U.S. diplomacy in Iraq skewered
 |
| The Borowitz Report has some fun with the demands the U.S. would place on Iraq |
Borowitz sends up Secretary of State John Kerry’s rather stringent demands on the Iraqi government, writing, “In a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry stressed the importance of forming a unity government in Iraq but refused to commit to a timetable for creating one in the United States.
The sensitive topic of a unity government for the United States came at the end of a thirty-minute meeting, during which Secretary Kerry lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister about the value of a government ‘where people of different parties put aside their differences, make meaningful compromises, and work together for the good of the nation.’”
Hilarious.
Or it would be if the situation is lampoons didn’t imperil people’s well-being. Or if the situation he sends-up didn’t stem from a continued miscalculation about the social, political, and religious situation ‘on the ground’. Michael Oakeshott was too conservative in some ways—perhaps most glaringly in his belief that it’s nearly impossible and nearly universally unwise to try to import a political tradition from one part of the world to another[i]. But, honestly, if ever there were a perfect case to highlight the stupidity of attempting to foist democracy on a group of peoples and a country, it’s got to be Iraq[ii].
Andrew Sullivan's more serious take
 |
| Andrew Sullivan provides perspective on Kerry's Iraq position |
From where I’m sitting, I see no way to achieve the ends John Kerry just outlined without a new war. And who will fight it? That shoe is the one that is yet to drop. My view: not a single American soldier, not a single cent, to build an Iraq that never existed and, at this point, never can. If Obama tries to do it, there has to be an insurrection from his supporters and from all sane Americans. If the Saudis and the Sunni states cannot rein in ISIS, then let the Iranians fight them.”
Right?
And this tack, Sullivan notes, comes even after the U.S.’s singular foreign policy achievement of the past 12 months: the dismantling and relocation of Syria’s chemical weapons! So, the one-percent doctrine isn’t in play as a rationale for Kerry to use.
Sullivan is as right as he is truculent with his observation, “If Obama wants to find a middle ground, he’ll be the first Westerner ever to discover it in Iraq.”
While I’d admire the chutzpah and independence such a self-confidence requires, I only wish it were based a little more in reality.
Audacia et prudentia
Charlie
Munger evinced an even more outrageous display of audacity when he showed up to
a meeting of economists to present a paper on what’s wrong with their
discipline, without ever having taken a single econ class. While opening with a
compliment, “It’s my view that
economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft
science,” Munger’s flattery didn’t last too long. His subsequent sentence was, “And it’s also my view that it’s still lousy,
and I’d like to discuss this failure in this talk.”
Of
course, if Munger were wrong about everything, no one would die—or even deploy.
So he had that going for him. That and a pretty strong fallback position: immunity
from the “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” argument.
While I
don’t agree with Kerry or his cavalier position regarding Iraq, I do respect
the courage it takes to go out on a limb for one’s convictions (I do realize
that Kerry, in this instance, is more likely to deserve praise not for sticking
to his own convictions but for the convictions of the administration he works
for. So, perhaps rather than Oakeshott and Munger, we’ll get Josiah Royce and James
Carville to plump for him). Whatever Kerry’s motivations, there’s certainly
something to be said for exhibiting the individuality to hold a (drastically)
divergent opinion. It’s one of the things Michael Oakeshott was best at.
You have my consent; do you want my soul as well?
As was
another of his students, Richard Flathman, who—more than Kerry and perhaps as
much as Munger—exhibits a fiercely independent streak. Harvard political
theorist Richard Tuck tells one of my favorite stories about Flathman:
“My
students at Harvard treasure a story that Richard Flathman told about himself
when he came to give a paper to a political theory seminar.
“He said
that many times in departmental meetings he has been outvoted on some issue,
and like a good colleague, he has agreed to go along with the result. Other
members of the department have often tried to persuade him after the meeting
that he had been wrong in his original position. ‘I tell them, you have my
consent; do you want my soul as well?’”
Tuck
takes from this account that one of Flathman’s chief virtues as a thinker was
his commitment to preserving people’s souls from capture by their fellow
citizens. Flathman’s “most interesting targets have not been the obvious and
familiar threats to individual liberty, which all modern right-thinking people
can more or less agree on (and most of which ceased long ago to be much of a
threat to the communities where right-thinking people tend to live).”
Flathman, like Munger, set his sights on disciplinary orthodoxies—though he set out to radicalize his own discipline. The crooked thinking Flathman set about righting were what he has called “virtue liberalism,” such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“who in my judgement is no liberal at all”), John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, and by a certain kind of rights theorist who is, at bottom, principally concerned with using rights to secure a civil order; John Locke is his prime example of this.
Against these writers, with their visions of communities united in the pursuit of widely disseminated and reasonable common goals, Flathman has pleaded for ‘willful liberalism,’ in which individuals are per-mitted and encouraged to make themselves, not to be made by the civic order. As he has admitted, [W]illful liberalism has affinities with libertarianism and especially with various strains in romanticism. The notion of liberation from state and other forms of power is reminiscent of libertarianism and even of individualistic anarchism, and the notions of self-making, selfenactment, and self-fashioning have manifest affinities with major tendencies in romanticism and expressivism.”
Flathman’s
thought is trying to do what’s impossible in contemporary Iraq—provide for the
conditions in which most people care for themselves. I wonder how, short of
acquiring a fortune as vast as Charlie Munger’s so as to insulate oneself from
criticism, might we cultivate the disposition to act independently—but without
falling into the kind of wrongheadedness Kerry seems to be mired in.
Sullivan’s and Flathman’s teacher Michael Oakeshott has an idea
Oakeshott
asks, “How does a pupil learn disinterested curiosity, patience, honesty,
exactness, industry, concentration and doubt? How does he acquire a sensibility
to small differences and the ability to recognize intellectual elegance? How
does he come to inherit the disposition to submit to refutation? How does he
not merely learn the love of truth and justice, but learn it n such a way as to
escape the reproach of fanaticism? And beyond all this there is something more
difficult to acquire: namely, the ability to detect the individual intelligence
which is at work in every utterance, even those which convey impersonal
information.”
 |
| Michael Oakeshott served in France and Belgium with the British “Phantom” reconnaissance unit during WWII |
His answer:
“The intellectual virtues may be imparted only by a teacher who really cares
about them for their own sake, and never stoops to the priggishness of
mentioning them.”
After
all, Oakeshott argues, it’s “not the cry but the rising of the wild duck impels
the flock to follow him in flight.”
[i] There’s a kernel in Oakeshott’s piece “Political
Education” of the arguments in favor of cultivating diversity as articulated by
anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his piece “On the Uses of Diversity”. Oakeshott,
though, instead of embracing the possibility that cultures might borrow and
learn from each other more fruitfully in exchanges that would leave all sides
richer, instead opted to advance a theory that limited a politician’s or
theorist’s activity in seeking out ideas from cultures outside of his or her
own only in cases of explicit, recognized need.
Interestingly, 538
recently published a pretty compelling piece that argues that the U.S. Men’s
National Soccer team has had such limited success because of it’s comparatively
limited exposure to different traditions and leagues that have forced other
nations and their national team coaches and players to innovate their style of
play and tactics. (Though, in fairness, the fact that U.S. kids have long had
other ambitions than the beautiful game that lead to quicker and more fame and
money might have something to do with it, too).
[ii] Middle Eastern literature is actually rife with
the word ‘primordial’. Geertz in another piece defines ‘primordial attachment’
that, “stems from the ‘givens’…of social existence: immediate contiguity and
kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from being born
into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language, or even
a dialect of language, and following particular social practices.” Geertz
didn’t have the Middle Eastern region in his sights per se while writing that, but the concept gets used with a
frequency and force in literature and analysis about that area unmatched by
anywhere else in the world.
[iii] The full passage Sullivan has in
mind, “Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that the Sunni
militants seizing territory in Iraq had become such a threat that the United
States might not wait for Iraqi politicians to form a new government before
taking military action. “They do pose a threat,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to
the fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “They cannot be given
safe haven anywhere.”
“That’s why, again, I reiterate the
president will not be hampered if he deems it necessary if the formation is not
complete,” he added, referring to the Iraqi efforts to establish a new
multisectarian government that bridges the deep divisions among the majority
Shiites and minority Sunnis, Kurds and other smaller groups.
No comments:
Post a Comment