Death spirals

Each year, I try to pick the most important story of that year, the one most likely to affect our immediate future. This year, however, I’ve picked two stories. They seem to have little in common but are strangely inseparable, at least to me. Perhaps it’s because they share the same theme — the death spiral of a monster.

The first story involves the war in Ukraine, which started late last February. It was supposed to be a quick mauling of any Ukrainian forces that resisted the Russian invasion. It was anything but. To understand why, we have to imagine a dictator who is among the greatest fuckups in history, and also one of the cruelest, most impulsive, and most vengeful — Vladimir Putin. If you’re wondering what he could have done to earn these distinctions, here’s a record of ineptitude that may challenge your credulity:

• Putin’s first responsibility was to gather intelligence, and in this he failed utterly. The estimate of Ukraine’s readiness and will to resist missed the mark completely. The estimate of the West’s commitment to Ukraine also erred badly. The West quickly agreed on crushing sanctions that all but crippled Russia’s economy. Then it followed through by providing Ukraine with advanced weapon systems, technical assistance, military intelligence, food, clothing, medical supplies, and infrastructure support. Putin failed to realize there was no way to intercept supply lines without invading NATO nations and triggering a doomsday scenario. In effect, Putin found himself fighting against the entire industrialized world, minus China, India, and Iran.
  
  
• He never bothered to understand the logistics of fighting a war. He had no access to Ukraine’s rail system, so he sent countless military and supply vehicles down Ukraine’s roads, where they stalled and became targets. The glut of traffic was so immense that fuel, munitions, spare parts, and other materiel couldn’t be efficiently moved to troops in forward positions.
  
  
• He put quickly trained — and therefore poorly trained — soldiers in the field. Moreover, he sent far too few of them. Approximately 150,000 to 190,000 Russian soldiers, regulars and irregulars, were in the initial invasion force, facing a country of 44 million people. That’s a ratio of 4 Russian soldiers for every 1,000 Ukrainian inhabitants. Data from modern warfare shows that roughly 20 soldiers for every 1,000 inhabitants are needed to conquer and pacify a hostile population. This explains why Putin has been desperate to find more soldiers. He has hired mercenaries and offered convicts freedom if they agree to fight. He has gone so far as to institute a draft, but this caused such an uproar that he had to give it up.
  
  
• Last April, Russian troops halted their advance on Kyiv. It was the perfect moment for Putin to cut his losses and pretend he had delivered a harsh warning to Ukrainians who dared to collude with NATO. Sadly, he was too proud to accept the rebuke he was dealt. He redeployed Russian forces to the East and South, where many Ukrainians identify with Russian culture. The Russians were brutal in asserting their claims to these regions. Rockets destroyed urban centers and residences. People on the street were indiscriminately executed and consigned to mass graves. Many of the survivors were tortured; women were raped. The new strategy was to demoralize Ukrainians by subjecting them to a barrage of war crimes. The memory of this savagery will evoke Ukrainian hatred for centuries. Even if Russian reverses its record of screwups and losses, it will never pacify a single acre of Ukrainian territory. Russia hoped to avoid sharing a border with a NATO country. Now they will share a border with something far worse, a blood enemy. And if Ukraine is ever in a position to dictate the terms that will end the war, Putin and his surviving generals will certainly face war crimes trials, imprisonment, and execution.
  
  
• He is oblivious to the enormity of his crimes. This winter he has doubled down. He’s sent missile barrages against Ukraine’s infrastructure, depriving Ukrainians of light, warmth, water, and food supplies. He has actually weaponized winter. This strategy will never drive his foe toward capitulation; it will have exactly the opposite effect.
  
  
• He has never had a contingency plan for a long war. After 10 months of fighting, he’s using charity drives to supply soldiers with medicine, sleeping bags, felt boots, woolen socks, mittens, scarves, and body armor. One charity event raised the equivalent of $45 thousand. Contrast this with the $45 billion that Congress recently passed for emergency assistance to Ukraine and NATO allies. The appropriation includes a critical infusion of Patriot anti-ballistic missiles.
  
  

The war will end in either of two ways. One, Russia loses in the traditional way — they capitulate and Ukraine dictates terms, which will undoubtedly include Putin’s removal (if he isn’t already dead), loss of the Crimea, and war reparations. Two, Russia loses in the pyrrhic way; that is, they win but pay a staggering price in lives, leadership, prosperity, and reputation. If it’s the second way, it won’t be called “pyrrhic,” because no winning military in world history will have paid such a disastrous price. It will be called a “putinic” (poo-TIN-ic, with two short i’s) victory. It’s amazing to think that the likelihood of a no-win scenario has probably never occurred to Putin.

The second story begins with a mass poisoning, an occurrence that is almost always accidental. A case in point is the poisoning of the Flint River some years ago when lead leached into the Flint, Michigan, water supply. It wasn’t a malicious crime but an instance of greed, arrogance, and gross incompetence, as we so often see in human dealings. Contrast this case with the poisonous lies and misinformation the Republican party and Trump Administration have for years spewed into the American body politic via mass media outlets — newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and an array of Internet social platforms. The climax, of course, was the Big Lie, the outrageous claim that the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen by the Democrats. That lie has been served up daily at every level of government. Invariably, it is garnished with supporting lies. Election observers were let go! Election workers stuffed ballot boxes! Voting machines were reprogrammed! Venezualan software was used to flip Trump votes! Fake ballots were flown in from China! Record numbers of dead people voted! The sum of the votes exceeded the number of voters!

Have no doubt that a repeated cocktail of lies can be just as destructive to a body politic as chemical poisons are to flesh and blood. Add to this another fact, that most Americans glory in jingoistic horseshit: America is exceptional, a shining city on a hill, God’s chosen nation, the savior of democracies, the last best hope of earth. We are disposed to love anyone who tells us repeatedly how special we are, which leaves us open to the manipulations of political flimflam artists. How hurtful it was to be told our star had dimmed. How restorative to hear our greatness could be made complete again. How thrilling to know a person is among us who could accomplish this mission. How infuriating to learn he had been cheated out of that opportunity! Thus the vile poison saturated our discourse.

All through 2021, the Trump-induced delirium rolled on. Denial of Biden’s election swept the South and Midwest, while the swing states were incubating sworn enemies of free and fair elections. Hundreds of candidates were ready to file for the 2022 midterms and usher in one-party rule. Meanwhile, the Democrats wallowed in helplessness. Because two of their number were closet Republicans, Democratic control of the Senate was an illusion. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was on the Senate floor in January, 2022. If it had become federal law, it would have superseded any state law that sought to thwart minority access to the ballot. Sadly, it lacked Republican support. The Democrats didn’t even have enough votes to block a Republican filibuster.

The outlook for the 2022 midterms was further dimmed by a disengaged Department of Justice. By the first anniversary of the January 6ᵗʰ riot, the department had arrested 700 rioters and was pursuing hundreds more, but it had done virtually no investigating of the role Trump and his colleagues played in organizing or inciting the riot. If DoJ priorities had been prudent, if the big fish had been its primary target, it would have known in just months that Trump had been assured the election was fair; it would have had all the information needed to lay bare the conspiracy of liars and cynical cowards at the heart of America’s poisoning.

In the face of DoJ inaction, Nancy Pelosi called for a national commission to investigate the origins of the January 6ᵗʰ riot. The idea passed the House but failed in the Senate, where the Republicans threatened to filibuster. Pelosi, undaunted, proposed that a House Select Committee, a so-called “January 6ᵗʰ Committee,” do the investigation. Kevin McCarthy, her counterpart, insisted that five representatives of his choosing be seated on the committee. Three of these were laughably biased, so Pelosi picked two even-handed Republicans to replaced them. The committee was approved by all the House Democrats and 38 Republicans. It held its first meeting on July 27, 2021, with the testimony of four Capitol police officers. By the end of the year, it had interviewed more than 300 witnesses, obtained more than 35,000 documents, and gone far toward exposing the subversion that lay behind the riot. Unfortunately, their findings hadn’t been woven into a coherent narrative and presented in full public view.

When 2022 began, Democrats were in white-knuckled dread of the changes the year would bring. They wondered, is this the year the Trumpists strangle democracy? In their despair, they failed to notice a sea change. Immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump labeled Putin a genius, adding, “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth [!] of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” In referring to the loss of life, he couldn’t avoid trotting out his Big Lie. “If our election wasn’t rigged, you would’ve had nobody dead.” Stunning. He delivered a trifecta of stupidity, mendacity, and conceit in just a few sentences, showing the world once again how loathsome he was.

Then came May, a month of reckoning for Trump. The preceding December, he had phoned Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who was busy looking into charges of voter fraud. Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to top Biden’s Georgia vote count, plainly an attempt to tamper with the election. As May arrived, Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, struck back at Trump. She requested that the county’s chief judge create a grand jury to determine if Trump’s behavior was criminal. The grand jury’s findings will be reported soon.

Later in the month, the first critical Republican primaries of 2022 were held. In Idaho, the governor beat a Trump-favored challenger. In North Carolina, Trump tried to save a congressman hip-deep in scandals but to no avail. In Pennsylvania, Trump went all out for Mehmet Oz, the charlatan doctor. Oz survived but with a dubious road ahead. The Georgia primary was the most bitter pill of all. Trump had a score to settle with Brian Kemp, the governor, who was up for reelection. Months before, Kemp had ignored Trump’s plea to replace Biden’s slate of electors with his own. Even more galling, Brad Raffensperger was trying to be reelected as Secretary of State. To Trump’s great chagrin, both men won easily.

In June, the January 6ᵗʰ Committee began broadcasting its hearings on live television. For the first time, the post-election misdeeds of ex-President Trump sank deeply into the public consciousness. Here is what the committee revealed about him over the course of ten televised sessions:

• Despite the loss of dozens of election-related lawsuits and the assurance of government officials that the election was fair, he refused to concede. He thus failed his Constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
  
  
• He asked DoJ officials to tell lies that would help his attempt to overturn the election.
  
  
• He pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of their state elections.
  
  
• He oversaw a plan to obtain false electoral certificates and send them to Congress and the National Archives.
  
  
• He asked members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several states.
  
  
• In federal court, he stated that false information was valid.
  
  
• He brought supporters to Washington, DC on January 6ᵗʰ, instructing them to “take back” their country. In speaking to them at the Ellipse, he further provoked them, knowing that some of them were armed.
  
  
• He sent a tweet that publicly condemned Vice President Pence while the rioting was underway.
  
  
• While watching the rioting on television over a period of hours, he refused repeated requests to tell the rioters to disperse and leave the Capitol.
  
  
• He had the authority and responsibility to call the National Guard into the District of Columbia but failed to do so.

As Trump was marinating in the televised testimony, August rolled around. On the 8ᵗʰ, a team of FBI agents entered Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, with a search warrant. They were looking for documents, many of them classified, that Trump had taken when he left the presidency and not turned over to the National Archives, as required by the Presidential Records Act. The FBI came away with over 100 classified documents, some of which reportedly contained secrets about nuclear weapons. This disclosure raised the question of whether Trump had violated the Espionage Act.

Later that month, Letitia James, the New York District Attorney, filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump and his three oldest children. In a news conference, she accused them of an “astounding” pattern of financial fraud. She claimed Trump had egregiously inflated his worth on financial statements to deceive lenders and insurers into offering beneficial terms. She wants the Trump Organization to give back $250 million of the benefits and be banned from buying commercial real estate in the state for 5 years.

On November 8ᵗʰ, Election Day, three questions hung in the air: how much would high inflation hurt Democrats? how much would the end of the Roe v. Wade era hurt Republicans? how much value would a Trump endorsement carry? Exit polls showed that worries about inflation hurt Democrats somewhat more than pro-abortion sentiment helped them. One issue pretty much offset the other. What gave Democrats the edge was concern about Trump’s political clout, especially among independent voters. They favored Democrats by a small margin, a considerable departure from their voting in the last four midterms. Generally, they favor the party not in power by double digits.

In mid-November, Attorney General Merrick Garland made a long overdue announcement, the appointment of a Justice Department prosecutor, Jack Smith, to oversee two criminal investigations. The first was to determine whether “any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.” The second was to continue the investigation of the documents found at Mar-a-Lago and “the possible obstruction of that investigation.” Garland’s announcement led me to a couple of conclusions. The work of the January 6ᵗʰ Committee had embarrassed Garland and forced his hand. I have no idea where we’d be today if the committee had never been created. What’s more significant, Smith’s work will inevitably end in criminal indictments. Anything less, and the uproar will be volcanic.

Recently, the January 6ᵗʰ Committee issued its final report. It asks the DoJ to look into at least four of its charges against Trump and to bar him from holding office again. The committee is in the process of turning all its evidence over to Jack Smith.

I expect Trump’s fortunes to decline even more rapidly in 2023. I see no path for him to win the presidential nomination in 2024, nor do I see him as a third party candidate. Either prison or political banishment will bar the way.

A perfect prelude

I’ve never read On the Beach and only got around to watching the movie on TV years after its theater release. Maybe I avoided it because of the emotionally draining story, the kind my 11th-grade lit teacher called “cathartic.” I ended up liking it very much. My sole criticism was the ceaseless playing of “Waltzing Matilda” until my head was ready to explode.

I recall a stirring scene between Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck. In a fury of incomprehension, she asks what could have caused the world’s leaders to order an all-out nuclear exchange. After all, it’s the ultimate geopolitical fuck-up, a step so breathlessly stupid that lunacy seems the only possible explanation. But the movie doesn’t deal in explanations, just consequences. Its focus is on the psychic torment of those remote from the bombing as they await the arrival of radiation poisoning.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I crave an apocalyptic movie in the same vein, but one that shows how the buildup to catastrophe can be plausible and insane at the same time. We badly need such a movie. Without it, we miss an invaluable chance to behold the macabre duality of human nature, our capacity for simultaneous sanity and madness.

It happens that the world stage is at this moment supplying a story line for such a movie. It’s a perfect prelude to On the Beach. I refer to the horrific war in Ukraine. Putin is the ideal villain. He’s 69. The clock is ticking. His dream of restoring the Soviet empire on his watch is fading. Snatching a tiny Baltic state will no longer qualify as progress. He needs a big win — Ukraine. The hero? There are two, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, and NATO, the grand Western alliance that Trump sought to castrate.

As the drama unfolds, Putin and his generals badly miscalculate the course of the invasion. They expect quick progress, perhaps even open arms and bouquets in the Donbas region. Instead they meet ferocious resistance, especially in the approaches to major cities. Meanwhile, the sanctions of over 30 countries bite hard. 450 companies withdraw from Russia. The ruble loses nearly all its value, Russian banks are severed from Western banking, and the Moscow stock market is shuttered.

Russia answers with war crimes. They attack fleeing refugees; target apartments, hospitals, and bomb shelters; drop incendiary bombs on civilians. Zelensky exhorts NATO repeatedly. “Give us 1,000 missiles a day” and “Give us a no-fly zone or you are to blame for the deaths.” He urges the USA to be the leader of world peace; it is our moral duty.

Now the war is in an agonizing stasis: thousands dead on both sides, the Ukrainian infrastructure in rubble, the Russian economy shattered. But even stasis is unstable. The Ukrainian forces can hold the line or even strengthen with infusions from Poland, and time is on their side. In Russia, anger is growing as the economic blight advances, and the drip drip drip of truth will eventually pierce the propaganda.

Putin and his generals know this. They must have capitulation before the walls fall in, but how do they get it? All their options are bad. They could attack with biological or chemical weapons, but that would cause NATO to enter the fight in Ukraine. They could attack the supply lines propping up Ukraine, but that again would cause NATO to escalate. Worst of all, they could deploy tactical nuclear weapons. That would likely cause NATO to take their attack to Russia. Ultimately, any effort to press for capitulation leads to a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia … and Ava Gardner’s question is answered.

I expect the Russian military will take out their trash rather than choose any of the catastrophic options. That assumes they aren’t too cowed to take the risk. The fate of humankind could rest on this assumption.

Doom and gloom

The end days are upon us. OK, that was just for effect, but it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say the end decades are upon us. And in the context of the 100,000 to 200,000 years that homo sapiens has walked the earth, what are eight or nine decades? A mere tick of the geologic clock.

My forecast is not a religious prophecy, as such forecasts usually are. The Second Coming and Judgment Day have nothing to do with it. Nor am I predicting the end of the planet or all life on it. What I foresee is the decimation of human life, the end of prosperity everywhere, and a dire focus on survival that will beget civil unrest and wars around the globe. Just that. It’s a conclusion based on an eyes-wide-open look into the future using what I know about the social history of our species.

Four grim realities are entwining to shape our future. They are weaving an inescapable net around us. The first of these is climate change. The fraction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is growing relentlessly. CO₂ recently passed the 400 parts per million mark. We’re on track to reach 1,000 ppm by the end of the century. That will make the world 3.2 to 5.4 degrees Celsius warmer than it was when the Industrial Revolution began. It’s enough to bring on extreme heat waves, cause food stocks to plummet, kill off ecosystems, reduce biodiversity, put coastal regions under water, and cause massive dislocations in population.

The second reality is what we’ve referred to for years as the “population bomb.” I suppose Paul Ehrlich coined the term to call attention to another kind of bomb that is every bit as worrisome as the thermonuclear kind. There are 7 billion of us now, and we’re on track to hit 16 billion by the end of the century. Obviously, the extra 9 billion will want to eat on a regular basis. How can that happen in a world beset by floods, drought, and all manner of freaky weather? Well, even though grains will be hard to come by, at least we’ll have plenty of meat, right? Probably not. It’s hard to imagine the mass butchery of cattle, hogs, and poultry at more than twice the current rate, and besides, don’t those animals also eat grains? Maybe we could all become big fish eaters. No, that’s improbable, too. U.N. experts predict that our oceans will be fished out in less than 40 years.

The third reality is what I call the Wreck-It Ralph Principle. It holds that the power to destroy is just as important to nations as the power to create. The latter begets national pride and the respect of our neighbors. The former begets intimidation and caution among our neighbors. Any nation with pretensions to greatness must flaunt both to be taken seriously. This principle explains a great deal: why the proliferation of WMDs is unstoppable, why terrorist groups want nuclear weapons above all, why networks are hacked and computer viruses are spread, why space weapons will propagate and computer-controlled infrastructure will be targeted. It’s alarmingly reminiscent of the beginning of World War I, when Europe was armed to the teeth and ready for any threat to light the fuse. What about a planet teeming with people, many of them starving and beset by a continual string of natural disasters while economic chaos grows around them? How’s that for a fuse?

The fourth reality is the clincher. It’s the inability of humankind to cooperate globally for the common good. If this weren’t true, the U.N. wouldn’t be a charade. We’d have an international treaty to mitigate CO₂ production and fund research on CO₂ sequestration. We’d have another treaty to establish thousands of family planning clinics that operate under uniform guidelines. We’d have a U.N. Charter that pledged military intervention against any nation that planned to acquire WMDs. In short, we’d have genuine international controls to protect against the biggest threats to our survival. But we’re so far short of these goals that we can only shake our heads and wince at our naivete.

In fact, we are actually slogging through an era of less cooperation. Take the United States for openers. The so-called “leader of the free world” is riven. A second civil war, albeit a cold one, is underway. It’s a war in which imbecility has become respectable. On the subject of climate change, James Imhofe, chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, brings a snowball on to the Senate floor to demonstrate that global warming is a hoax. On family planning, most Republicans urge cuts in Planned Parenthood because of the advice they offer for avoiding and terminating pregnancies. They likewise support businesses who cite religious scruples and exclude the cost of contraception from their health insurance plans. On foreign policy, a grotesque military budget continues to grow, and a contingent of Republicans promotes American intervention nearly everywhere in the Middle East.

In Europe, cooperation is eroding:

• NATO has all but announced it is not a counter-terrorist force. Western Europe, enjoying the cover of America’s military bases and nuclear umbrella, projects no military strength. The trade sanctions imposed against Russia have some teeth, but it’s hard to imagine that Germany isn’t cheating. Economically, they have too much at stake.

• The European Union (EU) looks earnest in its efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions, but it relies too heavily on biofuels to meet its goals. Meanwhile, member nations are uncoordinated in their plans to generate electricity. France alone relies on nuclear energy as a primary source of electrical power, as the rest of Europe pays a high price for an immoderate reaction to the Fukushima nuclear fiasco in 2011. Instead of learning how to make a clean technology safer—by building thorium reactors, for instance—second- and third-best solutions are in favor. Meanwhile, the Euro Zone is faltering under the unrealistic demands of German creditors, and a consensus is building in Great Britain to leave the EU.

Elsewhere, the ugliness of nationalism and sectarianism lives on. Russia has revived the swaggering and suppression that marked the Soviet era. They see cooperation with the West as a kind of cringing subservience. China belligerently pursues its goal of Asian domination by building military bases on disputed territory in the South China Sea. A party tabloid declares that if the U.S. interferes on behalf its allies—Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines—war is inevitable. Iran is saying clearly that inspections of its military facilities can never be part of an agreement to curtail uranium enrichment. In effect, their negotiating position was never serious. And the de facto nation of ISIS is showing its weakling enemies that it will be making mischief for a very long time.

Can the civilized world survive this witches’ brew? Many say yes. They point out that humankind has after all survived plagues, famines, and horrific wars, only to grow and prosper. Their model of the future is in theaters right now, in the Disney film Tomorrowland. I say no. There are no precedents for the challenges that will build to a crescendo later in this century. Our non-Disney future was foretold 120 years ago, when H. G. Welles wrote The Time Machine. It tells of a world so devastated that the human species fractures into two races, the Morlocks and the Eloi.

All the world’s a lab

Shakespeare wrote that all the world’s a stage. What else would you expect from an actor and dramatist? I take an analytical perspective. I say that all the world’s a lab. Just take a look around—there are real-life lab experiments going on everywhere. They’re telling us who we are and what our future is likely to be. I know that sometimes the data can be ugly and difficult to take in, but hey, don’t we owe ourselves a good look? So, steel yourself. I want to look at three of these experiments.

The first one involves the wars and skirmishes between Israel and the Palestinians. Here we have two groups of aggrieved people, each blocking the other’s path to happiness. The question posed in this experiment is, Will they ever find a modus vivendi, or will mutual hatred and bull-headed stupidity doom them to perpetual bloodshed? More than six decades into the experiment, it’s looking grim. The Israelis, for their part, abuse the rights of Palestinians who live in Israel proper and continue to appropriate land in the West Bank for new settlements. Israel no longer occupies Gaza; Hamas, a terrorist organization, governs. Even so, control of the territory remains with Israel: Gaza is fenced in, and Israel patrols the coast. Israel controls all but one of the exit points (the southern one to Egypt), so they can in effect turn Gaza’s commerce with the world on and off as one turns a faucet on and off.

That’s not to say there isn’t a good reason to fence in Gaza. If the population was at liberty to move about freely, some would surely cross the border and murder Israeli civilians. In fact, tunnels have been dug under the border, and they are used for just that purpose. The animus of the Gaza Palestinians is so intense that they are willing to endure a hundred times the number of deaths they inflict on Israel. When a cease-fire was called in the current conflict, mere hours passed before Hamas renewed its rocket attacks and began a new day of unbalanced death and destruction. This is surely mental illness on a mass scale, yet Fatah, the Palestinian party that controls politics in the West Bank, agreed last April to form a unity government with Hamas! Is it any wonder that Israel walked out of the latest round of peace talks?

America advertises itself as a “fair broker” in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but we also declare ourselves to be the unswerving friend of Israel. These two positions needn’t be inconsistent—not if we are the kind of partner that speaks up when a friend does something self-destructive. But when have we said, “Stop discriminating against Palestinians; we don’t befriend nations that grant civil rights based on religion or ethnicity”? Or, “Stop building new settlements in the West Bank, or we’ll share no more Iron Dome technology with you”? That’s not the American way. We let our fiends create a mess and then drag us into it.

The second experiment is about pride, power, and humiliation. It poses the question, When a nation of great power fragments and loses much of its dominance, does it integrate peacefully into the new order, or does it become spiteful and threatening? No, I’m not referring to Germany after WWI; that’s a similar experiment, but not current. I’m referring to the former Soviet Union, now Russia. Under its autocratic and popular leader, Vladimir Putin, it’s been bullying states that it formerly controlled. The one most prominently in the news is Ukraine, which wants closer ties to Europe and complete self-determination. Putin is determined to undermine the Westernization of Ukraine by any means, even if it means abetting a proxy war between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists.

America, of course, is put off by Putin’s saber-rattling—he has already seized Crimea from Ukraine—and favors a path of self-determination for the Ukrainian people. We’re also concerned that Putin may try the same tricks with other nations that were once part of the Soviet Union. Not wanting to go to war, we’ve appealed to our European allies to impose economic sanctions on Russia to get them to back off. The Europeans, however, attach more importance to Russian gas and oil than to freedom on their eastern frontier. They aren’t prepared to go beyond a hand slap. In this experiment, it’s the Europeans who are the friends we won’t criticize. (How satisfying it would be if Obama went to a European summit and said, “Your nations are well-respected around the world. Your citizens are well off, and their freedom is under no threat. You represent a huge political and economic bloc. Now lead, damn you, lead!” Dream on.)

We now see that the pro-Russian separatists are much like the Hamas leadership. They both possess advanced weapons—weapons given to them by nations with dangerous agendas—and they use them indiscriminately. As expected, neither the separatists nor the Russians are remorseful. In fact, it’s now the season for wild lies and delusions. The other day, I watched a series of Rooski-on-the-street interviews that focused on the destruction of MH Flight 17. When asked to speculate about the source of the missile, quite a few thought it was the Ukrainian military. Two thought they staged it with help from America. “There were Americans on that flight,” the interviewer said. “Why would Americans kill their own?” “Americans are cruel if they want something,” was the answer.

The third experiment is playing out in Syria and Iraq. Here we find numerous violent factions, large and small. Most of them despise the others and are ready to use any weapons or methods available to eliminate them. Not surprisingly, the faction that’s the most vicious and well-supplied dominates the rest. It calls itself ISIS, or ISIL. The question posed by this experiment is not, Will these madmen be able to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria or the Maliki government in Iraq? These outcomes are so improbable that the question isn’t worth posing. A better question is, Will ISIS be able to establish itself permanently as a nation—or, as it prefers, a “caliphate”—and become an unmolested exporter of terrorism? If so, they would likely pose a greater threat to world peace than Al-Kaeda did when it was well settled in Afghanistan.

Of course, that isn’t all that’s happening on Laboratory Earth, but those are certainly some of the highlights. How do you feel about them? I want to toss away my clipboard and notes, tear off my lab coat, and run into the streets with some Paul Revere-like message. That or just look away.

Where we are now

As I figure it, the USA has more than a 30-year history with Islamic terrorism. I don’t count the 15-month Iran hostage crisis, which seems more like chest-thumping belligerence than terrorism. I begin my timeline in 1983, when 241 U.S. service personnel died in their barracks in Beirut, victims of a suicide truck bomb. (A second truck bomb killed 58 French soldiers.) The Americans were part of a multinational peacekeeping force, invited to Lebanon by the Lebanese president to supervise the separation of hostile forces. While it’s true that the casualties cannot be counted as innocent civilians, they were nevertheless on a mission intended to harm no one.

Then, in 1985, the Achille Lauro was hijacked by terrorists; they murdered a disabled American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, and threw his body overboard. Three years later, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky by a Libyan bomb as it crossed over Lockerbie, Scotland, on its way to New York City. 243 passengers, most of them Americans, and 16 crew members died; 11 residents of Lockerbie also perished. In 1993, the World Trade Center was struck for the first time, by a 1,200-pound truck bomb in a parking garage. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. In 1996, another truck bomb decimated a building in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that was a residence for foreign military personnel. 19 Americans were killed and 498 servicemen of other nationalities were wounded. In 1998, two U.S. embassies, one in Kenya and the other in Tanzania, were bombed almost simultaneously. 213 died in Kenya, 11 in Tanzania. Thousands were injured. Two years later, the USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden when struck by a small boat in a suicide attack. Hundreds of pounds of explosives had been molded onto the hull of the attacking boat. The explosion took the lives of 17 American sailors; 39 others were injured.

I recount these atrocities only to help recall the state of mind we were in when 2,996 people were killed on September 11, 2001. The air was supercharged with outrage and a craving for revenge. Flags flew from car antennas and highway overpasses. It was payback time. Bush the Second declared a War on Terrorism. He said that winning it would call for determination and patience—it would be a generational war. Interestingly, no one argued that we were in for anything less. We were ready for the challenge. So when the government fixed the blame on Al-Qaeda, we were ready to go to Afghanistan and rout them and the Taliban, their protectors. The first troops were sent on October 7; the mission was called Operation Enduring Freedom. I won’t itemize the history of our efforts between that day and the present, but I do want to explore the shift in public sentiment between 2001 and 2014, try to explain the shift, and say why it puts us in danger. Perhaps a good way to do this is to cite some of the surprising things people have said about events in those 13 years and offer comments….

Going to Afghaistan was a mistake. It’s “where empires go to die.” We wasted lives and national treasure. A mistake—really? Were we really supposed to accept the deaths of thousands and an ongoing menace without striking back? No, that’s a curl-up-and-die mentality. In retrospect, though, our goals were too broad, and that did cause gross wastefulness. We went there for conquest: crush the Taliban, extirpate Al-Qaeda, remake Afghan society. We should have looked instead for retribution, an entirely different concept. Our policy should have been to deploy however many specialists we needed to track the enemy and discover targets. Then we could have hectored them with bombers and drones and kept them continually on the defensive. If a rare opportunity called for special forces, it’s only then that we should have put combat boots on the ground.

This observation comes with an interesting implication. Because conquest was never in the cards, regardless of the size of the invading and occupying force, diverting occupying resources to Iraq didn’t change the calculus of what our army might have accomplished in Afghanistan. Those who have deplored the Iraq misadventure have good reasons for doing so, but they cannot claim that it caused the Afghan War to go wrong.

I knew from the start that it was a mistake to go into Iraq. No, you didn’t. Not unless you worked for the CIA or a foreign intelligence agency and knew the WMD scare was a fabrication. Otherwise, the only thing you can claim to have known is that the U.S. government—chiefly the CIA and the military top brass—cannot be trusted. I sympathize with this attitude. After all, the CIA and Joint Chiefs lied to JFK about the chances of the Bay of Pigs invasion. And the CIA and the Johnson Administration lied to Congress and the nation about the naval skirmish that led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. However, if we think the government always lies, sooner or later we will recreate the Boy Who Cried Wolf fable: the government will cry wolf, we will ignore it, and the wolf will really be at our door. It’s a no-win dilemma, and 50 years of Washington liars have put us in this trap.

The invasion of Iraq was the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country. Such is the misguided opinion of Harry Reid and probably of tens of millions of other Americans. It makes no sense because it assumes that the war, from the moment of invasion in March 2003, was predestined to be a disaster. Actually, the war consisted of a string of independent political and occupational blunders, every one of which was avoidable. For example:

• Choosing exiles and people of dubious character to run the provisional Iraq Governing Council. Most Iraqis distrusted them from the outset.
• Disbanding the Iraqi army, leaving hundreds of thousands of well-trained men jobless and embittered.
• Disbanding the police, thereby ending police services. Lawlessness reigned for months. During this time, explosions and gun-shots were heard continually. Daily break-ins, kidnappings, and murders were common.
• Ordering “de-Ba’athification,” the dismissal of all public sector employees with an affiliation to Saddam Hussein’s party, the Ba’ath Party. As further punishment, these employees were banned for life from working in the public sector. The order affected civil servants in every part of the government, teachers and university professors, medical practitioners, judges and prosecutors, and anyone attached to the Ministry of Defense. Government ministries immediately became incompetent in delivering the basic services needed for a functioning society. To make matters worse, all the Ba’athists were Sunni Arabs, so the decree had the result of alienating them from the pluralistic society we wanted to establish.
• Disbanding the Border Guard Force. Arms, insurgents, and terrorists entered and left Iraq at will. Smuggling drugs, materials, vehicles, and machinery became a huge business.
• Indifference to electrical outages and water shortages, leaving millions of Iraqis miserable for weeks at a time.
• Mistreating Iraqis in intolerable ways, including impulse shootings, insulting and abusive treatment, and destructive home searches that included humiliating frisking and sometimes theft. The most notorious incident of mistreatment occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison. The abuses there by the U.S. Army seemed out of the ordinary to many observers, but they were instead indicative of a pattern of U.S. abuse throughout the country.
• Ceding control of the government to Nouri al-Maliki, a sectarian zealot who would deny civil liberties to Sunnis and so guarantee civil discord and a fragmented nation. We did this despite Colin Powell’s warning to Bush: “You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.” And then he reminded Bush of the Pottery Barn rule: “You break it, you own it.” We broke it and then failed to be responsible owners.

It does no good to attack the strongholds of radical Islamists because that will just drive them somewhere else to practice terrorism. I call this the Bill Maher Doctrine. He said it with ISIS in mind, the radical Sunni force that’s hastening the disintegration of Maliki’s Iraq. Nonetheless, I’m sure he’d like to apply it broadly, and so would millions of other Americans. It’s a terrible idea because it ignores a simple fact: a centralized military organization—one with financing, material resources, and the opportunity to train and plan—is far more dangerous than one that’s dispersed and under a continual threat of attack. For our own safety, not for the preservation of the failed state of Iraq. we have to confront the ISIS juggernaut and shift it into reverse. So far, we’ve done nothing but deploy information-gathering forces and enough military personnel to protect American civilians. Our slow and puny response is a sign of how thoroughly the Obama Administration has been swept up in the reaction to the lies and gaffes of the Bush Administration.

Of all the NATO members, we are consistently the most belligerent. This is a sign of something deeply dysfunctional in our society. I agree that we are the most belligerent, or to put it another way, our NATO allies are remarkably passive. And why shouldn’t they be? Every year, the U.S. spends tens of billions to shield Europe with military bases, personnel, and logistical support. The Europeans need never worry about the threat of… what? The Russians, maybe, kicking up dust on their eastern frontier? No problem. Last month, Obama pledged to spend a billion dollars more to increase our military presence in Poland and neighboring countries. In recent decades, European defense outlays have become a pittance of their overall budgets. Even if they were to acknowledge the alarm bells in the Middle East, how could they become helpful allies? They’d have to do something radical, like reallocate some of the money targeted for social spending.

But are we a belligerent people, with a propensity to go to war? That’s not easily answered. There’s certainly a lot in our country that’s out of whack. We have a propensity to coddle the rich and let the needy fend for themselves, to hold gun rights more precious than life itself, to put faith before empirical evidence. But on matters of war and peace, no, we do not have a cultural tendency to swing one way or the other. There’s a complication, however: when WWII ended we found ourselves with a huge military and industries that supplied it, gave work to thousands, and lobbied Congress extensively. This “military-industry-government” complex became a force unto itself, at times swinging the pendulum of public opinion with propaganda and lies.

After the WMD sham was exposed, after years of rotten leadership, after the expenditure of thousands of lives and the suffering of tens of thousands, the pendulum of public opinion began to swing toward peace. It has swung so far that the rabid medievalism on display in Iraq is rationalized as a mutually destructive religious war that might actually be a good thing! Where are we now? Whistling in the dark, too timid to lead, and without allies in any case.