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Matt Yglesias has a characteristically thought-provoking post today, where he argues for empathy for conservative positions. He notes:
Start with Paul Ryan and his acolytes. Ryan’s basic view is that all he’s trying to do is ensure that the federal government’s spending is brought in line with historic norms about the level of taxation. He’s a conservative, to be sure, and this agenda is clearly animated by a belief that high taxes are bad. But far from a radical effort to scale back the welfare state, it’s a sensible effort to preserve the status quo. On the other hand, serious liberals say all they’re trying to do is to preserve America’s historic social safety net.
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Now I have my own views about all of this. But I do think it’s worth taking a deep breath and trying a little bit to empathize with the different perspectives. The issue isn’t so much that they all have equal merit, but they do I think all have equal claim to be a kind of sensible defense of the status quo against radical alternatives.
This is a useful insight. And indeed, I have a lot of sympathy with a lot of conservative goals. I like free markets. I think Social Security and Medicare could be productively reformed, and by reformed, I mean “cut,” both by means testings and by providing some limits on the services covered. I supported welfare reform in the 1990s because the old system was riddled with perverse, negative incentives.
The problem isn’t the goals, when stated neutrally. I have no particular problem, as I say, with a principled, philosophical view that, say, the U.S. government should play a smaller role in our lives.
The problem with the GOP is that their leaders are consistently mendacious. I think cutting Social Security, both by reducing COLA formulas and introducing some level of means-testing, is good policy. But that is a CUT in social security. I support CUTS in Medicare, particularly in the provision of high-cost, low-benefit treatments. But those are CUTS.
The problem with the GOP is that they consistently lie about this. They want a smaller government. Fine. But they don’t want to admit that this means reducing benefits and services. They keep claiming it all be done by reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse,” or by invoking the magic “dynamic scoring” fairy by which tax cuts increase revenue. They want to privatize Medicare, still call the resultant (but very different) program “Medicare” and then claim they have protected “Medicare” even while essentially ending it. They claim they want to cut tax rates, but increase revenues by closing “loopholes,” but refuse to name those loopholes because, as a matter of politics, those loopholes are very popular — such as the home mortgage interest deduction.
The problem is not with GOP goals, per se. I like some of them, disagree with some of them, but we can have a reasonable debate over many of those issues.
But where debate becomes impossible is when one side refuses to admit the consequences of its policy preferences. When one sides lies almost continually. When one side demagogues every issue to death.
The reality is that GOP goals are very, very unpopular. Medicare and Social Security are immensely popular. The home mortgage interest deduction is one of the foundations of our home ownership society. The ONLY reason there is even a debate is because the GOP has lied so consistently and brazenly about what it wants to do and what the consequences would be that the public does not understand what is being proposed.
And that is the core issue. The GOP knows it couldn’t win on a platform of gutting Social Security and Medicare, but it still wants to pursue those goals, and has determined that the best way to achieve that outcome is to lie, confuse, and paralyze the system until a fiscal crisis forces the kind of policies they desire. They are willing to destroy faith in our public institutions and place in jeopardy the economic health of the nation for decades to come to achieve these goals.
And yes, I get that people like Ryan believe that the medium term pain this will cause is a worthwhile price to pay to “return the nation to greatness.” But this is an extreme Messianic approach to politics. In short, I have empathy for the goals. I don’t have any empathy for the methods by which the current GOP leadership is using to pursue them, though I understand that the massive unpopularity of their proposals (when stated honestly) pushes them in that direction.
Kevin Drum, reflecting on the problems with the F-22 and the disaster that is the F-35 program, wonders:
But it does make you wonder why we seem to have lost the ability to build a next generation fighter that works well at a reasonable cost. Have we reached some inherent plateau of complexity that we’re not currently able to surpass? Have all the smartest engineers all decamped to Silicon Valley? Or what? These are hardly the first Pentagon programs to sink under their own weight, but they’re certainly among the longest-lasting and highest-profile failures ever. I wonder what’s really going on here.
Tim F. at Balloon-Juice replies:
In brief, the Pentagon has gradually de-emphasized the original purpose of weapons projects in favor of making the projects themselves unkillable.
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Then you have feature creep. The Air Force has a pilot culture that worships derring-do by brave young men in awesome jets. The problem is that awesome fighter jets cost a lot of money, so new jets don’t come out very often, so when one does come around everyone wants to see their pet idea thrown in.
Tim also throws in some A-10 Warthog anecdotes to bolster his case.
But the core problem was the shift from contingency-based planning to capabilities-based planning that occurred in the 1990s. It seemed like a good idea to some at the time. With the Cold War over, and the discipline provided by planning against a known enemy in predictable theaters, it seemed wise to refocus defense planning around building a basket of needed capabilities — air superiority, forced entry, missile defense, and so on.
But the problem is that none of these capabilities make sense in the abstract. They all require a specific adversary with specific capabilities in specific scenarios to do a cost and benefit analysis of any given system. Capabilities-based planning unmoors defense programs from any solid analytical foundation. And so, weapons programs become free-floating, prone to whatever fads and conventional wisdom seem to be ruling the day.
Worse, without an adversary to discipline choices, programs compete against themselves. Modernization becomes an end in itself. Programs move to the bleeding edge of technology simply because in the absence of grounded cost-benefit analysis, leaders default to bigger and better.
Another issue is that we got on a glide path of modernization during the Cold War, spurred on by Soviet innovation. They stopped innovating in the mid-1970s, but we kept at it through the 1980s. And then in the 1990s. And then in the 2000s. We’ve continued to improve our weapons technology at roughly the same rate as we did during the Cold War, but now we’re not competing against any external adversary. We’re just competing against ourselves and our own expectations.
Don’t get me wrong. Congressional politics and the organizational culture of the Services contribute to our problems. But the bigger issue is that there is no disciplining counter-vailing pressure. Pork and the Services have always had distorting effects, but its only reached the current crisis point because of the collapse of any useful analytical consensus to shape choices.
And yes, this is a crisis. Go beyond airframes and look at land combat systems, at ship-building programs, at basically every major program out there. They are all floundering because there is no point at which the rubber hits the road except that at some point the money just runs out, but that is much too late to fix anything.
I’ve been ranting about this for so long that it feels like old news to me. I was warning about the problems of capabilities-based planning back in the mid-1990s. No one listened to me then (wisely probably since I was a 20-something with no experience or real knowledge, and the problem seems theoretical rather than practical), and no one listens to me now, which is less defensible given the collapse of so many high-profile procurement programs. But I’ll keep shouting into the void on this, in the hopes that somehow this issue generates the attention it deserves.
So, Mitt Romney is demonstrating his keen grasp of military affairs here:
Romney, who on Tuesday gave Obama a share of the credit for bin Laden’s killing, has said the U.S. goal should be to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield.
Well, yeah, that would be a damn fine idea if, you know, the Taliban was willing to meet us on a conventional battlefield. But they aren’t. So calls to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield amount to a call for a continued, open-ended commitment to counter-insurgency warfare. And despite whatever gains we’ve made in Afghanistan — either few or none depending on whose analysis you trust — achieving a battlefield victory remains perhaps a decade long process. Is that Romney’s position? I don’t think so. And indeed, I am pretty confident that if Romney wins, he will continue to follow, more or less, Obama’s glide path toward withdrawal.
But Romney’s posturing is yet another reminder that you never pay a price for sounding hawkish. “There is no substitute for victory.” ‘You can’t negotiate with terrorists.” All just so many empty words.
We are now in Afghanistan precisely in the same structural position we’ve been in for years. The Kabul government either can’t or won’t do what it would need to do to actually defeat the insurgency. It is simply too corrupt and lacking in capacity. Indeed, even if it had all the resources and leadership it needs, “winning” would be a hard road given ethnic divides in Afghanistan, the reality of geography, and continued support for the insurgents from Pakistan.
As in 2009 when we foolishly escalated in our involvement, the smart response today is still the same: targeted military operations combined with a coherent negotiation strategy aimed at splintering the insurgency and encouraging high level reconciliation and power-sharing. The outcome of this approach won’t remind anyone of “victory,” but it is nonetheless the best way to safeguard our interests and promote something which has the change of being a durable peace in Afghanistan.
I’ve been arguing for a while that it just does not make sense to see China as an enemy for the United States. My argument is pretty straight-forward:
(1) If you assess Chinese interests, they seem to line up with those on the United States on the whole. We want secure sea lanes, they want secure sea lanes. We want stable energy supply, they want stable energy supply. We want increased trade, they want increased trade. The problem we have with the Chinese isn’t that they want to reshape the international order in a fundamentally different way. The problem we have with the Chinese is is about who does what, where, when, how, and who pays for it. The China challenge is fundamentally one of coordination not of competing objectives. Now, coordination problems can result in a variety of tensions and sometimes suboptimal outcomes, but it rarely resulted in outright conflict.
(2) China and the United States are tightly bound together by economics. They are our second largest trading partner. They hold hundreds of billions of U.S. debt. Our countries are intertwined not just as matter of interests, but as a matter of actual interrelations. The case for overlapping interests, in short, is not an abstract one. This is not like when people say that the U.S. and Pakistan have shared interests regarding Islamist extremism, if only the Pakistanis understood their interests properly. No, in the U.S.-China case, not only are there shared interests in the abstract, there is a potent record of action demonstrating those shared interests.
Now, whenever I make this case — and I mean literally, Whenever. I. Make. This. Case. — someone will say, well, but people said the same thing in 1914, and look what happened then. Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion has to be the most cited, though never actually read, book in the Western canon.
A few thoughts here:
(1) Angell didn’t argue that war was impossible, just that it was futile and counter-productive. He was right. Now, this is cold comfort. You’d think people would learn from the past, but look at the response to the economic slump. Both in the United States and Europe, our policy response have been to mirror the failed policies of the early 1930s — austerity and hard money — with precisely the same consequences.
(2) Europe in 1914 was a different kettle of fish from the U.S.-Chinese relationship today. You had extensive security rivalries that promoted decades of shifting alliances and arms races, along with repeated military crises that required high-level summits to resolve. We may yet get to this point with China, but we’d have plenty of advanced warning. It took two decades of escalating tensions before World War I broke out.
(3) Another lesson of 1914 is that great power wars require total mobilization and lasts years. There is, in short, little point in planning for a China conflict now, since it won’t be won or lost with forces-in-being. Geography ensures that even under the worst case scenarios, there is no way for China to blitz the U.S., nor the reverse. In that sense, there is no point in thinking about first-strikes or pre-emption. Both countries have a margin of error in the security calculus that makes the situation less volatile than for countries sharing borders in a compressed European land area.
(4) But even if we accept the 1914 caveat, and we should, of course, keep it in mind, we need to remember is a caveat, and does not represent likelihood. While it is true that sometimes countries will go to war despite economic interdependence, it is also true that on the whole, economic interdependence reduces the likelihood of conflict. Countries just don’t usually go to war with their main trading partners. This is not definitive, but nothing in policy is. What were the odds that Libya would turn out well? That the bin Laden raid would turn out well? We often make policy decisions on the basis of very little certainty.
(5) There has also been an unmistakable, secular decline in the prevalence of great power war. Nuclear weapons almost certainly play a role in that. So does the spread of democracy. Norms have changed as well. But the reality is that we live in a world where major power war is just less common.
Take all of that together — shared interested, demonstrated by actual conduct; a relatively low level of security competition; geographic limitations on the ability of either side to win a war quickly; economic interdependence; and the secular decline in incidents of great power wars — and I would argue that this adds up to a very, very low probability of military conflict with China.
Indeed, I would argue that the probability is so low at this juncture that planning for it, even under the rubric of bolstering deterrence, is likely to be either ineffective or counter-productive. Our goal should be precisely to avoid interjecting security dynamics into the relationship. But flip side is also important, namely that in this case, preparing for war is unlikely to actually give us a better chance for ultimate victory. In great power conflicts, being prepared at the onset of hostilities is a rapidly waning asset quickly overwhelmed by factors of geography, alliances, and mobilization potential. At the beginning of World War II, the two nations best prepared for war were Germany and Japan. They lost. Why? Because geography and resilience of great powers prevented decisive knock-out blows, and the war was ultimately decided by mobilization potential.
Citing the outbreak of war in 1914 to justify military preparation vis-a-vis China is the ultimate example of cherrypicking history to make what is, in fact, a dubious case.
So, rightwingers are so prone to getting all worked up and made up shit, that it is tempting to dismiss all of their freakouts as just so much noise. But in this case, they have a point:
Al Armendariz, a mid-level official at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 2009, resigned this week after conservatives expressed outrage at a metaphor he invoked at a town hall meeting nearly two years ago.
Armendariz, who took leave from Southern Methodist University to join the administration, commented at a meeting back in 2010 that the EPA’s enforcement policy was to find “people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them.”
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean,” he said. “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law.”
There is no justification, no possible context, that makes it acceptable for a government official to talk this way about how he plans to deal with citizens. Forget the word “crucify” for a moment. Just read the substance. What he is saying is that as a matter of policy his office was looking to make an example out of someone. Not apply the regulations in a fair and balanced manner. No, to really screw someone over to scare or coerce everyone else into compliance. That is an abusive view of state power. It is on par with a prosecutor and judge sentencing someone just to send a message to other rather than applying the law.
Now, bring the Roman example back in. “They’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them.” This isn’t generally how the Romans behaved. And it is precisely because they usually did not behave like this that their empire had legs. The Mongols, yes. The Romans, generally no. Indeed, what the Romans sometimes did was make an example of people who rebelled or attacked Romans. But he’s not saying, “Look, our plan is to find the worst offenders, and really hold firm on asking for the strictest sanctions under existing guidelines.” Instead, he’s making a case for taking for finding potential people to make an example out of, whoever happens to be under foot.
My suspicion is that this is not actually how his office proceeded. That he was just doing a little macho posturing. But I don’t care. This is a man who clearly does not understand the proper way for a government official to relate to the citizenry.
This problem is rampant in law enforcement. Prosecutors coerce guilty pleas, they look to make an example out of prominent people to “send a message.” It is bullshit then, and it is just as much bullshit when some self-important EPA official does it.
Those of us who work in government need to always remember who we work for, the American citizen. They are our bosses and we should always strive to treat them with respect.
So, I’ve been reading Mary Habeck’s series of articles on the state of al Qaeda, and I’ve been struck by a number of things.
First, I simply don’t understand her definition of victory. Here is her conclusion about the state of AQ:
Based on these facts, any net assessment of al Qaeda would conclude that, despite its failure to carry out a mass-casualty attack on the U.S. since 9-11, the group is in far better condition on a global scale than at any time in its history. And if, as al Qaeda itself has always argued, attacking the U.S. was just one means toward the greater ends of overthrowing Muslim rulers, imposing their version of sharia, and controlling territory, then they have made real progress toward achieving their strategic goals. This judgment is not just an esoteric statement about theory, but also has important policy implications: If al Qaeda is indeed spreading itself across broad swathes of territory, can the U.S. continue to depend solely on regional partners and a counter-terrorism strategy to stop the group?
Now, I don’t really want to argue all the elements here. I could easily disagree with a number of these statement, but I won’t because as an empirical matter (which I’ll discuss later) a lot of questions about how much AQ is really spreading remain ambiguous. No, what I want to focus on here is the notion that the “War on Terror” is about denying AQ its goals rather than achieving goals of our own.
The problem with Habeck’s piece is that first sentence, which deftly acknowledges and yet minimizes the great accomplishment of the past decade. AQ seems no longer to be in a position to mount large-scale, mass-casualty attacks of the type the redefined the terrorist threat from 1998 to 2001. But this was precisely what our goal was on September 12, 2001. The AUMF specifically authorizes forces, “…in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States…” It does not authorize an open-ended commitment to deny AQ the ability to achieve any and all of its goals for eternity.
But it isn’t just the AUMF. In his book, for instance, Doug Feith talks about the goal of the U.S. response to 9/11: “We agreed that it was neither to secure criminal justice for the perpetrators nor to retaliate, but to prevent another attack.” I could give a dozen other examples. But the reality is that the goal of preventing another attack has always been central to our approach to AQ.
And indeed, this is how it should be. Habeck’s approach is fundamentally astrategic. She begins with the assessment that AQ is our enemy, and then in some sort of Manichean twist, assumes that our interests are simply the inverse of theirs. So, no matter how well we achieve our own goals — such as preventing attacks and reducing the capacity and willingness of AQ to attack us — we still fail if AQ is able to achieve any of its goals.
The absurdity of this viewpoint can be seen in her handwringing over how AQ’s goal of “overthrowing Muslim rulers” has come true. Yes, AQ wanted to overthrow what it calls “apostate” regimes, such as the authoritarian regime in Egypt. But certainly just because AQ wants it doesn’t mean we should oppose it, does it? Why must we put ourselves on the side of corrupt authoritarians just to deny AQ its goals? I mean, AQ is an evil organization, killing civilians and so on, but that does not mean that our interests are always at odds across the entire spectrum of human interaction.
More concretely, reading the Arab Spring as a victory for AQ (and inherently a defeat for us) is more than a little perverse. I mean, the other thing we’ve been trying to do over the past decade — in addition to degrading AQ’s terror capabilities — is promote reform in the Arab world precisely as a way to create a middle ground. Now, this may not work, and I would certainly not claim the Arab Awakening is wholly (or even largely) a consequence of American policy. But the point is, we need to assess developments in terms of our interests, not just in opposition to AQ’s interests.
Again, strategy is about achieving your goals, not inherently about denying your adversary his. The world is not zero-sum and bilateral.
But let’s go beyond the realm of strategic theory, and consider specifically the AQ goal of controlling territory and imposing its version of Sharia law as a prelude to the establishment of a global caliphate. This is indeed AQ’s goal. And indeed, preventing this goal is a U.S. interest. But look, we also have an interest in preventing asteroid strikes. And I would argue that the possibility of an asteroid strike is markedly higher than that of AQ serving in the vanguard of the establishment of a new global caliphate. Yes, this is AQ’s aspiration. But it is fantasyland stuff. We simply don’t have to take it seriously as a threat, and as a consequence, we don’t need to get overly worried about what are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty minor steps in that direction.
I don’t like Boko Haram or al Shabaab any more than Habeck does, but come on. You’re going to claim AQ has won some great success by dint of its ability to spread its influence to northern Nigeria and southern Somalia? And even there is the issue is further muted, because neither one of these groups is classic AQ-style organization. They are both clearly focused on local grievances, and recall it was precisely this focus on local grievances that Osama bin Laden founded AQ to combat. The fact that most AQ “affiliates” are now focused on local issues, and not planning large, complex spectacular attacks on the West is itself a fundamental refutation of the notion that AQ is winning. Quite to the contrary, AQ seems to have transformed itself back into its pre-Osama orientation, that is, a loose-knit web of locally-focused radical Islamist movements.
This is the second problem with Habeck’s focus on denying AQ its goals rather than focusing on our own. If AQ shifts its agenda, our response must shift with it. But that doesn’t make sense either. Why is it in the U.S. interest to oppose Boko Haram? What difference does it make to us? Now, as a practical matter, there may be some good answers to that question. But the reason we should be concerned about Boko Haram is not just that it has tied to AQ. It certainly can’t be in the U.S. interest to oppose Islamist movements anywhere and everywhere just because they enunciate support for AQ, particularly if AQ central under Zawahiri becomes more focused on local grievances and less on attacking the West.
Think about it, we’ve arguably reached a point where AQ lacks the capacity to attack us and has given up its strategic focus on attacking the “far enemy” in favor of focusing on local grievances. That sounds a lot like victory to me in terms of achieving our interests.
That said, and here is the other thing that jumps out at me about Habeck’s essays…. There is just almost no empirical evidence. We’ve been at the “war on terror” thing for over a decade, and our assessments about success and failure and based on a handful of public statements, scraps of recovered documents, and lots and lots and lots of guesswork. What we don’t know about the state of AQ dwarfs what we do know. I find that depressing.
But given this relative paucity of definitive information, it behooves us to at least define the problem clearly. And the issue, as always, is how to best achieve our interests, not simply the denial of those of our adversaries.
Over at Balloon-Juice, Dennis G writes:
Race is the trump card of Romney, Rove and the GOP. White folks of a certain age in America grew up in a culture of institutionalized racism. Certain stereotypes, fears, anxieties, and even haterds were taught and learned to the point where these notions of race became the “normal facts” of everyday life in White America. This changed with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (which may be why the Right hates that decade so much). Still, if the GOP can get enough of these White folks of a certain age to vote their learned prejudices, then they just might win. This appeal to race was strong enough to mobilize the Tea party in 2010 and now they hope that this white lightning will strike again.
There is a lot of truth there, but I do want to suggest another dynamic as well. I am not sure that what motivates a lot of GOP is some sort of longing for the institutionalized racism of the 1950s. After all, even though their electorate skews old, the 1950s is now a long, long time ago. The Civil Rights Act was is coming up on its 50th anniversary in a couple of years.
No, the Republican party is not living in the 1950s. But it is still living in the 1970s and 1980s, and not just in terms of race relations. For a lot of Republicans, Jimmy Carter is still in the White House. Our international problems are a function of weakness. Inflation is a terrifying concern. And so on.
But the 1970s were not all about inflation and the Sandinista threat to Brownsville, it was also about crime. A lot of left-leaning folks like to make fun of how Republicans seem convinced that crime is still increasing, but focusing on the misperception essentially fails to acknowledge how searing an experience was the exploding crime rate in the 60s, 70s, and early 1980s.
You can talk about “white flight” all you want. But the truth is that the core of many American cities were gutted in this period not because of some sort of ideologically-motivated racism, but rather because “urban decay” — particularly crime — was making cities unlivable.
The fact that the rate for many major crimes in places like New York have dropped 60-80 is a reminder of how bad things were. In New York, auto theft is down 94%. Think about that for a moment. There was a time when car theft was 20x more prevalent. Indeed, having lived in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, I can assure you this fear was not just abstract or localized. Car theft was rampant. And if you were lucky enough not to have your car stolen, your car stereo was also a common target. Indeed, this was so common that many people ended up buying removable car stereos and carrying them around when they left their cars. I imagine this concept is essentially unthinkable to 20-somethings out there. But look, that was the experience of not just generiatric GOP voters, but of people like me — 40-somethings.
Then came the crack epidemic, which led to a further explosion of murder rates.
And look, the fact of the matter is that a lot of this crime was indeed centered in the African-American community. “Black Crime” was not just a racist construct. It was a real problem. Indeed, even today crime rates in the African-American community are much higher than among whites. As always, there are biases in the data. If you adjust for income, urban vs. rural, and so on, a lot of that variation disappears. But the issue back in the day was not just comparative crime statistics. It was that crime was out of control. It was choking our cities to death. It was omnipresent and affected how people lived on a daily basis. It was a real problem, and would have been so regardless of the racial composition of the criminal class. That said, it didn’t help that crime was disproportionally prevalent in the African-American community.
Another problem was that American liberals, justifiable proud and protective about the Civil Rights movements, went into a sort of denial about both rising crime and the racial component. I have a liberal family member who was mugged. When asked by the police to describe her assailant, she refused to answer a question about his race. I still don’t quite understand that. And anecdotes do not make data, but if you read discussions of crime from the 1970s and 1980s, there is a lot of denial and defenseness in the discussion. Instead of a frank acknowledgement of the problem and a discussion of potential solutions, there was a lot of dancing around.
Indeed, the roots of the modern conservative movement — and its tendency to buy into weird conspiracy theories — was indeed borne not just for a longing for an idealized 1950s, but from a revulsion at various trends and developments in the 1970s and 1980s, trends and developments that liberals for years sought deny, ignore, or normalize. And it wasn’t just crime, by the way. Liberals were in denial about things like the Soviet Union, like the impact of AFDC on family structure, like union corruption, and so on.
Now, the weird thing is that a lot of those dynamics went away. Crime diminished dramatically. The USSR went away. Welfare reform, though it may be going too far in various places, did at least remove the most perverse negative incentives from the system. Declining union membership has marginalized whatever negative impact union rent seeking had on the economy. And yet, conservatives still live in a world where crime is rampant, government programs are expanding and breeding dependency and disfunction, American will is questioned abroad, and so on. It is a weird pathology.
But while a lot of this stuff is just weird, I think we need to be fair in acknowledging the special and terrible impact of crime on late-20th century American politics. The crime explosion was THE central fact of American public life in the 1970s and 1980s. And it was real. And the racial component was also real. It was a searing experience and it explains a lot of current GOP attitudes as much, or more, than some sort of longing for a golden age of white supremeacy.
So this is just a reminder of why I am a crappy blogger. Everyone has already commented on Mona Eltahawy’s compelling read in Foreign Policy, “Why Do They Hate Us?” — about the status of women in the Arab world. And here I am, when everyone has already moved on, writing a post about yesterday’s news. But be that as it may. The lede is straight-forward:
Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women.
But if the argument is straight-forward, the tone is uncompromising and brutal. It is an extended screed, and it is easy to see why it has set so many readers on edge. Many Arabs are already quite concerned about how their part of the world is viewed in the West, and Elthawy’s essays comes uncomfortably close to echoing bigoted attacks on Islam generally. She even, broaches the issue of Mohammed’s child bride and pedophilia.
I can see where her critics are coming from on this score. I imagine her defense would be that she is not writing about the Arab world holistically, but is rather focusing on the status of women, and indeed, there, any fair assessment is likely to look quite negative — at least from a Western perspective. But that is the interesting thing, isn’t it? She’s not some sort of right-wing Islamophobe. And she’s not even a radical feminist of European descent. She is, after all, talking of her own ethnicity. I am not sure this should matter. Do we really want to argue that only people of the proper ethnicity are allowed to speak out about abuses in their own communities? If Eltahawy says something that others would consider racist, must she get more latitude either because of her ethnicity, or even more touchy, because she’s a sexual assault survivor at the hands of Egyptian authorities? I don’t know. Hard issue.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the substance of the piece. And while it lacks any clear policy prescriptions, it seems to be a call for some sort of action. This does not need to mean military action, much less regime change imposed from outside. Imposing our values by force is not the sole possible response. What I think is more central is the idea that the issue of the status of women could/should be more central in our foreign policy toward the region.
[As an aside, Eltahawy is writing about the Arab world, but I can't help but think some of the arguments are also applicable to the broader Muslim world -- Somalia, Iran, and Afghanistan at least.]
In a sense, this echoes the human rights debate from the Cold War. The debate was always more complex than the notion of a dichotomous split because “realists” and “idealists.” The “idealist” argument was always that a human right focus, done right, would also serve core national security interests. And indeed, Reagan’s foreign policy as much as anything else reflects an attempt to leverage human right into strategic benefits. This has always been controversial. Many human rights activists bridle at this sort of utilitarian approach, seeing it, essentially as corrupting a noble instinct for human betterment into a crude tool of statecraft.
The challenge of making women’s right more central is multifold.
First, as many critics of the piece have noted, it is not as if women in the region have no agency. Now, I am not sure I wholly buy this particular line of argumentation. Voting and other political involvement often requires making tradeoffs and choices. I think it is true that women in the Arab world have not acted in a way that would demonstrate that their concern over women’s right is paramount — rejection of authoritarianism, corruption, and concern over economic stagnation may trump. But it isn’t clear that women in the region would not prefer, all else equal, a dramatic reshaping of gender relations. Furthermore, look, I hate to essentially pathologize millions of people, but there is a battered spouse dynamic going on here, both literally and figuratively. The idea of genuine gender equality is so far removed from the lives of Arab women that the idea of making it a core political demand is virtually unthinkable, or more accurately, too easy to dismiss as fuzzy headed dreaming. Recall, that early opposition to slavery was often framed in term of improving the condition of slaves rather than abolition. The kind of society Eltahawy describes is likely to generate calls for limited reform first, both as a practical matter and as a reflection of a certain failure of imagination.
Second, it is not clear how enhancing the importance of women’s right in our dealings with the region cuts in relation to our other strategic interests. This is not a debate about ends, but about strategy. I think the empirical literature suggests we’d be better off if the Arab/Muslim world treated its women better. It would be better for economic development, for the development of civil society, for the development of democratic institutions, and so on. And while we may disagree about the absolute power of democracy to prevent conflict, there is no question that, on the whole, we tend to have better, more stable, more productive relations with well-established democracies. But the question is, how to do you get there? How hard do you push? What sort of linkages — both positive and negative — do you put on the table?
From my perspective, I have few objections to increasing the centrality of women’s issues, at least rhetorically and diplomatically. Why? Because in the final analysis I think that whatever tensions this causes are relatively inconsequential. But I don’t say this because I doubt that Arab regimes would respond with hostility to our efforts to link women’s right to other issues, but rather because my view generally is that we should have dramatically reduced ties to the region. Will the Saudis get pissed if we start hammering away on women’s right? Yes, absolutely. But I really don’t much care because I see our engagement with Saudi Arabia was largely a strategic burden rather than a benefit. We can, in short, afford a more robust stance.
But saying we can afford such a stance is not the same as saying such an approach would be productive. It may not noticeably hurt U.S. interests, but it is not clear how it might help, not is it clear that it would affect conditions for women on the ground.
Third, it is not wholly clear to me that stressing women’s rights rhetorically is enough. If you buy into the argument — and I acknowledge, Eltahawy has critics, though most seem focused on issues of implied policy recommendation or tone/presentation matters — then shouldn’t we be doing more? Ultimately, the treatment of women in much of the Arab/Muslim world is, indeed, so appalling by Western standards that we come up against a Responsibility to Protect issue. Having failed to accord women minimal human rights, have some of these regimes lost their right to govern?
I’ve grappled with this issue in the case of Afghanistan, where I noted, that the threat to women posed by the Taliban was the “strongest case” for the Afghan War. I fear that as forward leaning as making a case of a women’s rights foreign policy focus may seem now, in a generation or two, we’re more likely to be condemned for our inaction. Some of what we see is just so incredibly appalling — direct attacks on women’s literacy, systematic sexual abuse, child marriage (aka child rape), and so on.
While I share the instinct for self-determination and anti-interventionism, I am not willing to place myself in denial about the consequences of this stance. And hence, I find myself torn. But this is a useful debate to have. I just hope we continue to focus on the issue itself rather than being dragged down a rabbit hole of debating graphic design or the logic of political correctness.
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