A Tale of Two Elections

At my last count, the US Congress had just two members who were openly either non-Christian or non-Jewish: Pete Stark (D-Cal), an atheist, and Keith Ellison (D-Minn), a Muslim - or "heathens," to use the parlance of the electorate. Thus far, neither Stark nor Ellison has shown his bifurcated tail in public or called for the sacrifice of virgins on the floor of the House chambers, but the fears of millions of god-fearing Americans nonetheless remain, causing many a sleepless night.

Good thing, then, that the bulk of American voters are not in France right now, where the presidential election pits a lukewarm Christian with an uppity wife against a Socialist woman who has four children with her, um, domestic partner. Two candidates, in other words, who would be too liberal for even a Montessori school in the US are vying to run the world's sixth largest economy. And for all their depravity, neither candidate seems likely to land the Grey Poupon in the shitter, as it were.

No doubt the private details of Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal will merely buttress the American view of the French, whose politics we've long distrusted (coup d'etat) and whose sex lives have always been more interesting (menage-a-trois) than ours. Theirs is a land where people work only four days a week - giving them an extra day to wallow in their joie de vivre and glare dismissively down their Gallic noses at everyone else - and whose army couldn't stop an eight year-old armed only with a water balloon.

"The balloon, oui, but the water we cannot stop."

So the success of Royal should come as no surprise to anyone with a healthy French stereotype. Exhibiting the "rebellious modernity of Simone de Beauvoir" - to quote Isabelle de Courtivron - she has four children out of wedlock and has refused throughout her campaign to exploit her feminine good looks - traits of women with only the most hyphenated of surnames in the United States. Most American analysts expect that, if elected, Royal will demand unbridled mass fornication on the Champs Elysees and press the Academy to award Gerard Depardieu a retroactive Oscar for My Father, The Hero.

Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, has portrayed himself as the Newt Gingrich de Paris, combining a knack for preaching the family values of Catholic France even while confessing that religion isn't his top priority and knocking about with every woman in the country except his own wife.

Oh yes, the wife. After leaving her previous husband for Sarkozy, Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz has been frequently in the news for her own series of infidelities and eventually left Sarkozy for a well-known French businessman. The couple officially separated in 2005, leaving Nicolas free to tomcat as he pleased until 2006 when he and Cecilia patched things up and resumed their sharing of toothbrushes.

Jump, then, if you will, across the Atlantic for a moment, where many hands have already been wrung with regards to the five spouses, past and present, of Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, who, say what you will, have at least made honest women of their wives before divorcing them and who have paid lip service to a fear of God. Giuliani's handlers remain concerned, however, at how the hidebound Republicans in outer South Dakota will react when they finally see the pictures of Rudy in a dress, even as no one mentions to them the fact that his law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, has worked as a lobbyist for Venezuela's Citgo Oil. Morality in America, you'll notice, simply demands that you don't cross-dress, get a divorce or cheat on your wife. Beyond that, you're free to do as you please.

To think that such an uproar was ever raised over an Oval Office blow-job. For some reason, Americans expect their politicians to breathe scripture and crap purity. That Gary Hart could be both an expert on national security and a philanderer - and that the latter doesn't necessarily detract from the former - are gears that just don't mesh in the Land of Liberty, and never you mind that John Kennedy diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis even as he got more tail than a calf-roper at the Snake River Stampede.

Jared Diamond may have said it best in Collapse:

We subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously "good" or "bad," as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person's behavior. If we find people virtuous in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.

In America, to judge by those in power, we'd rather have representing us men of dubious morality who pretend to believe in God and love their wives than to have anyone who would openly admit to being an atheist in a bad marriage but who might nonetheless make progress on the health care issue. None of which is to say that all atheists are good people, only that we're not getting much of a bargain from our so-called Christian leaders either. So go ahead, lie to us: tell us how your wife gives you moral guidance and how much faith you have in the Almighty, then start praying to that god and begging him to keep the Chosen Land safe from the devilry of the French.

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To: Iraq. Love: Korea.

As unsightly as the Guro district of Seoul may be nowadays, there was a time when, believe it or not, it was worse. Prior to being a refuge for homespun rubes and ill-bred jackasses turning my sidewalks into their personal spittoon, Guro - like the rest of Seoul - was overrun by North Korean soldiers on their charge south during the Korean War. It took the landing of UN forces at Incheon in 1950 - under the command of everyone's favorite megalomaniac, Douglas MacArthur - to turn the tide of the war and eventually push the Northerners back from whence they came. Of course, the fighting didn't stop for nearly three more years and, indeed, North and South Korea remain at war today, as no peace treaty has ever been signed.

The 1953 Armistice may have halted combat operations, but it didn't signal the beginning of democracy on the Korean peninsula. North Korea remains the most repressively closed society in the world and, in the South, a child born near the end of the war would never have experienced a free election until he was about 35 years old. To their credit, though, the people of the South made remarkable economic progress during those 35 years, even as they struggled and in many cases suffered under a variety of dictatorial regimes, especially that of Park Chung-hee. In the tradition of Pinochet in Chile, the Chiangs in Taiwan, and Lee in Singapore, Park held almost total power in Korea and used it to push forward a policy of modernization and economic growth that led to Korea becoming one of the so-called Asian Tigers.

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Korea has always rested in one of the most precarious geographic positions in the world, surrounded as it is by Japan, China and Russia - not neighbors any sane person would choose. As a result, every ornery faction in Asia, from the Mongols to Imperial Japan, either conquered Korea or tried to do so, such that Korea has somehow endured an incredible nine hundred invasions of various sizes in its two thousand years of recorded history. Located at the crossroads of Northeast Asia, Korea has long been a geopolitical linchpin: whichever foreign power controlled the Korean peninsula was able to influence, if not dominate, the entire region. Add to that neighborhood association Soviet-sponsored North Korea after World War II and you can see why South Korean presidents, from Syngman Rhee forward, have been hesitant to sever their country's military ties with the United States, which even now maintains a force of over 29,000 on the peninsula, to say nothing of the 33,000 in Japan. Over the past sixty years, the US has invested countless dollars and approximately 40,000 lives in Korea, which in 1988 held democratic elections and has since joined the ranks of the world's stable, secular democracies. This process took nearly forty years, though, and the US shows no signs of leaving anytime soon.¹

As Francis Fukuyama notes in his book State-Building, the US has intervened or acted as an occupying authority in many countries over the years, including (though not limited to) Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua and South Korea. In each of these countries the US pursued nation-building activities - holding elections, trying to stamp out warlords and corruption, and promoting economic development - but South Korea has been the only country to achieve long-term economic growth, which happened more through Korean policies than those of the US.² The lesson here for the US is twofold: first, think twice about getting involved, and second, if you do get involved, be prepared to stick it out come hell or high water.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to Iraq, where the Bush administration clearly never internalized Lesson #1 and where no one seems willing to concede Lesson #2. As volatile as Northeast Asia may be, it doesn't even compare to the powder keg that is the Middle East in 2007. With the exception of North Korea, the countries out here are all highly integrated into the global fabric and, as such, have more reasons to cooperate than to lob rockets at one another. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for our friends in the Levant, where suicide bombers are to lunch in Iraq what gimchi is to a meal in Korea.

At this point, most people not living or working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq ranks near the top of any list of bad ideas. That the occupation has been bungled to a degree worthy of Laurel & Hardy certainly hasn't helped matters either, but at last check no one has figured out how to turn back the clock and undo catastrophe. That being the case, the best thing we can do now is to come to terms with reality and admit that, effectve 20 March, 2003, Iraq became the 51st state of America, at least insofar as responsibility for the fiasco is concerned. This, ultimately, will have to be the underlying admission in any strategy for dealing with the problem, whether that strategy is a military or diplomatic one, or more likely, a combination of the two.

A Gallup Poll conducted last week shows that 62% of Americans now believe that going to war in Iraq has not been worth the cost in life and lucre, and a majority support a withdrawal - though not immediately - from the country. Of course, Gallup research also shows that 75% of Americans supported the war at its outset, a number that slowly but steadily declined to a 50% level at the time of the 2004 presidential elections, at which point things had already begun to sour considerably in Iraq.

Given the opportunity to change the course of events, however, American voters returned George W. Bush to power and allowed him to continue down the road to failure. Since then, the Bush team has shown that it couldn't run a popsicle stand, much less effectively rebuild a country in what is arguably the most dangerous region on the planet. Any credibility they ever had vanished into the desert long ago and, as a result, they shouldn't be too surprised that no one is listening to their ideas now, especially as they continue to ostracize other countries in the region and disregard any attempts to negotiate or alter their own strategy.

For their part, Democratic leaders, - many of whom voted to authorize the war, even in the face of evidence that the White House was lying to them - are only too eager to cite the current polls as a reason to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, as though effective military strategy was ever based on the mass plebiscite. However criminal the Bush team's handling of this war may be, it's not clear that either the American people or the Democratic opposition are to be trusted in their judgment.³ On one hand, the American public's disgust with the war stems from a justifiable sense that Iraq has turned into a quagmire - a la Vietnam - but I suspect also that the gruesome realities of war, made all too apparent by our ubiquitous, Youtube-era media has soured them on carrying out what will of necessity be a long-term commitment of great sacrifice and pain. Think South Korea redux, add radical Islam, vast oil riches and neighbors like Iran and Saudi Arabia and you've got a fair idea of what we're in for.

The United States government in 1953 knew it couldn't just pack up the Betty Page pin-ups and go home, lest North Korea - eagerly aided by the USSR and China - return and render meaningless the previous three years of bloodshed. But beyond that, no one outside Korea could give much of a reason for staying in, let alone fighting for, such a god-forsaken outpost of poverty and despair. The US didn't exactly want the place, but even less did it want Russia or China to get their hands on it. So has it been for much of Korea's history, as Don Oberdorfer points out in The Two Koreas:

Korea has been a country of the wrong size in the wrong place: large and well located enough to be of substantial value to those around it and thus worth fighting and scheming over, yet too small to merit priority attention by more powerful nations on all but a few occasions.

The benefits of protecting Iraq and nurturing growth therein are, by contrast, apparent to anyone who bothers with the situation at all. In the longterm, chaos in Iraq has alarming implications for everything from the global economy, international security and, perhaps most importantly, the millions of Iraqis directly impacted by the bedlam in their backyard. It is, to say the least, well worth protecting.

In Vietnam, the United States did finally withdraw, but only after almost 20 years of involvement and failure - and it was probably right to pull out. But just because the US withdrew didn't mean that that the violence ended - rather, it simply disappeared from the front page of the New York Times. So why is Iraq different? In removing Saddam Hussein, the US opened a power vacuum in a region that simply cannot abide such a space and thus created, first, a lawless state ripe for terrorism and, most recently, a civil war. The Middle East is simply too vital a region - both in terms of natural resources, unfortunately, and in ideology - for the US to clock out and go home. An effort must be made to give Iraq's neighbors a stake in building a stable country and the US, having created the problem, will have to lead the way in that process by showing that the country won't shirk its responsibilities.⁴

At the end of the Korean War, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, looked upon much as Tajikistan or Somalia are today. War-torn, broken, and hopeless, it was the classic Failed State and it took nearly two generations before anyone could experience democracy, economic prosperity and, indeed, freedom in any true sense of the word. Bringing Korea into the international fold as a stable, functional entity required decades of patience, coddling and prodding on the part of the US, which clearly - based on the 29,000 troops still here - still sees a measure of self-interest in the region. So while it may be fair to demand more of the Iraqi government - even by withdrawing all US forces - America, any way you look at it, is stuck with the country. It may be that the US leaves 100,000 forces in nearby countries - Qatar and Kuwait, if they'll allow it - to keep an eye on things and take names when necessary, but Americans shouldn't get the idea that they, or even their children and perhaps even their grandchildren, will be shut of the place anytime soon. With any luck, though - combined with a farsighted strategy - we'll one day look at Iraq as we now do at South Korea, and it may just take another 60 years to reach such a vantage point.




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Notes

¹ Although, to their credit, USFK has begun the process of redeploying away from Yongsan garrison in the center of Seoul, a move that, in addition to its tactical wisdom, will surely be a public relations winner as well.

² Fukuyama also cites Germany and Japan, though he notes that these two countries had strong administrative capacities and a state apparatus that survived the war and was preserved in the post-war period with little change. To this I would add that a Marshall Plan and the leadership of MacArthur in Japan certainly didn't hurt either. In Korea, the US provided a security shelter under which the local government could take charge of their own economic affairs.

³ But god bless them nonetheless for finally waking up and asking a question or two.

⁴ Substantive efforts and marked progress in the Israeli-Palestinian debates will be a critical part of this process - so, you know, good luck.

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Come On Up And See Me Urchins

Stand up right now and go look at your calendar. Actually, hold on. Hey, no...come back here and read this first. Before you wander off to wherever you keep your calendar, let me just point out that it's filled with countless stupid holidays, even as it neglects to inform you of all the worthwhile events that you haven't been celebrating.

For instance, the fifth of May is Children's Day over here in Korea. It's on my calendar, and it also happens to be one of the most asinine holidays of the year. Children already monopolize Christmas, get money for doing nothing on the lunar new year, and are the center of attention on their birthdays. Why do they need another day? Children don't do anything and, beyond birthdays, we shouldn't be giving out prizes - let alone days - just for existing. Hell, Administrative Professionals Day - which you no doubt missed this week, so busy were you in celebrating the Faroe Islands' National Flag Day - is by any measure more justifiable. At least secretaries can make an appointment and handle petty cash.

And, like I said, due to horsepuckey like Children's Day we're missing all manner of first-rate fiestas. I'd bet three fingers of my private stock against a two-cent bottle of ginger ale that no one in Korea knows that the fifth of May also happens to be International No Pants Day. Now there's a red-letter day worth the ink, but is it on your calendar? Doubt it.

In Japan, the nation wastes 19 September by honoring its old people, as though old people want to be reminded that they're old. Even worse, even as the Japanese fete their geriatric set, they overlook the fact that 19 September is also International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The least they could do is growl and say "y'aar" while pretending to enjoy listening to Grandpa's stories.

Today, 26 April, is World Intellectual Property Day. As such, I'd like to salute the kind folks over at Bit Torrent for all their help and support over the past three years. I say give 'em their own holiday.

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Catching Flies with Honey

...and I know that farting in another person's face is generally considered a social faux-pas - not something you ought to be doing outside the privacy of your own bedroom. I know this, but I also know that there's a time and a place for everything, and by my estimation, an old lady who persists in hitting the back of my legs with her bony elbows is fair game.

I bring this up because yesterday on the subway, I was standing at the end of a row of seats and behind me sat the Old Lady of Paragraph One who, in her geriatric oblivion, kept knocking my backside with her arthritic joints. I tried to ignore her, I really did. I even gave her the benefit of a few dirty looks, just to give her a sporting chance to knock it the hell off. As it happened, though, I'd had a bad case of gas that day but, due to a run of appointments, had been forced to hold it in for most of the afternoon, making mine the wrong rump to bump, as it were.

So I let one go. Silent, as they say, with an aroma to be determined.

Wouldn't you know it, though? At about the moment I let loose, the old bat realized that this was her stop and, groaning, she managed to get up, push a few people out of the way, and make it through the closing doors. In her place sat down a young bobby-soxer of, oh, about twenty-two who, within a second or two, was looking around to see who, for the sake of godalmighty, was responsible for that.

My problem, as you may have surmised, is that I don't aim to please. I'm not Lassie, for chrissakes. In fact - and despite denying it to myself for several years - I'm more along the lines of Dick Cheney. Lassie wouldn't have farted in that woman's face. Dick Cheney absolutely would have, and then, if the woman wrinkled her nose in objection, he would've told her to go fuck herself. But he only would have added as much because his farts aren't as expressive as mine. Mine say all there is to say.

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