America's Purpose: Unity 101
|
|
I was probably the youngest attendee at the America's Purpose conference entitled "Terrorism, Security, and America's Purpose" on September 6. Certainly, I was one of a handful--I mean less than 10, more like 5--attendees under 35. A few minutes into the first panel, I noticed another minority I belonged to: women. Perhaps I've simply become accustomed to this imbalance, expaining why I didn't find it notable right-away. That's a frightening thought.
Here and there a woman sat alone within the sea of men. Almost uniformly masculine and disquietingly still, these women observed their XY tablemates with either wary reserve or outright hostility. A few broke the mold, joining into the conversation with the abandon of a tomboy climbing a tree with her male friends. I applauded them.
Unfortunately, I was not at a table of men. Rather, I was at one of two female tables, bulwarks against the overwhelming masculinity of the room. But I was out of the frying pan and into the fire. These isles of femininity revealed the behavior of women toward one another to be downright predatory. Teeth and manicured claws at the ready, these women began conversations that evoked a pair of wild animals circling one another, searching for a weakness in the other to exploit.
I could boil down every comment made by the women at my table to two intentions:
1. Flaunt your pedigree. Begin sentences, regardless of topic, with a reference to your Ivy League education. One woman began a sentence about war protests with "When I was getting my PhD at Co-lum-bia." The point of the sentence was not that she protested but that she protested while obtaining a degree from Co-lum-bia.
2. Force the other to admit ignorance on a topic, no matter how obscure. Maintain the pretense that everyone who's anyone knows what she's just professed she doesn't know anything about. The Co-lum-bian said to me, "Oh, you've not read Allison's 'Conceptual Models'?" Luckily, I had. So I countered with Roskin. Away we went, circling and waiting for the other to stumble.
But once the panels began, I forgot about my vicious tablemates.
Representative Jane Harman of California, a Democrat, surprised me with the strength of her comments. Expecting another bland set of platitudes about America's greatness and our ideological superiority, liberally sprinkled with jabs at Bush, I was blown away by her rhetoric. While her later written remarks faded into bullet-pointed truisms, her initial words were willingly confrontational--something we don't see often enough from contemporary Democrats.
"Come on, people," she urged, before analogizing the effect of Hurricane Katerina to that of a WMD. She's right. Transportation, communication, healthcare, food, water, even order, have been subsumed by this tragedy. It was an event for which we had five days of warning. If you consider that the Gulf Coast is hardly unfamiliar with hurricanes, we've had years of warning that New Orleans and its neighbors were vulnerable.
While we know that terrorists will likely focus on big cities like New York and Washington, we have no specific geographic region in which to focus our preparations for a potential WMD threat. It is unlikely that we would have any warning of the disaster to come. Harman pointed out that terrorists likely tuned in to discover how unprepared and how vulnerable to the consequences of a major destructive event the US really is.
One of her strongest points, one echoed throughout the day by speakers from George Soros to General Wesley Clark to author Tom Clancy, was that we must fight terrorism with non-military forces. Harman centered her argument in a single, highly-effective fact: the Pentagon believes that the most effective action the US has taken against terrorism since 9/11 was to engage in tsunami relief efforts. She, like George Soros, developed her argument to attack the concept of a "war" on terror. For the struggle against terrorism to be couched in the rhetoric of military aggression encourages the continuation of a self-defeating strategy, the use of hard power.
We must, as Reiss said, switch to soft power. For the most part, the rest of the world admires or at least tunes in to our culture--they see our movies, hear our music, appreciate our science, and consume our products. Build upon this foundation for a relationship. In this vein, use the internet. Another Harman fact: there were 10 terrorist sites at the time of 9/11; today, there are more than 4,000. We must stem the tide of recruitment.
Fund grass-roots groups with the linguistic and cultural basis to be effective, aid the moderates to frustrate the extremists, and find other ways to deny extremists the enemy they must have in order to recruit more terrorists to their cause.
Rita Hauser, a wonderful inclusion, made a strong argument for an end to a unilateralist framework for the "War on Terror". It is not just the United States that has suffered terrorist attacks--Spain, anyone?--and it is not just the United States that knows the scourge of AIDS and the violence of natural disasters. Hardly. But after Hurricane Katerina, did President Bush call upon the United Nations for advice? The United Nations has dealt with natural disasters world-wide, has experts and resources that could have been of significant use. Hauser qualifies that no US president would have asked for UN assistance. But the larger point is that the US believes that it does not need the skill or assistance of others--not only during natural disasters, but during other times of crisis, even when the ramifications are global and not regional. It's a terrifying combination of xenophobia and nationalism that we're witnessing these days. It's not new, but it's evolving--the xenophobia perpetuated and enhanced by newly popular concepts such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory.
Hauser concluded with a striking quotation that amounted to the assertion that "International law and policy is predicated on a respect for the opinion of mankind." We have lost our respect for mankind--or else narrowed the definition considerably.
Now is not the time to look away and say "Not my administration" or "Not my fault." Progressives must effectively and cohesively promote a strong alternative to this course of unilateralism. If we had done so in 2004, John Kerry would be president.
From the way we behave at our tables, the way we treat our Progressive tablemates--despite shared political views, they behaved like opponents rather than allies--to our political manuevers, we must learn to be cohesive, to unify.
Here and there a woman sat alone within the sea of men. Almost uniformly masculine and disquietingly still, these women observed their XY tablemates with either wary reserve or outright hostility. A few broke the mold, joining into the conversation with the abandon of a tomboy climbing a tree with her male friends. I applauded them.
Unfortunately, I was not at a table of men. Rather, I was at one of two female tables, bulwarks against the overwhelming masculinity of the room. But I was out of the frying pan and into the fire. These isles of femininity revealed the behavior of women toward one another to be downright predatory. Teeth and manicured claws at the ready, these women began conversations that evoked a pair of wild animals circling one another, searching for a weakness in the other to exploit.
I could boil down every comment made by the women at my table to two intentions:
1. Flaunt your pedigree. Begin sentences, regardless of topic, with a reference to your Ivy League education. One woman began a sentence about war protests with "When I was getting my PhD at Co-lum-bia." The point of the sentence was not that she protested but that she protested while obtaining a degree from Co-lum-bia.
2. Force the other to admit ignorance on a topic, no matter how obscure. Maintain the pretense that everyone who's anyone knows what she's just professed she doesn't know anything about. The Co-lum-bian said to me, "Oh, you've not read Allison's 'Conceptual Models'?" Luckily, I had. So I countered with Roskin. Away we went, circling and waiting for the other to stumble.
But once the panels began, I forgot about my vicious tablemates.
Representative Jane Harman of California, a Democrat, surprised me with the strength of her comments. Expecting another bland set of platitudes about America's greatness and our ideological superiority, liberally sprinkled with jabs at Bush, I was blown away by her rhetoric. While her later written remarks faded into bullet-pointed truisms, her initial words were willingly confrontational--something we don't see often enough from contemporary Democrats.
"Come on, people," she urged, before analogizing the effect of Hurricane Katerina to that of a WMD. She's right. Transportation, communication, healthcare, food, water, even order, have been subsumed by this tragedy. It was an event for which we had five days of warning. If you consider that the Gulf Coast is hardly unfamiliar with hurricanes, we've had years of warning that New Orleans and its neighbors were vulnerable.
While we know that terrorists will likely focus on big cities like New York and Washington, we have no specific geographic region in which to focus our preparations for a potential WMD threat. It is unlikely that we would have any warning of the disaster to come. Harman pointed out that terrorists likely tuned in to discover how unprepared and how vulnerable to the consequences of a major destructive event the US really is.
One of her strongest points, one echoed throughout the day by speakers from George Soros to General Wesley Clark to author Tom Clancy, was that we must fight terrorism with non-military forces. Harman centered her argument in a single, highly-effective fact: the Pentagon believes that the most effective action the US has taken against terrorism since 9/11 was to engage in tsunami relief efforts. She, like George Soros, developed her argument to attack the concept of a "war" on terror. For the struggle against terrorism to be couched in the rhetoric of military aggression encourages the continuation of a self-defeating strategy, the use of hard power.
We must, as Reiss said, switch to soft power. For the most part, the rest of the world admires or at least tunes in to our culture--they see our movies, hear our music, appreciate our science, and consume our products. Build upon this foundation for a relationship. In this vein, use the internet. Another Harman fact: there were 10 terrorist sites at the time of 9/11; today, there are more than 4,000. We must stem the tide of recruitment.
Fund grass-roots groups with the linguistic and cultural basis to be effective, aid the moderates to frustrate the extremists, and find other ways to deny extremists the enemy they must have in order to recruit more terrorists to their cause.
Rita Hauser, a wonderful inclusion, made a strong argument for an end to a unilateralist framework for the "War on Terror". It is not just the United States that has suffered terrorist attacks--Spain, anyone?--and it is not just the United States that knows the scourge of AIDS and the violence of natural disasters. Hardly. But after Hurricane Katerina, did President Bush call upon the United Nations for advice? The United Nations has dealt with natural disasters world-wide, has experts and resources that could have been of significant use. Hauser qualifies that no US president would have asked for UN assistance. But the larger point is that the US believes that it does not need the skill or assistance of others--not only during natural disasters, but during other times of crisis, even when the ramifications are global and not regional. It's a terrifying combination of xenophobia and nationalism that we're witnessing these days. It's not new, but it's evolving--the xenophobia perpetuated and enhanced by newly popular concepts such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory.
Hauser concluded with a striking quotation that amounted to the assertion that "International law and policy is predicated on a respect for the opinion of mankind." We have lost our respect for mankind--or else narrowed the definition considerably.
Now is not the time to look away and say "Not my administration" or "Not my fault." Progressives must effectively and cohesively promote a strong alternative to this course of unilateralism. If we had done so in 2004, John Kerry would be president.
From the way we behave at our tables, the way we treat our Progressive tablemates--despite shared political views, they behaved like opponents rather than allies--to our political manuevers, we must learn to be cohesive, to unify.
!
A thought:
One part you're omitting is that the United Nations is terrible at actually getting things done in this regard. Our aid after the tsunami was so effective because we didn't go through the UN framework, despite their constant complaining about that fact.
Part of the issue with Katrina is that we can deploy our troops for humanitarian aid more easily abroad than we can at home, due to the nature of our governmental checks and balances. That may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it, but it's a factor worth recognizing.