“Vice President Joe Biden told POLITICO after a three-day trip to Baghdad that the American people will see President Barack Obama’s Iraq policy as a success when the “combat mission” ends on schedule on Aug. 31. Biden said the administration “will be able to point to it and say, ‘We told you what we’re going to do, and we did it.’” Yes. That is pretty much what we wrote about such things more than two years ago, when it was a little less fashionable.
I like what the VP said. He is right. I think the title of my article two years ago could have had the same title, “We told you what we were going to do, and we did it.”
I also wrote about two years ago, “The proper answer for the erstwhile surge opponents is to say that they were seriously wrong last year, but that they see the error in light of events and will work with conditions to take advantage of the success brought about by policies they opposed. “
In early human societies, and among the less technologically advanced until now, war is/was endemic. Simple societies are warrior societies that live in a constant state of lethal conflict. These are small fights, murder raids & minor skirmishes, but they are never ending. The “noble savage” was kept in top form by the exigencies of war. We cherish a myth about people before civilization – that they lived in harmony with each other and with nature. The fact is that it was more like road warrior, with death, capture and rape a constant reality. The only protection was the ability to defend yourself or hide in vast spaces. It was constant war and disease that kept the population below the carrying capacity of the land. It didn’t take long for our brainy ancestors to control or kill most of our erstwhile predators, but man preys on man. This is not an optimistic view of our species, but it comports well with the facts. Fortunately, people respond to challenges and especially to challenges perceived as threats. What is more challenging or threatening than war? In many ways our civilized institutions are responses to the endemic conflicts of our ancestors. War is the father of us all.
Alex and I went to see Victor Davis Hanson speak at the Smithsonian last week. He was one of the most engaging speakers I have ever seen. He was also very un-PC, as you can infer from the ideas up top that I took from the talk. He is one of the few historians that still characterizes himself as a military historian. Hanson points out that military history is extraordinarily popular. If you go to any bookstore, you see that a very part of the history section consists of accounts of wars and biographies of war leaders. Series like “the Civil War,” “Band of Brothers” or “the Pacific” win big audiences. But being popular with people in general and being accepted in academic history circles are different and often mutually exclusive things. I wrote about that before here, here, here and here.
Today people prefer to study peace, assuming that war is some kind of aberration and that peace is the natural human state. History does not back this up. As I mentioned above, our ancestors lived in a constant state of unrelenting war. Most of us personally live much more peaceful lives, but we live in a world that is still always at war somewhere. The ancient Greeks, Hanson says, recognized the ubiquity of war and didn’t give it much of a second thought. We can avoid some wars if we recognize what the Greeks knew and address the causes of war. So what are the causes of war? Hanson disagrees that they are primarily economic, although economics is a necessary part of most wars, it is not sufficient. Modern states do not have to conquer others to enjoy their resources. Albert Speer warned Hitler about invading the Soviet Union. He pointed out that as an ally Stalin was already supplying the Nazis with all the Soviet raw materials that they could expect to get by conquest and that he was doing it at a significantly lower price than the Germans would have to pay if they did it themselves. Speer was right and the Germans were never able to get as many resources from the Soviet Union after the invasion as they easily got before. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union for ideological or “honor” reasons. Economically, everybody knew it was a loser.
The same goes for our “war for oil” in Iraq. It makes absolutely no sense to view the conflict in these economic terms. Saddam Hussein was willing – even eager – to sell all the oil he could and he did it at a discount. After the war, we do not get more oil from Iraq and we did not take over any oil fields. If it was a war for oil, we forgot to pick up the prize. Some people might wish it was indeed a war for oil, because it is was we would have the oil. But we don’t. War is caused by a combination of many factors, such as fear, greed, honor and ambition. But these things are kept in check by deterrence of the power of others. Hanson says wars break out when there is a decline in the perception of deterrence. Put simply, people don’t go to war unless they think they have a reasonable chance of winning. It doesn’t mean that their perception is accurate or that they define winning in the same sense that we do, but war is not a random act and it is almost never the result of the oppressed just rising up, so we cannot solve the conflict by attacking the “root causes” if we find them in oppression and injustice.
Conflicts also require fuel. Consider the case of the Palestinians and the Israelis. This conflict has been going on since the 1940s (and before). The ostensible cause is that Palestinians were dispossessed of their land and they remain aggrieved. We take it for granted, but it is not the whole truth. In the late 1940s lots of people lost their ancestral lands. Around 15 million Germans were kicked out of places their ancestors had lived for centuries. The same happened to Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians … the list goes on and on. Among the peoples dispossessed in the 1940s, the Palestinians were a fairly small group and not poorly treated in relation to the other examples. In fact, much more recently ancient Jewish & Christian communities were driven out of homes in Arab countries, where their ancestors had lived a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs or Islam. Why is it that after all these years only the Palestinian problem remains an open wound? Why doesn’t the Silesian liberation organization highjack airplanes? Where is the Galician liberation army? The simple answer is that they had nobody to bankroll their misery and encourage them to continue the fight. They were also allowed to resettle. Other Arab countries could have solved the Palestinian problem years ago by simply doing what Poland, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, Finland and many others did with refugees associated with their countries. Why they didn’t can be explained by their perceptions of deterrence and their long-term perception of the chances of achieving their goals through conflict.
Anyway, both Alex and I enjoyed the talk. It gave us something to think about. One of the things l like best about Washington is the many opportunities we have to go to these sorts of things.
BTW – The picture up top is the Smithsonian castle looking NE on June 30 at around 6pm. It is what Alex and I saw as we headed for the lecture.
Brazilian television had a report about their parks and how they are poorly maintained. It was a good PR for the U.S. The headline says “[Brazilian] parks are abandoned.” The subhead makes the comparison that “Preservation of the national heritage in the USA is a tradition that goes back to the 18th Century.” They praised our park system and said that it would be good if the Brazilian parks became more like ours.
The American National Park system is the oldest and the best in the world. We sometimes take our parks and national forests for granted until we think about it or compare it with others.
One of my goals when I get to Brazil is to visit their national parks. I have already been to three of them: Iguacu falls, Aparados da Serra & Lagoa do Peixe. But that was before I took decent pictures or wrote up my experience. Anyway, there are thirty-two national parks in Brazil. That shouldn’t be impossible to see all of them in three years, but some are very remote. (I have to admit that I have not visited all, or even most, of our parks in America. Of course, we have more of them. That may be something to do when I retire. You can even get a special old folks’ pass.)
I think that I may perform a useful service if I visit Brazilian parks and do a reasonably good job of documenting the visit. There just is not a lot of good information available about some of them, especially in English. A big problem for the Brazilian parks is money. They evidently have a kind of moral dilemma about charging for admission and letting private profit-making firms have concessions within the parks. Some people think this is a task government should do. But, since it is clear that the government cannot or will not support the maintenance of the parks and the infrastructure to support visitors, Brazilians are looking for other models. Despite the fact that we also complain about lack of money, the American mixed system works.
One of the persons interviewed said that the only thing worse than charging admission and letting private concessions make money at the parks is not doing that and letting the parks decay and go unused by the people. The Brazilian model for making the parks work is the Foz da Iguacu. This is one of the biggest waterfall in the world (maybe the biggest, depending on how you measure), so it starts off with many advantages for attracting tourists. (You can see how pretty it is from the picture up top) At this park they charge admission and have granted concessions to hotels, helicopter tour operators etc. As a result, it is a nice place to visit and a model for others.
Chrissy & I visited the falls back in 1987. As I recall, the infrastructure was okay, but not great. Like so many other things in Brazil, it seems that they really have come a long way. My memory of the time is hazy. I wasn’t there very long. I was coming down from Brasilia and got stuck in Curitiba airport for a long time, so Chrissy got there first and saw more of the place. I remember best a little trivia. More water flows over these falls than over any other in the world, but it is not really one falls, more a series. The year-around warm weather, wet conditions and constant spray makes the area around the falls is a paradise for frogs. But the swift water isolates frog populations on islands and peninsulas, so that many species and sub-species have developed. If you are interested in frogs, this is the place to be. For the herpetologist the impressive waterfalls are just a bonus.
My grandfather was an immigrant who came to this country w/o particular skills. Back in those days there were lots of jobs that didn’t require skills and his education was about the same as that of the average American at the time. Today we can still use immigrants, but maybe not those uneducated masses like grandpa.
We should allow MORE legal immigrants,but we should choose the types of people we want and need. Literally millions of smart & skilled people would bring their skills here within days if we would let them. There is no shortage of applicants. WE should choose who gets to come to our country. Sorry, grandpa. Today you need at least a HS education or comparable tech background and you need to speak English if you want to make yourself useful.
People say that we need somebody to do the dirty work that we don’t want to do. This is only partly true. We still need some temporary farm workers, given the seasonality of that work. But there is no reason why these guys cannot go home at the end of the season. If we had a system that allowed them to come when needed and then come back again, I think many would indeed choose to do just that. Besides that, cheap labor is a mixed blessing.
Cheap unskilled labor creates its own demand. We employ lots of people doing crap jobs like blowing leaves because they work cheap. If we didn’t have cheap labor, we wouldn’t bother doing many of these jobs or we would use machines to do them. Cheap labor makes it less profitable to invest in new technologies to replace labor. We “need” cheap immigrant labor because we have cheap labor. Many jobs could be restructured or replaced by machines if we had to pay more for workers. It is a fairly simple equation.
I used to load cement bags. They had a dozen of us piling bags on pallets. Now they have one guy with a machine. We used to work twelve hour days; this guy doesn’t even come in to work every day. They don’t even use the bags at all most of the time. Now they just load cement directly. Dozens of dirty jobs have been eliminated by redesign. Some smart guy’s ideas replaced our many dirty and blistered hands. But if labor had been really cheap, nobody would have bothered doing that. Cheap labor retards development in anything but they very short run.
The fact is that you don’t get prosperous by hard work and there is nothing virtuous about working hard at low productivity. That is just for people who don’t know any better or are doing it for the exercise. People in the past worked physically harder than we do now and people in many poor countries still do but none of us wants to trade places with them. The key to prosperity is managing the connections, understanding the exchanges and working smarter. That is why we pay so little for unskilled labor. It is not worth very much. Knowing what to do and how to do it better is almost always worth more than actually performing the task. Brains won the battle with brawn long ago, even if some still ain’t heard the word.
Some jobs cannot be automated, but many of those jobs now done by immigrants used to be done by American teenagers or college students and could be again. I worked at McDonald’s, Burger King and several Italian restaurants whose names I cannot recall when I was in HS and college. My kids had trouble finding work at fast food places because they were competing with immigrants who would work almost full time. I say almost full time because employers are very careful not to let them work 40 hours where they would get benefits. Employers prefer immigrants to American young people because they are more reliable and easier to exploit. These are not indispensable reasons and may not even be good ones.
I don’t want my country to be competitive in low-wage industries, so I prefer not to import low-wage workers. I like the guys who come to America and open businesses, make software or do some things that create wealth. Immigrants account for about a third of the tech workforce in Silicon Valley. These guys make the big bucks and they create jobs in America. Good. Let’s have more of them and fewer of the cheap ones.
Give President Obama credit for improving the U.S. image in Latin America. Approval of the U.S. went from 68% in 2000 to 74% last year, according to a Latinobarómetro poll released yesterday. The news is even better when you look closer. Younger people have a better opinion of the United States than the old guys. While 74% of the region’s overall population has a positive opinion of the United States, only 55% of respondents who were more than 60 of the over sixty set agreed.
Compared with other countries, the U.S. does well at 74%. Spain gets only 65%; the European Union 63%; China 58% and little Cuba 41%. Despite (maybe because of) all his yelping, only 34% of respondents in Latin America think Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is playing a constructive role (only 25% of Brazilians think so) & even in Venezuela the U.S. gets a 64% positive rating.
