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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
Reading Tom Friedman's column in The New York Times ("The Chant Not Heard", November 30th, 2003), I felt myself nodding vigorously to his points, and then canceling those out with an emphatic shaking of my head from side to side. No wonder my neck hurts!
I agree that the " left needs to get beyond its opposition to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and moral support" which is exactly the point I was making in the New Frames blog below, but I disagree that the aim is "to try to make lemons into lemonade in Baghdad". I also disagree that the Iraq war, and military intervention more globally, is the most noble thing the Americans have done since the Marshall Plan. (That very statement would be cause enough for violent reactions in many quarters.) One of the great lost opportunities in the last 50 years was for America to rethink its role in the world after September 11th with some of the ideals and long term investments characteristic of the Marshall Plan, but that window slammed shut right after Bush's famous "axes of evil" speech and then, of course, the war. This opportunity probably never existed with the current administration's ideological position and worldview – that is, the world is a nasty dangerous, survival-of-the-fittest place requiring a might-makes-right strategy – but theoretically speaking, there was that option, and it was a scenario we (when I was doing the post Sept 11th work for GBN) seriously considered in the weeks and months after the attack.
Friedman is also forgetting that the means of achieving this war have made this fantasy impossible because the American intervention is perceived to be illegitimate, not just by the French but by many, many groups. Legitimacy is a slippery and illusive thing just like trust: once it's violated, it's very hard to build back. And America will not be able to build this legitimacy back using old might-is-right tactics. We're in a different era now where the sources of legitimacy are more complex and transnational. (This is another aspect to the importance of "soft power".) I won't unpack the issue of legitimacy here – because I'm still working out the details and it will require much longer treatment – but I will point you to an important, multidisciplinary book, Philip Bobbitt's, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History. This is 900+ page intellectual odyessy and thus hard to penetrate for most time-starved folks, but fortunately GBN's co-founder Jay Ogilvy wrote some useful condensed notes on the book. Any serious student of the future evolution of the global system of governance must read this!
Getting back to Friedman's Sunday dish, I sympathize with his dismay at the black-and-white approaches to opposing this war. I, too, find the rhetoric and ideological blinkers of these protesters a bit annoying and simple-minded. Their tactics also undermine their legitimacy in the eye's of current power brokers (important people to influence) but I'm at a loss to imagine alternatives to protesting this situation. We still need attention-getting activities like the protests in London during Bush's visit to raise awareness and debate. A dilemma, this is. So the most interesting and insightful thing I took away from Friedman's article was his parting quote:
"In general," says Robert Wright, author of "Nonzero," "too few who opposed the war understand the gravity of the terrorism problem, and too few who favored it understand the subtlety of the problem." [Btw, Non-Zero was also GBN bookclub selection.]
