpractice, fraud and abuse, the profit motive, and a good number of other aspects of American health care that are untouched by who pays for it. If the politics of enacting single payer above insurance companies' objections is tough, it's nothing compared to all the pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, hospital and medical associations, all demanding that the tax payer float the costs of every new, expensive thing without prejudice.

Imagine all the ads on TVs for scooters and diabetic testing kits if everyone had insurance that was guaranteed to pay for anything and everything with only a doctor's note. That's America.

I don't like our health insurance system, but consider this: every year these captains of industry don't take a growing percentage of our health care dollar. It's steady. It may be 10 percent, it may be 25 percent, but it doesn't change. At the same time, hospitals and doctors are paid more and more and more annually. Put those two facts on a curve and the math it pretty clear that health care costs are going up, and it's the cost of health care (not health insurance) that drives it. We could save money with single payer, but the pressures to spend more and more on the newest gadget, or the guy with the fanciest medical degree will remain. Medicare deals with this in the same way that private insurance does, and faces real political and regulatory constraints. It's health care that's expensive, not health insurance.

That said, even people with really good coverage must sort through a morass of deductibles, copays, preferred providers, pharmaceutical tiers, and who knows what else before a claim is either paid out based on some hidden algorithm, or it's rejected by some mysterious technicality. Forget it if you're poor, have crappy coverage, or can't be bothered to learn the rules of a game whose rules are both arbitrary and capricious. In my work, I'm constantly exposed to a regulatory structure that's designed to both encourage a functioning, competitive market and reduce abuses of the consumer that are often a result of that competition. I have to be familiar with dozens of federal, state, and private rules, and am supposed to have some wisdom about how they all interact. I'm reminded again and again that one person's policy pet peeve is another's cash cow, and that even with the best intentions, the everyday consumer is powerless against this deluge of legal jargon. The market can help here, but not without some strong, sometimes complex, sometimes controversial protections for regular people. We can and must do better.

Single payer would be simpler to deal with. It'd probably be somewhat cheaper too. Had we gone for it in the 60s, when Canada and other nations did, before medicine got so expensive and profit-driven, it'd probably have been a much better decision than any alternative proposed since. But here we are today. Health care is far more complex and costly than it was in 1965. With the power and economic influence that health care has amassed, I doubt that even Canada would be able to pass today what it did back then.

It's possible that a few states will move ahead with legislation, despite the recent setback in Vermont. It's even possible that Single Payer will spread like wildfire until some day decades hence, the Alabama legislature approves CrackerCare to become the 56th state in the union with a fully public system. But progressives can't just sit around and hope.

Right now, all the energy in health reform is on the conservative side. All the model legislation bandied around statehouses calls for greater "consumer participation," where larger deductibles and copays, an ever growing stack of confusing insurance products each with its own shell game, and fewer regulations is somehow supposed to lead to a utopia of Joe Consumer shopping for his chemotherapy from a number of willing, transparent bidders, each vying for the shrinking balance in his Health Savings Account. That's reality, and it's happening now. The progressive answer to complex, though thoroughly bad legislation with a good chance of passing cannot be "yeah, but Single Payer." It has to be complex, good legislation.

So what are some progressive ideas that might work within the confines of today's health care system? A few general principles are a good place to start.

1. The consumer should be freed from having to think about whether they're better off going for the cheaper or the more expensive chemothreapy. That's a job for doctors and insurance companies. As a consumer, I can shop for those with the right tools. I can't be expected to decide how best to treat my cancer.  
2. If it's cheaper health care you're after, deductibles and copays are a waste of time. A $5,000 deductible keeps consumers away from doctors who might prevent a problem early on, and then, once it's a $100,000 life-threatening problem, doesn't really affect the consumer's decisionmaking. It's the quintuple bypass surgeries that make health care expensive, not the visits to the cardiologist.
3. The government should set rules for negotiation between doctors and insurers. It should ensure that a neutral third party is available to appeal an insurance decision within  24 hours.
4. The consumer should be able to deep-six any insurance plan that gives them the run-around any time they want (within reason). That's consumer-driven health care.
5. The government should provide and publicize good evidence on what's good and what's a waste of money, regardless of who stands to make money off of it. Insurance companies can do with this what they will (within reason).
6. If we're going to have private insurance companies, they need the same bargaining power that the state would have. Much of Europe has private insurance. The difference is that everyone has it, and the companies bargain collectively. Let the insurance association sit down with the medical association and come up with a fair price for things.  
7. Insurers should pull from the same risk pool. Right now, plans are carefully crafted to keep sick people out. They might not offer a particular drug, or have a higher copay for a given condition. If insurers' risks were adjusted across the whole population, they'd compete on who offers the best service, not who has the cheapest patients.

There must be a clear progressive alternative to the status quo in the post-ACA era. Progressives need to get better at talking a big game while playing small ball.  Single Payer is a nice, simple idea, but it's not the only way to achieve better health care for more people for cheaper. We can't wait around for a perfect alignment of political forces to usher in some new, magical era of free health care for all. We can't expect its opponents to take it lying down. We need to work on the system as it is, today, before someone else does. We need to do this now.

    

Just because it itches...

Back in Junior High and High School there was this sort of guy who could reliably be made to fight almost anyone, almost at any time. The Spaz. All anyone had to do was walk up to him and say something like, "yo mama better stop wearing that rainbow lipstick because when..." and he would spaz on command, running headfirst at the guy who says it, or as a bank-shot move, the guy that the spaz thinks said it. Looking back at it, he was probably deeply traumatized by events of his past or the realities of his present. It was probably the only way he knew how to react. He always came back for more.

The Spaz is a modern allegory for us-- America and many others aside. This isn't middle school. It's the Middle East this time, and all we do is spaz, spaz, spaz.

"...We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy...All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations... Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah... As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars."                                                                                                                                                            --Osama bin Laden                                                                                      

When this started out, we charged into the Middle East headfirst in a righteous fury. A bunch of Arab guys had run several planes right into our nation's most enduring symbols. Thousands died, and the rest of were deeply shaken by what they did. So we went to Afghanistan, who only recently had finished with the French, British, and Soviets. The Arab guys who first came up with the whole idea were holed up in some caves in the middle of nowhere there. So we killed almost all of them, and many others aside. We spilled our lives and torched our money there.

Then we notice Iraq, who may never have cared for suicidal Quran-banging hillbillies, but was somehow supposed to have nuclear arsenals fit into overhead-bin-sized suitcases, thermoses full of VX gas, and tubes of toothpaste full of plague, all headed our way. So we went there too. And we killed almost all of those guys and many others aside. Lives and money were everywhere traumatic, ignoble wastes. And for nothing but a cabal of desert sadists, some old Russian tanks, some decent oil fields, and a hundred thousand dead, largely blameless, faceless people. We saw existential threats there and everywhere.

Eventually, most of us didn't like what we'd done over there. Here in America we were poor and shell-shocked. So a new president was voted in, and we mostly left Iraq and Afghanistan, somehow still hemorrhaging lives and money over there. Then other Arab guys, and many others from Central Asia and East Africa, who mostly learned from the earlier guys' run-ins with us, tried to smuggle bombs in Gatorade bottles, shoe soles, and underwear. They set off some nasty bombs on European public transit a couple times. They nearly got us in Times Square. And we mostly held back from all-out war.

Since then, several European countries, America and other allies have stopped many, many of these guys. A few have gotten through, and people in the West have died, but we were paying less and less attention to Iraq and Afghanistan, focusing here on ourselves as a nation than as vengeful occupiers of others. Then there were a few civil wars across North Africa and a few in the Near East, with all their associated atrocities and injustices didn't seem to raise our hackles like before. We mostly held back. So they took hostages and they start posting their grizzly deaths on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a thousand other sites, each with their own millions of viewers, watching agape. And we can no longer hold ourselves back.

Now we're going back into Iraq. We're talking about bombing Syria. We're making secret handshakes with Iran and greasing the palms of generals and sheiks. We're getting pressured to "leave everything on the table" in certain quarters here at home. But we know we're being taunted again. The overall threat of those behind ISIS might be vastly diminished from before, but they are taunting us with every last tool still available to them, scaring the world with viscous, horrific images, doing everything they can to drag us headfirst back onto the battlefield.

Let's be clear. Terrorists can hurt us. Even from afar, with only an IPhone, a kitchen knife, and a black mask, they can disturb us down to our soles. But nobody anywhere these days talks about these guys on the awful scale of nuclear annihilation. Let's not forget that just before we started getting involved in the Middle East, we had passed a generation under the real possibility of billions of lives gone in a final conflagration. Before that, a generation had gone to a war against total world domination, just after a massive economic collapse of their own. Before that there was only more of the same, and worse by many measures before that.

How can we compare the horrors of slightly more distant past with the events of the past thirteen years? It's been nearly an entire history of violence, and our traumas have left us punch-drunk, angry, and afraid. Terrible things may have happened to us in the past, but all it takes is a mama-joke now. These weak, almost childish enemies can get us playing their unending game. This time we have to see that the whole world is no longer at stake here-- there is no need to spaz. 

Listening to Dictators

One thing about dictators is that they're usually the most brutal in countries that were made up by others in the first place. Take the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, who was allowed to run roughshod over his straight-lined piece of desert because of other people's desires for oil and cold wars. We even encouraged him to gas people when we were fighting the Iranians.

Another thing about dictators is that when their authority is questioned, they usually say that the country will fall apart without them. If there's one thing we've learned in the 21st century, it's that they're usually right. We don't have to like them, but they're not stupid.

As a nation of immigrants ourselves, America has no natural ability to understand what sectarianism really means to people whose families have been killing one another for generations. Our collective boat ride over the proverbial ocean erased those instincts from our psyches, and replaced them with clear borders and a constitution that we hold sacrosanct. So we're left with pious theory. In come the neo-cons; people whose lack of instinct and skillful amnesia could only come from America. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It flows right through our own country. 

Watching events unfold in Iraq, Syria, and to a lesser extent in other parts of the middle-east, I sometimes imagine the raspy laughter of Saddam Hussein, followed by endless "I told you so's." I can easily picture just how absurd it must have seemed to him for our haughty generals to believe that we could replace what he controlled only through great bloodshed with peaceable, pluralistic, semi-secular democratic institutions.

For those who think that if we'd just stayed longer, dug in deeper instead of "cutting and running," it's worth considering now not whether nominal peace could have been assured in Iraq, but whether we could have achieved it without the level of tyranny that men like Saddam Hussein believed necessary. The tyrant has a natural constituency, speaks the local language, and has everything to lose by his defeat. These are inborn advantages to running a highly fractious, largely contrived nation that no amount of military hardware can surmount.

Others can relitigate the decision to go into Iraq. I'm actually grateful that the matter is up for discussion once again. It's the only way we have any hope of not repeating its mistakes. I'm more interested in what we should do now. While it was apparently news to some a decade ago, we know by now that in the Levant and Greater Mesopotamia there are several ethnic and religious groups that have never gotten along. Why should we force them to live in the same country?

Yugoslavia came into existence in the same era as Iraq and Syria, and for many of the same reasons. Once the dictators fell, it wasn't long before a nasty civil war broke out, followed by a plodding though eventually successful political resolution. Its progress strikes me as an excellent model for foreign involvement in a seemingly intractable ethno-religious conflict. Perhaps if the Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, Shi'ites, and a handful of others had their own states, they'd relax a little.

Perhaps those who live in nations that aren't ethnically their own would be viewed less as separatist enemies, and more as minorities that deserve protection. Nations with large separatist factions might even consider giving the separatists what they want. The Kurds of Turkey might drop the freedom-fighter bit if there was an actual Kurdish homeland, instead of a theoretical one that must still be fought for. If I was Turkey, I'd even donate some acreage, perhaps in exchange for a sweetheart oil deal.

My belief is that people who have a long history of hating one another might be better served by having their own borders, and answering to their own leaders. It's not to say that nations can't be very diverse. Perhaps levels of economic development or cultural heritage play roles. Whatever the case, when people start hurting one another, these sorts of solutions ought to be high on the list of anyone interested in stopping it.