by Eric Martin
I apologize to Jim Henley in advance for excerpting so much of this post, but it is simply too good to apply the pruning shears liberally enough to bring my use to within acceptable norms of blog excerpting. To provide some context, Henley is riffing off Gene Callahan's response to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that warns of the potential negative consequences of lifting the travel ban to Cuba.
Across a whole range of problems there�s a class of responses I�ll dub the �low road� and another class I�ll call the �high road.� Examples of the former include war, torture, sanctions and blockades, imprisonment, aversive conditioning of all types (spanking; �dominance�-based animal training). Examples of the latter include diplomacy, rapport-building, civil disobedience, the free exchange of goods and ideas, decriminalization and rehabilitation, positive conditioning (of humans and animals).
I don�t presently care to argue that there is never any �need� to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases � torture � I have a much easier time saying �Never go there.� But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.
Nine years into the invasion of Afghanistan we have to agree that pulling out after a decade is just too soon. Back in 2001, the Taliban�s failure to turn over Osama bin Laden within a couple of weeks showed the hopelessness of diplomacy. When torture �works� at all it takes weeks and months, just like more classic rapport-building methods of interrogation. And it involves more false positives. Plus, oh I forgot to mention, it is deeply evil. But even though classic interrogation methods produce statistically better results, we live in fear that there may be some time somewhere that torture might get an answer that classic interrogation missed, so of course we must continually torture for that possible moment�s sake. As Gene points out, O�Grady judges the European and Canadian liberation of travel to Cuba a failure because Cuba has not become a neoliberal paradise in the decade since, while leaving aside the fact that Cuba hasn�t become a neoliberal paradise after 50 years of American cold-war against the country.
Compare also the standard neocon �U SUCK LOL� directed against nonviolent resistance � Hitler would totally have just killed Gandhi hahaha! We accept that successful violent resistance might take years or decades to achieve victory � Mao, Castro � and that guerrilla movements might suffer casualties to ranks and leaders but keep on. But we can�t imagine that nonviolent resistances might achieve the same. The war on drugs will surely work at some point � we�ve only been at it for 90-odd years, trillions of dollars and countless deaths and humiliations. But should anyone anywhere decriminalize anything, a single death or inconvenience in the first week would condemn the entire effort. It takes time to get an animal to do what you want with positive reinforcement. It takes time to get an animal to do what you want with negative reinforcement. But taking the former time is simpering weakness while taking the latter is manly resolve.
This analysis is so right in so many ways it's hard to know where to begin listing the examples and exploring the ramifications.
With respect to the point made about the relative allotments of patience afforded to each category of approach, I recall countless arguments with Iraq war supporters about the alleged necessity of the invasion based on the fraying of the sanctions and inspections regime. What I found quite astonishing was that, almost uniformly, proponents of this line of reasoning argued that a massive military campaign designed to decapitate a regime and rebuild the entire political/economic structure of a nation, involving massive societal and cultural changes as imposed from the outside by a country with little cultural/linguistic/religious/historical affinity with the target nation, would somehow be easier than...convincing the relevant UN member nations to reinforce a weapons inspection regime/smarten sanctions. The former: cakewalk. The latter: Pipe dreams.
Riiight.
Another obvious quarry to probe (or, rather, further the excavation begun by Henley) is how this dynamic dominates our counterterrorism approach. While we have been occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for almost a decade in each instance, there has been a massive spike in terrorist attacks against Western and US interests around the globe (including and especially within Iraq and Afghanistan themselves), but few blame these results on the attendant military actions, or at least claim that more time is needed for the respective occupations to settle the situation down.
However, if we had withdrawn from either locale at some earlier date (say, a mere five years into each conflict), even if the overall number of attacks went down, is there any doubt that there would be a rush to blame our "retreat" as the cause for any subsequent attacks (especially if one occurred in the US itself) - and that these attacks would be seen as incontrovertible evidence of the failure of anything but the perpetual war approach?
The familiar "appeasement" meme would proliferate despite the simple and obvious rebuttal that the occupations themselves have provided impetus for terrorist attacks - notably, the Times Square Bomber was motivated by a desire for vengeance for US missile strikes in Pakistan, and Maj. Nidal Hasan was motivated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you think I'm being unduly cynical, consider that the mere mention of withdrawal from either theater even now (after almost a decade in each) is seen as evidence of a lack of resolve, will embolden the "terrorists" (even setting forth an aspirational contingent timeline gives them succor!) and will, like the ahistorical reading of the Vietnam denouement, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Such rhetoric resonates politically, and the knowledge of its political efficacy is, at the very least, in the back of the minds of many policymakers that might favor a more expedited withdrawal based on a more simple cost-benefit analysis. Bill Clinton was on to something when he noted that "when people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right."
In that sense, from my tiny little corner of the blogosphere, I've been trying to emphasize that this perception of "strength" itself is misguided, and that the misapprehension of what is "strong" lies behind much of the preference for, and indulgence of, the "low road" to use Henley's terminology. From a post in 2004:
In a recent post, I briefly discussed the phenomenon that Americans tend to view violence as a manifestation of strength. This of course is almost the opposite of what is true - violence is the act of a desperate, threatened and frightened being, believing that no other recourse exists. It is also one of the least effective means of achieving the desired outcome. Violence begets violence, a cycle of revenge, and a poisonous atmosphere not conducive to the resolution of conflicts. As an example, compare the approaches of leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the recently infirmed Yasser Arafat. It is hard to argue with the comparative results.
In foreign policy terms, this concept is translated into the belief that being "strong" on issues of national security means possessing a hawkish willingness to use the military over "weaker" diplomatic options. Again, this interpretation is misguided and exclusionary of the vast amount of evidence detailing the enormous successes of diplomacy. Despite all the public bluster and macho image, the "strongest" thing that Reagan ever did was agree to engage Mikhail Gorbachev in a paradigm shifting series of summits and normalization of relations that, eventually, culminated in the end of the Cold War.
A policy's "strength" should be measured by its ability to deliver the desired results at the least cost, regardless of how many things explode in the process, and what the eventual body count is. And a leader is strong, or not, based on their support for such wise and effective policies, not, again, on their willingness to unleash the dogs of war on every passer by.
Ironically, this overwhelming tendency to identify "strength" with violent means - and with those most willing to employ such means in the broadest array of scenarios, with the lowest threshold of provocation - is prevalent amongst people that ostensibly revere Jesus Christ, whose message about what true strength and power are seems to be in direct contradiction to the operative presumptions.
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