blog

something is better than nothing

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:41:15 -0700

To paraphrase a friend of mine, you don’t have to solve the problem to make a difference. This simple piece of wisdom is reflected in yesterday’s report from UNICEF on infant mortality.

According to the UN-based organization that promotes child wellness and gender equality globally, 8.8 million children under the age of 5 die each year. Numbers like that have the strange effect of being both staggering and desensitizing. After all, with that many children dying each year, what can I, the consumer of the information, possibly do about it? According to UNICEF, the answer is quite a bit, actually.

While nearly nine million children under the age of 5 died in 2008 (93 percent in Asia and Africa), infant mortality rates have been steadily declining worldwide for the last 20 years. In fact, compared to 1990, 3.7 million children survived in 2008. That means that every day in 2008, 10,000 children who would have died 20 years ago lived instead. Stop reading for a moment and consider that fact. That is a lot of children who are alive instead of dead every single day.

Still, 8.8 million children is a daunting number, especially given the fact that you are only one person. It is certainly true that you cannot save 8.8 million children. The point, however, is that you don’t need to save 8.8 million children to fundamentally change the world. Most child mortality isn’t the result of wars that you have no power to stop. In fact, the number one killer of children under the age of 5 in Africa is malaria. Do you have $20? How much did you spend eating out this week?

If you do, you can buy 3 mosquito nets to put around a child’s bed reducing the likelihood that those children will be infected with malaria by 50%. If you don’t think that 3 mosquito nets will make a difference in the grand scheme of things, ask the parents of those three children.

The point here isn’t that you are a bad person if you haven’t provided a mosquito net to a child in Africa (lots of other things work very well, too, like vitamin A treatments, oral hydration therapy, pneumococcal vaccines, etc.). Rather, it is that it’s easy to get discouraged if you don’t think that anything that you can do matters to the scope of a problem. Indeed, one of the oddities of our cognitive wiring is that we are much more likely to either deny or ignore the existence of a problem if we don’t think we can fix it (think climate change deniers or even procrastinating on a project that appears overwhelming). But you can do something.

Humanity has made a lot of progress on this and other important issues in the last 20 years, but it isn’t enough. If you think that the infant mortality number ought to come down even further, do something about it. If you think that we need to deal with climate change, you can call your senators and tell them. If you think that underprivileged children in your community deserve a fighting chance in school, you can volunteer a couple of hours every week as a tutor for your local church or community organization. It doesn’t take much to have a positive impact on the world, but it does take something.

I write this as someone who needs to take his own advice. I need to stop making excuses and start making a difference, so today I promise you, the reader, that I will do at least two things that might help someone in need, even if not everybody. I challenge all 5 of you who might read this post to do the same. Then I challenge you to challenge somebody else.

a respectful dissent

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 18:16:33 -0700

Hamid Karzai appears to have “won” an outright majority of all of the votes “cast” in the August 20 Afghan presidential election. However, the Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan (a UN-sponsored group of international and Afghan election monitors) has decided to conduct a partial recount to investigate over 700 allegations of vote fraud. Matt Yglesias presumably thinks that this is bad news because he believes that, for better or worse, we are stuck with Karzai because the election of a Tajik president in Karzai’s chief rival, Abdullah Abdullah, would be a disaster. He argues that a if the Pashto Karzai is ousted from office, it will be impossible to ever gain any kind of strategic advantage against the Taliban in the primarialy Pashto south because the locals will reject the legitimacy of the Afghan central government and any support NATO forces have in the southern provinces will evaporate. This is, after all, a battle for hearts and minds at the end of the day.

As an initial matter, I seriously doubt that the ECC is willing to simply invalidate the entire election. Unlike most cohorts of international election monitors, this commission has real authority, and I think it will be reluctant to use its first real opportunity to scrutinize an election in such a way as to ensure that it never has the opportunity again. I also doubt that the commission will be willing to let the blatant fraud go unaddressed. A more likely result is that the commission will invalidate enough fraudulent votes to bring Karzai below the 50% mark and force a runoff election between Karzai and Abdullah (probably in the because once winter sets in after the end of October, it would be very difficult to hold an election).

At first blush, Yglesias seems to have at least a colorable argument for riding it out with Karzai, but I am dubious. When Karzai was made interim president in 2002, it seems largely to have been part of a bargain in which the Tajiks got a good deal of misisterial posts, the Pashto got a president, and the US (and NATO) got a friendly Afghan government that would be able to hold the country together along ethnic lines. What we got instead (perhaps as a result of 7 years of neglect) is a corrupt, incompetent, and increasingly antagonistic president who is knee deep in the opium trade and has proven himself to be wholly incapable of developing any semblance of a civil society. Moreover, the Pashto south is essentially ungoverned by anyone other than warlords and the Taliban, and the existence of an ethnically similar president doesn’t seem to have gone very far in winning us the hearts and minds in the south.

It could be the case that the devil we know beats the devil we don’t. Maybe the steady resurgence of the Taliban over the last several years would have been much steeper had there not been a Pashto president, but I don’t think so. It may well make a difference at the margins, but the Tajik/Pashto ethnic divide in Afghanistan is not the Sunni/Shia/Kurd divide in Iraq and shouldn’t be treated as such. Furthermore, a new Tajik-led administration could help bridge the ethnic divide with some high-level Pashto cabinet appointments.

What seems to me to be of paramount importance in these elections from the point of view of U.S. strategic interests is congruence between values and behavior. Yglesias correctly notes that the U.S. is often the first to cry foul when other actors (especially Russia) turn a blind eye to (if not encourage) vote stealing elsewhere to prop up a friendly leader. His solution to the hypocrisy, however, is to stop crying so loudly. It seems to me that the better solution is to start crying foul even when our friends are to blame. As I have previously argued, this kind of consistency isn’t merely the right thing to do from the perspective of an ethicist (universalizability), it’s also sound foreign policy when the primary battle ground is in the hearts and minds of a foreign population.

If the ECC forces a runoff, so be it. If Abdullah wins the runoff, that is the consequence free elections. The United States should condemn voter fraud in a vaguely broad way, and stay out of the ensuing process. Chances are that Karzai will win a runoff anyhow and American support or disdain for a recount is unlikely to persuade the U.N. observers. Coming out against the election would merely strengthen the Taliban in their attempts to enlist support to defeat the American hypocrites. Condemning election fraud without condemning Karzai and shutting the hell up, however, would undermine the Imperial America argument.

My point is not that following my advice is going to solve our problems in Afghanistan. I’m merely suggesting that the benefits that would accompany this kind of consistency (both in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world) would outweigh the costs of condemning voter fraud and shutting up, even if those benefits are small. Even more than a Pashto president, I suspect that the Pashto Afghans want better security (which Gen. McChrystal is trying to provide by shifting away from airstrikes and toward civilian protection) and evidence that NATO forces don’t intend to stay forever. This approach would provide at least some evidence of the latter.

everybody wins

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:30:00 -0700

The LA Times ran an interesting article on Tuesday describing an emerging “state sovereignty” movement, particularly among western states, wherein a number of anti-federalists are seeking to resurrect a battle that they lost 220 years ago, 186 years ago, 144 years ago, and 45 years ago. Aside from the fact that using the term “state sovereignty” is a weak attempt to distance the movement from the “states rights” movement championed by racists like George Wallace (and endorsed by Ronald Reagan), this “movement” is monumentally stupid, and I, for one, think we ought to let it succeed. I think that most of us can agree that if Rick Perry wants to secede Texas from the Union, that may well be a pareto improvement. Similarly, other states are taking a softer, yet comparably idiotic, line may suggest equally desirable solutions.

According to Mark Barabak at the Times Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota have all recently passed resolutions in their respective state legislatures “asking the federal government to ‘cease and desist’ from meddling in their business.” As a fellow American who believes in the basic principles of comity, I say let’s give them what they want. These five states are sick and tired of the damned federal government interfering in affairs, and just want Uncle Sam to butt out. And who can blame them, after all, each of them is disproportionately affected by federal meddling. All five states are what are known as tax importing states, that is, more federal spending comes into the state than the state pays out to the federal government in taxes. Indeed, the level of federal oppression is astonishing. Just compare them with how unburdened a tax exporting state like California is:
 

Just imagine how liberated these five freedom loving states would be if they could somehow throw off the shackles of bondage and refuse federal spending. Indeed, these western rugged individualists could show the President once and for all how fed up they are with the federal government bailing out failing institutions by rejecting their own bailout money and letting the market sort things out. Moreover, they would finally be able to stop wasting their time with nit-picky federally imposed burdens like providing health care to poor seniors and preventing terrorism and get back to their real priorities:

With their state budgets completely eviscerated, each state would be blessed with the opportunity to start thinking really clearly about its priorities without any of those dollars from tax exporters like California and New York clouding their sovereign judgment.

This, it seems to me, is the perfect solution. The spoiled children in Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota get what they want (and what they deserve) and, as a Californian, I get a little closer to breaking even in the benefits I get from the taxes I pay.

smarter diplomacy

Thu, 4 Jun 2009 16:33:49 -0700

President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt today is being discussed in large part with respect to its efficacy as an act of public diplomacy (that is, an attempt to sell U.S. foreign policy directly to foreign publics in the hope of promoting the U.S. international agenda). Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy thinks “the rollout of the speech already stands as one of the most successful public diplomacy and strategic communications campaigns I can ever remember.” I think that he is right and that this is
a good thing. Indeed, the coordinated effort to translate the speech into numerous languages used by Muslims around the world, instead of merely Arabic (Urdu, Pashto, Farsi, and Indonesian to name a few), belies a broader cultural sensitivity that will not go unnoticed.

Obama’s effective use of public diplomacy is impressive, but I think that it’s impact isn’t being fully appreciated. The analysis of the President’s public diplomacy is focused on the administration’s use of social networks like Facebook & Twitter as well as SMS. Though such broad reliance on social media is an innovative way to reach middle class, educated, Muslims under 30 (the primary recruiting base for extremists), that’s only a small piece of the puzzle. As I argue in my paper “Rethinking Public Diplomacy in an Era of Transnational Terrorism,” effective public diplomacy requires a strong correlation between language and behavior. The real impact of the speech is much deeper and much broader.

Response to the speech in the Middle East gets the principle right but the facts wrong. The head of Hamas’ political wing, Khaled Meshaal, for instance, says that while the rhetoric was different from that of the Bush administration, “[w]hat’s needed are deeds, actions on the ground, and a change of policies.” Similarly, Hezbollah thinks that “[t]he Islamic world does not need moral or political sermons. It needs a fundamental change in American policy,” the Iraqi spokesman notes that “[t]he use of Koranic sayings plays a big part in a positive change of picture, but there is a necessity for action,” and Iranian Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says that “[i]f the new president of America wants a change of face, America should change this behaviour.” Words and talk will not result in change On this point, that talk is generally cheap, they are right. That’s the point that I make in the paper. Where they are wrong, however, is in their assumption that talk is all that they are getting. Under the Bush Administration, I think the criticism carried more weight, and it probably rang fairly true with the average person in the Middle East.

The U.S. democracy agenda under President Bush, for example, served as a poor justification for American intervention in Iraq when the U.S. withdrew support for free elections in Egypt because it looked like the Muslim Brotherhood was going to win and refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine. Similarly, U.S. attempts to play the honest broker between Palestine and Israel was totally undercut when the U.S. gave Israel free reign to wage total war in southern Lebanon (note that this is different than supporting a more proportionate response to Hezbollah attacks). President Obama’s speech, however, is only a part of a much broader diplomatic agenda, that includes “actions on the ground” that are highly visible to Muslims across the Middle East. The President’s public dispute with B.B. Netanyahu over settlement expansion in the West Bank, his request to send $200M to Pakistan, not to fund military operations in the Swat Valley but to provide humanitarian relief to the refugees fleeing the valley, closing Guantanamo Bay, drawing down U.S. presence in Iraq, and his conciliatory overtures toward Iran are all important aspects of the President’s outreach to publics in the Middle East. Viewed in isolation, none of these actions would be particularly remarkable to your average 27-year-old, college educated man at a café in Amman. What the speech does, however, is provide a narrative for U.S. foreign policy that shows that each of these things is part of a greater design to which the U.S. will be consistent.

Consistency is absolutely key if we want to start winning over hearts and minds throughout the Middle East. Though the President has not legitimzed either Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, he fit those decisions into his consistent narrative by noting that:

there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. No matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

While the decisions may remain unpopular in parts of the Middle East, the President is now able to defend them on principle rather than self-interest, a defense that is much more credible when America is perceived as consistent in its application of the rules.

In other words, this speech is not an act or incident of public diplomacy. Rather, it is a piece of a broader public diplomacy strategy that the Obama Administration is implementing. The speech, as a part of that strategy provides a powerful narrative for American foreign policy in the region. As I mentioned earlier, antagonists like Khamenei and Hezbollah are right that the speech, operating in a vacuum, will do little to win friends on the streets of Beirut. But it was not given in a vacuum. I doubt that it is a coincidence that the President chose the week leading up to his speech to raise the settlement issue with Israel. That move and the others I mentioned, combined with Obama’s personal story, and his tone of mutual respect probably helped him open the door just enough to get the ear of a lot of people in the Middle East for today’s speech. They alone aren’t sufficient to rebuild our credibility in the region, but by presenting the Muslim world with a coherent outline of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Obama has presented a vision of U.S. policy that can compete directly with the interpretation offered by Osama bin Laden. This, it seems to me, has the potential to accomplish what military intervention never could: slowly drpriving al Qaeda and other anti-Western extremists of their recruiting base. People are smart, and the more they see America operating in harmony with the President’s vision of the world, the less resonant Osama bin Laden’s accusations of American humiliation of Muslims become. That, brothers and sisters, is sound public diplomacy. Keep up the good work, Mr. President (doesn’t it feel good to be able to say that for a change).

*UPDATE*
As I suspected, Politico’s Mike Allen reports that this is a calculated strategy on the part of the Administration. Also, note that Obama seems to be setting up a frame, not just for U.S. policy going forward, but for al Qaeda, too. The idea being that people will not only begin to see U.S. behavior in the context of his narrative, they’ll look at extremist attacks in that way, too (that is, they will start to look more and more like acts of plain old murder).

getting past the beginning

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:16:24 -0700

I counseled a camp this past weekend at Loch Leven. While there are lots of great things that I could say about that camp experience, I’d like to focus on a conversation that I had after camp. After I got back to L.A., I had lunch with my friend Jeff (who was also at the camp) and debriefed. As both of us are prone to do, we got of on a tangent and started discussing the nature of the Christian message. In the course of that discussion, Jeff made a point that I think is worth further consideration: he said that as Christians (particularly as progressive Christians) we spend a great amount of time hammering home the message that “G-d loves you,” and we often treat that as the ultimate message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the end of the story. We talked about it a little more and decided (after about 2 minutes of deep theological reflection) that this is a profound mistake. We treat “G-d loves you” as the end of the story when it is really only the beginning. That is to say, “G-d loves you” is a critical insight, but its primary purpose is to prepare the Christian for the more important revelation: G-d also loves everybody else.

I have lots of problems with the baby boom generation, but my most profound grievance is reflected in their nickname. The “Me Generation” (and remember that I am speaking at the social level here, not about any individual) bought into postmodernism hook, line, and sinker. If, as postmodernism suggests, however, nothing inheres and all meaning is socially constructed, then it makes sense for humans who seek meaning to look inward to develop that meaning rather than to a meaningless outside world. This is not to say that I think that everything has an externally assigned, immutable meaning. A swear word is only a swear word because we say it is. The difference between “shit” and “feces” is that the French-speaking nobility who ruled England after the Norman invasion thought the Germanic languages native to the island were crude and unfit for polite discourse. Nevertheless, some things do have an inherent, G-d-given value (most notably the gifts of life and relationship), and the postmodern baby boom seems to have largely missed the theological boat.

The result of this “Me Christianity,” to coin a phrase, is that Christians who embrace the concept of a loving and gracious G-d (rather than a fearsome, judgmental G-d) tend conceive of G-d’s love in terms of the meaning that it gives their personal existence. I don’t think that there is anything per se misguided about that sort of relationship with the Divine, but in “Me Christianity” this focus is excessive. When the fact that G-d loves you is the paramount truth revealed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, personal spiritual development becomes the most important spiritual discipline.

It seems to me (and Jeff), though, that there is a more important revelation that “Me Christianity” neglects. The more important truth found in the Gospel is that G-d does not only love you, G-d loves everyone else just as much. When this truth is the ultimate message of the Christian scriptures, realizing that G-d loves you is an essential step. Indeed, you can only understand G-d’s love for everyone else once you understand G-d’s love for you. Nevertheless, “G-d loves me” is an intermediate truth, a predicate revelation that allows you to understand the more important notion that G-d loves everyone else.

This distinction may seem silly, but it has important consequences for the way we behave as Christians. While “Me Christians” will certainly acknowledge that G-d loves everyone else, their postmodern sensibilities make it more difficult to determine that they can discern their own value more effectively by seeking it out in others. On the other hand, when “G-d loves me” is only the beginning of a story that ends with “G-d loves them” our perspective fundamentally shifts. If the ultimate Truth that Christ came to teach us is that every person is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14), then caring for our fellow created beings is not only a virtue, it is a moral obligation. Understanding G-d’s love for ourselves, then, is a means for fulfilling this obligation. For once we fully appreciate the nature of G-d’s grace in our lives, offering ourselves in the service of G-d’s other beloved creations is the most reasonable response. (See Romans 12:1).

In this sense, postmodernism is in tension with the Christian ethic. Not only do other people have value that is inherent to their existence through G-d’s love and grace, any attempt to obscure or diminish that value is socially constructed. That is to say, it is the denial of meaning, not the assignation thereof that is illusory. I don’t, however, want to seem as though I somehow blame the baby boom for single-handedly degrading the Christian sense of mission. The foundations for “Me Christianity” go back at least as far as the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant conception of Jesus as a “personal Lord and savior” makes it easy for us to conceive of our relationship with G-d as a private matter between the two (or four if you are a strict trinitarian) of us.

Moreover, the version of the “Greatest Commandment” found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) can also read in conformity with “Me Christianity.” There, we are told that the greatest commandments are to: (1) love G-d with all our heart, mind, and strength and; (2) love our neighbor as we love ourselves. It seems to me that this formulation, though well grounded in scripture, presents a potential interpretive problem. While I read it as a clear command to be outwardly focused in my search for meaning, it also lends itself to a more insular interpretation where the two primary parties are G-d and the individual. In that reading, the individual focuses inward, developing his or her personal relationship with G-d through which the come to find their meaning, and the way that they treat others is a second-order consequence of their personal relationship with the Divine.

For this reason, it seems to me that the version of the Greatest Commandment found in the Gospel of John is more direct. There we are commanded to love one another as Jesus loves us. (See John 13:35 and 15:12). In this formulation we must still discern Jesus’ love for us and the nature of
G-d’s grace, but it serves a specific purpose. The process of discerning G-d’s love for us is the means by which we accomplish the first part of the commandment, that we love one another. When viewed through the lens of John’s greatest commandment, the synoptic version sheds any interpretive gloss that “Me Christianity” might give it, and can be moved from the first to the final chapter of the Christian story.

All of this is not intended to assail the “Me Generation” for obscuring the Christian message. They are, after all, a product of their time, disillusioned by the failures of the “Greatest Generation” (segregation, McCarthyism, and Watergate to name a few). Rather, it is designed to remind us that there is more to Discipleship than knowing that we are loved. The fact that G-d loves us is wonderful. Indeed, for some people, G-d’s love is the only love they have ever known. But what we need to bear in mind is that knowing G-d’s love in our lives is not adequate. To live a fulfilled life, one grounded in the Gospel of Jesus, we must also share G-d’s love with all of G-d’s children, who are equally beloved. It is, most importantly, this that we must be teaching our children. “Jesus Loves Me” is a perfectly legitimate song to teach to our children in Sunday School, but as they get older, we must respect them enough to tell them that it ain’t about them. That through G-d’s love they (better yet, we) are empowered to forsake the search for meaning within, and instead seek it without: loving the world as we were first loved from the moment G-d knit us together in our mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)