Movies of the decade

My top ten movies of the decade, based purely on how much of an emotional impact they had on me:

1. United 93 An almost perfect movie that imagines what it was like inside the one hijacked 9/11 flight that missed its target. The closing sequence, not despite but because of its inexorability, is perhaps the most physically powerful scene I've ever experienced in the movies. I was completely overcome.
2. The Lives of Others Three hours of shots of interiors and dialog, with virtually no action whatsoever, that nonetheless offers a riveting recreation of the psychology of a police state, from the point of view of a true believer in the system who is nonetheless a humanist.
3. Children of Men What if the experience of life inside the Gaza Strip became the pervasive future, in a world with no children, and therefore no hope for the future? The dystopia is so comprehensive that even the redemptive moment feels merely like a prelude to worse horrors.
4. In the Mood for Love A sad and beautiful account of the possibility of romance in the shadow of life's disappointments. Subtly erotic, with an endless parade of beautiful outfits for Maggie Cheung.
5. Waltz with Bashir An animated Israeli movie about the difficulty of working through memories of extreme trauma. The animation induces in the audience the same sense of dissociation from the depicted events that the characters in the film experience as they try to remember what they went through as young soldiers in South Lebanon, in the run-up to the Ariel Sharon-sponsored massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
6. Borat Vile, obscene, politically incorrect -- and utterly hilarious.
7. The Diving Bell & the Butterfly Grim yet oddly humorous first-person account of what it is like to lose all one's physical capacities while maintaining an intact mind.
8. Memento A classic film noir that puts you in the hero's no-memory shoes by being narrated backward. Carrie-Anne Moss does a brilliant turn as the femme fatale.
9. Sideways Side-splittingly funny account of a couple of odd-bedfellow friends going on a joint bender in opposite directions.
10. Downfall The definitive view from inside Hitler's bunker (in odd ways parallel to United 93's reimagining of a hellish scene from the inside). Bruno Ganz gives the performance of the decade as Hitler.

For a longer list, check out this one from the Times (of which I've seen about half).

Not with a bang, but in a rolling boil....

Tim Flannery summarizes James Lovelock's prediction as to how continued greenhouse gas emissions will impact human civilization:

Lovelock has spent most of his career trying to understand the consequences of increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. In his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, he argues that Earth's system of self-regulation is being overwhelmed by greenhouse gas pollution and that Earth will soon jump from its current cool, stable state into a dramatically hotter one. All climatologists acknowledge the existence of such climatic jumps—as occurred for example at the end of the last ice age. But chaos theory dictates that the scale and timing of such leaps are inherently unpredictable, which means that they cannot be incorporated into the computer models of Earth's climate system that such scientists use to project future climate change. Yet this is precisely what Lovelock attempts to do—using his own computer modeling—in The Vanishing Face of Gaia. A new climatic jump, he concludes, will occur within the next few years or decades, and will involve an abrupt increase in average global surface temperature of 9 degrees Celsius—from 15 to 24 degrees Celsius (59 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit). Such a shift, he contends, will trigger the collapse of our global civilization and the near extinction of humanity.

This will be a temperature jump greater than that while occurred at the start of the Holocene (the end of the last Ice Age), but with humans now overwhelmingly sedentary, our capacity to move in response to the northward shift of climate zones is much less than it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Abrupt change in the weather will be followed somewhat more slowly, but perhaps even more devastatingly, by the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and consequently rising sea levels. Even under Lovelock's most dire scenario, this process will unfold over several hundred years, albeit mainly in the form of statis followed by sudden shifts in coastlines after storm surges. Florida will shrink like this:

Long before sea levels rise 50 meters, however, half of Bangladesh (home to 150m+ people) will go underwater:
Where will those 100m people go?

Modernization theory never dies

Steve Coll, the President of the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank, trots out the classic liberal reason for neoimperial projects, namely, we have to bring modernity to the barbarians. You think I exaggerate? Here he is, verbatim:

United States has a vital national security interest in a stable, modernizing South Asia. Pakistan, India, all of South Asia -- a billion and a half people are on the cusp of joining modern Asia in a march to prosperity, political normalcy and stability.

If Pakistan blows up, if the Taliban succeed in radicalizing local populations, then this region will be chronically unstable for years to come.

And why does that matter to the United States? Not least because there are more than 100 nuclear weapons already finished and extant in this region. But this is a region that, like Southeast Asia and Latin America, has the opportunity to stabilize, gel, integrate economically and march toward modernity.

As always, that "march to modernity" is depicted as basically a historical inevitability as long as some disease of the transition process is not allowed to go untreated, which we can do by surgically removing the tumor of anti-modern forces.

The Taliban are essentially all that stands in the way of that project. It's more complicated than that, because the Taliban are a creature of dysfunctional Pakistani security services and lots of other unsolved problems. But the United States has a vital national interest in making sure that the Taliban do not destabilize South Asia.

Farcical, I know, but this is literally the EXACT SAME argument that liberals made for escalating in Vietnam during the 1960s: just a small nudge and these people will arrive at the promised land of modernity -- that is, become just "like us" -- and we'll never have to worry about conflict with them ever again. We know how that worked out last time. (For more on that history, read here and here.)

Hat tip: RM.

The project in Afghanistan

Question: what do you get when you cross Don Quixote and Sisyphus? The answer: General Stanley A. McChrystal!

Dexter Filkins, in his nearly hagiographical profile of Gen. McChrystal, summarizes the aims underpinning McChrystal's call for more troops for Afghanistan as follows:

What McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge — a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal’s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances, this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men.

In other words, the goal is to turn the most socially and politically devastated country on earth, one rife with hostile religious fanatics, into a kind of Asian Switzerland. No duh that's going to take a lot more troops and resources.

Let's be blunt: this is completely insane as an objective--insane in the same way that jumping out of an airplane with no chute is insane. Nation-building of this sort has never succeeded anywhere, and not for lack of trying. What's more, if that's the objective, then the resource commitments that McChrystal is asking for are bathetically modest. The 40,000 extra troops that McChrystal wants aren't going to come anywhere close to doing the trick.

There's an entirely different alternative, of course, which is to redefine US and NATO objectives in Afghanistan, and to match the resources to meet that redefined objective. Here's one thumbnail alternative: pull back from local commitments, work on developing intelligence sources, and make it clear that we will kill from afar anyone we can see consorting with known bad guys. It ain't very humanitarian, but at least it's a project that can succeed and won't bankrupt the nation.

Obama/Gorby??

A few times over the last year, I've asked whether Obama might end up in the role of an American Gorbachev, graciously ushering his country to a lesser global role.

Today, Glenn Beck points out that the last sitting head of state to win the Nobel Peace Prize was... Mikhail Gorbachev.

More on the politics of deviant globalization

I am reading Stephen Ellis's fantastic paper (sub req.) on the evolution of "West Africa's International Drug Trade," one of the most detailed and insightful analyses I've seen of the social, economic, political, and historical contexts for the rise of deviant globalization.

The paper is worth reading in its entirety, but I'd like to take this chance to riff on some of the political themes that Ellis alludes to but does not develop fully. Ellis notes that deviant globalization thrives in political contexts where there is "ineffective policing, governments who have a reputation for venality, and a relative lack of international attention" (p. 194). The point is deeper than merely the banal insight that corruption and crime go hand in hand. Rather, there is a broader political context for deviant globalization, in that black market economies both reinforce and are reinforced by "local authorities operating unofficial networks of governance rooted in local social realities" (p. 195).

Generalizing these insights, we can observe that deviant globalization undermines the authority of the central state by focusing the production and reproduction of political capital on local rather than national-level institutions. This is precisely why the UN Office of Drug Control, for example, argues that crime "hinders development." But this is true only if we insist on conceiving of "development" in the mainstream sense that pervades the thinking of the United Nations, the US government, and most "development" NGOs. In this mainstream sense, which has a hoary intellectual history, "development" is predicated on (if not, indeed, coterminous with) the extension of centralized state authority.

Of course, that mainstream conception of "development" is at odds with the ambitions of locals (and not just elites) for whom the central state does often literally less than nothing for them. The empowering of the centralized state is, for many deviant globalizers, simply a way to improve the capacity of remote elites to rob them. And while that might strike the UN as a laudable definition of development, you can understand why, say, Afghan opium farmers would take quite a different view of what "development" means.

For most poor people, insofar as "development" means anything, it is not about state authority per se, but rather about more practical matters like earning money and getting social services such as education, infrastructure, health care, etc. Among mainstream developmentalists, however, the myth still is that the state is the institution that delivers such services, but the truth is that the post-structural adjustment state (that is, most Third World states today) is at best intermittantly effective at delivering such services.

In most places, the rolled-back post-neoliberal state has been the reality for so long that people's political ambitions are no longer focused on state-building or state-capture (except, perhaps, to take over the rents that accrue to running a kleptocratic state). Over the last 20-30 years, what has collapsed is a grassroots belief that a "modernizing" or "developmental" state will be the primary vehicle for improving the lives of the masses. A state-centric conception of development may still animate some elites in Washington, New York, or London, but in most of the rest of the world, the people have, shall we say, moved on. Having made a virtue of post-SAP necessity, deviant globalizers now actively prefer to operate in "crippled state" environments.

The goal for such actors remains what it ever was: to make a living and to increase their political authority and autonomy. What has changed is the mechanism, and one of the most popular ones has been to join up in illicit economies, where participants can make windfall profits by arbitraging the moral compunctions of the West. This has been going on for so long by now that this alternative mode of "development" (if that term still means anything so redefined) is spawning a set of political commitments that are orthogonal to traditional national ones. Tip O'Neill's famous observation that all politics is local has never been more true than in today's deviantly globalized world.

Finally, one cannot overemphasize what a huge ideological shift this redefinition of development represents -- a complete sea change from the Marx-inspired revolutionary ambitions of yesteryear's underclasses. As Jon Lee Anderson notes in his New Yorker article on Rio's gangs, quoting a former Marxist guerrilla turned politician:

"Nobody wants to make revolution anymore. What these people with the guns want today is their immediate share of the consumption culture. It's so childish, and morally childish, and they kill like children too--like in a kid's war game" If they ever acquired an ideology, they could threaten the state, he said. "For now they are a totally entropic and anarchic group of young people who have figured out how to get what they want, which is basically, clothing cars and respect."

Indeed what has happened in Rio applies, in varying degrees, throughout Latin America--most notably in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia. Two decades after the collapse of Communism, the region's Marxist guerillas have disappeared, only to be replaced by violent drug mafias.

So, to end this long post with another thought that could be the subject for an equally lengthy post, the answer the question "Who won the Cold War?" is that the gangsters did.

How the Internet can strengthen dictatorships

Quote of the Day

Gore Vidal, speaking in Britain, explains how Obama misunderstands today's GOP:

Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word 'conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they’re fascists.

How international relations have changed

I just re-read Susan Strange’s The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, conceived and written in 1989-1993, first published in 1996, and now in its 12th reprinting. It stands up remarkably well as a description of the way that authority has been ebbing away from sovereign actors toward (on the one hand) big businesses, bankers, and accountants, and (on the other) nongovernmental organizations and criminals. Strange's basic argument for why international relations must take into account sub-national actors strikes me as having been largely validated by the events of the last decade and a half:

State power is declining. It is less effective on those basic matters that the market, left to itself, has never been able to provide – security against violence, stable money for trade and investment, a clear system of law and the means to enforce it, and a sufficiency of public goods like drains, water supplies, infrastructures for transport and communications…. Many states are coming to be deficient in these fundamentals. Their deficiency is not made good by greater activity in marginal matters, matters that are optional for society [such as greater regulatory meddling or social legislation].

I recommend the book warmly.

However, there are also two particular ways in which the book strikes me as notably dated, and not just because she won the methodological argument about making the discipline of IR more inclusive.

First, it’s striking how large the shadow of Communism looms in the book. Throughout the book, centrally planned socialist alternatives remain alive as a counterpoint to the emergent global political economy. Were the same book to be written today, no one would bother to make such contrasts. When she was writing the book in 1994-5, however, centrally planned socialism remained the conceptual elephant in the room, albeit less for its threatening aspect than for its putrescent stench. A student reading the book for the first time today, for whom centrally planned socialism exists only as a discredited anachronism in places like Cuba and North Korea, will doubtless wonder why Strange keeps contrasting the emergent system she is describing to a mode of political economy which today seems as dead as feudalism.

The second shadow that looms over the book (in this case, cast not from the past but from the future) is the rise of China, the prospect of which appears nowhere in the book. When discussing possible objections to her thesis, Strange acknowledges that East Asian state-led development may be an exception to her argument. Her referent countries, however, are limited to the (then so-called) "Asian Tigers," that is Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore -- which she rightly dismisses as exceptions produced by the Cold War. But the notion that mainland China might soon emerge as a worldbeating economic player, still led by the centralized political power of the Communist Party, remains completely unforeseen. Here the dating is obvious: no one today could write about the relationship between the balance of power between states and non-states without including an extensive discussion of the Chinese example. For Strange in 1995, however, China warrants only a couple of passing mentions, most of which are in reference to the historical importance of the Chinese Triad gangs.

None of this is to take away from Strange’s book, which as I say remains largely correct, as well as beautifully and concisely written. But it does show how much the world has changed in the last fifteen years.

What to remember about 9/11

From John Robb, fighting words (in several senses):

The only portion of the American national security system that actually worked on 9/11 was.... drum roll please.... the formation of spontaneous civilian militias. From the counter-attack on the one plane that didn't hit its intended target to militias that evacuated people in NYC. The hideously expensive agencies and departments did nothing (which is one of the reasons, as perverse as it sounds, we went to war in Iraq: to decisively prove the utility of these agencies and departments before a global audience).

Collapsitarian quote of the day

John Michael Greer, author of The Long Descent and the most thoughtful of the collapsitarians, fisks a recent debate in The Guardian about whether the end of industrial civilization is nigh.

His conclusion is that, yes, the end is certainly nigh, and that we who are alive today should appreciate our unique privilege at living in this historical moment, and not the ones that came before or will come later. Money:

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren's grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that....

We do no one a favor, least of all ourselves, by trying to sugarcoat that very unpalatable reality. Nor do we gain anything by playing the fox to industrial civilization's grapes, and insisting that the extraordinary gifts the recent past has given us are sour because they are about to pass out of our reach. During the age that is coming to an end, the billion or so of us who have lived in the industrial world have enjoyed comforts and opportunities that our species had never known before and almost certainly will never know again. Those could never have been anything but temporary, they were distributed no more fairly than anything else passed around by human hands, and a wiser species would likely have had more common sense than to launch itself on the trajectory we followed, but it's as distorting to dismiss the extraordinary achievements of our age as it would be to ignore the terrible cost for those achievements that will be paid by us and our descendants.

Stoicism rather than fatalism seems like the order of the day.

Twittering instead of blogging

If you're wondering where the blogging has gone, it's mainly migrated to Twitter. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/nils_gilman.

Deviant Globalization Journal: Kidney Market

CNN claims ten percent of kidneys globally are trafficked illicitly:

The Station Fire

Amazing time-lapse footage of the San Gabriels from the L.A. Basin:

Building a Better Liberia

Clearly there is hope now for West Africa:

Photo credit: JB

Whose side of modernity are the Taliban on?

Apposite to my screed the other day about the stupidities derived from using modernization theory to understand the Afghan situation, here we have an important article about how Pakistani efforts to "restabilize" the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which had been run by the Taliban until the recent Pakistani army offensive, are being hampered because the "landowners are still in exile."

Reading the article, it's quite clear that what the Pakistani regime wants is to reestablish the feudal land tenure system, whereas what the Taliban stands for (economically) is the dethroning of these "traditional elites." Without belaboring the point, it's quite clear that the Taliban is hardly a "traditional" force, and the Pakistani army certainly should not be assumed to be unambiguously on the side of "modernity."

The more general point is that whenever"the language of modernity/modernization" gets deployed as an alleged explanatory vehicle, it's almost always obscuring a (usually confused) ideological agenda. "Modern" is assumed to be good and desirable (though the actualy substantive content can vary) whereas its opposite is bad. But even a cursory glance at the Taliban should give pause to such analysis.

The pervasiveness of modernization theory

This post is pretty narrowly associated with my academic interests, but one of the things that continues to stun me about modernization theory is how it just won't go away. It's been attacked, discredited and destroyed in more ways than Robert Deniro in Cape Fear, and yet likewise, it seems almost impossible to kill off. Not only does it still get a respectible hearing in the Establishment foreign policy press, it also continues to explicitly inform policymaking in the many critical theaters. Specifically, the militarized nation-building projects the U.S. is pursuing in both Afghanistan and Iraq remain deeply indebted to a theory that one would long ago have thought was not just dismantled intellectually but also discredited politically.

And yet, you can't excape arrant nonsense like this, from Michael Daxner's contribution to the latest issue of the eminently mainstream if wonkishly liberal World Policy Journal:

As a whole, Afghans want their collective integrity and dignity restored; they want and need the traumas from 30 years of terrible violence to be eased with food, justice, and employment. They want their long efforts toward modernity revived. Indeed, though it may be difficult for Westerners to imagine that Afghanistan even remotely resembles a modern nation, there have been significant attempts to modernize the state and society stretching back nearly a century from King Amanullah Khan, who assumed the throne in 1919, through President Daoud Khan, who initiated progressive rule from 1973 to 1978, and on through the Soviet occupation. Even the last 30 years of war effectively continued the process of modernizing the country--in its own rather cynical, but apparently irreversible, way. Stinger missiles, sattelite phones, guerrilla warfare tactics, and the ever-present Toyota Hi-Lux (a 4x4 vehicle favored by the Taliban) are all vestiges of this modern era. We must understand that decades of conflict have created enormous tensions between traditional lifestyles and modern attitudes.

Where to begin? Note first the condescending attitude toward the reader, that dresses up misleading platitudes as profundities that we probably just don't get. Then consider the embedded assumption that there is a "collective" Afghan people, who have a single discernable will. (That would be the "nation" that the coalition forces are supposedly helping to "build.") Then there's the assumption that what this collective will desires is some quantum Daxner calls "modernity," which is not only the desired future of this supposedly unitary Afghan people, but also, oddly, part of Afghanistan's past, which we detect in residual form in "Stinger missiles, satellite phones, and guerrilla warfare."

Those menacing "vestiges" do not cause the author to question whether there might, in fact, have been something not so great about those anterior modernizing efforts, from the ecologically disastrous dam-building of the 1950s, through the sanguinary Soviet occupation, down to the galvanzing discipline of the Taliban. Failing that, Daxner assumes that the opposite of modernity must be "tradition," thus failing to grasp the nature of the forces who oppose what he calls "modernity."

In fact, virtually the reverse of all these assumptions is closer to the truth about Afghanistan. First, the Taliban are not a "traditional" group in any sense of the word. They are an artifact and output of the horrors the country has experienced over the last 50 years--a reaction, quite specifically, to the manifold and inevitable failures of the various awful modernizing projects that Daxner speaks of with bizarre reverence. In other words, while the Taliban is undoubtedly vicious, culturally retrograde, and completely disdainful of all the pieties of liberal humanitarianism, we should not let this obscure the fact that they are also adamantly opposed to "traditional" tribal leadership, and by some measures (not unrelatedly) the most effective centralizing political force that Afghanistan has ever experienced.

What's more, pace Daxner, Afghanistan is not a nation in any meaningful sense of the term (e.g. a people who imagine themselves as forming a single community). In fact, other than a sliver of once and future expats (and, ahem, the Taliban), there's virtually no one in the country that actually wants an effective, unified central government. Rather, Afghanistan is a multiethnic land run by warlords whose power bases reside in the control of various local resources (poppies, timber, fruit), from which they extract rents and in exchange for which they deliver (more or less capriciously) various kinds of political goods to the local populace, including education, infrastructure, security, and justice. No one with any power wants the country converted into some Asiatic version of Switzerland, which is apparently Daxner's fantasy.

All this has sharp implications for policy. It's true that the occupiers are not universally scorned. After all, they provide a resource stream from which rents can be extracted. But the interest in effecting the changes that these humanitarian "development" moneys are supposedly trying to bring about is minimal at best. For this reason, any political alliances we may form can only be tactical. Trying to produce a politics based on parliamentary democracy is worse than simply a waste of time: it is actually likely to make the overall situation more combustible. In general, trying to judge success or failure in Afghanistan according to a yardstick defined by an idealized fantasy of the West will only lead to the wrongs kinds of conclusions about what is relevant to American or NATO security concerns in the region.

Of course, if you see the world through the lens of modernization theory, you'll never get any of those insights. Which is why it's so scary that, despite everything, despite half a century of everything, modernization theory continues to occupy Washington's mind like some horrible intellectual golem.

McNamara: A Knave, not a Fool

Robert Strange McNamara died last week, and with his passing virtually all the major policy players involved in the conception and implementation of the U.S.'s initial strategy in Vietnam have now died.

McNamara occupies a special place in the history of the War, first as the Defense Secretary who oversaw the escalation from 1961-1967, and much later (much much later), and almost as famously, for his public self-flagellation over what he called in his 1995 book In Retrospect the "wrong, terribly wrong" nature of the War.

For some time in the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War was often known as "McNamara's War." There was a good reason for this. One of the most disturbing things about the Vietnam War was the way it appeared to be a grotesque apotheosis of instrumental rationality bereft of all moral grounding: McNamara's decisions about strategy and tactics for killing millions of peasants were cost-benefited, game-theorized, and run through all the latest and most rigorous forms of algorithmic analysis. This approach to the War belonged entirely to McNamara, the former Ford Motor Company CEO and "whiz kid," who more than anyone else embodied what David Halberstam called, in one of journalism's most witheringly ironic phrases, "the best and the brightest." Whatever one's critiques of War, one would have been hard pressed to deny the stringently "rational" nature of the War.

I came to McNamara as a young historian of American ideas and foreign policy during McNamara's heyday, so my revulsion from McNamara was not viscerally bound up with the immediate politics of the War. Instead, it had more to do with McNamara's insidious effort to rehabilitate his moral reputation late in life with the publication of In Retropsect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, and even more with Errol Morris's brilliant but flawed movie, "The Fog of War." I say "flawed" because Morris bought McNamara's self-perception that his late-in-life alleged mea culpa constituted some kind of "moral seriousnessness" on McNamara's part.

It did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, to his dying day McNamara never understood the moral nature of what he had done in Vietnam. The "lessons" he drew from his experiences running the Vietnam War were all operational, instrumental lessons--lessons about how to improve cognition, decision-making processes. If only we had had better information about the enemy, McNamara begs, or better communication channels with the enemy, then it all would have turned out so much better. In sum, McNamara's desperate plea in both "The Fog of War" and In Retrospect is for people to perceive his role in the War as the result of foolishness, not knavery.

In fact, however, the essential moral crime of Vietnam was not that it was operationally mishandled, but that it was evil--it was evil for the United States to kill millions of peasants on the other side of the world over an ideological dispute. Full stop. And that core moral point is one that McNamara never, ever copped to.

Yes, a better operational approach might have made some marginal difference. But the fundamental problem was not an operational but a moral one. As someone once remarked about Samuel Huntington, who suffered from the same moral blindness as McNamara, he "lost the capacity to distinguish between genocide and urbanization."

When pressed by skeptical boomer interviewers, McNamara insisted that he was not asking for forgiveness, that he was not apologizing. Indeed he was not. Because to ask for foregiveness, or to apologize in a serious way, would have meant acknowledging the moral weight of his crimes--something he never did. His much quoted phrase about the War being "wrong, terribly wrong" was widely misinterpreted as an (all-too-belated) moral reckoning. But it was no such thing. In fact, what McNamara meant by this phrase was that, in his mind, the whole war was the result of a misunderstanding. The only surprise about the fact that the Vietnamese reacted to this interpretation with polite skepticism... is the fact that they were polite.

McNamara was knave, not a fool. Or perhaps he was a fool, too, but above all and to his end he was a self-serving, morally unserious knave.

The difficulty with writing about apocalypse

I read Matthew Glass's Ultimatum this weekend. Only so-so. What's weak about it, as a scenario exercise, is that Glass creates his imaginary future by running forward a rather extreme set of climate numbers, and the most optimistic numbers about Chinese growth, but otherwise holding everything entirely static. Thus, despite the fact that vast evacuations of costal areas are now necessary (something he portrays only from the Olympian heights of the White House war room) and the Chinese economy is now twice the size of the U.S.'s, political alignments both domestically and globally are unaltered. How realistic is that?

What makes it so hard to prognosticate a couple of decades out, on virtually any subject, is that there are so many moving variables that one has to consider. Things Glass doesn't bother to consider, for example, is how radical genetic engineering may fundamentally change conceptions of practices of life; how major shifts in geopolitical alignments can take place very quickly (France-German, 1945-1951; U.S.-China in 1971; U.S.-Iran in 1979; U.S.-Russia in 1989, etc.); how aging populations may fundamentally change immigration politics; how coming egenry shortages are going to fundamentally shift adaptation options; and so on.

The result is that the book reads like a Bolshie Brit's fantasy about what it would be like if a belligerent version of Obama had been elected President in 2033, and then appointed Bill Kristol as his Secretary of State.

However, within that structurally weak frame, the novel is quite illuminating about how lefty Brits view American and Chinese politics today, and why ever getting an emissions deal done will be impossibly difficult.

Finally, Glass never considers that as the catastrophe happens, it may not even really be perceived as a catastrophe at all. That's the key insight of J.G. Ballard in The Drowned World.

Right wing extremists

Remember that DHS report on the threat posed by domestic "right wing extremists" -- you know, the one that got the, well, right wing extremists so up in arms (if you'll pardon the expression)? Turns out to have been pretty prescient. First in Kansas, now in DC.

More here.