Kolya on 16/12/2011 at 14:07

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Unlike you I see the social/political/moral tailspin of the US strongly connected to the economic downturn. It's always during these times that the radical forces gain momentum.
But they were always there of course: naive nationalism, anti-intellectualism, creationism, homophobia, etc. You even indulge in some naive nationalism yourself when you believe that the fall of the eastern bloc and the USSR was the "good guys" winning, ie the US.

That's a particularly interesting misunderstanding because it is directly connected to the economical crisis that the west is experiencing now: Despite the fact that the Eastern Bloc collapsed all by itself and only partly because of economical problems, this was largely taken as a proof that the economic system of the west was fail-safe (self-regulating capitalism). Rid of any balancing ideas it was sent into over-drive. What could possibly go wrong?

rachel on 16/12/2011 at 15:57

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Seconded, Adam Curtis's series is extremely interesting.

"The Century of the Self", his piece on psychology and how the US were basically turned into a giant live experiment of Freud's theories applied to marketing and mass control are equally fascinating and chilling.

negativeliberty on 16/12/2011 at 17:20

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I don't think I did an injustice to his term (putting aside I reject, albeit very respectfully, his dichotomy of two liberties and the conclusions that leads to) but I did not pick Wikipedia's definition, if that's what you mean. Nonetheless, feel free to argue how;

differs from;

When I say and nothing more, I'm merely referring to the fact one person's liberty to do whatever they want eventually infringes upon someone else's right to do whatever they want. I wasn't trying to twist his definition. I do take issue with your definitions, although I can hardly blame you as the whole subject is, as you rightly indicate, highly prone to errors and confusion. (And I will be the first to admit that when I neglect to keep up with the subject, I almost always forget exactly what they mean, I guess the world should be thankful I'm not a philosopher).

demagogue on 16/12/2011 at 18:51

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I had two major currents that touched on the period defined by Iraq, working at the US State Department in 2004 during reconstruction, and working for an environmental then a human rights NGO in the years afterwards. They came from different perspectives, to say the least.

Well before even that, just after law school I wrote a paper on the reconstruction of Iraq in early 2004, and the role of the UN and the US and other countries, the legal issues involved and all of that. It made a tiny splash and got cited some, mostly just because it was such an early paper on the topic, and the professor was a big name in the UN world and he touted it. (I also wrote a paper on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in the same neighborhood, but that's another topic.)

I'll give you guys a link to the Iraq paper if you want to look at it yourselves: (http://www.4shared.com/document/I0donuu0/MOSLEY_Iraq.html)

It's a technical article, so it's more dry law talk than anything else, but it throws a little theory stuff in too. It represents my most thought out opinion about the war and aftermath and what it means for the international system, so it's easier to just post it than try to retell it.

In a nutshell though (if you don't feel like reading it), it situates Iraq reconstruction into the "reconstruction phase" following the cold war (it was a big deal when the UN started promoting political reconstruction in the 1990s of, e.g., the Balkans and South Africa; within a few years it was becoming routine and even an expected role of the UN and the int'l community). But Iraq is a deviant exemplar that skews the whole evolution, and the basic argument was it perversely flipped the democratic peace argument around... The original moral case behind it is that making a democracy prevents conflict; the deviation is using that idea to start a conflict to make a democracy. The other part was the UN and int'l community getting marginalized in the reconstruction, and the UN being pressed to be more relevant by becoming more technocratic. And it gets into how the reconstruction powers actually work, and what the Iraq war means to their future development. It's somewhat pessimistic.

Working at the US State Department, I worked in the law office doing (among other stuff) diplomatic law, and Iraq reconstruction naturally came up often. (It's not something I worked on myself, but it was going on around me and sometimes they'd have roundtable discussions on stuff.) In that kind of setting, of course, it's not an academic exercise. We're occupying a country, tens of thousands of troops are still there, Iraqis need water and electricity and new hospitals, and the occupying power has all sorts of moral obligations (aside from the legal obligations), and a lot of legal issues come up every day that have to be addressed whatever one's opinion about the war itself. (It was an office of lawyers, so most people themselves leaned to the left and weren't fans of Bush, but they also knew their role.) As is well known, the State Department and Defense Department were in tension about how to handle the reconstruction (beyond just Powell and Rumsfeld), with the State Dept feeling that DoD was bumbling a lot things (which they were), having no institutional memory or sensitivity to what's involved in actually occupying and reconstructing a country after a war, and they saw themselves trying to set a more rational course. But like I said, I was mostly watching it from the benches.

After the State Dept, I started working for an environmental NGO (then much later a human rights NGO) which were both rather critical of everything from that era, so it was a much different perspective, but especially at the int'l environmental NGO, I was just in a different world, dealing with climate change and a mercury treaty and things like that, then Obama became president.

I'll say this. As a lawyer, as an international lawyer, our perspective on things is operational, how the machinery of international affairs works in all the nooks and crannies of actual human practices -- trade, terrorism, industry, agriculture, domestic life, politics. It's all the human things we all care about, but we have to translate it into a kind of special language which changes how you think about them too. You aren't given the luxury to rage about stuff from an ivory tower, you have to distill your feeling into what's actually going on on the ground and deal with it, as well as keep the big machine running so government services still get done and people can still work and lead their own lives with some dignity. The 2nd Iraq war was a bumbling enterprise from the start that gave a lot of fodder to rage at, but from my perspective it was more unfortunate in its perversity in upending all that machinery for not very convincing ends, but you don't just go out in the streets and shout, you need to roll up your sleeves and, in our world, write a technical article about it. Heh, granted, still not much, but it's amazing how much more effect a single good technical article has over a thousand poorly written letters raging in CAPS.

tl;dr: (http://www.4shared.com/document/I0donuu0/MOSLEY_Iraq.html) This article I wrote captures most of my attitude on the Iraq war & what it means, and the state of int'l affairs in our era.