Why Containment can't work in the future the way it worked in the Cold War

Many today suggest that Iraq and North Korea can be contained the way the Soviets were. These people are not physicists. Attempt this simple problem. Imagine a world in which there are two centers of gravity and determine the results. A strait forward Newtonian problem. These centers of gravity, (aka masses) will attract one another with a force equal to the sum of their masses divided by the square of the distance. Easy enough to predict. And where we can predict, we can fashion a managable policy. Now introduce a third object. This is the three-body problem. It took over a century of familiarity with Newton's Theory of Gravity to work out the math for a three body problem. Prediction is much, much harder. Nixon, being a very smart man, was able to do the calculus and go to China. Today proliferation is rampant. The number of countries who have nuclear weapons and act independently has grown considerably. The calculus gets harder and harder to make. It was challenging enough to face off against the Soviet Union when there were just two power blocs. States like Iraq and North Korea are wild cards. Containment would force us into keeping them on the page of every action we took. Just like our whole foriegn policy took the Soviets into account, in many ways perverting our foreign policy (imagine Vietnam without the context of opposing Communism), our foriegn policy would be contorted by the need to maintain containment. We might very well find ourselves in bed with terrible dictators for the sole reason that they are on our side in the question of Iraq or North Korea. We already find ourselves in that sandbox with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but those are temporary situations. Fixing the problems of Iraq and North Korea permenantly will allow us to pursue the policy we want to pursue, rather than containing ourselves in order to contain the nuclear rogue states.

Why Iraq is a bigger deal than North Korea

War is political. To pursue war just because Korea has powerful weapons is to pursue a policy for military purposes. North Korea is probabaly the second biggest deal for American foriegn policy. Here's why. Because war is a political act, we need to keep in mind the implications on the war for the broader world. Standing up to a Stalinist dictator and disarming him will put the fear of America in the hearts of all Stalinist dictators. That's not a large club. Standing up to an Arab dictator and disarming him will show the Arab world that we cannot be opposed with impunity. Some people fear that the United States will become an empire. The fact is, America became an Empire circa 1945. As such, peoples around the world assume we are heavy handed. That's why when we defend Muslims (Lebanon, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Afghanistan again, Somolia, &c) we get no credit or lasting gratitude. Its why people around the world fear our power and its use, including Europeans. Hence, the best we can hope to do is to appear as a benevolent empire. (An alternative will be considered and rejected below.) But we certainly must appear powerful, or those who oppose us for reasons rational and irrational will feel bold enough to act. Acting in Iraq has a greater audience than acting in North Korea does. Its political potential is vastly greater both in negative and positive terms. By negative, I mean our enemies will fear our power, and by positive, I mean that establishing free societies with democracy and capitalism will be a reward to those who desire to be like us. We should not under-estimate those who want to live under self-determination, politically and economically. They are a huge source of potential good will, mostly when they depend on our power or have very recently benifited from it. Hence, Iraq is the bigger deal.

Timing

Admitedly, Iraq does not pose the kind of time table as North Korea does, at least not in terms of nuclear weapons, which are the only WMD that matter. But we need time to build a coalition against North Korea, and we can't sound bellicose there until we know what China is thinking and doing. Working to get Japan, South Korea, and China on board with a policy of North Korean disarmament is essential. Look for building momentum here despite action in Iraq. The faster we wrap things up in Iraq the easier it is to move non-routine assets to East Asia. We already have substantial forces in South Korea and Okinawa, and frankly, this what they are there for.

An Alternative

I said I would mention an alternative, but I'm also going to reject it. We could go the Carter route and just disarm and be like Europe. But that means we have reverted to our 19th century selves. We hope that things work our well n the world and if they don't we are powerless to do anything. Things could get seriously out of hand in the world before decide its neccesary to re-arm and get involved. Despite the experience of WWI, it took the bombing of Pearl Harbor to get involved in WWII. The fact that Hitler had most of Europe was not going to get us into the world, despite the fact that imagining a Nazi victory in Europe is a very unhappy thing to contemplate. Any yet we would have to contemplate it as a matter of routine, if we disarmed as the esteemed Nobel winning president suggests. In effect, by disarming we would deflect hostility and aggression from ourselves to the poorer nations of the world. This is, in fact some of its appeal to the parochial. The costs to us would be higher in the long run. I also have to ask what kind of moral act is it to sluff this kind of aggression off on those less capable of dealing with it. It may be a price for us to pay, getting inbetween combatants all over the world, but since we are far more able to bear it (17 dead now in Afghanistan) than others, it would be terribly selfish and short-sighted to withdraw ourselves to our own shores and forget about the world as we were better able to do in the 19th century when Britain occupied the role of keeper of the peace.

Snow

It snowed here, as it did many other places. My brother parked in a ditch.

The Woes of a Balanced State Budget

Today the Times continues reporting on the state of Oregon's reduction of the school year as a cost saving measure. Could there be a more shortsighted measure? (Rationing out nuclear waste to every American to burry in their backyard to save the costs of Yacca Mountain?) That's about 8% of the school year. Hopfully this will mean an end to "free days", movies that are shown as a reward, and other time-wasting elements which fill up so much of the school day. Otherwise its an 8% cut in the amount of education children recieve, at least in bad budget years. Those familiar with compound interest can see where this goes after a couple of years. Already we graduate too many high school students with 8th grade educations. This is moving the trend in the absolute wrong direction. And all for the sake of a cast savings, as though we are too poor as a people to educate our youth.

The problem is twofold. One the one hand, the American public wants our children educated on the cheap. We want to optimize educational spending, getting the biggest bang for our buck, rather than working our way up the return on investment curve to someplace where tomorrow's workers will get the eduaction they will need to be competative. On the other hand we have states governed by 19th century ideas of budgeting. Our states are pre-Kensyian. They apply budgeting principles that Herbert Hoover thought too inflexible. I can understand we don't want states treating debt the way the Federal brach does, but there must be some intermediate possition between perpetual deficits and devestaing budget cuts.

Why Testing Doesn't Work

Today's New York Times has an article on how the increase in high stakes testing has actually decreased learning. There is truth in the article, specifically this paragraph:

"Teachers are focusing so intently on the high-stakes tests that they are neglecting other things that are ultimately more
important," said Audrey Amrein, the study's lead author, who says she supported high-stakes tests before conducting her
research. "In theory, high-stakes tests should work, because they advance the notions of high standards and accountability.
But students are being trained so narrowly because of it, they are having a hard time branching out and understanding
general problem-solving."

Unfortunatly, the final paragraph reinforces the false notion that the problem is in the testing and not in the teaching. The pose the question; '"Should we just make better tests," asked Anthony G. Rud Jr., associate professor of education at Purdue University, or "is there something fundamentally wrong with testing in this matter?"' Unfortunatly for the Times, the answer is neither. Teachers are not, as a group, the best and the brightest minds out there. The pool of teachers is typically drawn from the bottom half of college graduates. The exceptions stand out in the minds of their students and in their impact on the school.

Someone once observed that American managerial theory is the most advanced and progressive in the world and our actual practice is among the most regressive and primitive in the world. I think the same can probabaly be said for teaching. Bloom's Taxonomy tells us that factual knowledge is the lowest form of thinking. Most teachers seem to wander aimlessly in the desert of facts without ever asking students to do something with them. Facts isolated from context, from meaning, from connection to other facts amounts to trivia. I have seen a good deal of trivia taught in the schools. When considering Abraham Lincoln, students are often expected to know facts about him. When was he elected. This is only useful if it is meaningfully connected to other events. Teachers must provide and then evaluate based on analysis of facts, synthesis of facts, and evaluation of facts. Students who can analyze, synthesize, and evaluate will do well on any test. Teachers who only teach knowledge of facts end up wasting valuable classroom time teaching to the test. State testing boards have taken considerable efforts to make this difficult. So, teachers must spend a great deal of time doing it. Rather than teaching students, something they never did well to begin with, they are spending time attempting to goose their test scores. That, dear reader, is what does not work. Rather than questioning the tests themselves, the Times should be informing its readers that the teachers' responce to these tests is dysfunctional. Then the public has before them a useful choice: keep the higher standards and get teachers who can reach them, or keep the teachers we have and save money at the expence of the next generation.

Remeber, its a global economy. Demand for labor will flow to the place where it is done most cheaply. For Americans to compete in subsequent generations, we must have skills unavailable where labor is cheap. Where are the Russians to launch another Sputnik when you need them?

Innocents Abroad suggests that neoconservatives have won, and that even bothering to take notice of paleo and traditional conservatives gives them undue influence. This strikes me as a bit triumphalist. Certainly the likes of Novak and Buchanan have already waned, but listening to talk radio and to talk in middle America, I rather think that alternative forms of conservatism still carry considerable weight. Where neoconservatives may well be dominant is in internet and print media.

Its certainly true that many young neocons have't experienced a realignment that sent them from left to right. In that sense, certainly, they have always been conservative. But, they still value liberal goals, tend to be progressive, and value ideas in a way that can't be taken for granted among other conservatives. In many ways, a neocon is someone who accepts the liberal vision of society, but prefers that it be achived by individuals and markets, rather than by central planning. It is essential that neocons take a leadership role in the Republican party, perhaps the leadership role, but neocons are far from the only voice in the game.

The strength of the peace movement is dependent on the outcomes of the wars in living memory. In broad terms, the movement was strong prior to the Great War, and declined as the First and Second World Wars demonstrated the fallacies of the peace movement. By 1945, there was no meaningful peace movement. The closest you can come in the 1948 election (a significant election to say the least) is the Wallace candidacy. As a war secretary at Commerce, Henry Wallace was hardly a peace-at-any-price figure, but he did hold to a vision of WWII as a war to usher in a left-liberal world order. Wallace got 2.4% of the vote, 13,000 fewer voters than Strom Thurmond. For nearly twenty years the peace movement was discredited and meaningless. Vietnam changed that. The problem with Vietnam as a cause for intervention was made by Eisenhower, who refused to get involved on several occasions. That a movement would rise up against a ten year war was absolutly inevitable. It was a mistake of the peace movement to generalize from the errors of Vietnam to military action in general. Nevertheless, the Vietnam war loomed large in the minds of Americans as the paradigm of war. The peace movement waned as Reagan flexed American muscle, but it was far from dead. The Gulf War of 1991 was able to capture the center of American politics and so isolate the peace movement, but they were there. Today we see the peace movement and all the other usual suspects going through the same paces we saw in 1915. Of course one significant difference is that Main Street isn't supportive. 9/11 was the sinking of the Lusitania, the violation of the Sussex pledge, and the Zimmerman Telegram all rolled into one. Nevertheless, the peace movement ignores a century of lessons and makes essentially the same arguments that they made prior to the Great War.

Certainly its possible to argue against specific military actions without making the unsupportable mistake of peace at any price. What is most interesting is the fact that the Democrats would cling to the peace movement as its guide to foriegn relations rather than attempting to redefine Bush's proposed Iraq war in terms more compatible with their vision of the world order. One can only conclude they have no conception of the world order, and the only members of their constituancy that does is the peace movement. Of course, the American electorate repudiated that. The significant thing to note about the 02 election was not that the Republicans picked up seats during the midterm elections while occupying the White House, its that with so many Republican seats in the Senate vulnerable, it was the Republicans who gained seats. The President will do a much better job in Iraq if the Democrats can credibly hold his feet to the fire. If they cling to a peace at any price they will have no influence on the war and its aftermath.