In Aesop’s famous fable, a shepherd boy amuses himself by crying out wolf just to watch his fellow villagers rush up to the pasture to defend the sheep. There’s no wolf; the villagers are furious. The boy does this several times until finally when the wolf really does appear, his cries for help go unheeded. Bye-bye sheep.
I would like to update this story. In my 21st-century version, the boy cries wolf several times and the villagers respond with ever-diminishing concern. Everyone is obsessed with the wolf. Is it near? Will it attack? How do we defend ourselves? Meanwhile, the sheep develop hoof-and-mouth disease and all die. Same result. Different cause.
The shepherd boy, in both versions, identified a real threat. He didn’t cry “minotaur.” He didn’t cry “Martian.” The point wasn’t whether wolves existed or not — after all, they had attacked in the past — but whether they posed a threat when he cried out their name. In my version of the story, he and the villagers were so concerned with the wolf that they missed the threats closer to home.
We are now being told that our current “wolf” — namely terrorism — is no longer the threat that the Bush administration and its anti-terrorism comrades-in-arms made it out to be. Incidents of terrorism are on the decline. According to Gallup polls, the number of Americans identifying terrorism as the most important issue the nation confronts has dropped from 25% between 2002 and 2004 to 16% in 2006 to a mere 4% today. According to Foreign Policy magazine’s polling of national security experts in its annual Terrorism Index, 83% believed that the threat of global terrorist networks was increasing last year and only 55% believe so today.
We could attribute this declining significance of terrorism to the Bush administration’s crying of wolf when the wolf was not in fact at the door. Others might derive the lesson of Aesop’s fable: we villagers must still remain vigilant despite the administration’s very political use of the terrorism threat to build support for its own policies. The wolf is still out there. It is planning to attack when we are lulled into complacency by the bombardment of lies from our government.
Perhaps. But I prefer my modified fable. While we have focused on terrorism, other threats have undermined our security: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global warming, economic inequality, the persistence of nuclear weapons, and so on. The point is not whether terrorists exist. Yes, they do, even though nearly one in four Germans believe that the United States itself was behind the September 11 attacks and an astounding 43% of Egyptians believe that Israel was the culprit (according to a recent WorldPublicOpinion poll). The point is: the Bush administration has focused our attention on terrorism while it has waged war, ignored global warming, widened economic inequality, tried to build new nuclear weapons, and engaged in many other dangerous pursuits. We’ve been hit by the political equivalent of hoof-and-mouth disease.
Even the new Republican Party platform has recalibrated its threat assessment. Terrorism certainly appears in the document. The relevant section chides Democrats for naively believing that “international terrorists could be dealt with within the normal criminal justice system” (when, in fact, law enforcement is responsible for the major advances against terrorism, and “above the law” approaches like Guantanamo only served as a terrorist recruitment campaign). But that section of the platform focuses on the specter of nuclear weapons and the imperative to reduce nuclear arsenals. The Republicans almost, but not quite, sound like peaceniks.
Elsewhere in the platform, however, the Republicans offer a continuation of Bush foreign policy. “Despite the Clinton administration’s increases in the already bloated military budget after the end of the Cold War, the Republican platform insists that ‘national defense was neglected and under-funded by the Clinton Administration,'” writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) senior analyst Stephen Zunes in Assessing the Republican Party Platform. “The platform then calls for a significant increase in the size of the American armed forces, even though the United States — at barely 4% of the world’s population — already accounts for over one-half of the world’s military spending.”
So, the shepherd is not crying wolf quite so often or so loudly as he was before. But he still wants to spend the village funds on a huge arsenal of weapons to defend against all the threats hidden in the forest. He has chums in the stave and pitchfork factories. He’s worried that without a clear and present danger, the village will replace him with a more sensible shepherd. He sits on the hill surrounded by his new weapons. And meanwhile, one after another, his sheep are falling sick and keeling over in plain sight.
Fire Next Time
While global attention has now turned to Iran and Georgia, the real flashpoint, argues FPIF columnist Conn Hallinan, is South Asia. Pakistan is an economic and political mess. The United States is pushing a nuclear deal with India that challenges the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the fragile peace with Pakistan.
And the war in Afghanistan is simply not working. “While the White House and NATO are pushing for a military solution in Afghanistan, a recent study by the RAND Corporation, a think tank associated with the U.S. Navy, found that “there is no battlefield solution to terrorism. Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended,'” Hallinan writes in Danger in South Asia. “Some in Pakistan’s current government seem to have reached the same conclusion. ‘We have to talk to the Taliban,’ says Asif Ahmed, a member of parliament from the secular Pakistan People’s Party, the largest vote getter in the last election. ‘There is no peace in Pakistan or Afghanistan without it.'”
We can only hope that Russia, too, learns these lessons — and quickly. “Like the United States, Russia ignored diplomacy and the UN when it made the rush to war,” write FPIF senior analyst Adil Shamoo and FPIF contributor Bonnie Bricker in Georgia, Iraq, and Athenian Justice. “In both Georgia and Iraq, a sovereign nation was invaded contrary to all international laws with very little support from other nations. But invasions usually do not turn out the way the invaders desire. Russia should remember the lessons from its invasion of Afghanistan. And certainly, the disaster of post-invasion Iraq should serve as a warning to what can easily happen after a ‘successful’ attack.”
Food and Bases
We continue our strategic focus on the food crisis this week with a piece by FPIF contributor Thomas Lines.
“High agricultural prices ought to be good for poor countries and the poorest people in them,” he writes in Managing Food Prices. “Most of the world’s poorest live in rural areas and depend to a greater or lesser extent on agriculture for survival. Agriculture dominates their countries’ economies, providing the bulk of employment, incomes, and export receipts. One might think they would all gain from higher prices. Yet the story in 2007 and 2008 has been of social unrest from Argentina to Cameroon, from Ethiopia to China. In Haiti, the government fell. The World Bank estimates that the doubling of food prices could push 100 million people deeper into poverty. What does it all mean?” Read his commentary to find out.
Earlier this year we published a strategic focus on the U.S. military footprint overseas. Several of those contributors update their analysis in a new feature in Mother Jones magazine. And you can also read contributor Tom Engelhardt’s latest thoughts on the matter in his recent Being in Base Denial.
FPIF, September 16, 2008