A Supreme Political Irony
Peter Schultz
The political is the realm of the ironic. A supreme political irony: watching “rulers” fail while exercising their power(s) against those they “rule,” ala’ the French in Indochina and Algeria, the United States in Vietnam, the USSR in Afghanistan, Israel in Gaza, and Britain in Ireland, India, and Kenya.
Rule: A Central Political Myth
Peter Schultz
“The Taliban believed Washington had decisive leverage over Karzai, because he could not survive without their aid; the truth was, Karzai had established decisive leverage over the Obama administration, by taking their pledges of Afghani sovereignty at face value….”
“From the Taliban’s perspective, Karzai was merely an American puppet, one that depended on American support for money and physical survival.” [584, Protectorate S, Stephen Coll]
What is going on here? That is, how did It happen that Karzai proved to have more leverage vis-à-vis the Obama administration than vice versa? And, by the way, the same phenomenon was visible in Vietnam where Diem had more leverage vis-à-vis the Americans than vice versa, explaining why Diem was eventually overthrown. What is this phenomenon about and what does it teach us about politics?
To cut to the chase, this phenomenon illustrates that the idea of “rule” is a myth. That is, it is an idea that hides as much as it exposes. What it hides is the extent to which rule depends upon the consent of the ruled. Once Karzai withdrew his consent from American attempts to negotiate with the Taliban to reach a settlement in that war, the US capacity to rule disappeared. The “ruler” cannot “rule” without the consent of “the ruled.” So, viewing Karzai as “a quisling of no legitimacy,” as the Taliban did, was a fundamental error because even “quislings” cannot be ruled successfully without their consent, which is why “Karzai had decisive leverage over the Obama administration.” And which helps explain why politicians, e.g., like Diem in Vietnam, who withhold their consent are often overthrown and replaced by consenting, cooperating politicians.
So, when the USSR lost the consent of governed in the Soviet Union, that union collapsed. And when some Southern states seceded from the United States, that union also collapsed. Moreover, that union would not be “reconstructed” successfully until the South, after having its demands for an apartheid regime met, consented to rejoin the union. The United States couldn’t be united, genuinely united that is, without the consent of the South, and that consent would only be forthcoming after the North agreed, as it did in the 1876 presidential election, that the South would be allowed to create a social and political order based on white supremacy. And that regime of white supremacy would only be replaced when the South agreed that is should be replaced in the latter part of the 20th century.
The importance, the indispensably of consent explains why voting in the United States is treated as an absolutely essential duty, perhaps the only absolutely essential duty of American citizenship. It is a duty that only reprobates fail to honor. Why? Because by voting, regardless of whom they vote for, people are indicating that they consent to established order. They are registering their consent, thereby legitimating the existing political order. Non-voters, withholding their consent, subvert the government, undermine those who are ruling. Elections, if unattended by large numbers of non-voters, would undermine the legitimacy of the “ruling” elites. Hence, the constant drumbeat about the duty, the responsibility of voting.
Similarly, with the pervasive propaganda programs directed at the American people, programs meant to win their “hearts and minds.” Without the consent of the governed, the government cannot govern. So, while it might appear that the United States, as a superpower, can leverage the likes of Karzai and the Afghanis to do what it wants done, these appearances are deceptive. And, so, the United States finds itself repeatedly forced to turn to war, i.e., violent repression, in pursuit of its goals. And these wars won’t end until, e.g., the Afghanis – or that matter the Taliban – are satisfied. In attempting to impose its will, to rule the Afghanis or the Taliban, the United States guarantees endless wars and, eventually, failure.
The Problem of Good Intentions
Peter Schultz
Speculating on the meaning of Machiavelli’s assertion that failure invariably comes to humans who don’t “learn how to be able not to be good.” [The Prince]
What might Machiavelli have meant by this? What is it “not to be good?” And why is this something that needs to be learned?
It has often seemed to me that attributing good intentions to American politicians was a mistake, given that they so consistently chose policies that failed. I thought: Maybe they didn’t have good intentions. Maybe they had bad intentions, but intentions that would solidify their power and fortify the status quo. Could be.
But what if they did have good intentions and because they did, they invariably failed? That is, because they had good intentions, because they wanted to be and do good, they would choose and stick with policies that failed. Their good intentions, i.e., their inability “to learn how to be able not to be good” led to their failures.
Those having and being committed to good intentions, to being and doing good, are unlikely to “go with the flow,” i.e., to see when there is no flow. If you have good intentions, going with the flow will seem bad insofar as, when there is no flow, the best course of action requires relinquishing, abandoning your well-intentioned policies. And, so, in order to not give up your desire to do good, not to give up your good intentions, you press on -futilely – even in the face of obvious failure. For example, because George W. Bush was convinced that his intentions were good – defeating terrorism – he pressed on and on and on in Afghanistan and Iraq despite the fact that it was obvious his policies were futile. Bush couldn’t abandon his good intentions; he didn’t “learn to be able not to be good.” He had to be good, which was his downfall.
Isn’t it universally so that political life requires those engaged in it to have good intentions? Isn’t that how all politicians present and sell themselves? So, perhaps, the irony of political life is that what it requires – good intentions – is precisely what often or invariably leads to political failure. The road to hell – or political failure – is in fact paved with good intentions. Succeeding in political life is best achieved by not passionately embracing good intentions. Ironically, a sense of humor about politics proves to be worthwhile, even indispensable. And, again, ironically, the most serious human beings invariably make bad politicians.
Addendum:
Here is President Obama illustrating that he too did not learn to be able not to be good: “Obama’s message – to Karzai, the Afghan cabinet, and American troops he addressed – was one of unwavering commitment: ‘The United States does not quit once it starts on something…. We keep at it. We persevere. And together with our partners, we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.’” [435] Of course, Obama wasn’t absolutely certain of that. Nor were his partners, for example, the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency. And, so, despite the obvious failures of US policies up that point, in order to do good, to persevere, to keep at it, the killings would go on and on and on, including of course the killings of American troopers, with no guarantee that the United States would succeed.
Bin Laden v. the United States
Peter Schultz
Bin Laden, in his war with the United States, should be awarded a TKO, a technical knockout victory insofar as he changed the United States in significant and not beneficial ways. And one reason he could do this was because the United States deemed itself to be the exceptional nation, that is, an exceptionally good nation that deserved to control the world. After 9/11, the United States became a fearful, militaristic, and surveilling nation to an unprecedented degree. Bin Laden, it would seem, understood that the claim to be an exceptional nation left the United States vulnerable to manipulation to a great degree.
Because it took itself to be an exceptionally good nation, the United States could not fathom why it had been attacked. In other words, it couldn’t and didn’t understand the attacks. As a result, its response wasn’t well thought out, as Bush’s GWOT proved not to be. Although or perhaps because it saw itself as exceptionally good, America’s response to the 9/11 attacks was ill-conceived. Instead of going after the perpetrators of the attacks, Bush et. al. declared, and Americans embraced, a global war on a phenomenon known as “terrorism.” This was – and is – a fool’s errand. And it guaranteed that the United States would become a garrison state where the military or the military-corporate-surveillance complex took over American politics. All in the name of proving America’s exceptional goodness, it would waste its wealth as it was drawn into conflicts throughout the globe. It would even be led to create what may be called a “global Murder Inc.,” which would prove to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children.
Similarly, because it thought of itself as exceptional, Americans couldn’t understand the attacks themselves, thinking of them as apocalyptic, e.g., speaking of New York City as “ground zero,” as if the attack there was like the US atomic attacks on Japan. But the New York attacks, while deadly, weren’t close to being apocalyptic, as 3000 deaths hardly constitute an apocalypse. And the fact was that al Qaeda didn’t even use WMDs; it used airplanes, civilian airplanes.
But as the response to the Boston marathon bombing illustrated, bin Laden had successfully undermined America’s sense of security to the point that any attack was seen as potentially apocalyptic. “Boston Strong?” Not so much as the city and its people locked down as if two individuals wielding a pressure cooker bomb constituted an existential threat. Cowering in a city-wide lockdown is hardly indicative of strength. The reaction to that bombing was more like the reaction to “Blackhawk down” than not. “Boston down” seems more accurate than “Boston strong.”
Bin Laden, via the 9/11 attacks as interpreted by America’s elites and embraced by its people, had successfully remade the United States. The exceptionally good proved to be the exceptionally vulnerable on the road to being exceptionally self-destructive. For example, presidents were reduced to being commanders in chief. So reduced, the office was subordinated to the military-corporate-surveilling complex like the one Eisenhower warned about.
That complex and its presidents even had a cartoonish character, e.g., when Bush, decked out in a flight suit, landed on an aircraft carrier positioned so it seemed at sea to announce, “Mission Accomplished,” when nothing of the sort had happened. Or when President Obama fired General McCrystal for an article published in, of all places, Rolling Stone. And the 2020 presidential election had its own cartoonish sheen, when two geriatric candidates vied either to “save democracy” or to “drain the swamp,” take your pick. Bin Laden’s success had helped turn America’s politics into comedy, so it wasn’t surprising that presidents were routinely mocked on Saturday Night Live or late-night talk shows. And now the comedic 2020 election is going to be replayed in 2024. As an old expression has it: “You can’t make up stuff like this.”
America’s alleged exceptionalism, its alleged exceptional goodness, didn’t protect it against bin Laden and his small band of followers. As Machiavelli pointed out, humans who don’t learn to be able not to be good will invariably fail. Patriotism or goodness isn’t enough. Intelligence, a sense of humor, and a sense of the irony of political life are indispensable for succeeding politically, because these characteristics teach that the task is navigating the political world, not ruling it.
More Irony
Peter Schultz
From Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars:
“Johari Abdul Malik, who succeeded Awlaki as imam of Dar al Hijrah mosque in Virginia, was dumbfounded. He remembered Awlaki as a moderate and as a Muslim who bridged two worlds deftly. ‘To go from that individual to the person that is projecting these words from Yemen is a shock,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we read him wrong. I think something happened to him.’” [373-374]
Well, the same thing that happened to Awlaki happened to the Americans. Both moved from tolerance to death sentences, to the wish to kill, a movement fed by “genuine moral rectitude” on both sides. No one, on either side, was trying to “bridge [the] two worlds deftly.”
Now, that’s ironic.
Apocalypse Now: The World Is a Battlefield
Peter Schultz
I finally understand why Mark Twain, in his novel The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, has Merlin the Magician outlast the Yankee. In brief, it is because Merlin has a better understanding of the human condition than the Yankee, who, like George Bush, et.al., sees the world as a battlefield best dealt with via armaments.
Seeing the world as a battlefield was Bush’s fundamental mistake. If it were true, then power, especially great power like that possessed by the United States, would be sufficient. But time after time, such power isn’t sufficient for successfully waging the War on Terror.
“’I don’t think Brennan’s up to dealing with Saleh in terms of craftiness and wiles,’ Lang [said].” Because he viewed the world as a battlefield, Brennan lacked the craftiness and wiles needed to successfully deal with Saleh, the president of Yemen. Of course, Brennan was hardly alone in this regard. If you think power is sufficient, then you won’t think that craftiness and wiles are crucial in dealing with allies or enemies. When you meet obstacles, you will send in more troops, launch more drones, torture more people, assassinate more people. And, yet you will still be outsmarted.
Less powerful people are more likely to rely on craftiness and wiles because, out of necessity, they appreciate the world isn’t best navigated as if it were a battlefield.
The Connecticut Yankee’s successes were due to craftiness and wiles, for example, when he pretended that he possessed magical powers by predicting a solar eclipse, thereby not only saving his life but also acquiring significant power. But it must be noted that the Yankee’s success depended on his good fortune that the eclipse was to happen when he needed it to. His power depended on fortune or chance.
This helps explain the appeal of covert operations, which may be made to resemble “magic.” In Tim O’Brien’s novel, In the Lake of the Woods, “the Sorcerer” realized he could make villages disappear by speaking a few words into his radio: “Poof, and in a cloud of white phosphorus, the village disappeared.” But the Sorcerer couldn’t make villages appear or re-appear. His “magic” was merely destructive, which is confirmed later when he makes his wife disappear. The “magic” of nation-building or of “relationship building” is non-existent or unavailable to the Sorcerer. He is the destroyer of worlds.
For Twain and O’Brien, modern “magic” is then ultimately destructive. It relies on armaments, on weapons, which is why Twain made the Connecticut Yankee an arms manufacturer in the United States. Combine that kind of “magic” with the conviction that the world is a battlefield, and the result will be destruction and death on an apocalyptic scale, like the wasteland created at the end of The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Armaments, military power, whether nuclear or not, whether overt or covert, cannot create villages or nations. Such “magic” is merely destructive. And it is time perhaps to re-watch Coppola’s classic movie Apocalypse Now.
9/11: Neither Conspiracy nor Failure
Peter Schultz
The attacks on 9/11 were the product of neither a conspiracy nor failures, in the sense that some government officials failed to do their jobs. Those officials didn’t fail as they all did their jobs and, yet, ironically perhaps, the attacks succeeded. Why?
First, the CIA did its job, in predicting the possibility of attacks. In fact, it did that job quite well, as its assessment was the bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States.
So then, did the politicians, Bush, Cheney, et. al. fail? No, at least no more than gamblers “fail” when they don’t roll a seven, don’t draw to an inside straight, or pick the wrong horse to win. Outcomes can only be guessed at. While the present can be seen, the future cannot be because the present, however well assessed, remains mysterious.
But politicians neither see themselves as gamblers nor do they see politics as gambling. Politicians view themselves as “rulers,” as “governors,” as “the powerful.” They are in control, able to determine even the future. Ironically though, they are gamblers and, so, they get lucky every so often. And this points us to the question of “fortune,” and its place in human affairs. 9/11 reminds us or should remind us that fortune, not power, controls human affairs.
In fact, having great power blinds humans to fortune and its role in human affairs, and this blindness leads the powerful, even the most powerful, to losses, even catastrophic losses. Even or especially great power is a gamble, always and everywhere. Politics is a gamble, always and everywhere. And the powerful are more likely to lose and lose big insofar as they think they have conquered fortune. So, ironically, it was America’s great power, her “greatness” as some would say, that contributed to the success of the 9/11 attacks. Making America more powerful, as was done in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, will not, cannot correct the problem.
