Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

I vaguely recall that in one of Terry Pratchett’s books there is a quote along the lines of “he liked the idea of democracy until he considered the other people who would be voting.” No doubt other people have said similar things. Democracy always has the chance of devolving into mobocracy. The U.S. has a notoriously low percentage of people who actually vote; is that actually a good thing? Is it better when only interested people vote?

One natural fear about democracy is that it turns into a tyranny of the majority. The canonical example here would be the death of Socrates. Fortunately, in the U.S. this doesn’t seem to be the biggest problem, due at least in part to the Bill of Rights and the independent judiciary (in some places the first level of judges are elected, but there are higher levels which are appointed).

The problem in the U.S. seems to be more the capture by special interests. In a system like the U.S., the people who care a great deal about an issue can often get it passed because nobody exerts themselves to oppose it. I think this tends to lead to government by crisis. When there is some long-range problem, a relatively small group of people can delay action until the problem reaches crisis proportions. It’s difficult for a democracy to have a sensible long-term approach to problems. At least, that is true in a strong executive system like the U.S.; it is less true in a parliamentary system, in which parties must stake out clear positions.

Fewer people voting encourages capture by special interests and discourages tyranny of the majority. Capture by special interests discourages people from voting, as ti seems to have little effect. The special interests discourage people from voting, since it gives them a freer hand. Perhaps that is in part why the U.S. runs the way it does.

Of course, my forward-looking issue is your hobby-horse and their special interest. We all have our own.

I read an interesting article about Montenegro, a country which I know nothing about. Montenegro only recently became an independent country, after an election in 2006. (This was not the first time Montenegro was independent, but until the election it was joined with the much larger country of Serbia). The point of the article was that approach used by the supporters of Montenegrin independence. Polls in the early 2000s showed only weak support for independence. The EU decided, seemingly arbitrarily, that independence would only occur if 55% of the population voted for it.

The supporters apparently reached their goal by acting as though it was inevitable. Years before the election they started acting as though Montenegro was a separate country, declaring their own economic policy, negotiating agreements with other countries, and so forth. They created a flag and picked an official anthem. The effect of these actions was to make independence seem natural. Thus by the time of the actual vote, voting for independence seemed natural. The vote was still close—they barely got the 55% they needed—but it did pass.

More interestingly, this is not the first time this has happened in Montenegro. Montenegro started out as, essentially, four small districts more or less in the middle of the current country, hundreds of years ago. For whatever reason, those districts decided to create the trappings of a government. They proceeded to make treaties with other countries, and started to aggregate the surrounding districts. Eventually, over a couple of hundred years, they grew to the country’s current size. By acting as a real country, they were able to become a real country. This was mostly within the Ottoman Empire, although they managed to negotiate some independence within the empire. Later they became fully independent, in 1878, before a series of political shifts eventually left them as part of Yugoslavia and then Serbia.

I’m sure I have some of the details wrong. But the idea I find interesting is this notion of acting as though what you want to happen will inevitably happen. This is quite different from going around arguing that it should happen. It is an argument by action; people will tend to go along with you just because it’s easier. Your goal will seem increasingly natural, and will eventually be achieved. Of course, you can’t ignore what other people are telling you, and indeed you must adapt it. Still, you assume that your goals will win out in the end.

This will work best when you care much more about what you want than other people care about stopping you. In general that is of course always a good position in which to get things done. But I like the approach. It seems much gentler than constant argument, while still achieving your goals.

It’s nice to see the Bush administration doing another quick flyby of Israel and Palestine. Getting them to agree to end the conflict, and getting the rest of the Middle East to feel that the Palestinians were treated fairly, would make us far safer than even the best possible invasion of Iraq could ever have done. Unfortunately, it is fairly likely that this will be like the earlier Bush administrations flybys, and be forgotten in a few months.

In his book “Dark Hope,” David Shulman describes an unbelievable scene of an Israeli settler poisoning Palestinian sheep and goats. The goal was to force the Palestinians to move from their homes, continuing the long process of displacement and separation that has happened since the 1967 war. There will never be peace as long as Israel continues to permit the settlements to exist, and continues to support them by protecting their roads across Palestinian territory. That is obvious.

Similarly, it is obvious that there will never be peace as long as Palestinians carry bombs into Israel or launch missiles at Israel.

If only we could just get out and leave them alone to fight over their desert.

I really think that there will never be peace until the Palestinians are prepared to use determined nonviolent resistance. I don’t see how anything else can work. Even though everybody understands exactly what a final settlement will look like, none of the leaders can get there from here. A nonviolent resistance would force the Israelis to move forward. Violent resistance forces them to move away from any peaceful settlement. No resistance retains the status quo.

If that doesn’t happen, the general form of the future seems to be shaped by a simple fact: most Israelis can leave; most Palestinians can not. Therefore, conflict will continue, Palestinians will continue to attack, there will eventually be Israeli massacres of Palestinians (in all conflicts to date far more Palestinians have died through accidental shootings than Israelis have died through terrorist bombings), the Israeli moderates will leave, both sides will become more fanatical. Eventually somebody carries an atomic bomb into Tel Aviv, and Israeli forces kill or deport all the Palestinians. It’s very hard to be hopeful. We need Nelson Mandela, but nobody over there is even close. Or even trying to be.

I did think of one idea. The U.S. should go into the Palestinian territories and offer $1 million to anybody who can prove their ownership of land now inside Israel, in exchange for the deed and a videotape in which they abandon their claim. There would be plenty of forgeries, but that’s OK; it would only have to be done once, and it would be comparable to the billions of dollars that the U.S. gives to Israel very year. If this were done well, it could defuse one of the sticking points of any agreement: the issue of Palestinian’s right of return to their ancestral homes. Unfortunately, the chances of this happening are zero.

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.