David Brooks writes a column today in the NY TIMES puzzling over whether Obama has the "determination" required of a "war president." [Am I the only person who thinks that Brooks looks like one of those fat-faced smug little boys, all dressed up in a suit and being fussed over by his mother, who is being pushed forward to ask the four questions at a seder?] The subject, of course, is Afghanistan, and Brooks longs for a Churchill [whom he references] who will doggedly pursue wars to "victory." As columnists often do, he attributes these thoughts to unnamed "military experts," but the opinions are transparently his. [Brooks, of course, like almost everyone else pontificating about matters of war and peace, has never spent a day in uniform, and wouldn't know which end of a rifle to put the ammunition in, but that does not stop him from speaking with calm self-assurance about sending other people into harm's way.]
This set me thinking about what the so often invoked Founding Fathers wanted in a president. By a delicious irony, Obama actually comes very close to what those slave owners had in mind -- someone who seeks to work cooperatively with Congress, who takes a limited and modest view of the title "Commander in Chief," who shuns "entangling alliances" and focuses his energies on the domestic needs of the country. Brooks acknowledges condescendingly that Obama is "intellectually sophisticated" and "is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence." But, Brooks says, what really matters is whether Obama possesses "tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity anjd confusion."
Now, let us think. What recent president exhibited that trait, so much more important, accoridng to Brooks, than mere intellectual sophistication and the ability to weigh nuanced evidence? Ah yes, I remember -- George W. Bush.
If it weren't for the crossword puzzle and Frank Rich, I would cancel my subscription.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
THE CIA AND LOUIS XIV
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France was far and away the richest and most powerful nation in Europe. French replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy and Versailles served as the archetypal McMansion to which lesser monarchs could only aspire. During that time, France meddled endlessly in the conflicts that were continually breaking out in Europe, secretly underwriting one side or the other, and sometimes funneling funds to both sides in order to maximize its influence.
Since the end of World War II, The United States has assumed the role of Meddler in Chief. So it did not surprise me to learn yesterday that America, through the CIA, has been underwriting Hamid Karzai's drug kingpin and Taliban supplier brother. Louis XIV would be proud.
This revelation has sparked a good deal of moral outrage, which at the moment is a politically useful thing. But the fault of America's Afghan policy does not consist in the fact that we have made a pact with the devil. Inasmuch as we have assumed the devil's role in much of the world, whom else would we throw in with? The fundamental problem of our Afghan adventure is that it has no recognizable or plausible purpose, and serves only to waste lives and resources without end.
The Bourbon meddling was equally without point. In the end, it bankrupted the monarchy, and we all know how that story ended. Do you have your knitting, Madame DeFarge?
Since the end of World War II, The United States has assumed the role of Meddler in Chief. So it did not surprise me to learn yesterday that America, through the CIA, has been underwriting Hamid Karzai's drug kingpin and Taliban supplier brother. Louis XIV would be proud.
This revelation has sparked a good deal of moral outrage, which at the moment is a politically useful thing. But the fault of America's Afghan policy does not consist in the fact that we have made a pact with the devil. Inasmuch as we have assumed the devil's role in much of the world, whom else would we throw in with? The fundamental problem of our Afghan adventure is that it has no recognizable or plausible purpose, and serves only to waste lives and resources without end.
The Bourbon meddling was equally without point. In the end, it bankrupted the monarchy, and we all know how that story ended. Do you have your knitting, Madame DeFarge?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
These past several days have been emotionally wrenching. First the news [overblown] that Obama was trying to kill the public option. Then Harry Reid's bold move [my new hero]. Then Joe Lieberman's apparent announcement that he would vote to support a filibuster. [You have to be Jewish, as I am, to enjoy the privilege of saying openly just how thoroughly despicable he is. The knee-jerk apologists for Israel have a contemptuous epithet for people like me who dare to attack the Liebermans of this world. They call us "self hating Jews." The phrase always amuses a narcissist like me.] Just this morning, Reid and Durbin indicated that reconciliation is not off the table. [I hope my readers are sufficiently versed in the inside baseball of Washington politics to follow all of this].
Rather than try to blog by the minute, I shall let events unfold and instead talk for a bit about Freud's extraordinary book, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, which I have finally finished reading. Freud considered it his hauptwerk and he was not wrong. There is obviously much to say about the book, but I want to write about the courage Freud showed in writing it. Freud was, of course, thoroughly a man of his milieu, which is to say a bourgeois professional Jewish doctor in late nineteenth century Vienna. He was ferociously intelligent, classically educated [you need to be up on Greek mythology just to follow his associations to elements in his own dreams], fiercely ambitious, and prudish and proper in just the way one would expect. He routinely refers to masturbation as "pollution" and at one point, about to introduce a dream that features images of urination and defecation, he writes "I have the following short dream to relate, which every reader will read with disgust." [near the end of Chapter Six, "The Dream Work."] My copy is an old 1913 edition of the authorized translation, by A. A. Brill, of the Third Edition, and pasted into the front fly leaf is a slip of paper that reads: "Publisher's Note: The sale of this book is limited to Members of the Medical, Scholastic, Legal, and Clerical professions."
Despite the almost universal rejection he faced when he announced his clinical findings, Freud persevered, acknowledging openly in the accounts of his own dreams the intensity of his desire for professional success and recognition. The fact seems to be that had Freud pursued a more conventional neurological career, he might have actually been appointed to the professorship he so desired [though the fact that he was Jewish worked against him]. Instead, he followed where his research led him, violating enormously the powerful social taboos of his milieu.
The example I find most enchanting concerns the issue of infant sexuality. It was an unquestionable premise of all psychiatric discussion in his earlier days that babies and little children are asexual, only exhibiting sexual feelings and wishes upon entering puberty. But patient after patient, under the hypnosis that was then Freud's principal therapeutic technique [learned from the great French neurologist, Charcot], reported having been sexually molested by her father as a young child. Freud's reports of these findings scandalised his audience. He was, after all, talking about upstanding Viennese bourgeois. Eventually Freud concluded that the reports were actually accounts of infantile wishes, not experiences, an extremely important realization. But this, of course, made things even worse! So, the fathers were not abusers; the little girls were sex mad creatures lusting after their fathers!
We are now so accustomed to these ideas -- thanks, of course, to Freud -- that it is extremely difficult for us to think ourselves into the world that Freud inhabited, and to understand the strength of the inhibitions he had to overcome in order to do his revolutionary work.
Well, enough already. If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest spending several weeks with THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.
Rather than try to blog by the minute, I shall let events unfold and instead talk for a bit about Freud's extraordinary book, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, which I have finally finished reading. Freud considered it his hauptwerk and he was not wrong. There is obviously much to say about the book, but I want to write about the courage Freud showed in writing it. Freud was, of course, thoroughly a man of his milieu, which is to say a bourgeois professional Jewish doctor in late nineteenth century Vienna. He was ferociously intelligent, classically educated [you need to be up on Greek mythology just to follow his associations to elements in his own dreams], fiercely ambitious, and prudish and proper in just the way one would expect. He routinely refers to masturbation as "pollution" and at one point, about to introduce a dream that features images of urination and defecation, he writes "I have the following short dream to relate, which every reader will read with disgust." [near the end of Chapter Six, "The Dream Work."] My copy is an old 1913 edition of the authorized translation, by A. A. Brill, of the Third Edition, and pasted into the front fly leaf is a slip of paper that reads: "Publisher's Note: The sale of this book is limited to Members of the Medical, Scholastic, Legal, and Clerical professions."
Despite the almost universal rejection he faced when he announced his clinical findings, Freud persevered, acknowledging openly in the accounts of his own dreams the intensity of his desire for professional success and recognition. The fact seems to be that had Freud pursued a more conventional neurological career, he might have actually been appointed to the professorship he so desired [though the fact that he was Jewish worked against him]. Instead, he followed where his research led him, violating enormously the powerful social taboos of his milieu.
The example I find most enchanting concerns the issue of infant sexuality. It was an unquestionable premise of all psychiatric discussion in his earlier days that babies and little children are asexual, only exhibiting sexual feelings and wishes upon entering puberty. But patient after patient, under the hypnosis that was then Freud's principal therapeutic technique [learned from the great French neurologist, Charcot], reported having been sexually molested by her father as a young child. Freud's reports of these findings scandalised his audience. He was, after all, talking about upstanding Viennese bourgeois. Eventually Freud concluded that the reports were actually accounts of infantile wishes, not experiences, an extremely important realization. But this, of course, made things even worse! So, the fathers were not abusers; the little girls were sex mad creatures lusting after their fathers!
We are now so accustomed to these ideas -- thanks, of course, to Freud -- that it is extremely difficult for us to think ourselves into the world that Freud inhabited, and to understand the strength of the inhibitions he had to overcome in order to do his revolutionary work.
Well, enough already. If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest spending several weeks with THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.
Friday, October 23, 2009
THE WAY THINGS ARE
At the moment, as you may have noticed, the Republican Party is engaged in a particularly bitter internecine battle over whom to support in the 23rd Congressional District of New York. This upstate district, which has the distinction of not having gone Democratic in a House race since the Civil War [the real Civil War, not the one the Republicans are now waging], was carried by Obama something like 52-48 in 2008. After Obama named the long time Republican holder of the seat as Secretary of the Navy, a relatively moderate Republican woman won the seat for the remainder of the term. Now the fanatical right-wingers, frantic to shoot themselves in the foot, have thrown their support behind the nominee of the Conservative Party, with the result that in the latest polls, the Democrat is actually leading the three way race with barely one third of the declared voters.
Why do I allude to this obscure race, save for the schadenfreude it affords? Because as we come down to the wire in the epic battle over health care reform, countless ostensibly knowledgeable commentators are making absurd claims about Obama's wimpishness, or his betrayal of liberal principles, or his unwillingess to wield the hammer when it is needed. "The Democrats control both houses of Congress and have sixty votes in the Senate. Why, save for Obama's bizarre lust for bipartisanship, can they not simply pass the bill he says he wants?"
Let me connect up these two matters, as lawyers say. Howard Dean and the Democratic Party made a deliberate decision to broaden their electoral efforts in 2006 and 2008, contesting districts and even states that had previously simply been conceded to the Republicans. They went out of their way to find moderate Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, who might actually have a chance of taking safe Republican seats. They sought out Iraq War veterans, military men and women with impeccable records of war-time service. They were under no illusion that these candidates, should they win, would morph into flaming liberals. But they made a judgment -- one which, I believe, was incontestably correct -- that it would be better to control both Houses of Congress with a broad coalition of left and centrist Democrats, among whom compromises would have to be struck, than to pare down their numbers to a core of reliably liberal stalwarts, and then try to make compromises with a more and more right wing Republican contingent.
Well, the strategy was a brilliant success. We won a commanding majority in both houses, even slipping into sixty votes in the Senate. And so the inevitable compromising began. Had the Democrats followed their customary practice of writing off supposedly Republican districts, we would be nowhere near 60 votes in the Senate, and we would probably have no more than a slender majority in the House. The Republicans, Lord love them, have opted for purity, and for their trouble, they now are a hairsbreadth away from being a regional faction in a permanent minority. America really is a center left country, which means that realistically, the most we can hope for, with all the skill and luck in the world, is legislation that is canted a bit more to the left than to the center.
How then can we get the truly progressive legislation we desire? The answer is obvious.
ORGANIZE!
Why do I allude to this obscure race, save for the schadenfreude it affords? Because as we come down to the wire in the epic battle over health care reform, countless ostensibly knowledgeable commentators are making absurd claims about Obama's wimpishness, or his betrayal of liberal principles, or his unwillingess to wield the hammer when it is needed. "The Democrats control both houses of Congress and have sixty votes in the Senate. Why, save for Obama's bizarre lust for bipartisanship, can they not simply pass the bill he says he wants?"
Let me connect up these two matters, as lawyers say. Howard Dean and the Democratic Party made a deliberate decision to broaden their electoral efforts in 2006 and 2008, contesting districts and even states that had previously simply been conceded to the Republicans. They went out of their way to find moderate Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, who might actually have a chance of taking safe Republican seats. They sought out Iraq War veterans, military men and women with impeccable records of war-time service. They were under no illusion that these candidates, should they win, would morph into flaming liberals. But they made a judgment -- one which, I believe, was incontestably correct -- that it would be better to control both Houses of Congress with a broad coalition of left and centrist Democrats, among whom compromises would have to be struck, than to pare down their numbers to a core of reliably liberal stalwarts, and then try to make compromises with a more and more right wing Republican contingent.
Well, the strategy was a brilliant success. We won a commanding majority in both houses, even slipping into sixty votes in the Senate. And so the inevitable compromising began. Had the Democrats followed their customary practice of writing off supposedly Republican districts, we would be nowhere near 60 votes in the Senate, and we would probably have no more than a slender majority in the House. The Republicans, Lord love them, have opted for purity, and for their trouble, they now are a hairsbreadth away from being a regional faction in a permanent minority. America really is a center left country, which means that realistically, the most we can hope for, with all the skill and luck in the world, is legislation that is canted a bit more to the left than to the center.
How then can we get the truly progressive legislation we desire? The answer is obvious.
ORGANIZE!
THE GUILTY PLEASURES OF SENIORITY
Every close student of the American political system has had occasion to decry the system of seniority in the United States Congress that elevates mediocrities, or worse, to the chairs of the Committee fiefdoms that control the process of legislation. Anyone watching the egregious Max Baucus, lordly representative of three tenths of one percent of the U. S. population, will almost reflexively think of term limits and direct democracy. And yet --- and yet --- every so often, this archaic and deeply undemocratic system elevates just the right person at just the right moment to a position of benevolent dictatorship, yielding guilty delights that one must savor to the fullest while they last.
These thoughts were prompted by several hours in front of the television set watching the markup of the financial services regulation bill, presided over brilliantly, irrascibly, and imperially by the incomparable Barney Frank, long time member from Cape Cod. Frank has always been my favorite member of the House, a stocky, rumpled gay late middle-aged man with an unruly shock of white hair and a perpetually raspy voice who is manifestly about three times as smart as any of his colleagues. The Republicans on the Financial Services Committee were engaged in a seemingly endless delaying action, desperately trying to forestall what was patently inevitable, namely the imposition of some new and badly needed regulations to rein in the people who brought us the current depression. In a parliamentary body accustomed to effulgent expressions of collegial courtesy, Frank is an oasis of straight talk. After one proposed amendment had been shot down, Frank remarked, about the next one fielded by a Republican, "I thought the last amendment was the worst conceivable, but this one tops that." At one point, Frank asked routinely for unanimous consent to do something or other that one of the Republicans desired. The custom, as anyone knows who watches C-Span One or Two or Three, is for the Chair to say, "I ask for unanimous consent to ..." and then, without a moment's pause, to add "without objection." But at this point, Michelle Bachman, who sits on Barney's Committee [how is that for poetic justice?] said, "yes." "No, no," Barney explained, as to a three year old. "The way you show agreement is by being quiet. You only say something if you object." He did not add, "you idiot," but the words hung in the air.
As I say, you must cherish these moments. One final recollection, for those of you who do not know Frank so well. Frank was the first openly gay member of Congress. After he came out, he remarked, "There are plenty of gay members of Congress, and I've danced with all of them." The seniority system has its pleasures.
These thoughts were prompted by several hours in front of the television set watching the markup of the financial services regulation bill, presided over brilliantly, irrascibly, and imperially by the incomparable Barney Frank, long time member from Cape Cod. Frank has always been my favorite member of the House, a stocky, rumpled gay late middle-aged man with an unruly shock of white hair and a perpetually raspy voice who is manifestly about three times as smart as any of his colleagues. The Republicans on the Financial Services Committee were engaged in a seemingly endless delaying action, desperately trying to forestall what was patently inevitable, namely the imposition of some new and badly needed regulations to rein in the people who brought us the current depression. In a parliamentary body accustomed to effulgent expressions of collegial courtesy, Frank is an oasis of straight talk. After one proposed amendment had been shot down, Frank remarked, about the next one fielded by a Republican, "I thought the last amendment was the worst conceivable, but this one tops that." At one point, Frank asked routinely for unanimous consent to do something or other that one of the Republicans desired. The custom, as anyone knows who watches C-Span One or Two or Three, is for the Chair to say, "I ask for unanimous consent to ..." and then, without a moment's pause, to add "without objection." But at this point, Michelle Bachman, who sits on Barney's Committee [how is that for poetic justice?] said, "yes." "No, no," Barney explained, as to a three year old. "The way you show agreement is by being quiet. You only say something if you object." He did not add, "you idiot," but the words hung in the air.
As I say, you must cherish these moments. One final recollection, for those of you who do not know Frank so well. Frank was the first openly gay member of Congress. After he came out, he remarked, "There are plenty of gay members of Congress, and I've danced with all of them." The seniority system has its pleasures.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
ANALYZE THIS!
For the past several days I have been plowing through Freud's great work, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, in preparation for my OLLI course on Freud in the Spring. At the same time, each night, I have been having long, complicated, vivid dreams. It is as though some part of my mind is saying to Freud: "O.K. You think you are so smart? Analyze this!" Of course, Robert De Niro I am not.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
THE HIDDEN PERILS OF METAPHOR
There are two great issues now before the country -- the reform of health care, and the future of America's involvement in Afghanistan. The discussions of both are being confused and distorted by metaphors that badly represent the realities of the issues.
[A curious aside. Some years ago, Susie and I took a Dalmatian cruise that started in Athens. We were standing on a street corner in downtown Athens, idly watching traffic go by, when I noticed a panel truck attempting to back out of a driveway into the flow of traffic. I can read the Greek alphabet, but not the Greek language, so I spelled out what was written on the side of the truck. It was "Metaphoros." With a start, I realized that in Greek, "metaphoros" means "moving." It was a moving van. A metaphor is a literary trope that moves one meaning to another. "Metaphor" is a metaphor! Isn't that neat?]
In the discussion of health care, the dangerous metaphor is "a machine with many moving parts." In the Afghanistan discussion, and the discussion of many other foreign policy issues as well, the metaphor is "nation building." Both metaphors are totally inappropriate, and conceal rather than reveal the nature of the issues. [Another even more widespread and dangerous metaphor is "problem," which implies the existence of a "solution,"but let us leave that to one side for the moment.]
The characterization of the extremely complex health care reform proposals as "machines with many moving parts" is intended to compare them to Rube Goldberg machines [an obscure reference for you younger readers -- Google it] or old fashioned timepieces in which a mechanical complex of wheels and gears and springs and pointers whirrs and turns and uncoils and makes ticking noises, producing a display that tells the time, or --in the case of a typical Rube Goldberg machine -- delivers a biscuit to a pet dog. The clear implication of the metaphor is that if any one thing goes wrong -- a cog slips, a spring uncoils too soon, a gear fails to mesh -- the entire machine will come to a halt and jam up. But the complicated health care reform proposals are not like this at all. They are assemblages of proposed changes to a very large number of institutional arrangements involving the pricing of health insurance, the reimbursement of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers for services, the imposition or removal or alteration of taxes, and hundreds of other things. The proposals are lengthy and complex because health care in America is vast and complex, absorbing up to 15% of the nation's annual gross domestic product. If one or several provisions of one of the proposals fails to produce the intended changes, or produces unintended consequences, there is no reason at all to suppose that that will jam up the other components of the proposal or result in a systemic failure of the entire undertaking. And yet, bolstered by the false metaphor, Republican opponents of reform have made precisely that claim in the past few days.
The metaphor of "nation building" is much, much more dangerous. The implication of the metaphor is that bringing a modern viable nation state into existence is a problem in "social engineering" [another totally illegitimate metaphor.] The Manhattan Project [the World War II effort to make the first atomic bomb] was an engineering problem. All of the basic science was well known among the world's leading nuclear physicists, and what remained was to solve a series of very difficult engineering problems so as to be able to produce the explosive nuclear fission chain reaction that theory said would occur under the right conditions. The effort to send a manned capasule to the surface of the moon was also an engineering problem. Once again, the theoretical science was quite well known -- so well known that writers like Jules Verne were able to anticipate the space flight in their fictions by more than a century. But there is no such thing as "building a nation." The emergence of modern nation-states, now only four centuries or so old, has been a complicated historical succession of events much studied by historians, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists. I am not aware of a single case in which one nation state has actually created another viable nation state through deliberate, intentional state action. The closest examples, I suppose, are the artificial creation of states by imperial powers in Africa and the Middle East through the imposition of boundaries and the setting up of puppet regimes. Much of the present turmoil in the world is the aftermath of these misbegotten schemes. The question facing us in Afghanistan is not whether we are willing to expend the resources and suffer the casualties that would be required to build a successful Afghani nation. The question we face is whether, since that is an impossible and even meaningless project, we can find any national interest that will justify the expenditure of resources and lives. My own view is that the answer is No. But quite apart from what one thinks about that real question, we must all stop talking as though one possible, albeit expensive. option, is to engage in "nation-building."
[A curious aside. Some years ago, Susie and I took a Dalmatian cruise that started in Athens. We were standing on a street corner in downtown Athens, idly watching traffic go by, when I noticed a panel truck attempting to back out of a driveway into the flow of traffic. I can read the Greek alphabet, but not the Greek language, so I spelled out what was written on the side of the truck. It was "Metaphoros." With a start, I realized that in Greek, "metaphoros" means "moving." It was a moving van. A metaphor is a literary trope that moves one meaning to another. "Metaphor" is a metaphor! Isn't that neat?]
In the discussion of health care, the dangerous metaphor is "a machine with many moving parts." In the Afghanistan discussion, and the discussion of many other foreign policy issues as well, the metaphor is "nation building." Both metaphors are totally inappropriate, and conceal rather than reveal the nature of the issues. [Another even more widespread and dangerous metaphor is "problem," which implies the existence of a "solution,"but let us leave that to one side for the moment.]
The characterization of the extremely complex health care reform proposals as "machines with many moving parts" is intended to compare them to Rube Goldberg machines [an obscure reference for you younger readers -- Google it] or old fashioned timepieces in which a mechanical complex of wheels and gears and springs and pointers whirrs and turns and uncoils and makes ticking noises, producing a display that tells the time, or --in the case of a typical Rube Goldberg machine -- delivers a biscuit to a pet dog. The clear implication of the metaphor is that if any one thing goes wrong -- a cog slips, a spring uncoils too soon, a gear fails to mesh -- the entire machine will come to a halt and jam up. But the complicated health care reform proposals are not like this at all. They are assemblages of proposed changes to a very large number of institutional arrangements involving the pricing of health insurance, the reimbursement of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers for services, the imposition or removal or alteration of taxes, and hundreds of other things. The proposals are lengthy and complex because health care in America is vast and complex, absorbing up to 15% of the nation's annual gross domestic product. If one or several provisions of one of the proposals fails to produce the intended changes, or produces unintended consequences, there is no reason at all to suppose that that will jam up the other components of the proposal or result in a systemic failure of the entire undertaking. And yet, bolstered by the false metaphor, Republican opponents of reform have made precisely that claim in the past few days.
The metaphor of "nation building" is much, much more dangerous. The implication of the metaphor is that bringing a modern viable nation state into existence is a problem in "social engineering" [another totally illegitimate metaphor.] The Manhattan Project [the World War II effort to make the first atomic bomb] was an engineering problem. All of the basic science was well known among the world's leading nuclear physicists, and what remained was to solve a series of very difficult engineering problems so as to be able to produce the explosive nuclear fission chain reaction that theory said would occur under the right conditions. The effort to send a manned capasule to the surface of the moon was also an engineering problem. Once again, the theoretical science was quite well known -- so well known that writers like Jules Verne were able to anticipate the space flight in their fictions by more than a century. But there is no such thing as "building a nation." The emergence of modern nation-states, now only four centuries or so old, has been a complicated historical succession of events much studied by historians, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists. I am not aware of a single case in which one nation state has actually created another viable nation state through deliberate, intentional state action. The closest examples, I suppose, are the artificial creation of states by imperial powers in Africa and the Middle East through the imposition of boundaries and the setting up of puppet regimes. Much of the present turmoil in the world is the aftermath of these misbegotten schemes. The question facing us in Afghanistan is not whether we are willing to expend the resources and suffer the casualties that would be required to build a successful Afghani nation. The question we face is whether, since that is an impossible and even meaningless project, we can find any national interest that will justify the expenditure of resources and lives. My own view is that the answer is No. But quite apart from what one thinks about that real question, we must all stop talking as though one possible, albeit expensive. option, is to engage in "nation-building."
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