Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

In an article in the New York Review of Books about the transcript of the conversation between President Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Aznar before the Iraq war, Mark Danner writes a comment that I found interesting:

Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post–September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler, brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official power.

This really struck a chord with me, because it neatly encapsulates my feeling about what the Bush administration is trying to do. The administration seems to try to make statements true by repeating them. When that eventually fails, they don’t apologize, or admit that they said anything wrong. They simply stop talking about it. Thus we heard again and again that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague, or that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Nigeria. And then we didn’t hear anything about those facts, or former facts, at all. George Tenet got the Medal of Freedom even though by any sane standard he failed horribly; anybody can fail, and Tenet didn’t have to be punished, but he certainly didn’t deserve the highest civilian award granted by the U.S. government. What was that all about?

Bill Clinton had a rather casual relationship with the truth, but at least he was eventually able to admit it when he got something wrong. George W. Bush doesn’t seem to have that ability. That is very strange to me, and it leads to that strange sense of dislocation described by Danner’s quote above.

I find it very worrying that Hilary Clinton also seems to find it difficult to admit when she got something wrong. Obviously I’m thinking of her vote for the Iraq war, or as far as I know she hasn’t really admitted that her 1993 health care plan was a complicated debacle even before the health care industry trashed it. Though things can change fast, at the moment Hilary seems to be the person to beat to become our next president. Can we really handle another four or eight years of dislocation? Or will she make more sense when she no longer has to run for office?

When the war in Iraq was under discussion, but before it started, a friend of mine said: if you’re worried about a country which has WMDs and which supports Al Qaeda, looking at Iraq doesn’t make any sense at all. Look at Pakistan. They’ve already got the bomb. They helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan. They may be sheltering bin Laden–even at that time the common speculation was that bin Laden had crossed the border to Pakistan (of course, the term “border” is a complete misnomer for the unmarked unpatrolled line on the map which separates Afghanistan and Pakistan’s so-called “tribal areas”).

The only thing Pakistan had going for it at the time was that its local dictator, Musharraf, swore eternal allegiance to the U.S. Since then, nothing has changed. They still have the bomb (and we now know they were selling the technology to other countries). They still support the Taliban (at least, the well-funded and well-armed security service does). The general consensus is that bin Laden is happily living somewhere in the tribal areas (of course this could turn out to be wrong, but I know of no reason to think that it is).

Now Musharraf is showing his dictatorial colors even more clearly, not that they were at all hidden before. How long will we continue to support him? What will we do when he inevitably falls? We’ve got most of our military tied up in Iraq. If a radical Islamist government takes over in Pakistan, they could be a much bigger threat to the U.S. than Iraq could ever have been. Besides all the other reasons that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, it was a terrible worst case analysis.

That said, there is no reason to think that there will be a radical Islamist government in Pakistan. There is a solid bloc of Pakistanis who would be strongly opposed to it. But ensuring some kind of control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should have the highest priority for the U.S. The current Pakistani government does not want radical Islamists to get ahold of them. We should take advantage of that to work toward better control.

Let’s not forget that South Africa actually destroyed their nuclear weapons when it became clear that their government was going to change. So there is a precedent for that, although unfortunately not one that Pakistan is likely to follow.

Blog Action Day is asking blog authors to write about the environment. Since I’m a fan of communal action, it seems appropriate for me to participate, even though I have no idea what good it might do.

This is hardly an original observation, but surely the strangest thing about the environment today is that it has become a partisan political issue. It’s not like the political parties fall naturally on either side of the environmental position (as they do in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Memory of Whiteness” which had Red Mars and Green Mars political parties, later reprised in his Martian trilogy). For some reason Democrats have become associated with environmental support, and Republicans have become associated with its absence. This makes no sense.

Only a fool would argue that environmental degradation can not occur, when we so many historical examples. While I suppose it’s possible to argue in a principled manner that environmental degradation does not matter, I hold no brief for that position. Our children deserve to live in a world at least as good as ours, and that means one with a livable environment. In any case, few people actually make that argument, except perhaps the Christian millenialists (as in James Watt’s comment “I do not know how many future generations we can count of before the Lord returns.”)

One can of course validly discuss whether environmental degradation is happening today, and one can validly discuss what to do about it. I think the first question has been long settled. The only people who still claim that the Earth is not warming up, or that human activity has nothing to do with it, simply aren’t paying attention.

What to do about it is much less clear. But there is one argument which absolutely does not hold water: the claim that it would be too expensive to do anything about it. That is a complete misunderstanding of how a modern economy works. Money spent on improving the environment is not money buried in holes; it is money spent on productive activity, money which employs people and spurs investment. It is certainly true that spending money to improve the environment would cause money to stop going to some people and start going to some other people. But that happens all the time as the economy and technology changes.

So why are Republicans opposed to working to improve the environment? I really and truly don’t know. One could argue that it is because they are being sponsored by the people who have money now, and therefore might stand to lose it; however, the truth is, the same is true of the Democrats.

We may have to solve this mystery before we are able to do anything effective to help the environment.

By the way, I should add that I’ve seen the argument that we are destroying the planet. That of course is not true. But we are in the process of destroying the habitats of literally billions of people. Those people aren’t going to quietly accept it, which means that we are heading toward massive warfare. Let’s try to avoid that if possible.

I’m sure that many people have noticed that the stories about the presidential election race (the actual election is, of course, more than a year away) are handicapping the candidates by the amount of money they raise. Candidates who raise more money are doing better. The Democrats are beating the Republicans because they are raising more money. The candidates send out pleas for money saying “let’s show them we’re the best! give us all your money!”

Presumably the money all gets spent on television advertising. And I suppose some of it gets spent on salaries. It seems like this is basically a transfer of funds from the involved electorate to the television stations and political consultants.

It seems that the candidate who raises the most money does usually win. But there is at least some element of correlation rather than causation there: the candidate who raises the most money does tend to be most popular.

Spending all that money on political candidates is a colossal waste of time and money. It’s not good for democracy either, as it tips the scales toward the wealthier donors who are more able to afford donations.

We need to somehow make campaigns shorter and much less expensive. Requiring television stations to donate time to all candidates, with some fixed compensation from the government, would be a good start. Much stricter campaign finance laws are a necessity; since the Supreme Court consistently strikes these down on first amendment grounds, we may need a constitutional amendment. An amendment is obviously insanely heavyweight, but what else can we do? We have to break the cycle somehow.

In the meantime, I personally am declaring a moratorium on donating money to any political candidate. I encourage everybody to join me. Give the candidate of your choice your time, your proselytizing, and your vote. Just don’t give them your money. This is not a left-right partisan issue. It’s a democracy issue.

In one of the more peculiar recent news stories, the Chinese government is setting the procedure for Tibetan Buddhist monks to reincarnate. The background for this is of course a forward looking attempt by the Chinese government to silence the future Dalai Lama. The Chinese government is presumably trying to avoid the confusion over the Panchen Lama. Historically, the Dalai Lama has chosen the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, and vice-versa. However, when the last Panchen Lama died, in 1989, the Chinese government overrode the choice of the Dalai Lama, selected their own Panchen Lama, and have actually hidden the Dalai Lama’s choice. By setting the conditions under which the Dalai Lama can reincarnate, they are trying to prevent his reincarnation from being somewhere outside of their control. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, has suggested that he will certainly not reincarnate in Tibet, and that he may not reincarnate at all.

The idea of this kind of governmental control over religion is interesting. It’s difficult to imagine anything like that happening in the U.S. today. We tend to feel that government and religion are separate spheres. President George W. Bush often publically alludes to his religious faith, and indeed a key part of his life story is his conversion to seriousness after a discussion with Billy Graham (the conversion story is such an obvious version of Shakespeare’s Henry V that it’s difficult to take seriously, but it could have happened that way, and in any case the old stories are the good ones). However, we would definitely look askance if the president started laying down the rules for a church.

Still, similar issues of government vs. religion arose in the past in Europe: kings often tried to control the pope. One of the effects of this in Europe was to make the pope a political figure, which led more or less directly to the Reformation. The religious wars of the Reformation were arguably a significant cause of the great decrease in religious belief during the Enlightenment. Obviously many other factors were involved. But I think it is supportable to say that the influence of politics on religious figures had the effect over time of decreasing the power of religion.

If that is the case, then the Chinese government is making a rational move: by politicizing the Tibetan religious heirarchy, they are weakening it. Of course, in Tibet the religion and the government were more or less the same, so the main religious figures were already political. But now the Chinese government is trying to bring them even more strongly into a separate, non-religious, sphere.

China is hoping that by weakening the Dalai Lama they will weaken Tibet’s claims to independence. However, this may back fire. The Dalai Lama, while strongly resisting Chinese control, has been a generally calming force. Removing his influence may lead to a resurgence of more secular nationalism in Tibet. As the last century showed, nationalism can be just as potent a force as religion, and it often lacks the veneer of moral guidance.