Virtual campaign reality meets the real thing ... in real time
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 Free Headline Alerts
Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.
Again, the lesson is that the digital revolution and its increasingly enormous impact on our world has made the old problem of distinguishing fact from fiction, reality from perception, infinitely more difficult.
The IT world increasingly makes it possible for us to brilliantly simulate human conditions that either do not exist, that is, in “real time” — or not at all. The intellectual [and his doppelganger, the pseudo-intellectual], is always tempted pour le sport by endless speculation. He now has almost unlimited possibilities to cogitate on what might have been, what might be, and what might happen — not to say, what ought to have happened, how it ought to be viewed, and what ought to happen in the future. ShareThis
Nowhere is this more the case than in American politics.
And within that great arena, foreign policy is most illustrative. It incorporates not only the U.S.’ own policies, strategies and tactics. But there are the competing abilities and motivations of cooperative friends — and undying enemies.
Because of all this heavily larded menu, combined with the nature of the new President’s approach to power, Washington’s pursuit of policy and strategies is now affected in new and convoluted ways.
Take a current example:
The new digital world, almost suddenly, gives us the possibility of a new unmanned aerial weapon, often operated across the world from its target, to zero in and kill, almost human sight unseen.
Not privy to the technical details [which would probably be beyond most of us in any event], we know that American forces can defend themselves against terrorist attack by using this weapon to search out an enemy. For example, it has been used among the crevices of the world’s most forbidding terrain in the foothills of the Himalayas on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The “hardware” permits an enactment of ultimate discretion in this virtual world, as former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said in a recently badly mauled recent TV interview in the U.S. But he said it constitutes a question of tactics not strategy. Musharraf insisted, truthfully, he and his friends in the Pakistan elite and Washington have a common enemy in the tribal area terrorists – especially those interlopers from other parts of the Muslim world. [There were at least two highly publicized attempts to assassinate him.] But he protested that there could be difference in the evaluation of tactics, and therefore, Islamabad and Washington could and often do differ.
One example is that using this new weapon requires “the software” – expert intelligence on who and where these targeted enemies are. It also requires some measure of how much “collateral damage” [innocent civilians the terrorists may use as shields or simply by happenstance be there]. And that, alas! is only partially generated by the new technology for decision-making ultimately relies on “human intelligence” and judgment. Hot pursuit by U.S. forces could legitimately run counter to Pakistani politics.
Furthermore, the new weapon striking unbeknownst from “the outside” adds to all the outrageous conspiratorial theories generated — only in part by the Islamofascists — to explain the American war in Afghanistan. Just the frightening otherworldliness of the weapon does, indeed, “shock and awe”. But it brings with it accusations of violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty [for no Islamabad leader can admit publicly to permitting much less encouraging this new method of attacking its enemies]. It becomes one more tool in the hands of the xenophobes who dominate the terrorists’ following among the general uneducated population. It reinforces the psychotic complex of martyrdom which is part and parcel of the new Assassins with their complaint about generations of colonial exploitation. It further divides the loyalties of Pakistan’s own military, struggling mightily in the face of asymmetrical tribal warfare they helped generate in neighboring Kashmir against the Indian occupation but which has come back to bite them [literally] in their rear.
But these realities do not preclude its use in American national interest, not the least for beleaguered U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Fit all this in the rather loose virtual threat that candidate Obama threw out during the campaign of direct intervention in Pakistan with or without its leaders’ agreement, and you see where virtual perception hits the reality of policy implementation rather than its formulation in the remote recesses of Foggy Bottom or The Pentagon. The decision of whether and when to use the weapon becomes a much more difficult reality than its virtual existence.
Stage two: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appoints Richard C.A. Holbrooke with the President admiringly looking on as the new coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan to handle just such difficult issues. But for all the virtual talk of going for regional solutions, Holbrooke is not formally given the Indian portfolio as well. That is true even though it is obvious to all but the past virtual enthusiasts for separate India and Pakistan U.S. policy “tracks” that this is a three-cornered problem at best. So, Holbrooke meets with the head of the most powerful Indian lobbying group in the U.S. [and a large Democratic Party contributor]. Virtual meets real.
And so we are going to be presented with a continuing layout of the new administration’s virtual foreign policies, the virtual constantly being compromised by the necessities of reality. And, therefore, the world could end up with a foreign policy that looks not all that much different from the later Bush years including its contradictions. The ultimate picture, of course, vastly modified by the unanticipated consequences of past actions and the unexpected events which will dominate the President’s Blackberry.
The examples are universal.
Special envoy George Mitchell’s knowledge of the Middle East [including his own heritage] will very quickly have to exchange Obama’s virtual campaign talk of aggressive engagement for tedious wrestling with the intractable problem of Palestinian history. That issue, is nurtured by decades of official Arab promotion of victimhood assisted by a UN “new class” and its accompanying corruption, and now militant Muslim terrorism. It is in reality a Frankenstein Israel’s old enemies recognize, fear, but do not know how to control .
If there is to be an Iranian policy tsar, he will have to cope with Obama’s virtual promises of sitting down with Tehran’s mullahs. The reality is the almost literal ticking bomb of a nuclear-clad Iran with its implications not only for the Israelis but the whole Arab Mideast with its network of U.S. alliances. Whether the mullahs, ironically because of their own domestic weakness and the fragility of the regime, can realistically “talk” without the reinforcement of WMD is questionable. Meanwhile, there is widespread fear in the Gulf and in Europe that a new boy on the block may give too much away.
The virtual Obama faulted the Bush Administration’s failure to engage North Korea in face to face talks, calling the failed Six Power negotiations “ad hoc”. But those talks, originally endorsed by his current foreign policy advisers, have come and gone without tangible results. And 2009 reality is a Pyongyang apparently caught up in succession jitters and near starvation but still proliferating as well as defaulting on earlier promises to halt nuclear weapons development.
Candidate Obama encouraged EU leaders to believe Washington would help reinvent the international economic system, a fitting product of virtual reality. But reality suggests growing frictions with his own Congressional party and Republican minority critics of economic policy will meet the reality of the enormity of redrafting Bretton Woods admid a European downturn possibly greater than the U.S.’ and a general worldwide economic crisis.
On Africa, new UN Ambassador Susan Rice may fume virtually on Dafur [which Bush already called “genocide” challenging his UN colleagues to do something]. But candidate Obama’s virtual promise to double African aid [again over Bush’s record outlays] to $50 billion by the end of his first term will meet the reality of an historic U.S. budget crunch.
Chinese spokesmen have dismissed Obama’s virtual rhetoric on Communism and his advisers’ suggestions that U.S. complaints of currency manipulation might lead to action. The new reality for continuing a vacillating [Bush] policy toward growing Chinese armaments and economic warfare could be knowledge of its collapsing economy with critical implications for trading partners, the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and South Korea — and as far afield as Australian commodity exports-led economy.
Presidential candidate Obama called for virtual additional EU help in Afghanistan before 200,000 cheering fans in Berlin, but the reality is the Europeans could not muster much additional military support from their bureaucratic and expensive military structures even were they to agree. Meanwhile, his virtual calls for an original 7,000 additional U.S. troops have morphed to 30,000 for the war he charged should be the real focus of the U.S. anti-terror effort with its reality of growing difficulties including a threatened supply line through Pakistan.
With Sen. John McCain’s blessing, President Obama has ended the virtual reality of “enhanced interrogation” by adopting the Army handbook for interrogation techniques which would prevent torture being used. Attorney General Nominee Eric Holder says waterboarding is torture. But a special task force will decide if the reality requires special rules for CIA, just in case the U.S. captures another Khalid Mohammed Sheikh who may know where and when the next terror plot is planned and waterboarding would get it out of him.
Candidate Obama’s virtual promise to close Guantanmo as an eyesore for America’s reputation and prestige overseas has now become the reality of a year’s delay while a commission works on the issues [of a closure Bush already promised]. There is no plan for how to deal with the reality of the complex issues regarding the “war combatants” there now, including what to do with any future prisoners taken on the battlefield.
But virtual reality is not, as any IT mavim would tell you, a static process or art.
IT industry sources claim that “multiplayer online role-playing games" are now challenging the American young, and the youth culture that imitates them around the world, as a more popular form of entertainment than TV, recorded movies and music. New and more imaginative forms of virtual reality are, even in this season of straitened budgets and economic disaster, appearing weekly. Perhaps they are good training for the new world of heightened perceptions and the increased conflict between virtual reality and the real thing. Has the White House ordered new games lately?