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Chronicles of hubris

Thursday, September 11, 2008

SO THE MEDIA beat up a bit on Sarah Palin, and the lip-sticked pit-bull (to use her own striking terms) snarled effectively at the media in return ... and now the stage is thus set for the general election campaign itself.

In the process, rather remarkably, the battleground for American hearts and minds has shifted significantly. Purely domestic issues, and especially those thrown up by America's oddly introverted culture wars, are to the fore once again, grabbing most of the headlines. They've supplanted the broader issues - like America's place in the world - which so dominated debate when both parties were just beginning their candidate-selection nearly two years ago.

 

Notable among those broader issues was ... let's not forget  ... will Americans continue to fight and die overseas for what their government decided is a national cause?

 

I happen to believe, in my dogged way, that it is still a fundamental issue.  And it's interesting to see that those most basic of all tools for serious public discourse -- books, yes, old-fashioned books -- are now tackling it assiduously. A flurry of determined publishing output was aimed, thankfully enough, at this last stretch of the electoral season.

 

If you feel like some serious reading on this grimly resonant seventh anniversary, there are a great many new volumes to choose from, reflecting on where the Bush Administration's reaction to 9/11/2001 has taken us, and what's to be done about it now.

 

From Harper there's Ron Suskind's THE WAY OF THE WORLD about the misuse, and worse, of US intelligence-work ... from Viking there's Ahmed Rashid's DESCENT INTO CHAOS: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia ... from Doubleday there's Jane Mayer's THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals ... and from Random House there's Kenneth Pollack's A PATH OUT OF THE DESERT: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East.

 

But in a crowded and impressive field, my greatest admiration goes unquestionably to Andrew Bacevich (pictured above) for his THE LIMITS OF POWER: The End of American Exceptionalism from the Metropolitan Books imprint of Henry Holt & Company.

 

It's part of an ambitious program of linked publications called The American Empire Project, brought together by two thoroughly experienced editors who are historians and authors themselves - Tom Engelhardt, previously of Pantheon and Steve Fraser from Basic Books. I call it ambitious, but these editors themselves say it's "an immodest challenge to the fateful exercise of empire-building ... suggesting alternate ways of thinking about, confronting, and acting in a new American century." 

 

Immodest or not, it's a timely as well as a forceful challenge.

    

  

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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ANDREW BACEVICH HIMSELF, IN HIS CRISPLY delivered argument (and short, too, at just 182 pages, plus a careful index) incisively portrays America's "prerogative, self-assigned ... to establish and enforce the norms governing the post-Cold War international order". And he goes on to demonstrate how this hubris was escalated after 9/11 into an embrace of warfare that was both misbegotten and essentially unsustainable.

 

The author is widely admired as a conservative historian - in fact he's a former US Army colonel who now teaches at Boston University. He's to be taken seriously when he asks acutely "what is freedom today? What is its content?"  while he's considering that shibboleth so cynically invoked by our current leaders in promoting their "global war on terror". And he swiftly segues into highlighting the reality that our freedom (our freedom "to want more", as he calls it) has made us the world's biggest debtor nation. Indeed, he points out:

 

"At precisely the moment when the the ability to wield power - specially military power - has become the sine qua non for preserving American freedom, our reserves of power are being depleted."

 

Employing richly relevant references to mid-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (and obviously sharing Neiburh's distaste for Americans' "most grievous temptations to self-adulation") Bacevich mounts a compelling case for the US to now change its behavior, and in future adopt some true and confident humility among the nations of the world. Such a transformation could be based on genuine American strengths, and on a recognition of our inescapable limitations.

 

This soldier-scholar's strong tone of regret and frequent flashes of anger about his country's reckless leaders made an even greater impact on me when I turned back to his spare Dedication page:

 

      To the memory of my beloved son

      ANDREW JOHN BACEVICH

      First Lieutenant, US Army

      July 8, 1979 - May 13, 2007 

 

The author doesn't tell us, but the younger Bacevich was killed during combat patrol in Balad, Iraq, by an improvised explosive device.

  

   

 

THIS NEXT ALERT ABOUT AN OVERSEAS ISSUE MIGHT SEEM like a contradictory appeal for American interventionism. I assure you it's not; instead I pass on from my inbox a wrenching "backgrounder" from the IRIN news service (the United Nations' cumbersomely named Integrated Regional Information Networks) in hope that some multinational attention, and some specifically regional African action, may be brought to bear on the ever-worsening disaster that is Zimbabwe.

 

Even among our dedicated international coverage venues, journalism is letting down that benighted country again. In the words of a noted foreign correspondent (who on reflection didn't want his name associated with this description) media observers have lost their focus on the political efforts at a Zimbabwean settlement "because they're not going anywhere".

 

For sure, there's little (conventional) story-telling to be elicited from the protracted, grinding effort pursued by South Africa's Thabo Mbeki to get the dictator Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to agree on power-sharing; but meanwhile - as IRIN explains - the humanitarian catastrophe is simply getting horribly worse, if that were imaginable.

 

Quoting United Nations staff sources on the ground, the agency dispatch tells of 70 year-old Janet Chagwiza from Nharira, a small village in the Mashonaland East area. Two of her grandchildren, like many young citizens of this once abundant country now suffering desperate food shortages, resorted to foraging for wild fruit.

 

But the fruit can cause bad stomach trouble, and it made these two youngsters severely ill. No medical help could be found, because doctors were on a nationwide strike, and the children died. The village adults were all completely depleted of energy, said Mrs Chagwiza, and could not dig proper graves, so the children's bodies were laid in a single, shared pit.

 

It's of course one of those countless tiny but telling microcosms, full of detail that's probably uncheckable for most journalists who might work on the story.

 

Looking more widely, the UN's humanitarian workers are predicting 5 million Zimbabweans will be starving by the end of this year. In the midst of his political manipulations Mugabe banned foreign aid groups from doing their work. That ban has supposedly been lifted for almost two weeks now, but constraints on the ground still apply (not least the need for food aid workers to report to police) and there's no sign of any real improvement.

 

We'll be due now, I fully expect, for bulletins in some of the West's heavier-weight media, about the top-level negotiations as they struggle toward an outcome. But stories like Mrs Chagwiza's?   I doubt we'll see so much.  

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