BBA MBA and PostGraduate UnderGraduate Management Courses: September 2008

Friday, September 26, 2008

Iraq means war. Iraq means election.

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Iraqi policies form the basis for US presidential campaign. But in what form?

Iraq remains a significant concern for the population, but that is a matter of little moment in a modern democracy. Not long ago, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the presidential campaign, as it was in the midterm election of 2006. But it has virtually disappeared, eliciting some puzzlement.

But there should be none now. The US army in Iraq carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. Its December 2007 report of a study of focus groups was uncharacteristically upbeat. The survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups... and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis.” The Wall Street Journal came close to the point: “Issues Recede in ‘08 Contest As Voters Focus on Character.” To put it more accurately, issues recede as candidates, party managers and their public relations agencies focus on character. Progressive democratic theory holds that the population – “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” – should be “spectators,” not “participants” in action, as Walter Lippmann wrote.

The participants in action are surely aware that on a host of major issues, both political parties are well to the right of the general population, and that public opinion is quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in the useful study, “The Foreign Policy Disconnect,” by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton. It is important, then, for the attention of the people to be diverted elsewhere.

The real work of the world is the domain of an enlightened leadership. The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words, though some do articulate it: President Woodrow Wilson, for example, held that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered to preserve “stability and righteousness,” essentially the perspective of the Founding Fathers. In more recent years the gentlemen are transmuted into the “technocratic elite” and “action intellectuals” of Camelot, “Straussian” neocons of Bush II or other configurations.

For the vanguard who uphold the elevated ideals and are charged with managing the society and the world, the reasons for Iraq’s drift off the radar screen should not be obscure. They were cogently explained by the distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, articulating the position of the doves 40 years ago when the U.S. invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and Washington was preparing to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already tearing South Vietnam to shreds. By then the invasion launched by President Kennedy was facing difficulties and imposing difficult costs on the United States, so Schlesinger and other Kennedy liberals were reluctantly beginning to shift from hawks to doves.

Elite reasoning, and the accompanying attitudes, carry over with little change to commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq today. And although criticism of the Iraq war is far greater and far-reaching than in the case of Vietnam at any comparable stage, nevertheless the principles that Schlesinger articulated remain in force in media and commentary. It is of some interest that Schlesinger himself took a very different position on the Iraq invasion, virtually alone in his circles. When the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, he wrote that Bush’s policies are “alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.”

That Iraq is “a land of ruin and wreck” is not in question. Several million people are internally displaced. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees fleeing the wreckage of Iraq, including most of the professional classes, have not been simply wiped out. But that welcome is fading soon!

Noam Chomsky

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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