The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/
“An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.”
– Mark Twain, “Glances at History” (1906)
Talking Points: Four years on….
Wit and Wisdom: A new job for the sacked U.S. attorneys
From the Blogs: “The Internet and Politics”
Check It Out: The wisdom of Murray Edelman
Featured Article: “A History of Violence”
Happenings: TV Interview; new CI Director; new CI Fellow; car donations
Endorsements: L. Hunter Lovins
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor
TALKING POINTS
Four years ago, in April 2003, when the initial phase of combat operations in Iraq had just concluded, the Uncommon Denominator offered a few thoughts on that precarious moment. Now, when second-guessing about the war is rampant, and when memories about who said what when can get hazy, it might be helpful to look back briefly. Among our observations:
“Most Desirable Outcomes. A better life for the Iraqi people. A revitalized country that ably balances pluralism, self-determination, and civil liberties. Harmonious relationships with Iraq’s neighbors and the world community. A world in which the threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are diminished. An American administration and public that are humbled rather than inflated by our display of military power.” How tragically remote this now seems! Except for the humbling, and that’s for all the wrong reasons.
“Least Desirable Outcomes. The radicalization of large numbers of young Arab and Muslim men. Breakup of Iraq into warring fiefdoms. The acceleration of an informal diplomatic partnership among European and Asian nations designed to counterbalance American power. Proliferation of nuclear armaments. A successful effort by the American right to identify love of country with political conservatism, further stifling open debate.” Well, it’s no fun to say “We told you so,” but we told you so. In hindsight, two other unpleasant results deserve mention: the triumph of Iranian extremists and the horrendous weakening of America’s long-term economic strength.
“Most Dangerous Prospect for the Iraqi People. That their country becomes the next Lebanon. Look at what happened the Beirut, the erstwhile cultural jewel of the Middle East, which was destroyed by internal factionalism and external opportunism. The risk to Iraq is that the U.S. will not fully commit to its reconstruction, which will require great patience and attention, an openness to other viewpoints and to methods of compromise, and a willingness to spend billions of dollars on other people’s welfare. Unfortunately, our track record in such places as Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Haiti is not so good. But the stakes are higher this time.” Sigh. If anything, Iraq will be lucky to get back to where Beirut is now. Even if one supports withdrawing the troops as soon as possible, it’s hard to see how that can portend anything good for Iraqi civilians.
“Most Narrowly Averted Catastrophe. The burning of hundreds of oil wells. This time, Iraq only set nine oil wells on fire. Horrific environmental and human damage would have resulted if American and British forces had not moved quickly to secure the wells in southern Iraq. While the motives for securing these wells are multiple – a fear of environmental disaster, a desire to protect the oil for the Iraqi people, and an interest in lubricating the global and American oil markets – the military and political leadership nonetheless deserve credit for this part of the campaign.” Amidst all the bungling, this success got lost sight of, but we stand by the claim. If only we could do away with all oil now, the dark clouds of which shadow all that our civilization has managed to accomplish!
“Worst Catastrophe That Could Have Been Easily Averted. The looting of Iraq’s national museum. A violation of the historical identity and cultural patrimony of Iraq on a scale unseen since the burning of the library at Alexandria in 48 B.C. Whether or not it was an organized outside job (as many believe), the disappearance of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts into private hands or into the international black market for antiquities could have been prevented. The military and its civilian leaders could have foreseen it. After all, they managed quickly to secure the Oil Ministry. (Close runners-up: the looting of some of Iraq’s hospitals, and the destruction of a number of archaeological sites).” Hmmm. Not as compelling now, when the colossal failures of the Coaliltion Provisional Authority, such as stringent de-Baathification, or the refusal to properly oversee corporate contractors, are so well known.
“Most Heartening Moment. A variety of moments, really, when our young people in uniform showed themselves to be free of the racial hate that war can bring out in people. There were orders to be culturally sensitive, of course, but the Uncommon Denominator believes that the vast majority of soldiers have genuinely avoided the kind of racism that developed in Viet Nam or even in World War II. That’s a good sign for our country.” Unfortunately, four years of battle stress tends to bring out the worst in people, and judging from the evidence of YouTube and mainstream media reports, anti-Arabism among American troops is on the rise.
“Least Expected Good News for Latin Americans and Africans. The United States, which has always been the leading opponent of debt forgiveness, now wants a number of nations, including Russia, to forgive billions of dollars of Iraqi debt as a way of contributing to the reconstruction effort. Although the concept of “odious debts” and debt forgiveness is a complicated issue, with cogent arguments on different sides, it is still true that the people of such countries as Mozambique and the Dominican Republic would be well served by debt forgiveness. It is also true that the money owed by most of these Latin American and African countries is pennies next to the tens of billions owed by Iraq.” Even though the debt situation in Iraq remains grim, there are very positive signs on this front more generally. Specifically, the G8 in 2005 agreed on something called the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), which offers total debt forgiveness for “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries” that owe money to the World Bank, IMF and African Development Bank.
Where will we be in another four years? How much of the self-inflicted damage – military, economic, political, and moral – will the United States have been able to repair? What will our international standing look like, and our historical ability to act as a force for positive good in the world? Will we have come to truly understand that the greatest threat to our national security and way of life comes from global warming, not from the Middle East?
WIT AND WISDOM
Bush Offers U.S. Attorneys New Positions in Iraq
Attempt to Calm Furor over Mass Sacking
“In a bold attempt to end the controversy over the sacking of eight United States attorneys, President George W. Bush today offered the fired prosecutors what he called ‘exciting new positions’ in Iraq.
“With the President facing pressure from Congress over the firing of the attorneys and funding for the continuing war effort, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House that sending the “surge” of eight U.S. attorneys to Baghdad was a ‘win-win’ solution to both problems.
“‘Congress has been trying their darnedest to limit my ability to prosecute this war,’ Mr. Bush said. ‘Well, I can think of no one more qualified to prosecute this war than those eight prosecutors’.”
— from The Borowitz Report
FROM THE BLOGS
Visitors to the Indonesian island of Bali are often surprised to see farmers, herders, children – virtually anyone and everyone – making professional quality art. When asked about this, Balinese are often puzzled by the question. In their world, there are no professional artists, everyone has some talent, and everyone uses it for his or her own joy. While some artists are clearly better than others, and some artwork reaches a "professional level" in a commercial sense, everyone has access and everyone creates the art that inspires them. Art has not been "professionalized" in Bali as in the West – it is still democratic. Like art, politics and media have also been professionalized in the West – made undemocratic through the exclusion of ordinary citizens.
Although our nation was founded on the concept of citizen lawmakers and town meetings in which everyone had a voice, politics in the U.S. has evolved into a highly professionalized activity in which citizens are expected to contribute money and volunteer in campaigns under the direction of the pros, and then go away until the next election. The media have also been professionalized beyond the days of the citizen broadsheet of Ben Franklin and pamphlets of Tom Paine. Political information has become the province of professional journalists, pollsters and commentators, who themselves have become the property of giant media corporations. Citizens are expected to watch, listen to and read what they are given and not ask questions reporters have not thought of (or been brave enough to ask).
The Internet is changing this. The internet holds the promise of re-democratizing American politics and media, enabling citizens to recapture the peoples' democracy envisioned by the nation's founders. It promises a democratic process in which all citizens who want to can apply their particular talents to the aspects of politics and media that they are attracted to. As in Balinese art, some will be better and more effective than others, but all will have access.”
Read the rest of Patrick O’Heffernan’s “The Internet and Politics: Re-Democratizing America” on the Commonweal Institute blog at: www.commonwealinstitute.org/CIBlog/2007/03/the_internet_and_politics_rede_1.html#more
CHECK IT OUT
Some truths bear much repetition. One of the most important is that successful democracy requires a well-informed public. Knowledge enables choice; ignorance invites manipulation. Truth nourishes freedom; spectacle diminishes it. An electorate mindful of the ways of power can better resist its abuse; a public unaware of the problems it faces will find it harder to achieve real self-determination.
Fortunately for democracy, there’s Murray Edelman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconisn. Unfortunately, there’s all the stuff he writes about.
In his most recent work, The Politics of Misinformation (Cambridge, 2001), Edelman shows how the various institutions of society – from the political parties to the scientific establishment to the law – create misleading images of social progress and rational democracy which the public is all too ready to believe. These images, he argues, work to reassure people that everything is moving forward just fine while dissembling the superficial nature of most “progress,” limiting understanding of the systemic problems of the country, and thereby weakening the democratic process.
Another troubling read is Edelman’s earlier work, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago, 1988). Here, he focuses on the means by which the language and symbols of politics are employed to create a mass-consumption spectacle that distracts attention from the real issues and thus reinforces the ideological and economic status quo. In this account, the political process obscures its own workings behind a screen of entertaining conflict and “interpretation,” ably assisted by compliant media and a spectacle-hungry public.
Even if this strikes you as common sense, Edelman shows how it all works, in detail, in depth, and with theoretical sophistication. His writing is academic, and his conclusions are not exactly heartening, but both books are high-octane, high-nutrient. Check ‘em out.
FEATURED ARTICLE
The following is an excerpt from Steven Pinker’s “A History of Violence” which appears in the March, 2007, issue of The New Republic.
“In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
“Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
“At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.”
Read the whole article at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html.
HAPPENINGS
New CI Board Member – The Commonweal Institute is proud to welcome Judith Schwartz Ms. Schwartz is founder and principal of To the Point, a marketing consulting firm specializing in compelling video narratives, audience-centric content development and information architectures, and integrated multimedia campaigns. Her clients over the past two decades have included leading high tech and consumer product companies such as Logitech, Apple, Sun, SGI, and Novell, as well as many startups and non-profit organizations. She designed groundbreaking web communities and interactive applications, leading multidisciplinary teams of expert specialists. In the 1980s, following a stint at Apple Computer, she was President of Polar Spring Corporation, a company that developed a patented water treatment technology based on freeze crystallization. In 2006, she published her first political novel, Doublethink: A Tale of Unintended Consequences, published by Raise the Bar Press, which explores the challenges and risks facing American society. Ms. Schwartz began her professional career in the museum field, working for such institutions as The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Broadcasting, the Akron Art Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received her B.F.A. from Cornell University. as a new member of the Board of Directors.
TV Interview – On March 15, 2007, CI President Katherine Forrest was interviewed by Michael Killen for the Killen Report, a San Francisco Bay Area television broadcast, on the subject “2008 Candidates Awareness of Status of the Election Process.” As Dr. Forrest summarized the appearance: “Presidential candidates (and their campaign staff) should be concerned not only about appealing to voters and getting out the vote, but also about making sure that the voters who would want to vote for their candidate are (a) able to vote and (b) will have their votes accurately counted. As of March, 2007, it looks like the 2008 presidential candidate squad is not on top of the situation.”
The interview will be shown on Bay Area community access TV throughout April, and can be viewed online at:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=michael+killen+katherine+A+Forrest&hl=en
New CI Fellow – The Commonweal Institute is proud to welcome Mary Ratcliff as a new Fellow. Ms. Ratcliff has over 30 years of experience in the software industry and is currently a senior software development manager for a geographically diverse team in a large software company. She is also a senior editor and writer at both The Left Coaster (http://www.theleftcoaster.com/) and Pacific Views (http://www.pacificviews.org/), and writes a monthly column for the e-zine, Nebraska Vox-Populi (http://www.voxpopuli-ne.com/). Her particular areas of interest include the environment, energy policy, human psychology and behavior, and leadership. Ms. Ratcliff has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University and a MS in Computer Science from Stanford. Ms. Ratcliff has been a mentor, presenter and organizer for programs encouraging minorities and girls to explore careers in math and science. See her commentary “Commonweal Institute and Building the Progressive Infrastructure,” posted on her personal blog, Pacific Views, at
http://www.pacificviews.org/weblog/archives/002515.html.
Car Donations! – DONATE YOUR CAR TO SUPPORT THE COMMONWEAL INSTITUTE. You can now donate your used car, running or not in most cases, to help support the work of the Commonweal Institute. Just call 877-537-5277, toll-free, to start the donation process. Trailers, RVs, boats, and airplanes can also be donated. Why donate? Because this is a great way to relieve yourself of an unwanted burden, get a nice tax deduction for your contribution, and support the progressive cause.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Developing effective messages that speak to specific constituencies remains one of the critical tasks facing all think tanks today. As the founder of two think tanks, I am well aware of the challenges that arise when you propose to combine activism with lofty ideas. What does it matter how good our ideas are, if we can't speak in ways that broad-based, diverse constituencies understand? Concepts like Natural Capitalism aren't easy to communicate. As Commonweal Institute develops ideas and implements new, creative strategies for communicating moderate and progressive concepts, we'll all benefit. You have my heartfelt, best wishes for rapid success!.” — L. Hunter Lovins, President, Natural Capitalism, Inc.
GET INVOLVED
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