Mark Twain is Still Right

I don't repost items too often. But this one seems worth it. I posted a longer version of this over a year ago, and I think the questions have become more urgent since then.


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Why Are We There? When Can We Leave?


I'd like to share with you Mark Twain's thoughts on the Iraq war:

You ask me about what is called imperialism. Well, I have formed views about that question..... There is the case of Iraq. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess.... We were to relieve them from Hussein's tyranny, to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Iraqis, a government according to Iraqi ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.

Okay, obviously Mark Twain didn't say that about America's occupation of Iraq. But he did say it--with the nations' names changed of course--about America's occupation of the Philippines, a nation that which came under US control in 1898 as part of the terms the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War (the Philippines had long been Spanish colonies). We promised the Filipinos that we were freeing them from oppressive monarchic and colonial rule, but they decided they'd rather free themselves. In 1899, the Filipinos declared independence. We fought their independence movement until 1913, and we won. The islands didn't leave American control until WW II (when Japan occupied them) and didn't get independence until 1946. (We got Puerto Rico and Guam in the same treaty and kept 'em.)

I'm fascinated that Twain's sense of the problems of the problem with America's occupation of the Philippines in 1900 applies so well to America's occupation of Iraq in 2006. And I don't think it's a fluke. I think it tells us something about the dangers of pursuing a foreign policy based on military force.

Worse, a closer analog to Iraq than the Philippines is another island nation that fell under our control after the Spanish-American War: Cuba. We got Cuba in the same treaty that we got the Philippines. President McKinley was pleased to have Cuba under his control, and he declared that America would have a twenty-year trusteeship over it. Pres. Roosevelt was more sympathetic to Cuban desires for independence, so he granted independence in 1902. But that independence had a big catch. Not only did the conditions of independence require that Cuba lease of Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity, they also granted--explicitly in the Cuban constitution--the US the right to intervene in Cuba's domestic affairs when it saw fit.

In 1906, the US exercised that right when it wasn't satisfied that Cuba's fragile (and elitist) government would survive the death of Pres. Estrada Palmer. The US was directly and indirectly involved with appointing or deposing governments in Cuba until 1944.

The factional and racial violence that helped keep Cuba politically unstable over that period seems unnervingly analogous to the regional and ethnic tensions in today's Iraq. Of course, the new Iraqi constitution doesn't allow us the right to intervene at will in Iraqi affairs, but Iraqis' inability to establish a new government, the ongoing guerrilla violence, and our having a hundred and fifty thousand troops on the ground makes that constitution more a piece of paper than a compelling reality.

And I'm afraid that the temptation to intervene militarily in Iraqi politics will be enormously strong for this and future Presidents. We now know that Bush entered this war excited not so much by supposed WMDs as by the neocon aspiration of "regional transformation," of deposing Saddam and putting a democratic, pro-US government in his place. A lot of those people are still in various important positions in the US government and a lot of them will be reluctant to see the US leave Iraq before a strong, pro-US government is in place. The problem is, it seems less likely every day that left to its own devices Iraq will have either a strong government or a pro-US government any time soon, much less both.

And you don't have to be a neocon to be tempted to stay in Iraq until we somehow "get it right." We've lost thousands of soldiers, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, spend hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spend on education, or health care, or a night on the town. People want those lives and that money to mean something. And Iraq is hugely important--as a source of oil, as a check on Iran, as a potential ally. If things go badly there, all that could go down the drain.

It took only a few years for thoughtful people to realize that they couldn't understand why we were in the Philippines or Cuba, but it took the US forty-eight years to get out of the Philippines and forty-six years to get out of Cuba. We've been in Iraq four. When will we get out? When can we get out? And, at least as important, how can we stop getting into these situations?

Soccer and Empire (ABRIDGED VERSION)

So it's been a while since I posted. I'm prepping a big move (Chicago to LA) and doing some research, but the main reason, I confess, is that I've been watching soccer. In many ways, this has served as an excellent distraction from my uncomfortable vacillation between numbness and rage whenever I look at politics in America. But even soccer, it turns out, is a temporary and ultimately unsatisfactory refuge from political rage. This offers up some insights into America's challenges and duties in conducting foreign policy once the current set of incompetent bullies leaves office.

This is now a long post. It used to be a very long post, but I decided that I was trying to make two separate points. So I've relegated one of those points--my defense of the terms "American" and "soccer"--to the comments section. It's a pretty tight bit of arguing, if I do say so myself, but on re-reading it, I will concede that it may appeal only to specialized palates.

THE ALLEGED PROBLEM: "SOCCER" AND "AMERICA"
There's been a lot of soccer involving Americans this summer. Among other events, the MLS is in full swing (I'm not going to name the famous English dude since he's been discussed in one or two other places), the world-beating women's national team has looked good in its World Cup tune-up matches. The men's team won the Gold Cup (the North & Central American championship) by beating Mexico 2-1 in the final. The U-20 men's team just finished its successful run in the U-20 World Cup (along the way, they beat Poland 6-1 and Brazil 2-1). And the US men's team played as an invited guest in the Copa América, South America's championship.

There were some handbags at the end of the U-20 US-Uruguay game (the Uruguayans really hate to lose), but the only real controversy the US stirred up this summer in the soccer world was in the Copa América. In order to round out the field, the South Americans invite two teams. One is the previous Gold Cup champion (the US, this time) and the other is Mexico, whose TV companies and advertisers give the South American organizers a lot of money. After losing to the US at the end of a shaky Gold Cup performance, Mexico played brilliantly throughout much of the Copa, but the US tanked, in large part because we sent our B or C team--promising but inexperienced players in their early 20s--and that team lost all three games by a cumulative score of 2-8.

A lot of South American fans then experienced a quandary: should they resent the US for sending the C team or revel in the US's utter defeat? A good number of them thought it over and decided that they could do both. So the US got ripped both for its "arrogance" in not taking the Copa seriously and for the pathetically low level of its men's soccer. (Of course, the South American fans weren't alone in this. A lot of US soccer fans were furious. They wanted the coach fired. They wanted the president of US Soccer fired. They wanted to kidnap and forcibly nationalize Argentina's attacking players.)

Against the background of these specific complaints about the US's participation in this particular Copa América, there were repetitions of longstanding complaints about the arrogance of American soccer. It's those complaints that I really want to emphasize here because they help crystallize how much rebuilding America's image needs abroad. This administration has been particularly disastrous for our international standing, but a lot of these issues go back decades, even centuries.

Resentment #1: A lot of South Americans (and, more generally, Latin Americans) are pissed that we call ourselves Americans. Resentment #2: A lot of Latin American (and other) soccer fans are pissed that we use the word "soccer" rather than "football." Non-Latin Americans and non-soccer fans would be surprised how common and heartfelt that resentment is, but, trust me, for some people it's very real.

The resentment about "Americans" comes from a sense that, by using that name to refer to ouselves, US citizens are pretending to be the only people who live in the Americas. The offended parties point out that there are two American continents (North and South), at least three American regions (North, Central, and South), and dozens of countries in the Americas. The resentment about "soccer" also involves what many see as unacceptable American exceptionalism: the whole world calls it "football" or some variant, they say, so why does America have to extend its middle finger to the world by inventing the word "soccer"?

Both of these resentments, I think, are misguided and even a little silly. As mentioned above, I provide breathtakingly excellent analysis of that in the comments section. Feel free to read, revel, and repeat. Here, however, I simply push onward because


THE REAL PROBLEM ISN'T THE WORDS
Misplaced though the resentment may be about the terms "America" and "soccer," Americans have a great deal to answer for in much of the Americas, and we forget that at our peril. Most of the anger that gets diverted into these relatively trivial issues of nomenclature has as its real objects bigger and more legitimate grievances.

And those grievances come from the same sort of rage that initially sent me on my soccer-watching binge this summer. One of the people who went after me for saying a version of what I say above said, "What you seem to miss is the fact that we [Latin Americans] perceive your use of America offensive in the context of a rosary of offenses." Another poster appropriately took this fellow to task for claiming to speak for all Latin Americans in the same way that he was taking Americans to task for pretending to be all Americans, but in fairness that sense of grievance is, if not universal, then at least widespread in Latin America. And with good reason. I didn't miss that at all. In fact, I was trying to argue that "that rosary of offenses" isn't always the fair or proper context for understanding American behavior (our soccer fans are some of the most respectful in the world, and for their own sakes people from all over the world would do well to encourage that sort of behavior). But anger over that rosary runs so deep that otherwise thoughtful people can find it impossible to escape.

IMPERIAL BRACKETOLOGY
So what are those offenses? Well, here's a partial history of US involvement in Latin America framed in terms of the Copa América preliminary groupings:

Group A
Bolivia--Not too bad, though we did support General García Menza's short-lived dictatorship.
Uruguay--Until late 1970s, backed the military government that overthrew the legitimate civilian government.
Peru--Not too bad.
Venezuela--Backed coup to overthrow democratically elected Chavez government (which hadn't yet become nearly so authoritarian and which probably is still better for the many, many poor people in that country than the government that it replaced).

Group B
Brazil--Backed brutal military dictatorship in 1970s and 1980s.
Ecuador--Not too bad, actually. Even helped bring peace to a war with Peru in 1942.
Chile--Backed Augusto Pinochet's repressive military dictatorship in 1970s and 1980s. Milton Friedman-inspired neoliberal "Chicago boys" helped wreck the country's economy.
Mexico--Took a huge chunk of its territory (now California and the American southwest) during trumped-up Mexican-American War.

Group C
Argentina--Helped assassinate democratically elected president Salvador Allende and replace him with military dictatorship.
United States--Spent a lot of money supporting these jerks.
Columbia--Financed Panamanian independence movement from Colombia in 1903 so that we could build and control the Panama Canal. Have contributed to country's ongoing civil war in country by financing "war on drugs."
Paraguay--Supported Alfredo Stroessner, the military dictator who ruled Paraguay from 1954-1989.

This doesn't take into consideration other Latin American countries, where in the twentieth century the US supported military dictatorships or oppressive oligarchies (El Salvador), where it actively helped bring about military coups against democratic governments or at least tried to do (Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala), and where it actually invaded some countries for some pretty lame reasons (Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada).

So of course a lot of Latin Americans are predisposed to think the worst of America and to see almost anything as proof of arrogance or imperialist intention.

SO WHAT THE HELL DO WE DO ABOUT IT?
Does that mean we never do anything good in Latin America? Far from it.

Does pointing the finger at the US change the fact that a lot of the dictators we supported in Latin America had plenty of backers at home? Nope.

Does it change the fact that a lot of Latin American leaders, just like a lot of Middle Eastern leaders, frequently combine legitimate US blunders and imperialist interventions with wild exaggerations about the Great Satan in order to distract their citizens from their own crummy records as rulers? Nuh uh.

Does this even mean that we need to stop saying "soccer"? Nah.

But it mean does that we as individuals and we as a country should understand this history when we deal with Latin America. We have not only a perception problem but also, more importantly, a reality problem. We need to act better in Latin America (which as a country may mean acting less) for a long time before many Latin Americans give us credit for doing so.

In Latin America, as in the Middle East, even when we're right, people will suspect us of being wrong. Is that fair? Maybe not, but who cares. It's reality, and this country, we need to start dealing knowledgeably, humbly, and rigorously with reality. We don't have another trillion dollars and 3,000 soldiers' lives to spend on another counterproductive ideological adventure, and we don't have decades more to wait before winning friends and influencing people.

Our wars have been financed by literal debt, and our wars have put us in moral debt. And we need to start paying those debts back, or the interest charges will be too high to meet and our creditors too angry to reason with.