Peace in our time

Should anyone ever imply that government is not serious business, consider that the current world stage is set for conflict that stretches to a future horizon none of us can see. That's a heavy way to open a "post" on a "blog" on the "internet," but the decisions people at many levels of government make matter in a very real, visceral way. Reports circulate now that war with Iran could have become a diplomatic impossibility in 2003; that is no longer the case, never mind that it may be logistically impossible.

All the rage among the hawks this week will be a report released Sunday detailing that US military leaders have discovered Iranian weapons in use by guerrilla forces in Iraq. This is probably true, but on the level of consideration politics, it is difficult to say what that means in a larger sense. I think it is lost on many people that politics matters to such a degree that people live and die by the results. Peace and war are used as bargaining chips among players in government farther down the ladder than we'd probably like to admit: I don't really trust most of the people running the boat these days to make sensible decisions, but the idea that someone I can't see has a hand on the rudder keeps me up at night.

Doug Feith is not a guy that you would miss if you looked hard at all at DoD in the last 6 years or so, but he wasn't someone who seemed to be a major power center. That perception was incorrect. A finding on Feith's efforts to create an entirely fabricated link between al-Qaeda and Iraq determined that it wasn't illegal, which I suppose is important to understand about how government works but doesn't really do much to put the milk back in the bottle on that whole War front. A man, an entire department of dubious legality, and an American administration conspires to make a case for war where one would not normally exist, and the major finding once it all sees sunlight (so far) is that it wasn't exactly illegal.

So politics matters. Government matters. Any historian considering the couple of paragraphs preceding this one, without turning the page, might think to themselves, "Well, they went to the moon. I'm sure they cleared all this up before it got worse." Then the historian would turn the page and be disappointed.

Democrats, or really anyone who questions the motivations behind the American use of force, are often hounded by hawkish right wingers as being a part of the Blame America First crowd, which is an argument unhampered by the unfortunate boundaries of logic. Politics causes problems with governance, and without fail, anyone choosing the best solution over what polls well is thinned out of the ranks in the next election.

If this is an inexorable truth about American politics, and you'd better believe it is, the only way forward is for some effort to be put into making the right decisions popular. Obviously 'the right decisions' is a highly subjective set of ideas, but Republicans have been doing it since before Reagan was sworn in and there's no reason Democrats can't do it as well.

One thing I think we often forget is that the content of the character of the men we send to local and state government is the same character that moves on to federal government and executive appointments. The habits they pick up in the state house will follow them to Washington D.C. So if progressives begin with the idea that communication of an idea is just as important as what that idea may actually do, that practice will stick with them as they advance through government's ranks to the positions where you can really help people, or alternatively, do some damage.

At a national level Democrats are still seeking an effective way to communicate the most obvious and publicly-supported policy initiatives of our time. You can watch them learn, and just like with local to state and state to federal, the really good ones, the ones with big ideas and effective communication skills, will make it. It is not impossible for the right decision to be the popular one. It is not impossible to convince the citizens of Texas that coal plants are a bad idea, or to convince the American public that we may not have been going about foreign policy in the best way possible these last long few years. It is not impossible to convince people that peace in our time is not only possible, but desirable. Government is serious business, and sometimes, to make things happen, you have to redefine the business itself.