Saturday, December 29, 2007

I'm Not Alone (But I Don't Like the Company)!

The time stamp on yesterday's post indicates that I completed and filed it at 8:09 AM (Pacific Time). This was after John Bolton's appearance on Hannity & Colmes on Thursday. However, because I think the last time I spent more than 60 seconds with Fox News was several years ago in a Tokyo hotel room when I was trying to find any source of "straight news" in English, I did not know about Bolton's opportunity to reflect on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto until I read yesterday's account of it by Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano for The Raw Story. If I read this account properly, then it would appear that Bolton and I are in the same camp when it comes to stray conspiracy theories: this was not (as I put it) a "pathology of contempt" but a "pathology of ignorance."

At this point, however, our ways depart, at least somewhat. From my perspective the ignorance resided in ill-considered actions towards the promotion of democracy in Pakistan (which, in the context of our more "visceral" goals of capturing Osama bin Laden and/or bringing down Al Qaeda, may, itself, have been an ill-considered goal). As Aivaz and Juliano reported, Bolton was concerned with a different context:

Bolton said the primary concern of the US needs to be the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. With Bhutto's death plunging the country into chaos, there is now a "very grave danger" the weapons will fall under control of radical Islamist militants within the Pakistani military.

"What we have now is a prescription for chaos," Bolton said.

Another foreign policy expert told RAW STORY Thursday that the death of the opposition leader likely has caused the so-called atomic "Doomsday Clock" to tick closer to midnight.

This distinction reveals what may be an interesting difference in decision-making strategy that may explain not only the ignorance leading up to the Bhutto tragedy but also Bolton's abrasive tenure at the United Nations, not to mention the more fundamental question of whether or not our "War on Terror" has been either legitimate or effective.

It all goes back to the distinction that Gore Vidal stressed in the wake of 9/11: The only way to view those attacks was a criminal acts. Since we are all reared on the "law" and "order" perspectives of crime prevention by our television viewing habits, we should all remember that the prosecution of a criminal act is grounded on three factors: means, motive, and opportunity. Bolton's reflection on Hannity & Colmes seems to indicate that he believes that any "War on Terror" should be based on "battles over means," so to speak. In terms of Republican ideology, this is slightly ironic, since it comes down to the principles behind gun control, but on a much larger scale that includes nuclear weapons. My own belief, which I have tried to write about in the past but never particularly clearly, is that we can only understand terrorism by viewing it through the lenses of motives: If we can undermine or disable the motives, the threat of those motivated to attack us will be reduced. (It is with a bit of trepidation that I suggest that just about every story about an Al Qaeda video I have seen, particularly those issued by bin Laden himself, are focused primarily on "messages of motive.")

Why is this distinction important? The answer resides in another one of my favorite themes, which I usually discuss when I am writing about technology. One can try to address the problem of means in the "objective world;" but problems of motive reside strictly in the "social world," with all the messiness it entails with regard to communicative actions. At the risk of being too reductive, Bolton came across as so disagreeable at the United Nations because his fixation on the objective world blinded him to all that messiness; and, as a result, his communicative actions just made our social relations in the global community messier. This is not to dismiss the value of an objective perspective (or, for that matter, the importance of means of access to nuclear and other dangerous weapons); it is to dismiss the view that the objective perspective is the only perspective, which seems to be a view that Bolton shares with most of the neoconservative community. Unfortunately, the mess we are now in is, more than anything else, a consequence of "a failure to communicate" (thank you, Paul Newman, not to mention Winston Churchill's remark at the White House on June 26, 1954: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war"); and, if we persist in our dismissive attitude towards the importance of communicative actions, particularly where the social world is concerned, that mess will only get worse.

No comments: