by Alex Evans | Aug 26, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Middle East and North Africa
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Back when the US chaired the 2004 Sea Island G8, George Bush’s flagship proposal centred on the idea of a Greater Middle East Initiative, or GMEI (by way of a reminder, here’s what Brookings had to say about it then). At the time, there was heavy criticism – not only of of the GMEI’s optimistic hopes about democratisation, but also its dubious geographical assumptions: could Iran and Afghanistan really be lumped together with all the Arab countries?
But here’s the thing. If the idea of a Greater Middle East was clumsy, there’s still a case for coming up with some new geographical categories to reflect changed political realities in the region. In particular, it’s surprising that we still have no one category that draws together Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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by Alex Evans | Aug 26, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
The New York Times this morning has a leaked copy of a UN report due out on Monday, with news of another record opium crop in Afghanistan – “led by a staggering 45 per cent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand”. But, the NYT goes on:
Loren Stoddard [the head of the US Agency of International Development’s agriculture program in Afghanistan], who helped Wal-Mart move into Central America in his previous posting, predicted that poppy production had become so prolific that the opium market was flooded and prices were starting to drop. “It seems likely they’ll have a rough year this year,” he said, referring to the poppy farmers. “Labor prices are up and poppy prices are down. I think they’re going to be looking for new things.”
by Alex Evans | Aug 24, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Another week, another comparison between the US and the last days of Rome. This week, the man full of woe about military overstretch and fiscal implosion is David Walker – the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, no less – who writes in the FT that:
America’s fiscal, healthcare, education, energy, environment, immigration and Iraq policies are in need of review and revision. Timely action is needed because Washington’s historical crisis-management approach to dealing with hard public policy choices is no longer prudent.
Rather than discussing whether America today is or isn’t like Rome’s last days in the late fourth century CE, I’ll just note how successfully the “US heading into a decline-and-fall scenario” meme continues to propagate itself (c.f. last week’s post about Thomas Homer-Dixon‘s latest book), not least among Americans themselves – and make two additional observations.
One is that the “decline and fall” meme of popular imagination – riots, starvation, conquest, a thousand years in the Dark Ages – rests on an incomplete, and rather Atlanticist, view of Rome. After all, there is the small matter of the eastern empire, i.e. Byzantium, as it became. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome runs for a full 1,045 years beyond Alaric’s conquest of Italy in 408CE, all the way to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Byzantium’s rise after the split of the Roman Empire provides a precise illustration of Homer-Dixon’s central point: if breakdown can lead to collapse, it can also be a springboard for transformation and renewal. This is a useful and important counter-meme to the riots / starvation / Dark Age meme – and one which deserves to be propagated more often.
The other observation is simply: we could do with some more constructive historical analogies than the ones we have today. Other than the decline-and-fall analogy, the other one most discussed today is Vietnam; another relentlessly gloomy reference point in the popular imagination. (Update: I have just remembered the subject of my last post – whether Iraq is at a ‘Weimar moment’. So I include myself in this criticism!)
Maybe we could do with some more hopeful historical analogies; so here are three starters for ten. Other suggestions welcome.
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by Alex Evans | Aug 23, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
Writing in the Washington Post today, George Will poses a question that I’ve been wondering about lately: if political pressure on the Bush Administration forces a substantial withdrawal of troops sooner rather than later, just as conservatives in the US begin to hope that the tide is turning, what the hell will that do to any prospects for bipartisanship any time in, oh, the next couple of decades? As Will observes:
Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable. After the First World War, politics in Germany’s new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power.
The Weimar Republic was fragile; America’s domestic tranquility is not. Still, remember the bitterness stirred by the accusatory question “Who lost China?” and corrosive suspicions that the fruits of victory in Europe had been squandered by Americans of bad character or bad motives at Yalta. So, consider this: When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.
by Alex Evans | Aug 23, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
I’m reading David Bohm in spare moments this week. Bohm was a US-born quantum physicist who worked with Einstein and died in 1992. In his later career, he became fascinated by the links between science, philosophy and cognition, including how they intersect in the real world of global issues. Here’s a sample:
…So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction. … What is the source of all this trouble? I’m saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That’s part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It’s like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, it’s far over 20%.
…the general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that it’s not doing anything – that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don’t decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.
Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call ‘sustained incoherence’.
Genius.
