Glasnost

Dear World,

Having seen the mess you're in, I'd like to suggest a few changes. I realize, of course, that 6 billion other people will scream "idealist!" in a variety of languages, but I'm used to it. Just block it out, it works wonders. Goethe once said, "If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he could be and ought to be, he will become what he ought to be." Yes, I'm assuming it takes a somewhat different form in the original German, and no, I don't actually have a primary source for the quote. But the sentiment fits with my world-view exactly.

Let us transition. Let us transition to Gandhi, so I can quickly make my point and dish up some delicious chicken taco soup from my crockpot. Gandhi treated men and women, especially the British occupation, as rational human beings. He expected them to realize that if hundreds of thinking, unhysterical people were passionately, though passively, resisting their rule, then maybe those people had a point. The British left. There were problems, snafus (literally), and bad spots, but the direction was always the same.

The relationship to American foreign policy is not too far of a jump. The sooner we start treating the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the entire Arab world as human beings capable and partial to compassion, we'll have a much more peaceful world. What that means, in other words, is letting them operate outside of our dour military shadow. The longer our soldiers, who don't speak Pashtu or any other dialect, communicate with grunts and rifles, the longer the United States will be perceived as an imperialist power looking to forge a united Afghanistatn for the sake of a natural gas pipeline. The longer we sequester ourselves in the Baghdad green zone, the longer we will be that group of strangers that rides into town every so often in humvee.

All people are capable of compassion. All people have the ability to listen, even the predisposition to do so. So let's leave. Let's tell them our side of the story without air support. Let's give them information and trust them to make good use of it.

Impossible, you say? The insurgents and the Taliban and the bad guys would poison their minds against the West? Maybe so. But this world is shrinking. I watched the Kyrgyz government fail the other day, and I watched it on my laptop. How many of us can locate Kyrgyzstan on a map? How many of us saw the videos and pictures of a smokey Bishkek? There's a great disparity between those numbers, and in that disparity lies the hope for a new century of peace.

If we leave our occupational endeavors now, will we (Americans) lose a degree of safety? In all likelihood, yes. There may even be another September 11, where innocent lives will be lost at the hands of fanatics. But what if, instead of invading sovereign nation states, we simply invested in Middle East fiber optic cable networks? What if we made sure that every village in the world could access and contribute to youtube? Could see what their neighbors had done to another neighbor? Where would the fanatics' power be then? Who would join their training camps?

Violent radicalism can only be nurtured in an environment devoid of the perceived enemy. Pogroms started in courts and bars where no Jews dared to come. Violence ensued.  A system of segregation enforced racial stereotypes and blanket judgments. Violence ensued. Homophobia flourishes in communities where "gay" is a dirty word. Violence ensues. While these horrible memories occurred (and occur) in various forms of isolation (time, custom, etc.) that resist any effective tinkering right now, there is one kind of isolation we can correct. The sooner we connect the world with silly things, the sooner the world will connect on more important issues. If a fraction of the war budget had been spent on extending the reach of the internet, we would live in a different world. If we had a fraction of the kind of courage that brings peace, thousands fewer people would be dead. So stand up world, or rather sit down. Take some losses. Make the fanatics look stupid for once. Stop prosecuting people for thought crimes and "threats." Try people in an open court. Abolish the idea of military justice. As we open up the world, we're going to see some ugly things. But stay strong and sit tight. A better world will grow from that ugliness.