Remora

For Christmas in 1914, the Kaiser sent every German soldier on the Western front a box with 10 cigars. Facing them, the Tommies were being flooded with Christmas parcels containing plum cake -- apparently parents and wives at home were properly alarmed at what their boys would be eating over there in France -- all those sauces, you know. The soldiers on both sides declared an informal ceasefire, and traded cigars for plum cake, and sampled each others beers. On January 1, the Germans initiated a barrage, but the Tommies soon noticed they were firing in the air. The British replied, shooting high in the air. A good enough time was had by all. The high commands on both sides were furious, and sent strict orders down to the lower level officers that any fraternizing with the enemy in the future would be severely punished.

Four months later, in April, the Germans tried to break through the front at Ypres using a new weapon. Cannisters were exploded in a salient in front of an Indian-Pakistani battalian. A yellow cloud appeared, and was moved forward gently by the wind. It killed trees, birds, rats, and people. The gas was chlorine. The troops arrayed before it had no knowledge of gas, and no protection from it. Chlorine, breathed in, will either choke you to death immediately or have these effects: you spit up masses of bloody mucuous, your lungs expand to almost twice their normal size, they fill with water, you die. If in 1914, it seemed natural that the troops would fraternize at Christmas, the appearance of the gas -- which was used, by the end of the year, by the British - signalled that this was, indeed, another kind of war altogether. The old 19th century codes were gone.

I'm thinking about this because of an article in the WP Style section Sunday by
Joel Garreau.

Here's the intro grafs:

"Hinges in history -- 1914, 1929, 1945, 1963, 1981, and maybe the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

These are pivots on which our lives move from one world to another.

After we swing past them, it's hard to remember what the previous world felt like, or what sense it made. (Why did '50s fraternity boys compete to see how many people they could stuff into a telephone booth? What was a telephone booth?)"

I am not sure 9/11 is in that company, but as it becomes obvious that the US is still vulnerable to a terrorist strike - that indeed, we can expect it, if the letter writing anthrax campaign isn't part of it - perhaps something has turned.

There's a lot of criticism of the way the Left has protested this war. Marc Cooper has an article in the LA Times which lays out the problem -- although I don't know what to make of Cooper's mild flag fixation. It isn't the alienation from American symbols that characterizes the Left's wierdness right now -- it is the alienation from reality. Reality is that we might have to look seriously at how we do the future - we might have to leap out of the practico-inert, to use Sartre's wonderful term -- and the left should have some idea of what that means.

Here is what I would like to see as a kind of left-sympathetic guy.

I would like to see some more serious response to the various policy disasters in the Middle East than the "why do they hate us" mantra. Which means making difficult decisions. If it is true that the US sanctions against Iraq and the bombing are immoral, it is also true that the regime of Saddam Hussein is a horror, perpetrated against a people who have never had a chance to decide their fate for themselves. They are locked in a prisonhouse created at the end of WWI and called Iraq. By quitting the bombing, we would accomplish one thing. We would stop pursuing an immoral and also an irrational policy. But what then? Simply leave SH free to continue killing and torturing on the usual scale?

The 'solution' to this, I feel instinctively, is democracy. US foreign policy, famously, is split between a realistic and a Wilsonian, or idealistic, school. The problem isn't really that the idealists are wrong -- it is that they continually underestimate the difficulty of pursuading the American public to follow through on the type of committments that would underwrite idealism, beginning with the failure to join the League of Nations and going all the way up to the ridiculous control Jesse Helms exerted over foreign policy in the Clinton years.

An idealist would have to say -- it is impossible to pursue foreign policy in a properly democratic way without building support for it domestically. Unfortunately, even when the US has promoted democracy, it has done so inconsistently, with wide leaway left for America's material interests. Jimmy Carter would lecture Argentine generals about human rights, but not Saudi sheiks. And when it got down to promoting democracy, the end result has been mere voting. Voting is the last part of democracy -- without separation of powers, without guarantees of rights, there is no democracy, period, whether the state's leadership has been elected or appointed itself over the barrel of a gun.
But given that stronger notion of democracy, can the left really credibly promote democracy? Only if it is willing to say that democracy might not be good, in the short run, for the West -- I imagine real democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt would be plenty bad for the Western oil interests, and let's face it, that is our interest. Our standard of living depends materially on the availability and cheapness of oil.

Which gets us to the second serious contribution the left can bring to the table (while tucking in its napkin and asking for a little more wine, garcon): power is a political issue. The refusal to recognize or go with the Kyoto accords isn't just a disaster for the environment, but it is a lost political opportunity. The Federal government underwrote our oil economy - from a foreign policy that was calibrated to keeping the price of a barrel of oil as low as it could go in the fifties and sixties to the socialization of the road system. The left has to make the case for the Federal government underwriting a new power economy -- that means everything from fuel cells which use natural gas to solar and wind power to conservation. This is the most powerful part of a lefty program, and it has been oddly muted since 9/11.
It shouldn't be.

The connection is pretty clear between the alienation of bin Laden's supporters, both active and passive, and the failing government in Saudi Arabia, which is authoritarian, corrupt, and unintelligent. America is so fixated on the Palestine-Israel drama that it doesn't even see what is evident in the Middle East -- that America's other great ally, Saudi Arabia, has squandered its wealth and inscribed itself in the global economic system to the extent that its oil simply doesn't count anymore. It can't afford gestures like the 1973 oil boycott. It can't afford the infrastructure it so stupidly built. It shouldn't have built it anyway. And who profited from it but American weapons manufacturers, American construction companies, and etc. When you think about the importance of SA to the Arabic world, this is the elephant in the room.

So - there are things the left, or at least a lefty leaning guy like me, can suggest about the future.