Campaign Blog: Vaclav Havel on Morality and Environmentalism

Posted from the campaign site. Link and discuss here.

I had the great honor of campaigning and conversing over beers with Vaclav Havel in 1990. If there is anyone in the world who can speak from a position of moral authority it is him. Here is a boigraphical sketch of Havel.

This week Havel wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, "Our Moral Footprint." What does morality and environmentalism have to do with city government, you may ask? Havel writes:

We must return again and again to the roots of human existence and consider our prospects in centuries to come. We must analyze everything open-mindedly, soberly, unideologically and unobsessively, and project our knowledge into practical policies. Maybe it is no longer a matter of simply promoting energy-saving technologies, but chiefly of introducing ecologically clean technologies, of diversifying resources and of not relying on just one invention as a panacea.

I’m skeptical that a problem as complex as climate change can be solved by any single branch of science. Technological measures and regulations are important, but equally important is support for education, ecological training and ethics — a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility.

Either we will achieve an awareness of our place in the living and life-giving organism of our planet, or we will face the threat that our evolutionary journey may be set back thousands or even millions of years. That is why we must see this issue as a challenge to behave responsibly and not as a harbinger of the end of the world.

What Havel is saying is something I completely agree with; that we cannot fix our society's problems -- from the environmental crisis to corruption in government -- with technical or proceedural changes. The changes have to begin with us. We need to rediscover the moral and ethical core in our society.

This moral rediscovery most certainly does not include the culture of moral judgement-making that is so popular among certain political parties. No, it must first and foremost be, as Havel points out, the consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility.

Part of that shared responsibility is the duty of Americans to be involved in their own government. That is the genius of the dream of the Founding Fathers -- that free people can govern their own affairs through involvement with and holding accountable their elected representatives.

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Time to Walk the Walk.

It is really easy to bang away at the keyboard sneering and playing Monday Morning Quarterback with our politicians at all levels. Which isn't to say that those sneers and second-guesses are unearned. But at the end of the day if we really, really want to look ourselves in the mirror, or face our children and say we are really making a difference then it is time to push ourselves away from the desk. Time to walk the walk.

Which is why I announced this week that I am running for Clinton City Council for an At-Large seat. The election is this November 6.

Just a couple of weeks ago, via Ed Fallon's IM for Iowa mailing list I got a message urging people to run for their local offices. Ed said,

Somehow, we have to get beyond the ridiculous, popular notion that all politicians are crooks. Heck, even my favorite folk singer, Don McLean, said as much from the stage as he performed the closing act at the Iowa State Fair earlier this month, calling all presidential candidates “liars.” Do some tell lies? Sure. Big ones. But if McLean would choose to pay attention, he would hear a lot of truth in what some of the candidates have to say. In fact, some campaign rhetoric follows the same themes McLean so poetically expresses in his music.

I don’t know how to put this any more emphatically, so imagine that the next sentence is highlighted, bold-faced and underlined (this e-mail program only allows caps): WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT. IF POLITICIANS ARE CORRUPT AND ACT ONLY IN THE INTEREST OF BIG BUSINESS AND THE VERY WEALTHY, IT’S BECAUSE WE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT!

I've spent a lot of time in my life as the person or a person behind the candidate. I have always said that I would take my turn, when I had my fortune made and I could do and say what I wanted. But that would mean that I would allow my children to grow up in a city and a region that is not the great place to live, work and do business that I know it can be.

There is a lot of work to be done. If this campaign is to be run right -- that is to say run to win -- then there are doors to be knocked, funds to be raised, signs to be put up and voters to be turned out.

This blog is going to go on hiatus until after Election Day. But, I will continue to blog, just in a more focused way. I'll be blogging about what it is like to run a local campaign in Iowa as a first-time candidate. Please join the conversation over at www.andersonforclinton.org

Later,

Connor Anderson


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Maintenance Break

Posting will be light this week as my provider migrates me to a new server, I migrate to Moveable Type and prepare for a couple of other major announcements. Back Thursday-ish.

Keys to Success in Iraq

I attended Sen. Barack Obama's speech on Iraq in Clinton today. First, off I was rather impressed that he has attracted Zbigniew Brzezinski as an advisor to his campaign. Mr. Brzezinski introduced Obama.

The actual pullout plan was a small part of a speech that was focused on the need for a pull out as a prerequisite to re-engage America's diplomatic and political efforts to secure peace not only in Iraq but in the region. Obama promised to personally conduct diplomacy to this end.

Obama also stated that a final resolution must come from the Iraqi people as part of a new constitutional order. He mentioned a soft partition as a possible solution but stressed that it must be the Iraqis' decision, not one imposed from above.

He focused on the cost of the war in both lives, money and in the things not done: education, healthcare, etc.

Good speech. Rational, and as many have said, there are no good choices left in Iraq any more. Only bad choices and worse choices. A lot of this is straight out of the Iraq Study Group proposals from last year. The rest just common sense.

Mock this (or any Democrat's) plan if you must. But compare it to the Bush administration's Keys to Success:



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Gen. Petraeus' Dirty Job

I have no doubt at all that Gen. Petraeus is one of the most capable field commanders the US Armed forces have produced in a generation. His command of the 101st Airborne in the early years of the war (how sad that we are referring to the "early years") showed that he "got it," about the new kind of war fighting that would be required to give us any chance of success in Iraq.

His reward was to be given a promotion and tasked with the thankless work of attempting to turn the sow's ear of the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq into a silk purse of a stable unified state.

We should have no doubts that Gen. Petraeus' report will reflect the political will of the administration. No matter what his personal judgement he will in the end, be a good soldier and take orders. It is a dirty job, but a soldier's duty is full of distasteful tasks.

Last week, Hilzoy of the Obsidian Wings blog wrote a guest post over at Andrew Sullivan's blog while Sullivan was on honeymoon. There really isn't much to add to it. It logically picks apart everything that will be said in defense of the surge and continuing engagement in Iraq under the current strategy.

Read all of: Thirteen Ways Not to Think About the Petraeus Report:

(1) "The surge is working; we should maintain it until we've done the job." -- This is not an option. Fred Kaplan:

"Adm. Michael Mullen, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified at his confirmation hearings last month that the "surge" in Iraq could not be sustained at present levels past April 2008.

There are a few ways to remedy this shortfall, all of them impractical or infeasible. First, soldiers' tours of duty in Iraq, which were recently extended from 12 months to 15 months, could be stretched further to 18 months. However, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, told me, during a recent interview for a separate story, that this idea is "off the table." As it should be: The relentless rotation cycles have already compelled many soldiers and junior officers to quit the Army; pushing duty and tolerance much further might not just exhaust the troops beyond limits but spark an exodus from the armed forces."

This means that the surge will end next April. When we ask ourselves whether or not to maintain it until then, we should recognize that the only question worth asking is: will keeping the extra troops there until April improve matters? Asking whether it would improve matters to keep them there in perpetuity, or "until we get the job done", is beside the point: we can't.

(6) But look at all our military progress! Doesn't that count for anything? -- In a word, no; at least not without political reconciliation. What is true in Anbar is true across the board: if the Iraqi government uses the increased security our troops are providing for them to create the conditions for real peace, then we will have accomplished something of real importance. If, on the other hand, they do not, then once our troop levels go back to normal, or lower, we'll be right back where we started. The entire effect of the surge will have been to produce a temporary fix, not a lasting improvement.

Don't take my word for it, though: here's Bush's nominee to be head of the Joint Chiefs:

"Unless the Iraqi government takes advantage of the "breathing space" that U.S. forces are providing, Mullen said, "no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference." (...)

In written responses to committee questions, Mullen warned that "there is no purely military solution in Iraq" and that the country's politicians "need to view politics and democracy as more than just majority rule, winner-take-all, or a zero-sum game." Absent that, he said, the United States will be forced to reevaluate its strategy."

Everything turns on whether or not the Maliki government takes advantage of the surge to make real progress towards reconciliation. And, of course, they haven't. From a briefing accompanying the National Intelligence Estimate:

"Political reconciliation has come to a "standstill," said a senior intelligence official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity."

And from a story on the recent GAO report:

"One of eight political benchmarks -- the protection of the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature -- has been achieved, according to the draft. On the others, including legislation on constitutional reform, new oil laws and de-Baathification, it assesses failure.

"Prospects for additional progress in enacting legislative benchmarks have been complicated by the withdrawal of 15 of 37 members of the Iraqi cabinet," it says. An internal administration assessment this month, the GAO says, concluded that "this boycott ends any claim by the Shi'ite-dominated coalition to be a government of national unity." An administration official involved in Iraq policy said that he did not know what specific interagency document the GAO was citing but noted that it is an accurate reflection of the views of many officials."

And, of course, there is no real Sunni buy-in to the government, which makes reconciliation even more unlikely.

And without reconciliation, any improvements in security will vanish as soon as we do.

The sad truth of the matter is that it took a brutal strongman like Saddam Hussein to hold the diverse population of the state of Iraq together. The only realistic option for a post-invasion success was to maintain the Baathist civil service and Army in place and to put an overwhelming US presence on the ground -- an MP on every corner. This is the model that worked in post-WWII Germany. It was proven and as close to a sure thing as there is in international politics.

The Bush Administration had other plans. Plans that they have stuck with for four years despite overwhelming evidence that not only were they not working, they were almost surely never going to work. Even the best generals leading the best army in the world wanting it with all their hearts and blood can make it work.

The inevitable decay of Iraq will come for Bush's successor(s). The responsibility for dealing with it will be theirs and ours in the years to come. But at the end of the day, all can and should know that the responsibility for these results rest squarely at the feet of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The blood is on their hands.

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