Fuzzy Signals

Emotional Physics

One must eventually come clean with whom one reads and is influenced by. I'll make one of those disclosers now, since we're all trying to extract the signal from the noise and find good filters of information and insight. In this respect, I highly recommend Gwynne Dyer an independent, syndicated journalist whom I religiously read because he's a master synthesizer, a great communicator, and tries to provide people a refreshing peek beneath the curtain of contemporary affairs. (Other factors do help as well: the fact that he's an expatriate Canadian, an accomplished CBC documentary filmmaker who did an excellent series on the history of war, and entertained me with his wife over a lovely lunch the year before last in their London home.)

Cloudy Sky over Iranian Desert
© Rob Howard/CORBIS

All of this came to mind after reading his recent article "Let's Attack Iran!"(18 January 2005.) In it, Dyer alludes to all the fuss Seymour Hersh's article, "The Coming Wars" in The New Yorker has caused (also a good read), while pointing out the interesting bit -- that is, how the mainstream media is trying to cope with it (not very well).

Dyer then illuminates for us some obvious reasons why Iran should NOT be the focus of the US's attention. There are important observations, for instance: the fact that Iran under the mullahs has never invaded another country nor sponsored terrorism; the reality that Europe's diplomatic pressures will likely curtail their nuclear capabilities any way; and with a longer view in mind, Iran has a chance of changing itself given that the younger generation is pro-Western and more moderate and modern, unless of course a US invasion turns them into newly minted radicals first. Again, the pattern of the US biting off its' own nose in spite of its' face, something you would think US leaders would have learned given Iraq's difficulties. I'm sure a new chapter of Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly will be written in years to come about the seriously maladaptive learning disability of this American administration. In fact, we may not have to weight that long, with such a clear picture now of how history is likely to record this.

The focus on Iran is particularly perplexing compared to more real and present dangers, like China or Pakistan and North Korea. Pakistan, most especially, is already nuclear, more unstable in many ways, probably housing Osama Bin Laden, and is known to be housing the nuclear scientist who was selling his know-how to unfriendly regimes. Yet Americans don't seem to be troubled by these facts.

As Dyer conjectures:

So why this apparent haste in the Bush administration to attack Iran now, and why the seeming enthusiasm for such a hare-brained project in wide sections of the US public (or at least of the media that claim to speak in their name)? Edward Luttwak, the military historian and strategic analyst who is renowned in Washington for his maverick views, recently described US foreign policy post-9/11 almost as an exercise in emotional physics. Never mind all the elaborate strategic plans and projects of the neo-conservatives, he implied; what really drives all this is just push-back.

After 9/11, there was an enormous need in the US to do something big, to smash stuff up and punish people for the hurt that had been done to Americans. Afghanistan was a logical and legitimate target of that anger, but it fell practically without a fight and left the national need for vengeance unassuaged. The invasion of Iraq was an emotional necessity if the rage was to be discharged, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States.

Emotional physics: for every reaction there is an opposite and equal reaction. Yes, that's a succinct way to describe the psychology of the US right now. The trouble is the Powers That Be may not even be aware of this dynamic dancing figures in their heads, a systemic myopia which invariably happens when decision-making circles are so small, so tightly circumscribed and so tightly controlled with few real world feedback loops checking their assumptions.

Posted by nicole at January 24, 2005 06:02 PM