Thursday, December 07, 2006

Ideology

Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary:
  • ideology – The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.

  • dogma – 1. A system of doctrines proclaimed true by a religious sect. 2. A principle, belief, idea, or opinion, esp. one authoritatively considered to be absolute truth : TENET. 3. A system of principles or beliefs.

  • orthodox – 1. Adhering to the established and traditional faith, esp. in religion. 2. Adhering to the Christian faith as set forth in the early Christian ecumenical creeds. 3. Conforming to accepted standards or established practice.

In November 2001, the campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan was proceeding smoothly and was nearing it's completion. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's idea of a light mobile force was a smashing success. Public approval of the operation in Afghanistan hovered around 90%. Rumsfeld was a rock star; people from across the political spectrum tuned into Defense Department briefings to see this enigmatic leader. And Osama bin Laden, the evil mastermind and financier of the 9/11 attacks, was in the mountains of Tora Bora, surrounded.

But there was a problem. Even after days of raining down daisy cutters on Tora Bora, Bin Laden was still alive, hidden in a complex of caves and tunnels. The force holding down Tora Bora was predominantly Afghan, with very few American soldiers. This was the way most of war had been conducted -- American Special Forces assisting Afghan troops. This was Rumsfeld's design.

There was sufficient time to replace or augment the Afghan contingent with an American force. This was before the beginning of the Iraq War, so there were more than enough American troops available. But to do that would alter Rumsfeld's design, which had worked so well.

The result is well known -- Osama bin Laden escaped into the netherworld of the Pakistani tribal areas, where he, more than likely, remains to this day. (See an account at How bin Laden got away.) The speculation is that members of the Afghan force assisted Bin Laden's escape, which is not farfetched given that much of the progress in the Afghanistan War resulted from troops merely switching sides. Loyalty to any particular cause did not seem to exist. Rumsfeld's military ideology didn't take this very flexible loyalty into account, even with all the evidence. That's the problem with ideology.

The definition of ideology given above is succinct and beautifully accurate in it’s seeming vagueness. Ideology is inverted logic – the principles are fitted to an desired end result. It’s really more than desire, it’s a need, like the jonesing of a heroin addict. Without ideology, members of many groups would lose their self-identification, they would be people without a country.

Ideology does not just infect the right wing of the political spectrum. At the onset of the war itself, many stated that invading Iraq was “immoral”. Committing the US blindly to an adventure in Iraq may have been foolish, impractical, and not nearly the most important and reasonable use for the military at the time, but it certainly wasn’t immoral. A typical case for this stand of immorality states that “No one has the ‘right’ to attack another person because they ‘suspect’ that person is planning to attack them. This holds for nations as well. A preemptive war is legal and moral only if there is overwhelming, objective evidence that the offending country or people are actively trying to destroy the defending country. A guess is not a moral premise for war.” This may be true when the countries in question are civilized democracies, but is overthrowing a repressive dictator immoral? Would it have been immoral to attack Hitler’s Germany if the only reason were to stop the Holocaust? Many have called for intervention in the Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur, yet the Sudanese haven’t attacked us, nor do they plan to. Would an invasion of the Sudan to stop genocide be immoral? This discussion of the immorality of the Iraq invasion was prompted to a great extent by the initial bogus reason given by the Bush Administration, that Iraq was in possession of WMD, but it is sheer Rovian twisting of fact to use this as a basis for analysis.

The left wing has currently equated the Iraq War with the Vietnam War, even though there are palpable differences (as outlined in Outcomes II). It is as if any war that is badly executed, fundamentally lacks the backing of the country backing the war, has endemic violence caused by insurgents, and turns into a “long, hard slog” (in Rumsfeld’s immortal words) is the Vietnam War all over again. The absolute illogic of equivalencing Vietnam and Iraq is a perfect example of purely ideological thinking. The left identifies itself with their victory of the US leaving Vietnam, and is craving a similar victory in Iraq. This is not to say that leaving Iraq is the best overall course given current circumstances. But the left’s equation relieves itself of thinking of any future consequences of leaving.

Not every war that is bogged down is equivalent to Vietnam. The American Civil War was bogged down until Lincoln fired McClellan. The Reconstruction, which was in all ways a war between Southern racists and blacks and their federal protectors, was also a long hard slog, and because of the weariness and lack of support of the North, combined with political factors, was forfeited to the South, guaranteeing almost 100 years of brutal repression.

Ideology infects every area of political and economic thought, from Democrats holding on to fossilized welfare systems that had the unexpected effect of destroying family structures to Republicans demanding stimulative tax cuts when the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to cool off the economy to minimize the threat of inflation. Both sides are guilty of using ideology to ignore the potentially painful gray areas to paint falsely definitive images in black and white. Only when we ignore ideology, and see the entire range of potential outcomes to any proposed solution, will we be able to understand the full impact of our decisions.

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