I'm not sure what "amateur historian" means. It's often appended to authors that write books that include good historical under-pinnings but may not be about history itself. Whatever it means, it should stop. It's condescending to people that work hard to understand and appreciate history without being a "historian".
On a side-note, I'm thinking of starting a science blog. Nothing technical. Just something that will address common misconceptions about some topics (climate, evolution, nano-technology, etc.) and point out interesting tidbits. Everything from astronomy to zoology that is interesting but may not make headlines. I think the first topic might be "why it's probably ok to re-freeze thawed out chicken". If there is anything you'd like to see or have questions about, let me know. It would be even better if it was a question-and-answer type of deal. But that would imply that enough people are reading this to keep the questions coming. Plus, you probably have better things to do than spend more time in my corner of the internets.
I've been reading a grip of books on foreign aid, foreign poverty, and the flow of money from rich to poor countries. The excellent comments on my last post got me thinking about a recurring theme in these books: change and progress in republican governments are made incrementally and piecemeal, with debate amongst people with vastly different ideas on how to approach and solve problems. As Jack and Adam astutely pointed out, even the founding fathers were at odds on the best way to govern this country. Changes to our way of governing, our economy, and our social setting have usually happened slowly. It's a trial and error situation. If you look at most Western democracies you'll see a similar story. These two ideas (incremental change and legitimate dissent/debate) are cornerstones of why our political system works well. But we don't apply these same ideas to other governments or situations.
Here's an example: whether you agree with it or not, the fact is that we invaded Iraq, ripped up its governing structures and institutions, and insinuated ourselves into an area that has sharp ethnic conflicts. Rather than making incremental changes and finding solutions to these problems within the local economic, political, and social setting, we have pushed for one massive, over-night, over-arching shift from autocracy and dictatorship to free markets and democratic elections. This is simply not a reasonable expectation. The American people expect to see movement in Iraq away from conflict and toward things promised before the war (democracy, elections, capitalism, etc.) But David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker can't deliver news that Americans see as progress. (They also don't answer straight forward questions, but that's a different problem). And the reason they can't deliver that news is because we're expecting Shakespeare and getting Grisham. We have high expectations, but those expectations are not based on any real-world model or any previous success using this method of creating overnight sensations (Zappa rules!).
The way forward is never certain and everyone wants to see different outcomes. Some people even want to go backward. I'd like to think the U.S. can learn from its successes as well as its failures. We're resourceful people. This is a great opportunity to be relatively successful in a zero-sum situation. Just because it's not success the way we wanted to measure it (with generic metrics like democracy, free markets, end of major combat, etc.) doesn't mean it's not worth trying. Incremental changes add up over time. If we ever want to consider what happened in Iraq a "success", we have to give them the tools to be successful during the difficult transition to a new way of governing and interacting both inside the country and internationally. One of those tools is the freedom and ability to adapt things to their unique situation and another is the freedom to try things that fail. We can't implement an over-arching U.S. blueprint for Iraq. It didn't work in Vietnam, it didn't work in Haiti, it didn't work in Iran, and there's no reason to think it will work in Iraq.
6 comments:
I don't think it is nice to make fun of your wife in the title of your blog, mister. :OP
I was wondering about that. If Janelle hadn't already posted I would have asked if you were making fun of her. Perhaps a trained attack chinchilla would be the appropriate response.
One of our greatest failures in Iraq (independent of the issue about whether we should have been there in the first place) is that there never appeared to be a plan in place to allow the local government and forces to take over. We hadn't done our homework to understand the region and the interactions between rival sects, which only further plunged the country into chaos as we removed the few stabilizing influences in place in the country. An incremental plan that didn't destroy the infrastructure would have been a good start. Things like roads, water, and electricity make the people much happier and more willing to work with you.
On the subject of a science blog, I would love to be able to contribute. Any idea if Wordpress accounts can be set as authors on Blogger? I've already got my first idea in mind, since it was going to be the next post over on my site. I may want to cross-post to both and take the two people that read my blog and add in the seven that read yours.
Tungtide, you can't bridge Wordpress to Blogger, but if you have a Gmail account, it can double as a blogger account.
The science blog is a dope ass idea, and you should just limit it to Q&A (you can feed me questions for anything you feel compelled to rant about) because that forces interactivity from your audience.
As far as political progress goes, think of it this way-- in the wake of the American Revolution, the US adopted the Articles of Confederation, which was supposed to group the 13 states together with an emphasis on states' rather than federal power (remember, the biggest fear of the colonists was a strong National Government that could turn tyrannical).
The Articles failed for a number of reasons (ie the federal government could levy taxes but not ENFORCE them (Govt: Hey, Virginia, PAY YOUR TAXES. Virginia: FUCK YOU!)), but it took almost a decade of economic depression due to the federal government's inability to regulate interstate commerce before people started to get it that the central government had to be strengthened, despite their fears.
Notice-- the Articles were a trial that failed, so we revised, BUT THE UNITED STATES COULD NEVER HAVE SKIPPED THAT STEP. The colonies after independence NEVER would have ratified the Constitution as is/was. Now apply that to political whinging about Cuba, Iran, Iraq, etc.
In my opinion, our biggest failing in foreign policy is our inability to accept that Democracy (in our sense of the word) does not, and can not, happen overnight. Countries and people need bridges, stepping stones, and inbetweens to get from there to here. Saddam straight to Bush does NOT work. Iraqis need a Taft or Mossadeq thrown in as a logical midpoint; they need to go forward slowly, evaluate, move back if necessary, then forward again. But only, and this is crucial, AT THEIR OWN PACE.
Trying to hurry democracy is about as useful as yelling at the antarctic shelf to melt slower, which is all Republicans seem to be proposing to combat global warming.
Even after the articles of confederation, Madison was especially concerned over a strong central government (at least until he became president). Madison was so concerned that 'he' drafted the constitution so that the house and senate would have to agree before any laws could pass...therefore making it (supposedly) difficult to pass any legislation unless it was REALLY needed. He basically wanted the government to NOT be able to do anything.
I agree with Adam that the Iraqi people will need to take a long time to resolve their governmental needs. U.S. troops will be there a long time. But, if you look at what happened after WWII, the Marshall plan was not real popular and took a lot of years to accomplish its goal, and in many ways the Iraqi people have been more peacable than the Europeans were during reformation after WWII.
- Nell's dad
By the way, you should be nice to my daughter's little legs!
:-)
I'm all for the Q&A science blog, but wonder if there's enough traffic to actually feed an interest? I'm working to increase traffic on my page (averaging about 6 hits a day...woo-hoo?) but without a steady input it's going to be difficult. I've got no issues ranting to a nonexistent audience though.
I don't have a google or gmail account so I'd have to either set one up or feed blogs in through Brandon. I just had to be different and use wordpress, huh?
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